Book Review

No Band of Brothers consists of ten essays dealing with military leadership in the Confederacy. Though eight of them have been previously published in various journals or anthologies, it is unlikely that even the ardent reader has stumbled over half of them. Additionally, despite the author's numerous monographs dealing with this topic, there is abundant new material in this volume. Eight articles emphasize negative aspects of Jefferson Davis and generals P. G. T. Beauregard, Joseph E. Johnston, Robert E. Lee, and John Bell Hood and lieutenant generals Leonidas Polk and James Longstreet. Steven E. Woodworth's revelations about Johnston and Longstreet during the Peninsula campaign and Polk's violation of Kentucky's neutrality are superb, and his conclusion that Davis's rearrangement of military departments in the fall of 1862 predetermined the Confederacy's loss of the Mississippi River is sound. Davis is the ultimate villain throughout the volume, as clearly shown by the author's "what if" essay on the president's handling of appointments in the western theater in 1864.

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One of the remaining articles deals with what Braxton Bragg's insubordinate subordinates cost the Confederacy in the days preceding the battle of Chickamauga; the other details the likelihood that a civilian who rose to high rank in the Confederate army was probably going to be as good a general as those who graduated from West Point and who had prior military experience. Strangely, the author failed to mention Wade Hampton in the latter. Woodworth's portrayal of Lee closely resembles the widely accepted view today that Lee bled the Confederacy white and managed to manipulate Davis into allowing him to do so. Nonetheless, this volume will delight anyone looking for new information on the military leaders of the Confederacy.

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