North Carolina Office of Archives and History

Shades of Blue and Gray: An Introductory Military History of the Civil War by HermanHattawayReview by: Matthew M. BrownThe North Carolina Historical Review, Vol. 75, No. 2 (APRIL 1998), pp. 233-234Published by: North Carolina Office of Archives and HistoryStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23522640 .

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Book Reviews 233

the cotton trade, as well as in the manufacture of goods destined for the South. [Their] tasks complemented and reinforced the slave system."

Although his most original research encompassed the remarkably detailed statistical

portrait drawn of Democratic Party activists in 1844, Gronowicz utilized a wide diver

sity of sources in compiling this study. He not only charted a path through the laby rinth of structural changes in New York City's municipal government but also brought in the voices of such literary figures as Edgar Allen Poe and Herman Melville to critique the mass-consumer culture that had evolved in the city by the mid-nineteenth century. Consumerism, as Gronowicz argues, "gradually advanced purchasing power as a substi

tute for political power." In addition, popular forms of working-class entertainment, such as minstrel shows, fostered the racist stereotypes that enhanced the self-esteem of

white workers.

The applicability of Gronowicz's findings to northern cities not so heavily involved

in the southern trade remains open to questions, but his depiction of the largely reac

tionary and racist role of labor in New York City's public life is a powerful one that forces

the advocates of a more celebratory role for the antebellum working class to defend

their position. William L. Barney

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

William L. Barney

Shades of Blue and Gray: An Introductory Military History of the Civil War. By Herman Hatta

way. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997. Frontispiece, preface, acknowledgments, pro

logue, tables and figures, illustrations, suggested readings, epilogue, glossary, index. Pp. xii, 281.

$29.95.)

Historian Herman Hattaway has previously produced How the North Won: A Military

History of the Civil War (1983) and General Stephen D. Lee (1976). His new book, Shades

of Blue and Gray, is a concise—yet complete and entertaining—summary of the story of the Civil War.

Hattaway's angle in this work is the Civil War as a critical chapter in the great saga of world military history. The transformation of warfare brought about by advances in

technology in the mid-nineteenth century serves as a dominant theme. The railroad

revolutionized the movement and supply of armies. The rifle and minié ball brought

firepower of much greater range and accuracy. Similarly, the use of rifles and trenches

rendered frontal assaults impractical. Steam-powered ironclad ships took over the war

at sea, and hot-air balloons began to bring the conflict into the air. Hattaway also em

phasizes the emergence of military professionalism. Civil War armies were frequently led by senior career officers trained in warfare and engineering at West Point rather

than by amateurs whose good political connections brought their military appoint

ments. The author's accounts of battles and campaigns are both succinct and insight

ful. Instead of dwelling on the minutiae of troop placement and movement, Hattaway

provides the reader with the outstanding and remarkable features of each action, its

significance to the progress of the war, the reasons for the outcome, and the lessons

learned.

Although a concise work, Shades of Blue and Gray is rich with fascinating anecdotes,

statistics, and illustrations. An annotated list of suggested readings concludes the pro

VOLUME LXXV • NUMBER 2 • APRIL 1998

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234 Book Reviews

logue and each of the text's four parts. The book includes a fine glossary of military terms and a thorough index. A few readers may be put off by the work's informal

style—the "photograph" of Robert E. Lee holding an AK47 is an egregious example. But, on the whole, Shades of Blue and Gray is faithful to its mission as an introductory

military history, demonstrating excellent writing, careful scholarship, and insightful

analysis. This is a fine choice for anyone beginning to explore military history.

Matthew M. Brown

Division of Archives and History

Matthew M. Brown

Maryland's Blue and Gray: A Border State's Union and Confederate Junior Officer Corps. By Kevin

Conley Ruffner. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997. Acknowledgments, ab

breviations, introduction, tables, illustrations, notes, conclusion, appendix, bibliography, index.

Pp. xiii, 428. $34.95.)

Kevin Conley Ruffner has assembled a collective biography of 365 Marylanders who served in the Union and Confederate junior officer corps. This study is of interest at vari ous levels. Some of the most innovative recent Civil War scholarship has examined the world of the common soldier, mining personal papers for evidence about the values, motivations, and everyday experiences of the conflict's rank and file. By concentrating on

company-grade officers, Ruffner provides a bridge between these recent studies and the more traditional biographies of military leaders. Moreover, his focus on the deeply divided border state allows for valuable comparisons of those officers who fought for the Union and those who opted to journey south to the Confederacy.

The result is less a single collective biography than a pair of separate prosopogra phies—one of Confederate officers and a second, much less substantial, of Union

officers—presented in alternating chapters. Ruffner introduces his subjects with a wealth of quantitative data. The 146 junior officers who served in the Confederacy's Maryland Line were largely native-born sons of the state's elite families, the majority

coming from professional or semiprofessional backgrounds. Their 219 counterparts from the Union's Maryland Brigade generally came from more modest circumstances,

representing "the state's growing working class." Few on either side owned slaves, and Ruffner argues that neither proslavery fervor nor abolitionism figured prominently in their decisions. Although these comparative portraits are fascinating, they are some times frustrating in their presentation. The quantitative analysis is not always convinc

ing. Ruffner, for instance, has birthplaces for fewer than two-thirds of the Maryland Brigade, but he casually asserts that "it is likely that the nativity [of the missing seventy-five men] would be similar to that of their comrades." Moreover, opportunities to compare the data with national norms or even to present systematic comparisons of

Maryland's Confederate and Union officers are generally missed, forcing the reader to

flip back and forth in order to draw some of the more interesting conclusions.

Following these early chapters, most of the book is arranged in generally chronologi cal chapters tracing the histories of the Maryland Line and the Maryland Brigade. The narrative interweaves organizational details, military episodes, and individual case his tories. Ruffner carefully untangles the complex history of Maryland's Confederate troops, who fought without the structural assistance of a state government but also without

the legal obligations faced by citizens of the Confederacy. Maryland's Union troops did

THE NORTH CAROLINA HISTORICAL REVIEW

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