Wilson’s Creek: The Second Battle of the Civil War and the Men Who Fought It (review)

Wilson's Creek: The Second Battle of the Civil War and the Men Who Fought It. By William Garrett Piston and Richard W. Hatcher III. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Civil War America Series. Pp. 408. $37.50.)

A countercharge thunders across the verdant field, its objective a brick, Greek revival structure atop a hill overlooking the surrounding village. The wool-clad troops are in deadly earnest, intent upon reclaiming by frontal assault the heights they traditionally controlled but which their opponents, now occupying the hill, recently won from them in a flank attack. The scene is not Virginia of 1862. Rather, this pitched battle is being waged today on modern university campuses between historians of the Civil War. The attackers are military historians; the defenders, social and cultural historians who during the 1980s and 1990s claimed the field for their own. As both see it, the soul of the profession is at stake. This book should go far to help the militarists' case, though, ironically, by interweaving the research agenda of the social historians into its skillful military narrative and analysis. As the subtitle suggests, this book offers great depth on the combatants, from lowly volunteer privates to army commanders, tracing their lives and motivations for enlisting in the war as well as their aspirations for its conclusion. In this, they have furthered the recent historiography on Civil War soldiers by applying it to the trans-Mississippi region, a theater of war so overlooked by Civil War scholars as to have earned the sobriquet "The Forgotten War." The authors have plumbed deeply for their subject; they have used virtually every available site for resources in the region and beyond—twenty-three in all—as well as more than sixty newspapers in bringing life to the 1861 campaign and battle. While they have minimized the political aspects of Missouri's unique struggle, through the use of vignettes the reader will obtain a deep, if personalized, sense of the war's complex meanings in the minds of combatants from the far western region. In doing so they have offered important insights into both regional identity and the very nature of the nation's epic internal struggle in the border region most sensitive to its deepest meanings. While their handling of characters is impressive enough, the authors reserve their true talent for their analysis of the battlefield. Until now, the clash of forces at Wilson's Creek has been overshadowed by the stories of its enigmatic leaders, Nathaniel Lyon (who died there, the first federal general to fall in the war), Sterling Price, and Ben McCullough, as biographies of each suggest. If anything, this book brings into balance the commanders and their commands. Far more than a regimental, tactical study, this book is, quite simply, a military history tour de force, a superlative study of the personal and unpredictable nature of Civil War conflicts. Never before have the mechanics of a Civil War battle been placed in such stark relief, never before have readers been offered such intimate access to the fine line between chaos and lethargy that pervaded battlefields on all fronts of this now-distant war. From the influence of the phenomenon of acoustic shadow to the frequency of shots fired to the timing of regiments falling prone in the tall prairie grass just as they were to receive fire, the realism of battle limned in this book will make it immediately a must-read by Civil War scholars, students, and enthusiasts. This, combined with its superb use of maps and illustrations—most from the region's single most important Civil War museum, General Sweeny's Museum, located near the Wilson's Creek National Military Park at Republic, Missouri—will make Wilson's Creek far more than simply a much-needed revision of Edwin C. Bearss's study of the...