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  • A Savage War: A Military History of the Civil War by Williamson Murray and Wayne Wei-Siang Hsieh
  • Earl J. Hess (bio)
A Savage War: A Military History of the Civil War. By Williamson Murray and Wayne Wei-Siang Hsieh. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. Pp. 602. Cloth, $35.00.)

This volume falls readily into a well-known type of book on Civil War history. Murray and Hsieh set out to write a general military history of the conflict much in the mode of Russell F. Weigley's A Great Civil War: A Military and Political History, 1861–1865 (2000), John Keegan's The American Civil War: A Military History (2009), and even in many ways Bruce Catton's books published in the 1960s. Organized chronologically, the volume takes the reader through the conflict mainly by discussing strategy, generalship, major campaigns, and battles.

Within the confines of what Murray and Hsieh set out to do, they have done it well. The book is a handsome product with very good maps and a clear, engaging writing style. The authors discuss a number of subtopics relevant to their remit.

There is a place for such works in the Civil War field. Even though several reliable general military histories are available, the popular market seems to enjoy the appearance of a new one. But the field of Civil War studies is much in need of a different kind of book, a work of synthesis that incorporates all the new lines of interpretation that have been worked out by historians, especially over the past two decades. Unfortunately, this volume does little to incorporate the most recent research on the Civil War.

The research base of this book is quite narrow and highly selective; the authors ignore a number of studies that bear importantly on the subject. Mark Neely's call to reevaluate the level of destructiveness by the Union army, Paddy Griffith's groundbreaking work on the role of the rifle musket, my own studies of the rifle musket and of the use of field fortifications, all are bypassed. The growing body of literature on the important connections between military operations and the environment produced by Lisa [End Page 671] Brady and contained in an anthology edited by Brian Allen Drake also are ignored. The authors pay some attention to the international context of the Civil War. However, they see the conflict as trending toward modernization rather than siding with recent views of the conflict that see the persistence of old methods of war-making as more important than the modernizing aspects that obviously existed in the Civil War.

The authors also have failed to incorporate the many battle and campaign studies that have been written in the past two decades. A military history of the Civil War ought to pay close attention to this genre, for it goes directly to the heart of the subject. Only a small handful of battle books are mentioned, but books by Timothy G. Smith on Shiloh, by George Rable on Fredericksburg, by Kenneth Noe on Perryville, and my own books on the Atlanta campaign battles are absent from their bibliography. Battle and campaign studies offer perspectives on the resonance of battle in the lives of soldiers and civilians alike, in the way that armies actually operated in the field, in the decision-making process endured by commanders, and in the many factors that underlay the movement of armed masses of men through enemy territory. All of these subtopics are as relevant to a military history of the Civil War as those covered in the book under review. A military history of the conflict ought to be based on more rather than fewer sources.

The lines of interpretation in the book are very similar to those in past such volumes. For example, Henry Halleck comes off as a petty and poor general, while Ulysses S. Grant seems virtually flawless in his execution of military operations. The authors see the Civil War as the threshold of modern warfare, presaging the horrors of World War I. They believe, along with most historians, that the fall of Atlanta cinched Abraham Lincoln's reelection to the presidency. But they fail...

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