The Finishing Stroke: Texans in the 1864 Tennessee Campaign (review)

John Lundberg's The Finishing Stroke highlights the valor and dedication of Texans who served with the Confederate Army of Tennessee. Lundberg proposes to build upon the rank-and-file Texans' experience to make what the foreword calls a "bold argument" that command failures within the Army of Tennessee, particularly the leadership of Texan John Bell Hood, squandered the Confederacy's last chance at victory (p. 12). The "failure of command" thesis seems anything but bold given the similar conclusions found throughout the Army of Tennessee's historiography. Furthermore, the assessment that, if led by more capable commanders, the Army of Tennessee's 1864 Tennessee campaign could have "turned the tide" of the Civil War is dubious given recent scholarship on the Confederacy's rapidly deteriorating condition by late 1864. Therefore, The Finishing Stroke emerges as little more than a stale and flawed "fife and drum" campaign study.

Lundberg's narrative centers upon Hiram Granbury's Texans, but also includes Matthew Ector's Texas "Chubs." Unfortunately, a cumbersome and generic description of the campaign's prominent events all too often obscures the Texans' experience. Beyond detailing the valor and glory of Texans in enduring the Army of Tennessee's deplorable conditions and leadership, Lundberg provides scant evidence of who these Texans were or for their motivations for soldiering on given their circumstances. Texans themselves are rarely heard from in Lundberg's account, because he chose to draw heavily from secondary sources such as Craig Symonds's Stonewall of the West: Patrick Cleburne and the Civil War and Wiley Sword's Embrace an Angry Wind: The Confederacy's Last Hurrah to find descriptive evidence concerning the Texans. Instead of investigating the motivations behind the Texans' perseverance through primary sources, Lundberg's narrative reads like a warmed-over Official Records after-action report, telling us who was where and when, lauding the performance of the army and its junior commanders (especially Cleburne), while assigning sole blame to Hood for any failure. Thus, the Texans and rest of the army appear as mindless automatons, especially at Spring Hill, arguably the campaign's most decisive point, where the Texans' lack of initiative let the Union army pass right by them, forcing Hood to launch the slaughter at Franklin.

This book suffered just as severely from a lack of editorial guidance as it did from its unsound argument. Editors should have addressed the manuscript's shaky historiographical foundation at its early stages. They should have also requested that Lundberg improve the manuscript's style and organization. The persistence of passive voice and the interruption of the narrative with lengthy unit histories made the book frustratingly impossible to follow. Given the myriad unit battlefield movements provided by the author, the paucity of maps is bewildering. The publisher chose to include only two stock maps, one of Hood's movements from Atlanta to Franklin and the other a general overview of the Battle of Nashville. Neither of these maps pinpointed the locations of any Texas regiments on the field, nor did they elucidate anything more than a basic understanding of the action.