April 28, 2008
Civil War St. Louis Reviews...
Guide to Missouri
Confederate Units, 1861-1865
By James E. McGhee
Guide to Missouri Confederate Units, 1861-1865
by James E. McGhee
Now available from Amazon.com
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Guide to Missouri Confederate Units, 1861-1865
By James E. McGhee
Non-fiction
Hardcover: 314 pages, 22 photos
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press (April, 2008)
Price: $34.95
ISBN: 1557288704
Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1.3 inches
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Reviewed by G. E. Rule
It sucks mightily to lose a civil war, and in a host of
ways. The obvious result, of course, is that the cause you were willing to spend
your blood and treasure on is lost. Less obvious, but even longer lasting, are
some of the ancillary consequences. For instance, you might have a little thing
called “Reconstruction” if you lived in a state that the victors were kind
enough to concede was officially (by their definition) “in rebellion”. What
happened to you in a state that was not “official” in the victor’s eyes (see:
A Minirant on the Number of Confederate States) was arguably even
nastier (see: Oath of Loyalty). And aside from
official consequences, one could read in local newspapers for years after of the
sad and unofficial results of night riders thundering down a farm lane after
dark to call out an ex-rebel to his final moments on a country porch in front of
his wife and family.
Then, of course, is one of the hoariest truisms in all of
historiography –“the victors write the history”. This means that learned
gentlemen shall come behind your bleeding corpse and explain to generations yet
unborn why your defeat was inevitable, justified, and really quite to the
benefit of all, often with an air of dispassionate smugness that explicitly or
implicitly gives the impression that they’d have done much better than the
actual actors had history chosen them to land its sledgehammer of unhappiness
upon.
But here’s another terribly important thing to consider
about why the victors typically get to write the history on a civil war –in
general, the victors have much, much better record keeping.
Certainly this was true about the losing side of the
American Civil War as it played out in Missouri from the years 1861-1865. Driven
from the state in the early days of the war, such bureaucracy as the Confederate
government-in-exile that the Missourians had was harried, underfunded, and
barely functional. Such recruiting as the Confederacy was able to do in
Missouri was typically done under the noses of the Union forces who kinda-sorta
controlled the state, more-or-less, for most of the war. Confederate recruiting
efforts were ongoing for most of that period, though typically in identifiable
waves. Add to this amazingly higgledy-piggledy situation the fact that often
there were as many as four levels of pro-Confederate recruiting going on –that
for official Confederate forces; those for the pro-Confederate Missouri State
Guard; those for unofficial local pro-Confederate militias (these typically in
the early days of the war – see Ab Grimes’ hilarious account of his and Mark
Twain’s early experiences for an example); and those for the infamous
pro-Confederate guerrilla groups such as those led by Bill Quantrill and William
Anderson. Any way you look at it, trying to recreate even the basic records that
good history writing requires in such a situation is obviously quite a
challenge.
As we get in range of the sesquicentennial of the beginning
of the American Civil War, a new book by James E. McGhee and the
University of
Arkansas Press addresses at least
part of the problem –official Confederate units from Missouri.
First, a word about the
University of Arkansas Press “Civil
War in the West” series of which
the current title is part. The word is a simple “Bravo”. As anyone reading
these words can reliably be assumed to be a devotee of the Civil War in
Missouri, we can not provide a stronger recommendation than the one we do for
the University of Arkansas’ series.
As for the author, Jim McGhee, we must first admit a
partiality. Jim is a friend of the site (see:
First Missouri Confederate Brigade by
James E. McGhee). But then Jim
is a friend of anyone who toils seriously to shed illumination on the less well-lit
corners of the civil war in Missouri (see:
The Fight at Jackson Fairgrounds) and has been
for more years than he might like to be reminded of (see:
U.S. Grant and the Belmont
Campaign by James E. McGhee).
At any rate, we cannot imagine anyone better qualified to
have written Guide to Missouri Confederate Units, 1861-1865, and
the book he has produced does not disappoint. Separated into three sections, one
each for Artillery (20 batteries), Cavalry (26 regiments, 7 battalions, and 3
squadrons), and Infantry (12 regiments and 1 battalion), he has produced the
definitive guide to official Confederate units from Missouri. Each unit receives
a biographical sketch of its composition and career from its inception by one of
the leading authorities of the war in Missouri. Just as lovely, if you are even
half the geek that we are, is the bibliography of sources given for each unit’s
history.
It’s not often that we feel a need to quote someone else’s
opinion of a book we’re reviewing. But sometimes, someone else says it at least
as well as you can say it yourself. In this case, we tip the cap to series
editors Daniel Sutherland and T. Michael Parrish for the best thumbnail
description of what McGhee has accomplished with this title: “. . . his
expertise is evident on every page of this book. The scope of the work is
startling, the depth of detail gratifying, its reliability undeniable, and the
unit narratives highly readable”. You can’t ask for more than that from any
history book, and while the cause of the Missouri Confederates is still lost, at
least it has become a wee bit more possible for their history to be written
accurately because of the efforts of James E. McGhee and the University of
Arkansas press.
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From the webmasters of Civil War St. Louis...
Noted Guerrillas and, the extremely rare,
A Terrible Quintette
on a searchable CD-ROM:
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information and to order
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