James G. Hollandsworth Jr. | Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.4

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James G. Hollandsworth Jr. | Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Don Carlos Buell: Most Promising of All. By Stephen D. Engle. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. xx, 476 pp. $45.00, ISBN 0-8078-2512-3.)

Students of the Civil War will usually recognize the name Don Carlos Buell, but they may have difficulty placing it. Wasn't he the general who showed up on the second day of Shiloh? Didn't he command Union forces at the battle of Perryville? Other than those two minor distinctions, there is little to celebrate about Buell's career in the Union army. In this new biography, Stephen D. Engle explains why Don Carlos Buell is destined to remain on the periphery of our memory. 1

Buell was a very thorough, one might even say tedious, man. Engle documents this characteristic aspect of Buell's personality with an exhaustive account of his timid occupation of central Tennessee and subsequent flirtation with the eastern part of the state. Reading this part of the book is slow going, and the reader is tempted to turn pages three and four at a time. Nevertheless, students who are interested in the first two years of the Civil War in the western theater may find Engle's account of Buell's dilatory tactics rewarding. Perhaps the best part of Engle's book is his comparison of Don Carlos Buell with George B. McClellan. Buell's conservative nature, like McClellan's, tended to neutralize a substantive advantage in men and matériel and interfered with his ability to cope as a military commander under civilian control. "McClellan and Buell . . . were insensitive to the need to interpret military realities to politicians," Engle informs us. . . .

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