A Citizen-Soldier’s Civil War: The Letters of Brevet Major General Alvin C. Voris ed. by Jerome Mushkat (review)

through an expensive and exasperating process of trial and erron Nor did nature give the Baltimore and Ohio much help. The winding Potomac River often proved more hindrance than help,and steep mountain ridges in a sparsely settled wilderness presented a series of difficult engineering problems. Political and economic barriers, however,turned Out to be more important than geographical challenges. State legisl atures sometimes dictated uneconomical routes;financial panics left the company without capital to finish the line; competing improvements threatened to siphon off traffic and revenue; times he includes too much detail and the story becomes hard to follow. His steadfast narrative organization contributes to the confusion. The author,for example, addresses labor unrest when each strike or riot occurred,thus interrupting other threads of the story. Storeover, Dilts focuses so intently on the i railroad's construction that he WN neglects to analyze its impact, ™ and for those interested in the 1]1_- __.,_ t» i ''' history of the Ohio Valley, perhaps the biggest disap41 *11 pointment in this book lies in the author' s failure to trace the railroad' s increasing influence 9. 4. K on the West. Finallv, Dilts notes in his prologue that the builders of the Baltimore and Ohio " were following George Washington's plan of binding together a young nation,commercially and politically." ( 4) Yet it is far from clear that the railroad succeeded in this task, if that is what the railroad' s builders sought to do. Wheeling and West Virginiathe area most affected by the Baltimore and Ohiobecame part of the North rather than the South after all, suggesting that the railroad contributed more to sectional conflict and perhaps to the coming of the Civil War than to national unity. and laborers violently protested when bankrupt contractors could no longer pay them. No wonder it took twentyfive years to complete the road from Baltimore to Wheeling. Dilts includes a large cast of characters in his story, but Tbe Great Road ultimately focuses on how a few committed individuals overcame these many hurdles. The hero of the story is Benjamin H. I. atrobe,Jr., who supervised the complex task of building the railroad from Cumberland, Maryland, to Wheeling, Virginia, and Dilts excels at explaining the solutions engineers such as Latrobe devised when extending the railroad westward. Various political supporters of the railroad and its presidents receive somewhat less sympathetic treatment, and the politics surrounding the road, Dilts suggests, ranged from shady dealings to outright corruption. Yet politics, however shady and corrupt,proved to be as crucial to the road' s completion as competent engineers. Like many other internal improvements in the antebellum period, the Baltimore and Ohio depended upon government investment for its very survival and that government investment came to the railroad through political means. Dilts fits together all the elements of railroad building into a comprehensive account,but someJobn Majewski University of California,Santa Barbara Jerome Mushkat, ed. A CitizenSoldier ' s Civil War:Tbe Letters of Brevet Major General Alvin C. Voris. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002. ISBN: 0875802982 ( cloth), $ 36.00. n the aftermath of the Civil War,many veterans carefully put away the letters and diaries that they had written,saving for posterity their chronicles of what they knew would be the most important and SPRING 2004 79 BOOK REVIEWS memorable years of their lives. So many of them did and gender dominate the writing of academic hisso ,and so many of their descendants treasured and torians,Voris's 423 letters to his wife Lydia seem preserved these documents,that even onehundred - at times almost too good to be true. If you are fifty years later it is still possible for a scholar to find, interested in gender roles, read about how Clara edit and publish a new and worthwhile collection of Barton herself nursed Voris back to health after he soldiers' letters, as Jerome Mushkat has done with had received his second wound. If race is central the letters of Alvin C. Voris. to your concerns you will want to examine Voris's Voris lived in Akron at the beginning of the C vil deas on the subject. He opposed slavery from the War,and...