Review: Cunningham, Shiloh (1966, 2007)

[truepenny]

Shiloh and the Western Campaign of 1862 by O. Edward Cunningham

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This was Dr. Cunningham's Ph.D. thesis. It is the result of a prodigious amount of research. The 2007 editors (Dr. Cunningham died in 1997) claim that the thesis is "extremely well written," and I regret to inform you that that is not true. I found him hard to follow, and especially got bogged down in the endless roll calls of troop dispositions (e.g., "The Kentucky Unionist [Crittenden] chose to attack with his Fourteenth Brigade, commanded by Colonel William Sooy Smith, a thirty-one year old West Point-trained Ohioan. Smith had the Thirteenth Ohio, Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Hawkins, on the left, the Twenty-sixth Kentucky on the right, Lieutenant Colonel Cicero Maxwell, and the Eleventh Kentucky, Colonel Pierce Hawkins, in reserve. The Fourteenth Wisconsin, Colonel David Wood, was attached to the brigade, and it fought to the right of the Twenty-sixth" (353-54)---and this is a relatively small and restrained example). I get why the troop dispositions are an important part of Cunningham's thesis (so much research!), but that doesn't make them any easier to wade through. And otherwise, no, like most Ph.D. theses including my own, Shiloh is very clunkily written and I don't come away feeling like I understand the battle any better than I did before. I know more, if I can retain any of it, but I feel like I'm drowning in details (including awkwardly inserted human-interest anecdotes) and never got anything really to hang those details on.

So, yes, amazing research, kind of hard to read. It took me forever to get through it, partly because I kept putting it down to go read other things.



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