Book Review

Canada and the United States

Military historians, Allan Millett astutely observes, are often less military historians per se than historians of specific wars. That is to say, their research, published work, and presumably knowledge base tend to focus on a specific conflict. Russell F. Weigley is a formidable exception to this rule. In a scholarly career spanning over forty years, he has studied not only the length and breadth of American military history, particularly in his classic The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (1973), but also European warfare (e.g. The Age of Battles: The Quest for Decisive Strategy from Breitenfell to Waterloo [1991]). Central themes from these earlier works reemerge here: first, the failure of Robert E. Lee's single-minded pursuit of a Napoleonic decisive victory; second, the rarity of such victories even in Napoleon's day; and, finally, the success of Ulysses S. Grant's "strategy of annihilation," by which he eviscerated the Confederacy through the exhaustion of its armies, the destruction of its war resources, and the demoralization of its white population through a series of destructive raids.

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Does the book improve on James M. McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (1988)? In his bibliography, Weigley himself calls Battle Cry of Freedom "the best comprehensive one-volume history" (p. 567). How about Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones's How the North Won: A Military History of the Civil War (1983)? With equal generosity, Weigley writes that, despite some interpretative disagreements, "for comprehensive coverage grounded in a superb knowledge of the history of warfare it is the best one-volume military history of the war" (p. 566).

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