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Confederate Generals in the Western Theater. Volume 1: Classic Essays on America's Civil War, Volume 2: Essays on America's Civil War. Edited by Lawrence Lee Hewitt and Arthur W. Bergeron Jr. The Western Theater in the Civil War. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2010. Pp. [xxiv], 288; [xxiv], 296. $45.95, ISBN 978-1-57233-700-8; $45.95, ISBN 978-1-57233-699-5.)
In the large literature of the American Civil War, the military operations and personalities of the eastern theater dominate. In many ways this makes sense. The most famous generals spent the war primarily or solely in the East: Robert E. Lee, Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson, J. ?. B. Stuart, George B. McClellan, George G. Meade, and Ulysses S. Grant. Likewise, legendary battles such as Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, and Cold Harbor took place in the East. However, for years many historians have argued that the war's outcome really hinged on operations in the western theater and the men who fought there. The western theater was critical to the Confederacy because "this vast region of mountains and valleys, of forests and rivers, was the foundation for their continued survival as a nation" (vol. 1, p. xi). The result of historians' increasing attention to the western theater has been many fine scholarly books and articles. A notable contribution to this burgeoning body of work is Volumes 1 and 2 of Confederate Generals in the Western Theater, both capably edited by Lawrence Lee Hewitt and the late Arthur W. Bergeron Jr.
For the first volume of a planned multivolume series on the western and trans-Mississippi theaters, the editors selected fifteen essays from the past six decades on Confederate generals in the West. Hewitt and Bergeron picked some superb essays by such...