The Embattled Confederacy: Volume Three of the Image of War, 1861-1865 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS The Embattled Confederacy: Volume Three of the Image of War, 1861-1865. Edited by William C. Davis. Senior Consulting Editor, Bell I. Wiley. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, 1982. Pp. 464. $39.95.) Readers who liked what they saw in the first two volumes of this series of six proposed books should stay the course. The Embattled Confederacy is very like the previous offerings (except that the price has risen about five dollars). That means that it contains over 650 photographs (many of them published here for the first time), that they arereproduced handsomely, and that they are accompanied by a quite respectable text: essays on Antietam , the blockade, the Negro's role in the war, Chancellorsville, the Confederate home front, and Gettysburg. The more distinguished among these essays are Peter J. Parish's lucid work on Fredricksburg, Frank E. Vandiver's dramatic recreation of Chancellorsville (which argues that prejudice against German-Americans caused officers to turn a deaf ear to warnings that might have saved General Joseph Hooker from defeat), and Charles P. Roland's "The South at War" (which proves to be a brief cultural history of the Confederacy with little-known and interesting observations on Southern humor, education, and belles lettres ). Two "portfolios," with photographs and captions only, focus on New Bern, North Carolina, and Washington, D. C. Battlefields, infantrymen, cannons, and headquarters sites become somewhat monotonous, and one is grateful for the fine naval photographs and for the pictures of the home fronts and of slaves and freedmen . William C. Davis is to be complimented for thus broadening the focus, but this book, like its predecessors, still suffers from the military fixation of popular works on the Civil War. Despite Roland's essay, there are no portraits of cultural figures and precious few of politicians. The home front is more visually indistinct to the Civil War student than the battle front, and the books could do more to clear this up than they have done to date. Still, there is much to be grateful for in this ambitious and generally distinguished series of books. Mark E. Neely, Jr. Louis A. Warren Lincoln Library and Museum ...