Human beings died, futilely charging into areas where no human could expect to survive. Officers gave stupid orders and stubbornly refused to change them in the face of the most obvious human and geographical obstacles. They also ran they pillaged they scavenged they deserted. He graphically depicts what happened to Union sailors and soldiers on both sides who were caught in the slaughter: they suffered horrible wounds and died awful deaths. He does not sugarcoat the horror of war in one place, for example, he notes that "Blood, brains, and other parts of human bodies covered the Richmond" (p. Hewitt does a good job in describing the fighting. Hewitt tacks his brief discussion of these contentions onto his main effort: describing what happened when Union and Confederate forces clashed over Port Hudson on land and river. Unfortunately he does not prove this point either. Hewitt also argues herethat black performance at Port Hudson was instrumental in causing the North to accept the idea of black troops. Had Banks been successful in his early assaults at Port Hudson, Hewitt contends, hewould havebeen able to link up with Grant and, by virtue of rank, would have superceded him, become thehero of Vicksburg, and eventually become commanding general ofthe entire Union army. The final chapter argues the Banks-Grant point in a "what if section which is interesting but unprovable. The bulk of the book is a blow-by-blow account of the establishment of Port Hudson, of the fiery 276CIVIL WAR HISTORY passage of Admiral Farragut's fleet past it, and of Banks' bloody, uncoordinated, unsuccessful assaults against it. He states his thesis in his Preface and repeats it in his concluding chapter, but the pages in between do not deal with it. Unfortunately Hewitt's book is not organized around this argument. The battle "brought about the participation by Negroes in the war and prevented Banks from superseding Grant-thus hastening the downfall of the Confederacy and making Port Hudson a turning point of the Civil War" (p. He reiterates the same point in the book's last sentence. "Port Hudson was important-a major Civil War event-and should be understood as such" (p. This neglect is unfortunate, argues Lawrence Lee Hewitt, a history professor at Southeastern Louisiana University. Port Hudson is usually remembered only as an afterthought to Vicksburg, falling five days after the Mississippi Gibraltar's capitulation made its own continued Confederate defense impossible and unnecessary. It is never mentioned in the same breath with battles such as Gettysburg, Shiloh, or Chancellorsville. $19.95.) It did not receive all that much attention during the Civil War, and later historians have continued this neglect. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987. Charles Royster Louisiana State University Port Hudson, Confederate Bastion on the Mississippi. With the help of Piston's extensive catalogue of old arguments and enduringbiases, perhaps abiographer can give us a modern study of this enigmatic man without making him more modern than he was. Eckenrode and Conrad sketched a stubborn, often narrow-minded one. Michael Shaara imagined a profound- almost tragic-Longstreet. When Southerners sentimentalized the Confederacy, romanticized the war, and melodramatized the generals, should one who respected Longstreet have lamented his exclusion from their favor? The book's discussion of the Longstreet literature usually stays within the terms of the nineteenth-century controversy that it summarizes. Henry, he could amuse his readers by making fun of the oldfashioned Southern magazines devoted to "goobers, governors, and Gettysburg." Piston does not develop asustained analysis of theimplications of postwarpraise of Confederate generals. Bythetime that the North Carolinian William Sydney Porter was writing under the pen name O. 116), complained that he was morewidelyreadin the Norththan in the South. John EstenCooke, whose novels Piston calls "immensely popular" (p. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:īOOK REVIEWS275 biographies of Jackson, which Piston contrasts with the obscurity and abuse that fell on Longstreet, didnot sell well.
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