The Training Ground: Grant, Lee, Sherman, and Davis in the Mexican War, 1846-1848
By Martin Dugard
(October 2008 Civil War News)

Illustrated, maps, appendices, notes, bibliography, index, 446 pp. 2008. Little, Brown and Company, 237 Park Ave., New York, NY 10017, $29.99 plus shipping.

Reviewer: Jeffry D. Wert
Jeffry D. Wert is a retired Pennsylvania high school teacher. He is the author of seven books on the Civil War, including his recent Cavalryman of the Lost Cause:  A Biography of J.E.B. Stuart.

Review:
Martin Dugard’s The Training Ground is an exasperating book. A gifted writer, Dugard has fashioned a compelling narrative, with striking characterizations of individuals and telling vignettes. But the book contains surprising, even astonishing, factual errors that mars the work’s qualities.

The Training Ground is not a major history of the Mexican War. It is the story of select officers, West Pointers, who would rise to prominence during the Civil War. Ulysses S. Grant, Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee merit the most study in the book. But other fellow academy graduates — William T. Sherman, James Longstreet, Braxton Bragg, Thomas J. Jackson, and others — receive the author’s attention. In fact, many of the army’s senior officers, including Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott, are deftly sketched by Dugard.

He examines the conflict’s major campaigns and battles. He is particularly good in discussing logistics, the hardships of conducting operations across hundreds of miles of forbidding terrain, of the contrast between regular soldiers and volunteers, and of the Mexican officers and forces.

Dugard’s battle descriptions are skillfully drawn, but without the detail some readers may be seeking. Unfortunately, the maps are more confusing than clarifying.

 Although this reviewer is not an authority on the Mexican War, it seems that Dugard has written a moving, popular history of that struggle. The narrative flows in a series of brief chapters. He chooses to present the lessons these trained soldiers learned in Mexico by describing their experiences in combat and in the arduous marches. He does not offer analytical discussions of the lessons.

 The factual errors, however, bring into question the narrative’s reliability. Although a number of the errors are contained in an appendix, the mistakes will capture the attention of well-read students of military history.

Several examples should suffice: Longstreet is described as a Virginian; Richard Ewell commanded the Third Corps at Gettysburg; John Pope led the Army of the Potomac at Cedar Mountain; Jackson was “shot three times by a sentry” at Chancellorsville; Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1859; and George E. Pickett “led one of the most famous cavalry charges in the history of modern warfare.”

As popular history, The Training Ground is a well-written work. It must, however, be read with caution.