| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Thomas J. Goss. The War within the Union High Command: Politics and Generalship during the Civil War. (Modern War Studies.) Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 2003. Pp. xx, 300. $34.95.

The Union army's several "political generals" populate—even dominate—almost everyone's list of the Civil War's worst field commanders. The military blunders of men like Benjamin Butler, Franz Sigel, Nathaniel Banks, John C. Frémont, and others have made them synonymous with military failure and served to underscore the foolishness of entrusting high command responsibilities to politicians rather than to West Point-trained professionals. Yet in this extended essay, Thomas J. Goss (himself a West Point graduate and a former Military Academy faculty member) argues that Civil War political generals have been given a bad rap. To be sure, their battlefield record was less than stellar, although Goss insists that it was not as bad as is often represented, but the real value of these men, he argues, was that unlike most of their West Point-trained counterparts, they recognized that winning the war was about more than battlefield victories.

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