Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 39.djvu/231

 BouK Reviews. 219

Recollections of a Maryland Confederate Soldier a:id Staff Officer — under Johnston, Jackson and Lee — 1861-1865. By -AIcHenrv Howard. Octavo, pp. 423. Illustrations and Alaps. $2.00. ^^'illiam J. Wilkins Co., Baltimore, Md.

This latest narrative of experiences in the War period. i86t to 1865, comes from the press in this year of 1914. It is one of a class of books on the war which we deem of the greatest value and interest, the personal recollections of one who served in the field from the beginning to the close of the struggle for Southern Independence. The author is a professional man of the widest intelligence, who writes with his own diary and notes before him, and with the use of the resources of all the accumu- lated literature, official and personal, which a half century af- fords. And these are the recollections of an ardent Confederate soldier whose position was that of a Brigade Staff officer, in the very line of battle on the many fields of the Army of Northern Virginia. It is of what he saw with his own eyes that he tells, not from the distance of a General, but with the close, personal, participation of one who went with the lines into the fire and smoke of the battlefield. Again and again he was wounded, and twice from the front he was taken away to the privation and sufferings of a prisoner of war, in Fort Dela- ware, and worse than that, on Johnson's Island.

It is distinctively a history of the Maryland contingency in the Southern Army, of which the State that was ground be- tween the upper and nether millstones, will never be ashamed. Major Howard was the youngest son of a family of distinc- tion in Maryland history, the grandson of a revolutionary hero, Col. John Eager Howard, and of Francis Scott Key, author of "The Star Spangled Banner." From his own Baltimore home, his father, Charles Howard, was taken to prison in Fort War- ren, and six sons, with the loving consecration of the mother, went into the army that followed Robert E. Lee. Among gen- eral officers Maryland gave Trimble and Elzey and Winder and Steuart and Bradley Johnson. And following were Herbert and Goldsborough and Snowden Andrews and ^Murray ; and the ^Ic-