A Texas Cavalry Officer's Civil War: The Diary and Letters of James C. Bates by RichardLowe; James C. BatesReview by: Anne J. BaileyThe Arkansas Historical Quarterly, Vol. 59, No. 3 (Autumn, 2000), pp. 335-336Published by: Arkansas Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40027998 .

Accessed: 14/06/2014 11:54

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Arkansas Historical Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to TheArkansas Historical Quarterly.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 62.122.72.154 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 11:54:20 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

A Texas Cavalry Officer's Civil War: The Diary and Letters of James C. Bates. Edited by Richard Lowe. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Uni- versity Press, 1999. Pp. xxiii, 366. Preface, introduction, illustrations, epilogue, appendix, bibliography, index. $34.95.)

BOOK REVIEWS 335

The publication of James C. Bates' diary and letters, owned by family members in Dallas, provides a fascinating look at a cavalryman who served in the Trans-Mississippi and Western theaters during the Civil War. Editor Richard Lowe has taken the diary, which begins in September 1861, and interspersed the letters Bates wrote home throughout the narrative. By using a method of intertwining letters and diary entries, the reader does not experience a chronological break in the story. Bates' experiences, thoughts, and feelings, develop as the work unfolds. Indeed, one can see the twenty-four-year-old recruit mature over the four years of war.

Bates joined the 9th Texas Cavalry Regiment when the war began and fought in two small engagements in the Indian Territory, at Pea Ridge in Arkansas, and in several battles in Mississippi, Tennessee, and Georgia. Roughly one-third of his story (around 100 pages) deals with the first year of the war and his experiences in the Trans-Mississippl. His initial encoun- ters with the enemy came in the Indian Territory before his regiment moved into Arkansas and settled into winter camp about fifty miles east of Van Buren in January 1862. In February he told his mother that the regi- ment had orders to join General Sterling Price at Fayetteville. En route through the mountains he told his future wife: "If the Arkansas troops are one half as rough as their country they need but to show themselves to a Yankee to make him run" (p. 73).

Although the entry of March 6 is a detailed account of his regiment's movement toward Bentonville to meet General Samuel Curtis' s Federal Army, the Texan lost his diary on that snowy night and unfortunately did not record his impressions of the battle at Elkhorn Tavern. Professor Lowe fills in the story with a brief description of the battle. Lowe also points out that most accounts do not credit Texans with charging a Federal battery on foot, but that little-known fact is in a letter Bates wrote to his future wife the week following the battle. The diary resumes in late March as the army moved across Arkansas toward the Mississippi River, eventually arriving at Corinth, Mississippl.

The remainder of the text describes Bates' experiences on the east side of the Mississippi River. He served with the Arkansas battalion of sharp- shooters in his brigade briefly in 1862 but was transferred back to his orig- inal regiment in the fall. In May 1864, Bates suffered a serious wound while fighting Sherman's cavalry during the Atlanta campaign. After a bullet entered his mouth, exiting below and behind his left ear, he endured

This content downloaded from 62.122.72.154 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 11:54:20 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

336 ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

excruciating pain. But he recovered after a long convalescence and re- joined his unit in November. Still unfit for active service, however, he missed Hood's disastrous Tennessee campaign.

Bates' letters and diary provide an engaging account of the life of a cavalryman. He had promised his sister to keep a record for the family at home to read and he faithfully kept that pledge. In editing the diary and let- ters, Lowe skillfully fills in gaps in the narrative and points out errors and inconsistencies in conveniently placed footnotes. As a result, Lowe has added another valuable chapter to our knowledge of the life of a Confed- erate trooper.

Anne J. Bailey Georgia College & State University

Confederate Homefront: Montgomery during the Civil War. By William Warren Rogers, Jr. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999. Pp. xiv, 209. Preface, illustrations, acknowledgments, epilogue, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95.)

William Warren Rogers' Confederate Homefront makes a valuable contribution to the emerging picture of life behind the Civil War's battle lines. It will be especially prized by those interested in the social world ar- dent Confederates made for themselves in areas safe from federal occupi- ers. The book considers the history of Montgomery, Alabama from the eve of war in 1860 to the surrender of the city to Union troops on April 13, 1865, three days after Lee's capitulation at Appomattox. While paying at- tention to regional differences within the South, Rogers views Montgom- ery as a fairly representative example of the experience of Confederate townsfolk. He consistently contrasts the "veneer of normality" that Mont- gomerians strove to maintain with "the lacerating forces of war" that "stripped the lacquer from any romantic notion of war and revealed its un- varnished reality" (pp. 152-153). Yet perhaps more remarkable than the war's destruction of secessionist dreams was the determination of white Montgomerians to fight on long after military events had made defeat a foregone conclusion.

For all of its typicality, Montgomery stood out as the first capital of the Confederacy. In the heady spring of 1861, a spirit of optimism and occa- sionally foolhardy overconfidence came to town along with the new gov- ernment' s legislators, soldiers, and myriad hangers-on. Rogers shows how

This content downloaded from 62.122.72.154 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 11:54:20 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions