With Ballot and Bayonet: The Political Socialization of American Civil War Soldiers (review)

66CIVIL WAR HISTORY Woodworth seems, this time, far more interested in discussing the merits and doings of the armies Grant will come to command. Burnside (Army of the Ohio) is nothing short of a bungler; Hooker (Army of the Potomac) seems balky and lacking the necessary "can-do" attitude; Sherman (Army of the Tennessee), on the other hand, is the reverse image of Bragg's Confederate subordinates: he obeys orders; he hits hard and swiftly; he is loyal; and he commands an army of "sturdy and resourceful" men. The cautious George Thomas (Army of the Cumberland) does not impress Woodworth, nor does William Rosecrans. The latter conducts the Tullahoma Campaign in a manner "nothing short of brilliant , complex yet practical and perfectly adapted to his army's capabilities," although the result is "most striking in its incompleteness." Everything changes when Grant assumes command in the gloom following Chickamauga. Grant is magnificent—seeing the military significance of terrain, handling details and problems personally, and utilizing the talents of Baldy Smith, Hazen, Sheridan, and Sherman. Woodworth joins Grant in searching out complacency and despising it. Some will quibble with the praise heaped on Minty and Wilder and Willich and others. Some will point out that Jefferson C. Davis was not a West Pointer, that Garfield and Dana did bear close watching. Doubtless readers will react strongly to Woodworm's audacious analyses and pronouncements, particularly of Union and Confederate leaders. But, on the whole, even the most critical will admire the clarity and insight he brings to the Tullahoma Campaign and Chickamauga. Few historians can deal so skillfully with so large a canvas. None have managed to offer such a compressed, coherent, sequential narrative linking Tullahoma, Chickamauga, Chattanooga, and Knoxville. It makes reading Six Armies in Tennessee pleasurable and instructive. Nat C. Hughes Jr. Chattanooga, Tennessee With Ballot and Bayonet: The Political Socialization of American Civil War Soldiers. By Joseph Allan Frank. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998. Pp. ix, 304. $40.00.) There is a refreshing trend among Civil War historians to pay attention to the intellectual, cultural, and emotional life of the common soldier. No one has yet produced a study comprehensive enough to take in all the many facets of this topic; thus we have to build toward a synthetic work by absorbing studies that each deal with only one dimension of it. Joseph Allan Frank carefully contributes a look at the political life of the soldier. "This book contends that politics was the defining feature of the people's armies of the North and South," he asserts (vii). He overwhelmingly proves his point that political awareness was very high among the soldiers and that politi- BOOK REVIEWS67 cal issues suffused nearly all aspects of the war experience. No one has sharpened our awareness of the soldier's political life as Frank has done in this book. The heart of Frank's study is his work in the papers of ? ,01 3 soldiers, North and South. He ranks their political awareness in three areas: political acuity, scope of interest in political affairs, and sense of political effectiveness, concluding that more than a third of the soldiers "exhibited a higher level of political sophistication in their correspondence" (34). The differences within that group are interesting; Federals were slightly more sophisticated than Confederates , Midwesterners were slightly more sophisticated than New Englanders, and officers were a lot more sophisticated than enlisted men. Generally, the strength of politic interest increased over the course of the war, although the sense of political effectiveness declined for some men. Two thirds of the sample believed that high principles and ideals were at stake in the war; nearly twice as many Federals as Confederates believed this. More than 70 percent of the politically motivated Union soldiers favored arming former slaves. Surprisingly, nearly halfofthe Confederate soldiers also favored putting guns in black hands. And, when the war ended, more than 60 percent of the Rebel soldiers totally accepted defeat, while twice as many officers as enlisted men vowed never to accept it. These are enlightening statistics, although Frank is careful to point out that his sampling is too small to be taken as typical of all Civil War soldiers...