Maryland's Blue and Gray: A Border State's Union and Confederate Junior Officer Corps (review)

BOOK REVIEWS35 I troversy of its own. Critics took issue with its lack of a historical framework of American civil liberties in treating Vallandigham and with his failure to grapple fully with the question of the proper limits of dissent. Others believed that he tended to exonerate Copperhead extremes in opposing the war. However, Steven Rogstad reminds readers of the book's gestation period, an era with its remnants of McCarthyism and the emergent Cold War. As Klement's legacy, he notes the "new wave ofrevisionism" ofmore recent scholars in treating "Lincoln's Democratic critics" as well as the challenges to them (xxiii). As welcome as the reissue of Limits ofDissent is, the lack of its historical framework of civil liberties continues to limit its value. And Vallandigham, in tum, remains as controversial as he was in life. Richard R. Duncan Georgetown University Maryland's Blue and Gray: A Border State's Union and Confederate Junior Officer Corps. By Kevin Conley Ruffner. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997. Pp. xiii, 428. $3495) In Maryland's Blue and Gray, Kevin Conley Ruffner states that he is writing a "prosopography, or collective biography" (7) that examines the lives of the junior officers from that border state that served in the Union Army of the Potomac and the Confederate Army ofNorthern Virginia. By combing through extensive archival sources Ruffner, a historian for the Central Intelligence Agency, appears to have uncovered nearly every shred of evidence relating to the captains and lieutenants in his study. Ruffner states that he is writing ofthe men who served asjunior officers from Maryland in order to "study the background, motivations, and experiences of a particular group who fought in the nation's bloodiest war" (7). Out of nearly 60,000 Marylanders who donned Union blue and 25,000 who wore Confederate gray, Ruffner chooses a highly selective population of 365 officers in 4 Union infantry regiments and 7 Confederate units of infantry, cavalry, and artillery , all of which served in the Virginia theater of operations. Runner's work offers much that is useful and original to the point of being groundbreaking. In his first chapter, Ruffner excellently outlines the political and social geography of Maryland from its inception as a refuge for English Catholics in the New World to the onset of the Civil War. His next two chapters provide perhaps his most intriguing and original points. Adeptly using quantitative records and manuscript sources, Ruffner explicates that a large portion of the Confederate junior officers were educated young men who hailed from the Southern slaveholding aristocratic section ofthe state and sought to defend their civil liberties, rather than the institution of slavery. Conversely, while classifying the Confederate contingent as members from the "rural and urban gentry," 352CIVIL WAR HISTORY he identifies the Union officers as being young men who hailed from the westem portion of the state and were "the vanguard of the state's growing white working class" (75). However, after such a promising beginning, the work falters in places. It at times from repetitive themes, and the author often disorients the reader by dropping too many names of officers from various regiments and randomly returning to them later without preamble. In addition, Ruffner seems to lack a clear focus, as he alternates between offering a composite social portrait ofthe junior officers and providing a basic regimental history. In an inherent flaw in his thesis, Ruffner attempts to categorize the junior officers as separate from the enlisted men that they commanded, which is unfortunate . Company-grade officers had a symbiotic dynamic with the enlisted men in their units, and it is difficult to comprehend how a book-length monograph can successfully explore one without examining the other. The author fails to make a convincing case for why the Maryland junior officers deserve a book unto themselves, while a slight condensing ofthe first three chapters would have made an excellent journal article that substantially contributed to the literature on the backgrounds and motivations of Civil War soldiers. Judkin Browning North Carolina State University All the Daring ofa Soldier: Women of the Civil War Armies. By Elizabeth D. Leonard. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. Pp. 386. $27...