These Rugged Days: Alabama in the Civil War by John S. Sledge (review)

This is yet another book on the Alabama experience in the Civil War, but it is written by John Sledge, a born storyteller so talented as a writer that he could probably transform the Mobile telephone directory into moving literature. And no doubt to the delight of his many fans, it is an unabashed and sometimes romantic homage to Alabamians who fought for the Confederacy and those civilians who supported them and the Lost Cause. Sledge makes this goal clear at the very end of the book when he insists that "we owe it to ourselves and our heirs never to forget the remarkable men and women who endured those rugged days ever so long ago" (212).

The dust jacket includes a blurb touting the book as a "fresh look at the Civil War in Alabama that thoroughly covers the topic," but unfortunately, it offers little in the way of new information, and its scope is so narrow that professional historians and close students of this period will quickly spot some significant omissions. For example, although Sledge acknowledges that the conflict was all about "Northern meddling on the slavery question" (28), he does not attempt to explain why secession or war was seen by any Alabamian as a necessary cure for the growing hostility to slavery. Like other books of this type, the role of dissidents—Unionists—is minimized to a few brief snippets (1, 40, 43, 47, 58, 81, 101, 149). Presumably, Sledge intends his pointed disdain for "politics and Unionism" (xxii) to excuse this, forgetting the essence of Carl Von Clausewitz's famous axiom from over a century ago that war is simply a continuation of politics by other means. Politics and war are inseparable and any discussion of war should include the military battles as well as the political battles, of which there were many during the Civil War in Alabama. Thus, although Sledge rightly concludes at one point that "context is everything" (212), the relevant context is mostly written out of the story (there is no mention of white Alabamians fighting in the Union army), or papered over with specious assertions like "the martial spirit was triumphant all over Alabama" (32).

Left out of the discussion of unity of sentiment in Alabama is any deliberation on the Confederacy's early resort to conscription as the only means to fill out its armies, or of the existence of Alabama draft dodgers. Brief allusions are occasionally made to deserters (74, 81, 124, 207), but there is no discussion regarding the reasons for, or frequency of, desertion among troops from Alabama. Along these same lines, there is no mention of the mutiny of Alabama troops in Brigadier General James Holt Clanton's brigade in early 1864, and very little about the effect of inflation, taxes, impressment, and food shortages on the morale of Alabama soldiers or their families (77-79). These were among the reasons why the days about which Sledge writes were "rugged."

There are also some factual errors, most of which are minor. Selma, rather than Cahaba, is said to have been the "Dallas County seat" (122). Centreville is misspelled "Centerville" (156). Sledge contends that an expected benefit of Union general Lovell Rousseau's raid in July 1864 during William T. Sherman's Atlanta Campaign was to "pull Confederate [general] Nathan Bedford Forrest out of Middle Tennessee, where he was playing hell with Union communications" (106), despite the fact that Forrest was not engaged in that activity there at all in 1864 until September, after this raid and the evacuation of Atlanta. Confederate general John Bell Hood is said to have evacuated the "Georgia capital" on September 2, 1864, when he actually evacuated Atlanta (144) and not Milledgeville, the antebellum and wartime capital. Mississippi and middle Georgia are considered "relatively untouched" by war by 1865, when those states were actually the scene of far more battles than Alabama (146...