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Book Reviews These are some reviews from a recent issue of
The Civil War News:
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A Legacy of Valor: The Memoirs and Letters of Captain Henry Newton Comey, 2nd Massachusetts Infantry.
Edited by Lyman Richard Comey.
Illustrated, maps, notes, index, 312 pp., 2004. The University of Tennessee Press, Communications Dept., Knoxville, TN 37996, $38 plus shipping.
Henry Comey of Hopkinton, Mass., enlisted in the 2nd Massachusetts Infantry shortly after the Civil War opened with the firing on Fort Sumter. Through the course of the next four years Comey and his regiment served in both the Eastern and Western theaters of the war and participated in some of the hardest fighting experienced by the Army of the Potomac and the Army of the Cumberland. Following its formation, the 2nd Massachusetts joined Gen. Robert Patterson’s command in the lower Shenandoah Valley. Moving up and down the valley they took part in the battle of Winchester and later sustained heavy casualties at Cedar Mountain. Transferred further east, the regiment became part of the 12th Corps and took part in the battles of Antietam, Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. Following Gettysburg the 2nd helped quell the New York City draft riots. When the 12th Corps was transferred west, ultimately becoming part of the 20th Corps, the 2nd Massachusetts went along. In the west the regiment participated in the Atlanta Campaign, Sherman’s March to the Sea and the Carolina Campaign. Comey writes an especially interesting narrative of the 2nd’s participation in the latter. The regiment was sent north and discharged shortly after the battle of Bentonville. Comey indicates that the 2nd ended the war with 141 men, down from the 1,040 that enlisted in 1861. Comey himself would rise from private to captain and command of a company by war’s end. He was wounded twice, once at Gettysburg and again at Tullahoma. He saw heavy fighting and was a witness to some well-known incidents. At Gettysburg he was present and overheard the order given to Lt. Col. Charles Mudge to attack the Confederate position to which Mudge commented, “Well, it is murder, but it’s the order.” Following the war Comey didn’t stop, as related in the Editor’s Epilogue. Comey married, was active in various veterans’ organizations, was instrumental in the restoration and preservation of the Petersburg National Battlefield and was one of the founders of the National Historical Society. Personal reminiscences often concentrate on collections of letters or diaries to tell their stories. Comey’s work includes both of these plus the addition of a narrative (resembling a regimental history) that the captain wrote. The story is carried using all of these, chronologically intermingled through the book’s pages. Letters are worked in at their proper point in the narrative. The diary starts at the beginning of 1863 and continues through the end of the Gettysburg Campaign. Comey did his research in writing his narrative and despite not having the information available to modern researchers the facts are for the most part on the mark. Though his letters, diary and narrative Henry Newton Comey wrote an interesting history of the 2nd Massachusetts and its part in the Civil War. Editor Lyman Richard Comey, the author’s descendant (Captain Comey was his great-grandfather’s cousin), has done a fine job of editing the work. The maps are nicely done and the illustrations are crisp and clear. This reviewer highly recommends this volume for anyone interested in Massachusetts’s regiments, the early war in the East and later war in the West.
Blake Magner
Blake Magner is the Book Review Editor of The Civil War News. He makes his liv-ing as an editor, writer, car-tographer and photographer of Civil War history.
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