Meade’s Army: The Private Notebooks of Lt. Col. Theodore Lyman

Edited by David W. Lowe
Illustrated, notes, index, 512 pp., 2007. The Kent State University Press, 307 Lowry Hall, P.O. Box 5190, Kent, OH 44242, $45 plus shipping.

Reviewer: Jonathan A. Noyalas

Jonathan A. Noyalas is a history professor at Lord Fairfax Community College in Middletown, Va., and the author or editor of four books on Civil War era history.

Review:

In 1922 George Russell Agassiz, the nephew of Lt. Col. Theodore Lyman, a volunteer aide on Gen. George G. Meade’s staff from September 1863 until the Civil War’s end, published Meade’s Headquarters 1863-1865: Letters of Colonel Theodore Lyman from the Wilderness to Appomattox.

Scattered throughout Agassiz’s volume — largely correspondence between Lyman and his wife — are excerpts from Lyman’s private notebooks. Despite the awareness that Lyman kept private journals which offered tremendous insight into the Army of the Potomac’s high command no historian pursued publication of these notebooks housed in the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Fortunately for Civil War history David W. Lowe, a historian with the National Park Service, rediscovered Lyman’s private journals and has presented them in a nicely edited and significant volume, Meade’s Army: The Private Notebooks of Lt. Col. Theodore Lyman.

Lowe allows Lyman’s words to echo through the ages in the book’s seven main chapters. Aside from a splendid introduction which provides a summation of Lyman’s life and detailed endnotes the book is not littered with information that detracts from Lyman’s musings.

Like so many young men in the North, Lyman’s patriotism surged with the outbreak of Civil War. Unfortunately Lyman had been in Europe when the war broke out and did not return until mid-1863. As he prepared to return to the United States he corresponded with an old acquaintance, Gen. George G. Meade.

Lyman was first introduced to Meade in 1856 in Florida, while Lyman was gathering specimens for Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology and Meade supervised the construction of light houses along Florida’s coast. Meade made an impression on the young Lyman.

During Lyman’s return trip from Europe he decided that he would like to offer his support to the war effort as a volunteer aide to the Army of the Potomac’s commander. Despite warnings from Meade about the hardships of military life Lyman arrived at Meade’s headquarters in September 1863. Like so many soldiers, Lyman passed the time by writing to loved ones and confiding to journals.

While Lyman’s notebooks offer traditional information contained in journals, such as weather, troop movements and family concerns, their real value is in the observations that Lyman makes about other generals in the Army of the Potomac and Meade’s reactions to certain circumstances.

Lyman’s colorful observations and criticisms of commanders is undoubtedly why he preferred these notebooks to remain secret. Throughout the work he offers very intriguing assessments of some of the bigger names who served in the Army of the Potomac.

For example he states that Gen. George Sykes was “not brilliant, but like a good clock, always on time.” Opinions about superior officers frequent Lyman’s notebooks, but they also illustrate his admiration for Meade — a commander who still today has been neglected by historians.

Lyman also provides insight into Meade’s responses to situations such as Grant making his headquarters with the Army of the Potomac and Meade’s displeasure with too much praise being heaped upon Gen. Philip Sheridan.

The volume also offers a glimpse at the tension between private entities who aided the war effort and the military, such as the animosity between army doctors and the Sanitary Commission.

Lyman’s assessments are keen, witty and at times humorous. Historians who study the Army of the Potomac, Meade or the Union high command should make Meade’s Army essential reading.