Civil War Leadership and Mexican War Experience by Kevin Dougherty (review)

Civil War Leadership and Mexican War Experience. By Kevin Dougherty. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. Pp. 222. Illustrations, diagrams, appendices , works cited, index. ISBN 978-1-57806-968-2. $50.00, cloth.) Kevin Dougherty tackles the relationship between the Mexican War experience of American officers and soldiers and their Civil War leadership. Perhaps the greatest weakness of the book is that the author tried to do too much. In covering the experiences of twenty-six men, Dougherty limits himself to a few pages for each. Surely Henry Hunt, Jefferson C. Davis, John Slidell (a diplomat), Philip Kearny, John Winder, and William T. Sherman (who played no role in the war) might have been eliminated, so as to provide more space for essays on Robert E. Lee, U. S. Grant, and Stonewall Jackson. Likewise, the space available is not wisely used. The author dedicates four pages to Jackson, four and a half pages to Lee, six pages to Grant, seven to Gideon Pillow, seven to Samuel Du Pont, and twelve to John Pope. Furthermore, the author sometimes relies on outdated secondary sources while ignoring modern scholarship. In his essay on Jefferson Davis, Dougherty refers to Cass Canfield as Davis’s biographer, citing the short book, The Iron Will of Jefferson Davis (1978), while ignoring more recent and scholarly biographies by William C. Davis and William J. Cooper Jr. Most disappointing, the editors at the University of Mississippi Press did not remind the author of Joseph E. Chance’s excellent, Jefferson Davis’s Mexican War Regiment, which they published in 1991. The same problem is apparent in the essay on Gideon Pillow, in which the author does not cite the definitive The Life and Wars of Gideon J. Pillow (1993) by Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes Jr. and Roy P. Stonesifer Jr. Likewise, Dougherty sometimes demonstrates a simple lack of knowledge of the Mexican War and its historiography. Checking the bibliography, this reviewer noticed that Richard Bruce Winders’s Mr. Polk’s Army: The American Military Experience in the Mexican War and James McCaffrey’s Army of Manifest Destiny: The American Soldier in the Mexican War—starting points for any study of the American army in Mexico—are not cited. Likewise, his statement, “Geographic enthusiasm for the war was generally confined to the South”, (p. 15) is just wrong. In 1846, President Polk asked Indiana to provide three regiments and enough men volunteered to fill nearly six. That said, this reviewer did find some of the essays interesting and enlightening , particularly those on George McClellan and George Gordon Meade. This could have been a much better book, however, if the editors at the University of Mississippi Press had sent it out to readers with more knowledge of the Mexican War. Texas State University–San Marcos Jeffrey G. Mauck 328 Southwestern Historical Quarterly January *jan 09 11/26/08 12:00 PM Page 328 ...