No Better Place to Die: The Battle of Stones River (review)

BOOK REVIEWS No Better Place to Die: The Battle of Stones River. By Peter Cozzens. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. Pp. xii, 282. $24.95.) In mid-winter of 1862-63, Union military fortunes hit a low point. In less than a month the Yankees suffered crushing and embarrassing defeats at Fredericksburg, Virginia; Holly Springs and Chickasaw Bluffs, Mississippi ; and Galveston, Texas. In the midst of that time of gloom and doom for the North came word that the Federal Army of the Cumberland under Major General William S. Rosecrans had won an important strategic victory at Stones River, near Murfreesboro, Tennessee, in a battle fought December 31, 1862-January 2, 1863. (Tactically the battle was a draw, but the subsequent Confederate retreat from the area allowed the Northerners to claim a victory and to solidify their control over Middle Tennessee.) "I can never forget," President Abraham Lincoln wrote to Rosecrans, "that . . . you gave us a hard-earned victory, which had there been a defeat instead, the nation could scarcely have lived over." Had Stones River been yet another lost battle for the Unionists, the Emancipation Proclamation—issued in its final form on January 1, 1863, as the contending armies faced each other on that battlefield—would have been perceived as the desperate, last-gasp effort of the discredited Lincoln Administration trying to prop up a rapidly collapsing cause. In No Better Place to Die, Peter Cozzens, a foreign service officer with the State Department, tells the story of the battle, something of the history and organization of the armies that fought in it, and a bit about the eccentric generals who commanded them (the irascible Braxton Bragg led the Confederates). Cozzens also presents an all-too-brief evaluation of the battle's place in the larger strategic framework of the war and describes its impact on the bitter intramural squabbles among the Confederate generals that consumed so much of their time and psychic energy, and so greatly hampered their efforts at achieving any success in the West for the remainder of the war. No Better Place to Die is not as detailed as some other recent studies of Civil War battles, but the text and the maps make it possible for readers to follow the movements of the contending armies across the battlefield in enough detail to satisfy all but the most rabid of armchair 344CIVIL WAR HISTORY generals. Cozzens does a good job of describing the battle from the viewpoints of both the generals and the men in the ranks. The text of No Better Place to Die is generally well-written, but it does suffer from the pronoun problems that bedevil so many authors (plural pronouns with singular antecedents or with no antecedents). Cozzens sometimes overworks words: "Minty shook out his three regiments " (51); "Johnson shook out his lead units" (57); "McCown ordered skirmishers shaken out" (85); "Cleburne shook out his skirmishers" (91); "the second battalion of Missourians was shaken out" (122); and "Parkhurst ... shook out his stragglers' line" (131). Indeed, there was a whole lotta shakin' goin on; perhaps Jerry Lee Lewis was somewhere on the battlefield. Cozzens also uses "not only . . . but" on many occasions when he clearly means "not only . . . but also." And, it sometimes seems, he is determined to begin every other sentence with a conjunction. The book contains the usual quota of factual errors. For example, Cozzens's statement that the 68 percent casualties suffered at Stones River by the 8th Tennessee Infantry Regiment was "the heaviest [loss] suffered by a Confederate regiment in any single battle of the war" (157) is wrong. At Antietam the 1st Texas lost more than 80 percent of its men, and casualties in both the 26th North Carolina and 8th Virginia at Gettysburg approached 90 percent. Although Cozzens made use of a number of unpublished sources, he did not consult the material at the Stones River National Military Park (at least no such material is listed in his notes or bibliography); nor, except for Illinois, did he make much use of materials housed in the archives of the states that sent troops to the battle. He did not make much use of contemporary newspapers. The...