The Civil War in the West: Victory and Defeat from the Appalachians to the Mississippi by Earl J. Hess (review)

Four chapters into Earl Hess’s The Civil War in the West, the latest entry in the University of North Carolina Press’s new Littlefield History of the Civil War Era series, a small illustration taken from the venerable Battles and Leaders series appears. It depicts Federal soldiers at work on the New Madrid Channel canal prior to John Pope’s assault on Island No. 10. According to the author’s caption, the “sketch illustrates the inventive and industrious spirit that drove much of the Union war effort in the West” (59). Proverbially, one cannot tell a book by its cover, but here a single engraving of Union soldiers toiling on the Mississippi River, joined by modern explication, really does capture the author’s thesis better than Paul Philippoteaux’s familiar painting of U. S. Grant at Fort Donelson that graces the dust jacket. To be sure, Grant is the central character in the volume. Yet like the engraver, Hess focuses on the “inventive and industrious” army in blue, expressing less interest in battle than in the geographical, logistical, and technological factors that made Union victory possible. The result is a fresh if sometimes uneven survey of how the Union army won the Civil War out in the western theater.

Starting in the Mississippi River Valley, Hess asserts, Federal commanders quickly took better advantage of favorable river and rail transportation systems as well as a growing fleet of gunboats, logistically overwhelmed their foes, and tactically won early battles that gave their armies a growing edge in morale. By the spring of 1862, Union forces occupied fifty thousand square miles of Confederate territory, controlling an enclave that stretched from Kentucky to Corinth, Mississippi. There, at the end of his logistical rope, Henry Halleck wisely stopped to consolidate his gains, shore up his communications, and wait for Father Abraham’s “three hundred thousand more.” The geographic and transportation challenges presented by the vastness of the Deep South simply required more men and supplies, Hess maintains, resources that the Lincoln administration was only beginning to amass. In the meantime, Halleck and other generals began to deal in earnest with the thorny problems of military occupation, a subject that emerges as the book’s welcome second major thematic element. Guerrillas, often corrupt cotton buyers and merchants, secessionist smugglers, hungry civilians, slaves seeking freedom, and a bevy of local and national politicians all offered challenges to generals who had come south to fight a war only to find themselves policing a peace. Most rose to the occasion, although completely defeating the guerrillas ultimately proved impossible. In regard to trade, the author agrees with Grant that reopening it too early on the “trade follows the flag” principle prolonged the war by tying up troops, diverting Federal officers, and enabling smugglers who managed to continue supplying Confederate forces and partisans.

The arrival of the new regiments from the north in the winter of 1862–63, coupled with the massive recruitment of local African Americans in blue, signaled the beginning of a new phase in the western war. At a critical juncture after the debacle at Fredericksburg, Stones River offered a victory the administration desperately needed. Vicksburg proved to be a truer turning point, however. Disagreeing with those scholars who maintain that Union control of the Mississippi offered largely symbolic gains, Hess argues that the fall of Vicksburg and subsequently Port Hudson hurt the Confederate cause materially. Logistics remain front and center as the author turns to subjects such as William Rosecrans’s methodical buildup to the Tullahoma campaign as well as William Tecumseh Sherman’s march to Atlanta, supported, if barely, by a single railroad. In contrast, Confederate generals such as John Bell Hood ignored logistics at their peril. In the end, Hess concludes that the Union won the war...