Engineering in the Confederate Heartland by Larry J. Daniel (review)

Reviewed by: Engineering in the Confederate Heartland by Larry J. Daniel Mark A. Smith (bio) Engineering in the Confederate Heartland. By Larry J. Daniel. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022. Pp. 240. Cloth, 45. 00. ) Having authored or coauthored eight books on the Civil War's western theater, Larry J. Daniel explores another topic in that field with Engineering in the Confederate Heartland. He has packed this slim volume with an overview of southern engineering operations in the West, and, in doing so, he has joined the ranks of Earl J. Hess, Thomas F. Army Jr. , Justin S. Solonick, and others who seek to understand the critical roles of engineering and logistics on military operations in the Civil War. Daniel adopts a blended organization for his volume, dividing it into nine roughly chronological chapters, each of which also highlights a particular engineering operation. He opens with the static defenses that engineers built to secure the Mississippi River through the spring of 1862. His second chapter covers the construction and fall of Forts Henry and Do-nelson. Chapter 3 describes field engineering from the late winter of 1862 End Page 135 to early 1863, and chapter 4 examines the myriad engineering demands that overtaxed available resources in the first half of 1863. In chapter 5, Daniel examines the Confederate engineers' efforts to defend Vicksburg. The next chapter covers events from the summer of 1863 through the following spring and emphasizes the organization and employment of engineer troops, especially the Third Engineer Regiment. The seventh chapter covers mapping operations from 1863 onward. Chapter 8 discusses rebel engineering in the Atlanta campaign, and the final chapter describes pontoniering during John Bell Hood's operations from the fall of Atlanta to the end of the war. This organization allows Daniel to provide a comprehensive, if brief, overview of Confederate engineering in the western theater that also incorporates some comparisons to rebel efforts in other areas and, occasionally, to the engineering operations and organizations of U. S. forces. He also highlights the failures and successes of the Confederate military engineers, including the defense of Island No. 10, which delayed U. S. forces moving down the Mississippi and gave Albert Sidney Johnston the opportunity to overwhelm Ulysses S. Grant at Pittsburg Landing. While the Confederate commander failed, the rebel engineers made the attempt possible. The location of Fort Henry on a flood plain susceptible to inundation was perhaps the greatest failure of Confederate engineering in the West, but Daniel's analysis of this shortcoming also points toward one of his own study's limitations. In several ways, Daniel overestimates the military engineering expertise available in the Confederate heartland. For instance, he blames Fort Henry's poor site on Colonel Bushrod Johnson, a West Pointer who was then in charge of the Tennessee Provisional Army's Corps of Engineers. This, and other Confederate shortcomings along the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers, allows Daniel to fault U. S. Military Academy graduates for the failures that contributed to the falls of both Fort Henry and Fort Donelson. He is undoubtedly correct about these failures, but in making this conclusion Daniel exaggerates the equivalency between a West Point education and proficiency in military engineering. While the academy's antebellum curriculum was heavily weighted toward engineering, only the highest-ranked graduates received commissions in the engineers or the other technical branches. Those who performed less well in the school's scientific curriculum were relegated to the infantry or cavalry. Thus officers such as Colonel Johnson, who graduated in 1840 and served in the infantry until he resigned 1847, may not have been very well versed in the military aspects of engineering, a shortcoming that is equally true of the many civilians who served as Confederate engineers. Daniel also misidentifies two officers as West Pointers: Bushrod W. Frobel, a volunteer engineer with End Page 136 John Bell Hood's Army of Tennessee in the late summer of 1864, applied to the academy but never graduated, and James M. Couper, a staff engineer for rebel forces at Vicksburg, never even applied. Similarly, some officers are occasionally misrepresented as military engineers, such as David B. Harris, an artillery officer who served as assistant professor. . .