Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/920

 9 1 o Reviews of Books periorit}' in marksmanship or other backwoods talent. City boys pre- dominated in but very few Northern regiments. In most others a majority of the soldiers had from early years used firearms, ridden horseback, and often slept in the open at night. General Cox's strange judgment disparaging West Point training as a preparation for Civil War officers seems to us unworthy even of notice. The author gives it considerable attention though in the end he refutes it thoroughly enough. If some of Forrest's operations and the capture of Fort Fisher be excepted, hardly a piece of work by a civilian general in all the war was brilliant or decisive. Cox is no doubt right in deeming the course at old West Point narrow and shallow but he undervalues the esprit there imbibed. While Mr. Hosmer sets forth with remarkable fullness the Con- federacy's military and naval doings, paralleling those of the Union to an extent leaving nothing to be desired, its internal and civil history is not presented in a detail at all comparable with that allowed the corresponding phases of history on the side of the North. Southern war legislation and diplomacy, the acts and attitudes of Southern states and statesmen, party leanings and squabbles, and other such topics, receive rather scanty consideration. Paucity of material partly accounts for and justifies this, but there would seem to be a further reason, a word or two upon which shall end this review. Though meant to be perfectly fair, as we have said, and in nearly all particulars actually fair, what Mr. Hosmer has written is a Northern history after all. To his credit as a patriot he cannot wholly forget that he wore the blue. His soldier passion has cooled, while life and study have broadened his mind and his sympathies. Generous, thor- oughly informed, honorable, never intentionally or reprehensibly partizan, still it is only with effort that he succeeds in carrying his point of view- across Mason and Dixon's line. He can use the word " rebel ". The work under examination, therefore, while an excellent record so far as it goes and on the whole the best Civil War history yet written, is too little objective to serve as the final history of that war. We do not go so far as to demand that this great episode in our national life be written upon as a mere phase of biology, yet we shall never present it quite triumphantly till we both see and feel that the secession move- ment was, no less truly than the spirit and measures frustrating it, a logical outgrowth of our constitution, a result which our history and conditions rendered inevitable. Passion did not originate it, and even if it had done so the nature and power of that passion would still remain to be explained. E. Benj. Andrews.