Confederate Generals in the Trans-Mississippi, Volume 1, Essays on America’s Civil War ed. by Lawrence Lee Hewitt with Arthur W. Bergeron Jr. and Thomas F. Schott (review)

Confederate generals in the Trans-Mississippi have long suffered a bad reputation. In his General Sterling Price and the Civil War in the West (1968), Albert Castel spoke for past, present, and future generations of Civil War historians when he characterized the Trans-Mississippi as “the junkyard of the Confederate Army” (141). The Trans-Mississippi was the place where underperforming generals from the eastern theater, such as John B. Magruder, went to live out the war in a mixture of obscurity, eccentricity, and mediocrity. Lawrence L. Hewitt disagrees with this interpretation, and he has assembled a collection of essays to show these much-maligned officers in a different light. Hewitt hopes these essays will create “a better understanding of Civil War generalship and of how battles and campaigns ended as they did” (xviii). As with most edited volumes, the essays are of mixed quality, but they do indeed remind historians that the Trans-Mississippi’s generals should not be so easily dismissed.

Among the more valuable features of the collection is Hewitt’s brief introduction, in which he examines the circumstances surrounding all of the transfers of Confederate generals to the Trans-Mississippi. According to Hewitt, very few generals seem to have been exiled to the department, while many who did come were either capable officers or deliberately sought transfer to return to their native states. Hewitt is no doubt correct in concluding that the Trans-Mississippi was hardly a dumping ground for bad generals.

Eight biographical essays form the core of the volume, and they demonstrate that the Trans-Mississippi contained its fair share of good, bad, and middling generals. The profiled officers include Thomas C. Hindman Jr., Theophilus H. Holmes, Edmund Kirby Smith, Mosby M. Parsons, John S. Marmaduke, Thomas J. Churchill, Thomas Green, and Joseph O. Shelby. It is an eclectic mix of subjects, ranging from commanders of the department to brigadiers. Indeed, that is one of the problems with the volume: it never really justifies the selection of some relatively minor figures, such as Churchill and Parsons, over other more important and controversial generals, such as Sterling Price and Richard Taylor.

There are some especially strong essays in the collection. Joseph G. Dawson III’s study of Theophilus H. Holmes is a perceptive look at the sort of qualities necessary for a successful general during the Civil War. Because Holmes lacked a merit-based promotion, an ability to inspire subordinates, and simple self-confidence, it was hardly a surprise that his tenure as commander of the Trans-Mississippi was both short-lived and marked by failure. Jeffery S. Prushankin presents a balanced treatment of Edmund Kirby Smith and his command of the department in 1864. There were many strategic, operational, and personnel challenges in a year that saw the Red River Campaign, an aborted attempt to transfer infantry to the Trans-Mississippi, and Sterling Price’s invasion of Missouri. In each case, Kirby Smith did little to merit praise from either his superiors or subordinates. But ultimately Prushankin reminds readers that any criticism of Kirby Smith needs to be tempered by an understanding of the complexity of the politics and military challenges of a department cut-off from the rest of the Confederacy.

Two of the lesser-known generals in the Trans-Mississippi, Thomas J. Churchill and Thomas Green, receive capable treatments by Mark K. Christ and Curtis W. Milbourn. Both essays are well grounded in a mix of printed primary and archival sources. Less enlightening are the essays on John M. Marmaduke and Joseph O. Shelby. Each is largely based on familiar printed primary and secondary materials that historians have often used to describe these generals and their campaigns. Stuart W. Sanders’s...