Shadows of the Storm: Volume One of The Image of War, 1861-1865 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS85 Sliddell (p. 201); John Quincy Adams, not John Adams, was a presidential candidate in 1824 (p. 23); Ruffin was not in Washington on New Year's Eve, 1859 (p. 151); seceding southern delegatesnominated Breckinridge in Baltimore, not Richmond (p. 157); and the Confederate Congress did not pass a new conscription law in the summer of 1863 (p. 236). More serious is the consistent misreading of evidence to make Ruffin appear ludicrous, inept, self-serving, vain, and senile. Armed with a plethora of deprecatory words—he "clucked," he "whined," he "frothed," he was subject to "burping spells," he was a "martinet," he looked like "some queer apparition of the Ancient Mariner"—Mitchell labors assiduously to ridicule her subject. The same end is achieved through subtle manipulation of source materials. Thus, Ruffin's statement , "I spoke . . . for about three-quarters of an hour—& then stopped, having forgotten to bring in some of my main points," becomes, in the hands of Mitchell: ". . . he rambled on for threequarters of an hour, then ended abruptly, having forgotten to mention most of his main points" (p. 167, my itaUcs). Considered individually, such examples seem trivial, but when multiphed a hundredfold they are profoundly disturbing. Within a single chapter (nine) the author misrepresents Ruffin's position on the Lecompton Constitution and the reopening of the African slave trade, grossly distorts the purpose of his visit to Old Point Comfort, falsifies his assessment of John Tyler's intellectual powers by quoting from a statement made more than a year earlier, distorts his reaction to the Wanderer incident, and assigns to him purely selfish motives for seeking to promote a romance between Jane Ruffin and his son. Ruffin was by no meansperfector, inmanyrespects, even admirable. He was a human being with more than his share of the frailties common to that species. Always strongly opinionated, his extremism was exacerbated by the emotional atmosphere of the Civil War period. On occasion—as when marching with the V.M.I, cadets to witness John Brown's execution or when riding on a cannon atFirstManassas—he did present a ludicrous appearance, as he himself admitted. But he was far from the buffoon portrayed by Mitchell. Nor was he as naive in his analysis of political and military affairs as shesuggests. Perhapsas much as anything else, his treatment at the hands of Mitchell demonstrates that sectional feelings have abated but little in the last 120 years. William K. Scarborough University of Southern Mississippi Shadows of the Storm: Volume One of The Image of War, 1861-1865. Edited by William C. Davis. Senior Consulting Editor, Bell I. Wiley. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, 1981. Pp. 464. $35.00.) Shadows of the Storm claims as its ancestor Francis Trevelyan Miller's Photographic History of the Civil War, published by the Review of 86CIVIL WAR HISTORY Reviews Company in 1911. William C. "Jack" Davis's new work promises to be a worthy successor to Miller's monumental ten-volume opus in that The Image of War will eventually consist of six volumes containing "about four thousand photographs, over half of them published for the first time." There is nothing in this first volume to cause a reader to doubt Davis's claims for the books. Dozens of photographs make their first appearance here, and a host of others are unfamiUar, doubtless because their previous publication was in obscure places. Davis admits that the book "is not conceived as a photographic history of the war." Such a work would be impossible, if for no other reason than the inability of the photographic equipment of the time to capture moving subjects. Therefore, Davis shaped the book around the pictures available, including in it, for example, a fascinating section of photographs of Civil War photographers at work in the field. There is a brief essay on the little-known Confederate photographer J. D. Edwards anda longer essay onCivilWar photographers in general. Yet, if the book were more about the history of photography than the history of the war, it might not reach as large an audience as it should. It therefore contains brief essays on the early history of the war. The best of these are Bell...