Earl J. Hess. The Civil War in the West: Victory and Defeat from The Appalachians to The Mississippi. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012.
A straightforward work of military history which is arranged chronologically, The Civil War in the West makes a case that the war was actually decided in the West, and that western armies deserve a great deal more credit for defeating the Confederacy than is generally given in mainstream acocunts which center their attention on the Eastern theater. The book is generally told from the Union point of view.
The problems of controlling--to one degree or another--vast expanses of conquered Confederate territory is a recurring theme. So is the logistic difficulties experienced by Union forces as they penetrated deeper into the Confederacy, often connected to sources of supplies and ordnance only by rivers and wagon trails of dubious quality. Western armies and their commanders often found themselves forced to fulfill many civic functions in occupied areas, especially when local government officials were either Confederates or of questionable loyalty. And with the acquisition of more Southern territory came contact with more slaves; the question of what to do with them would evolve with time, circumstance, changing policy, and the decisions and attitudes of different commanders.
Western warfare was generally fought at a smaller scale than the famous battles of the East, but were as fiercely fought. Western armies on both sides were generally less disciplined in terms of dress, demeaner, and tendency to plunder (Confederate forces were seemingly about as likely to exploit Southern farms as the dreaded Yankees) than their Eastern counterparts. Another contrast lies in generalship--in the West, the Union held the advantage from the beginning, unlike in the East, and with sporadic exceptions and setbacks the war in the west was marked by a steady succession of Union success. Hess notes that some generals who were successful in the West then failed in the East (Halleck, Pope, etc.), but follows that observation up noting that Lincoln would finally again give command of Eastern forces to a general who had been fighting in the "Western style". (317) That general was Grant, and in collaboration with the much more provincially Western Sherman, Grant applied lessons and tactics learned in the West to the Eastern theater, with decisive results.
A very readable and well-argued addition to Civil War literature.
