The Civil War in the West

Review by William C. Davis

For more than half a century the debate has endured between those who maintain that the Civil War was decided east of the Appalachians versus those who argue for the West, that is, the region between the mountains and the Mississippi River. This can hardly be new to even the casual reader of the Civil War. Great—indeed seminal—works like Thomas L. Connelly’s two-volume Army of the Heartland, the numerous fine books by Richard M. McMurry and Grady C. McWhiney, and others, have all reinforced the western side of the argument forcefully and backed by deep research.

The consensus that seems to have emerged after all of this, one shared even by many who spend their efforts studying the war in the East, is that the war could have been decided either side of the Appalachians, but in the end the Confederacy was losing it constantly in the West while until the summer of 1864 it was holding its own in Virginia. As McMurry argues, by the spring of 1865 the Union and Confederate armies that were traditionally identified with the West were facing each other east of the mountains in North Carolina, and if Lee had held out a week or two beyond Appomattox, they might all have been in Virginia. Essentially, the West would have come East, an eloquent demonstration of just how pre-eminent the West had become.

Still, we have not had a discrete, full length and deeply researched general narrative of that Western war for many years, and there has never been one as detailed and nuanced as Earl J. Hess' fine new contribution, The Civil War in the West: Victory and Defeat from the Appalachians to the Mississippi. Hess will be well known to experienced students of the war for his many fine tactical studies, and he does not disappoint here.

This was a war of comparably vast spaces and demanding travel and use of resources. While the armies in Virginia fought over the same few hundred square miles of Virginia for four years, whole states changed hands in the inexorable march of the Union armies that successively took Tennessee, north Alabama and north Mississippi, central and north Georgia, and eventually portions of South and North Carolina. In the offing, those armies marched hundreds of miles in a season, and thanks to better weather than in Virginia, often carried on campaigning through the winters. Not surprisingly, it was in the West that the great Union commanders arose, men like Grant and Sherman and Sheridan and Thomas, while their Confederate counterparts scarcely compared in ability or achievements. That was the exact opposite of Virginia, where Lee eclipsed every opponent sent against him until Grant came east, in a way making the Army of the Potomac a “western” army, too.

As Hess ably shows, if the war had been confined to Virginia, the Confederacy was winning it steadily until 1865 simply by not losing and staying in the field. The Civil War in the West makes it inarguably clear, however, that in that other war that Easterners then and later so easily ignored, the Union was on the glory road to victory almost from the day the war began.