The Stones River and Tullahoma Campaigns: This Army Does Not Retreat

Christopher L. Kolakowski

The History Press, 2011, 160 pp., $17.95

Reviewed by Gordon Berg

            Reading Chris Kolakowski's monograph on the Stones River and Tullahoma campaigns in Tennessee is like being on a well organized staff ride led by a thoroughly briefed officer.  If all the volumes in The History Press' series honoring the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War are as deftly organized and clearly written as this one, they will be a worthy addition to the historiography of what Robert Penn Warren rightly called “for the American imagination, the great single event of our history.”

            But don't let Kolakowski's conversational tone fool you.  Beneath it lies a keen strategic and tactical analysis of these two frequently overshadowed campaigns.  Kolakowski explains why they were decisive precursors to the more widely known battles that would later open the heartland of the upper South to a relentless tide of blue-coated invaders.    

            The book's first two chapters set the stage for the initial clash between the newly formed Union Army of the Cumberland and the newly named Confederate Army of Tennessee along a clear, limpid stream 30 miles south of Nashville.  Both Union Major General William S. Rosecrans and Confederate Lieutenant General Braxton Bragg had the same New Year's Eve 1862 battle plan; hold on the right and turn the other's left flank.  

            Bragg struck first and, for most of the day, the situation looked bleak for the boys in blue.  But a makeshift defensive line anchored at a place that aptly became known as “Hell's Half Acre,” and strung out along the Nashville Pike, eventually stemmed the gray tsunami..  The next day, both armies salved their considerable wounds under a cold, driving rain.  On the afternoon of Jan. 2, 1863, a poorly planned and disastrously executed Rebel attack on the Federal right at McFadden's Ford against a wall of expertly directed artillery fire ended what was to be the war's bloodiest battle in proportion to the number of troops engaged.  

            The battle of Stones River reflected the personalities of each army's commander.  Rosecrans was at the height of his powers; proud, profane, and personally courageous.  Bragg was rigid, aloof, and personally arrogant.  Kolakowski rightly characterizes the failings of the Confederate command structure in the West,  from Jefferson Davis on down, as a continuous psychodrama that plagued the Rebel armies in the West for the rest of the war.  

            Both armies then went into winter quarters.  Bragg, at Tullahoma, spent his time squabbling with his superiors and subordinates while Rosecrans, at Murfreesboro, reinforced and resupplied his battered army.  After 169 days of rest, and considerable prodding from Washington, Rosecrans was ready to resume campaigning.  Because of momentous events occurring in other theaters (Lee's invasion of Pennsylvania and Grant's final assault and capture of Vicksburg), the Tullahoma Campaign rarely earns a historiographical footnote.

            The long blue lines marched out of Murfreesboro on June 24, into “one of the wilder and latest-settled areas in Tennessee.”  The roads were bad and the weather was worse.  It rained for 14 of the next 17 days, leading one of Rosecrans' brigade commanders to observe “The roads seem to have been lost, as we passed through woods with bottomless mud.”  But Rosecrans had two secret weapons, accurate maps and Captain William Emory Merrill to draw them.  First in his class at West Point in 1859, Merrill was now in charge of the army's topographical department.  He left nothing to chance.   Maps produced by his topographical engineers allowed commanders to study the roads leading to the Tennessee River, calculate their capacities and limitations, and pinpoint locations where they could find water and forage.  Map making for the Army of the Cumberland had become an integral part of its war making capability.

            “Rosecrans's conquest of the region,” Kolakowski concludes, “had been amazingly cheap.”  At a cost of less than 600 casualties, “The Army of the Cumberland now controlled Middle Tennessee and threatened Chattanooga itself.”  The roads to Alabama, Georgia, and East Tennessee were now open.  

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Gordon Berg is a past President and member of the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia (www.cwrtdc.org).  His reviews and articles appear in the Civil War Times and America's Civil War, among other publications.

Enduring Legacy:
Rhetoric and Ritual of the Lost Cause

By W. Stuart Towns

University of Alabama Press, 2012, 208 pp., $37.50

Reviewed by Gordon Berg

            The Lost Cause, like Faulkner’s past, is not dead and, according to W. Stuart Towns, it’s not even past.  In his incisive exploration of the rhetoric and ritual associated with the South’s most enduring myth, Towns maintains “that twentieth-century white southerners learned much of how they were going to think about race, about the North, about the Civil War and Reconstruction, and about themselves from the rhetoric of the Lost Cause.”

            A former communications professor at Southeast Missouri State University, Towns examines the public oratory that formed the bedrock of southern ideology after the end of the Civil War.  His prose is clear, concise, and unfailingly direct; his hypotheses are boldly stated and scrupulously supported with evidence; and his conclusions are solidly based in logic and data. 

            Towns is non-judgmental about the post-war South's white supremacy ideology.  His aim is to show how ceremonial speaking and other forms of public address  were    the “primary vehicles for creating and disseminating the Lost Cause to the South's oral culture.”  Speeches at Confederate Memorial Day ceremonies, regimental reunions, and monument dedications extolled the valued heritage of a white society destroyed by the war.  For the formerly ascendant class, Lost Cause ritual and oratory “created a sense of order and community out of the chaos, uncertainty, and despair of defeat.”

            Many of the orators Towns investigates are not household names today.  But prominent people like Tennessee Senator William B. Bate, Florida Governor Cary A. Hardee, and veteran John Warwick Daniel, known as the “Lame Lion of Lynchburg” were regular speakers at civic gatherings like the 1910 reunion at Little Rock, AK that drew 150,000 spectators to watch 12,000 Confederate veterans and 14 bands pass in review.  

            The idea of redemption was an essential component of Lost Cause ideology.  It gave white Southerners the hope of setting things right again after their long night of radical, black dominated, Reconstruction.  “This redemption,” Towns argues, “was strongly reinforced by southern speakers in words that echoed for several generations as a cornerstone for the white-controlled, absolutely segregated, 'Solid South.'”

            Towns argues, persuasively, that Lost Cause orators spread their social vision so effectively and so persuasively “that they are still alive today and will remain so well into the future.”  In the desegregation and civil rights decades of the 1950s and 1960s, Towns maintains, Lost Cause rhetoric “justified, vindicated, defended, and explained states’ rights and white supremacy as enduring and fundamental planks of the ‘southern way of life.’”  Towns finds a clear and direct link between the “right of secession” and “sacred honor” rationales offered by former Confederate generals John Bell Hood and John Brown Gordon in the 1870s and the code words of “states’ rights” and “constitutional liberty” used by governors Ross Barnett and George Wallace in the 1960s.

            Towns hopes that the sesquicentennial commemoration will be used by people North and South to discuss and more fully understand the rhetoric underlying what Robert Penn Warren called “the great single event of our history.”

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Gordon Berg is a past President and member of the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia (http://www.cwrtdc.org/).  His reviews and articles appear in the Civil War Times and America's Civil War, among other publications.

America’s Great Debate:
Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas,
and the Compromise That Preserved the Union

By Fergus M. Bordewich
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2012, 398 pp.

Reviewed by Publishers Weekly

In this vivid, insightful history of the bitter controversy that led to the Compromise of 1850, journalist Bordewich (Washington: The Making of the American Capital) reminds us that Southerners dominated all branches of the federal government until 1850.  Every president had owned slaves except the two Adamses, and Southern states still made up half of the Senate.  The territorial bonanza after the 1845-1847 Mexican war threatened their control because California and New Mexico's governments excluded slavery.

Outraged Southern leaders refused to accept this, paralyzing Congress for months. A compromise designed by an aged Henry Clay failed, but was quickly revived and passed thanks largely to Stephen Douglas.  It admitted California as a free state, put off the status of the remaining territory, and strengthened the fugitive slave law. Despite narrow passage and wildly abusive debate, it was a dazzling achievement that temporarily staved off civil war. Political history is often a hard slog, but not in Bordewich's gripping, vigorous account featuring a large cast of unforgettable characters with fierce beliefs.

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Fergus Bordewich is a member of the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia (cwrtdc.org).  His other books include America’s Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise That Preserved the Union and Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America.  Additional information about Mr. Bordewich and his books, articles and other publications is available on his website http://www.fergusbordewich.com/books.html