Banners to the Breeze: The Kentucky Campaign, Corinth, and Stones River

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Summer 2000 by Gerleman, David J

Banners to the Breeze: The Kentucky Campaign, Corinth, and Stones River. By Earl J. Hess. (The University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln and London, 2000. pp. 252. $32.00)

Civil War military operations between the Mississippi River and the Appalachian Mountains were perhaps the most decisive campaigns of the conflict. Illinois and other loyal western states contributed vast numbers of men to the struggle to prevent Confederate domination of this vital region. Earl J. Hess's book Banners to the Breeze examines an important phase of the war in the West during the late summer of 1862. Hess's work provides a well-rounded narrative of the origins, personalities, and course of the 1862 western campaigns encompassing the battles of Perryville, Kentucky, Corinth, Mississippi, and Stones River, Tennessee. The book is one of the University of Nebraska Press's planned sixteen volume series Great Campaigns of the Civil War and is an excellent addition to Civil War scholarship.

The main premise of Hess's book is that military operations were the fundamental determining factor for the outcome of the war. This was especially true between July 1862 and January 1863 when joint Confederate offensives East and West held the possibility of reversing the string of defeats that had pushed Southern armies out of Kentucky, much of Tennessee, and the Mississippi rail center of Corinth. If the Confederacy could have mounted successful invasions of northern territory, then the glittering possibility of foreign recognition might have been achieved.

One of the ways Hess's work succeeds is by his use of excellent topographical and geographical descriptions of each campaign. His explanations of the lay of the land of the western theater and of the battlefields helps one understand the generals' tactical intentions, problems of mobility, as well as concomitant logistical difficulties. Hess also makes shrewd judgments of the leadership, describing the entire Confederate command structure in the West as "schizophrenic," and he goes on to aptly sum up the generalship of Earl Van Dom and Sterling Price as "artless bumbling." Hess amply credits Confederate General Braxton Bragg for skillfully initiating the autumn invasion of Kentucky and for his excellent disciplinarian and administrative qualities, but contrasts these with his indecisiveness and consistently inept battlefield performances. Union generals Don Carlos Buell and William S. Rosecrans also come in for their share of criticism for command failures and inability to grasp shifts in Washington political realities which radicalized the war's prosecution.

Banners to the Breeze provides readers with a concise campaign narrative blended with the concerns and judgments of commanders as well as common soldiers, including the imprint their actions and morale left on their respective homefronts. In addition, Hess integrates non-military themes such as the role of women, civilian concems, and also addresses the pervasive issue of slavery. Hess not only explains how these themes intertwined, but why they mattered on different political, military, and socio-economic levels. In his overall estimation of the Perryville, Corinth, and Stones River campaigns, Hess makes clear that despite being limited tactical Union victories, they had an important overall impact in boosting Northern morale during the gloomy autumn of 1862 when eastern defeats piled up. Lincoln needed even closely-won success in the West to off-set a series of military disasters in Virginia. In that sense then, the Kentucky campaign and other rebel set-backs helped regain lost Union military momentum and alleviate the possibility of European recognition of the Confederacy.

Criticisms of the book are generally minor, such as Hess's questionable use of the term "booted" to describe officers' promotions or the lack of directional indicators on all the maps. A more serious difficulty arises when Hess uses the term "African American" in the text. The use of a late twentieth century term applied to the Civil War period can cause unnecessary confusion. Does Hess's contextual use of the term imply free blacks, escaped slaves, or "contrabands"? Could it mean requisitioned slaves from local owners or perhaps a mix of all three of these possibilities? Such modern terminology should not be allowed to bleed into historical writing as it tends to obscure the author's intended meaning.

Banners to the Breeze is an excellent account of the crucial western campaigns of late 1862 when the western rebel forces had a brief window of opportunity to turn the tables on the invading Union army; however, failures in generalship, Confederate limitations in logistical capabilities, and Union countermeasures effectively ended all rebel hopes of foreign help to achieve independence. For that reason alone the western campaigns that year were decisive in turning the war's course toward Union victory. Overall, Banners to the Breeze is a sound example of the skillful welding of competent research, colorful narrative, and broad interpretative analysis that serves as an example of modern Civil War scholarship.