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Book Reviews These are some reviews from a recent issue of
The Civil War News:
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Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War
Charles Bracelen Flood
Illustrated, notes, index, 460 pp. 2005. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 19 Union Square West, New York, NY 10003, $27 plus shipping.
Few would dispute the notion that the personal relationships between commanders and their subordinates played a crucial role in shaping the course and conduct of military operations during the American Civil War. The military history of the war is full of examples where poor command relationships compromised efforts to achieve success on the battlefield and good ones provided the foundation for victory. The case of Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman is clearly one of the most prominent, if not the foremost, examples of the latter sort of relationship. Almost as soon as they began working together in early 1862, Grant and Sherman developed a tight personal and professional bond that was critical to Union victories at Shiloh, Vicksburg and Chatta-nooga, and not only survived, but continued to flourish as the two men directed the great campaigns of 1864-65 that crushed the Confederacy. The warmness of the Grant-Sherman relationship and its importance to the ultimate success of the Union war effort is well-known to anyone with even a passing familiarity with the military history of the Civil War. Moreover, the Grant-Sherman relationship is not only an important story — it is a good one as well. Both men were born in Ohio only a few years apart into very ambitious families, managed to make it through the United States Military Academy at West Point before the Mexican War, and encountered frustration in their professional lives during the 1850s. Then, of course, came the war, in which Grant and Sherman struggled initially, then worked together to overcome the obstacles fate lay before them and compile incomparable records of military success. In Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War, Charles Bracelen Flood effectively retells the remarkable story of these two men and their relationship during the Civil War. The famous evening conference in the rain after the first, horrible day at Shiloh, the magnificent maneuvers on and off the battlefield at Vicksburg and Chattanooga, the grand coordinated offensives in Georgia and Virginia, the March to the Sea, and the controversy over Sherman’s management of the surrender of Joseph Johnston’s army are all here and described in clear and highly readable prose. Of course, few, if any, of the many biographies of the two generals have failed to devote considerable attention to how Grant’s and Sherman’s warm personal relationship contributed to their success as commanders. Civil Warriors looking to Flood’s book for compelling new insights into these two men and the conduct of the Civil War in general will be disappointed. There is, for example, little discussion of what the emerging sense of professionalism among West Point graduates before the war might have contributed to the Grant-Sherman relationship and no mention of Grant’s and Sherman’s roles in Lorenzo Thomas’s 1863 mission to raise African-American troops in the Mississippi Valley. It would have also been nice to see Flood make more of an effort to explain Grant’s and Sherman’s other command relationships by way of comparison, especially their problematic ones with George Thomas and William Rosecrans. Nonetheless, Flood’s objective is simply to tell a good story and he has succeeded. Readers looking for an entertaining and well-written retelling of the great story of the Grant-Sherman relationship will enjoy and find value in this book.
Ethan S. Rafuse
Ethan S. Rafuse is associate professor of military history at the U. S. Army Command and General Staff College. His publications include A Single Grand Victory: The First Campaign and Battle of Manassas and George Gordon Meade and the War in the East.
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