Stonewall Jackson at Cedar Mountain (review)

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 Although Cozzens made use of a number of unpublished sources, he did not consult the material at the Stones River National Military Park (at least no such material is listed in his notes or bibliography); nor,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 notes indicate that Cozzens consulted the Official Records far less often than do most authors of Civil War battle histories. James Lee McDonough's Stones River: Bloody Winter in Tennessee (1980) is absent from his bibliography. No Better Place to Die is not the final word on Stones River. It is, however, adequate for most purposes. Civil War scholars need now to focus on individual units and commanders—especially the Federals— who were involved in the battle. Richard M. McMurry Decatur, Georgia Stonewall Jackson at Cedar Mountain. By Robert K. Krick. (Chapel Hill, N.C: University of North Carolina Press, 1990. Pp. xi-xiii, 456. $29.95.) The battle at Cedar Mountain, Virginia, on August 9, 1862, came to pass as Major General John Pope's Union Army of Virginia moved BOOK REVIEWS345 southward, threatening the rear of Confederate General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. Lee, keeping a wary eye on Major General George B. McClellan's Union Army of the Potomac, ensconced at Harrison's Landing on the James River east of Richmond, refused to be caught between the two Union forces. Either Pope and McClellan could cooperate and both strike Lee from east and west, or Pope could draw off enough Confederate strength from Lee's army to allow McClellan to withdraw quickly from the Peninsula—then both could face Lee in northern Virginia with vastly superior forces. But Lee moved promptly to frustrate either plan. Gambling that McClellan would not renew his offensive, he sent Major General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson and twelve thousand men, followed by Major General Ambrose P. Hill with a division, to frustrate Pope's advance. Meanwhile, McClellan had no intention of either striking at Lee or of reinforcing Pope, even if he could have moved fast enough to make a difference at Cedar Mountain, a doubtful eventuality. Jackson met the vanguard of Pope's army, commanded by Major General Nathaniel P. Banks. Outnumbered, Banks nevertheless attacked, and so the Battle of Cedar Mountain followed. Krick carefully, even meticulously, followed the action of each unit, skillfully portraying many of the officers and enlisted men involved. Krick kept them from being mere cardboard figures, as, for example, when mentioning the death of twenty-two-year-old Sergeant Lucius Cammack of the 10th Virginia, who had "a clear and unshakable premonition" that he would die, and so he did...