Webb Garrison’s Civil War Dictionary – An Illustrated Guide To the Everyday Language of Soldiers and Civilians
By Web Garrison
(February/March 2009 Civil War News)

Illustrated, bibliography, softcover, 350 pp., 2008. Cumberland House, 431 Harding Industrial Dr., Nashville, TN 37211, $16.95 plus shipping

Reviewer: Clint Johnson
Clint Johnson’s latest book is Pursuit: The Chase, Capture, Persecution and Surprising Release of Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

Review:
Who knew there was a USS Alabama (and what Union nitwit decided to name a ship after the Confederacy’s most famous commerce raider)? What sounds better, alvine flux or diarrhea? And finally, how does Webb Garrison keep turning out books eight years after his death?

The answer to that last question is that his wife Cheryl finished the book for him in 2001 and this is really a 2008 reissue.

Garrison was a master of what I call the “tidbit” kind of book where you collect interesting and curious facts and put them into a book that readers can pick up and put down at will. These are good books to give to people who don’t care to know the hard facts of specific engagements, but who want an easy way to get into studying it. I’ve written several of these types of books myself.

This Civil War Dictionary is just such a book with more than 2,500 entries and 330 illustrations. To help fill out the pages, the book really goes beyond “dictionary” to include the names of Confederate and Union ships. That is handy if you are looking for details on a specific ship, but odd in a way since the reader already knows what a ship is.

Other entries such as “Radical Republicans” seem to be shorter than they could be in trying to define the men who were both supporters and opponents of Abraham Lincoln.

Another term that could have been fleshed out was “galvanized Yankee,” which refers to the 6,000 Confederate prisoners who joined the Union army and were sent west to fill in the ranks of Union regiments. Garrison says they were engaged in several skirmishes and one battle, but he does not mention the names or locations of those engagements.

Where the book comes in handy is in defining specific military terms of the period that might be lost on modern readers. For instance “retrenchment” is defined as a secondary trench to which defenders could get to in the event they lost control of the first trench.

“Echelon” is correctly defined as the movement of infantry units where they are moving parallel to each other while also maintaining a specific distance from each other.

Some terms are just plain odd, such as “to eat the dishrag,” which means eating a piece of bread that has been used to clean a plate. It remains unclear just when a reader would need to know that piece of information other than if it is mentioned in a soldier’s letter.

So, don’t be a wagon dog (soldier who feigned illness to ride in a wagon). Go ahead and get this book and wonder when the next Webb Garrison book will appear.