This is a great book about two very important figures in the War Between the States. It is a great introduction to this very important campaign. Dr. McWhiney is a wonderful writer and an important scholar.

This book is a wonderful look at the two icons of the Civil War in battle. Magnificent!

Poet, essayist, and Southern Agrarian, Allen Tate brings (brought) to his life of Jefferson Davis not only a tremendous narrative talent, but also a deep understanding of, and sympathy for, the Southern culture that produced Jefferson Davis. But unlike other Southern writers who made Davis a larger-than-life hero of the Lost Cause, Tate pulls no punches in his assessment of the President's weaknesses as well as his strengths, and how they may have crippled the Confederacy from the very beginning.

Tate considers Davis a man of high ideals and great personal honor. At the same time, though, he had a "peculiarly inflexible mind" ("he had not learned anything since about 1843") (p. 197) and a "feeble grasp of human nature" (p. 255). He treated his office as a sort of super-minister of defense, and was never "the leader of the Southern people as a whole" (p. 180). The South could have won the war if she had had the right kind of political leader, Tate argues. But Davis, whose rise to leadership was generally unearned (p. 79), wasn't it.

Beyond Davis the man, Tate also has a deep grasp of the Southern culture and the larger historical and cultural issues that were clashing in the War Between the States. In keeping with his Southern Agrarianism, Tate paints the South as the last outpost of European culture in the Americas, standing against -- and ultimately overwhelmed by -- the surging might of restless, expansionist, wealth-seeking "Americanism," embodied in the Yankee Northeast. Tate's grasp of Southern regionalism lets him place an emphasis on the tensions between Upper and Lower South that, for me, shone a light on the instability of the Confederate government that I haven't seen as emphasized elsewhere.

Tate's perspective and narrative form may not be in keeping with more modern styles of biography. But this book is nevertheless an excellent and insightful read, and I recommend it to any student of the men caught up in, as well as the issues behind, America's bloodiest conflict.

This book is no act of idolatry, despite the author's reputation as a Southern conservative and Agrarian. Tate believes Davis was a great man, but he points out his flaws as well, his diffidence in acting sooner that might have won the South the War, his pride, his sometime aloofness, his tendency to remain loyal to generals (Braxton Bragg foremost among them) whose incompetence was all too apparent to others, and his refusal to appoint the right men for the right job.

This is an absorbing read that puts one in mind of Shelby Foote's celebrated War trilogy, although Tate's was written first. It has the same novelistic quality and drive and the same quickly drawn but utterly convincing characterizations. The book alternates between presentations of certain monumental battles and portraits of life on the "homefront." The latter is actually more fascinating than the former. We learn in vivid detail of the strength and loyalty and perseverance of the Southern people.

Confederate Crackers and Cavaliers is a worthwhile read for anyone with a deeper interest in the Civil War. Before anyone purchases it, however, they should be warned that it is not a book in the usual sense. Instead, it is a collection of Civil War related essays by the esteemed Southern historian, Dr. Grady McWhiney. They include analysis of decisive battles and important personalities, with particular emphasis on Jefferson Davis and Braxton Bragg. There is also an essay on Dr. Francis Butler Simkins, who was Dr. McWhiney's friend and mentor. All of the essays are well written, and any Civil War student can benefit from Dr. McWhiney's knowledge and experience.

I enjoyed this book. Took me awhile to read but very enjoyable. Civil War on the high seas!

I enjoyed this book for several reasons. It is short; yet it is detailed enough to effectively describe the battles in this campaign. It also includes brief profiles of the commanders of the particular conflicts-both Federal and Confederate. And an interesting fact from this Texas Overland Expedition was the presence of six governors of Texas in the two armies.

This story about Texas and a Civil War Campaign all started with a plan conceived in the minds of a group of New England businessmen some two decades before the Civil War and that didn't even take place in Texas. However, when these northerners realized that war was inevitable and that Texas was siding with the Confederate States, rather than give up their lucrative idea, they considered the war to be in their favor. If they could enlist the help of the president and War Department, they could move into Texas under the Union Flag and consequently have the Federal troops to protect their northern settlers. From this nucleus, the story evolved to its climax of the battle. It is good reading.

I found that Cottonclads! was a quick read as I finished it in one day. This book really helps to paint a picture of the state of affairs along the Texas Gulf Coast during the Civil War.

The book places special emphasis on the Battle of Galveston, which freed this important Texas port from Union control. Additional chapters cover battles at nearby Sabine Pass.

What I liked most about this book was its ability to get me to think about Galveston in a different way. I had never thought of what this city was like in the 19th Century, but the book claims that it was the largest city in Texas. When the Union Army occupied the city, it was with the intent to legitimize a Union-backed government there and to use the city as a base of operations for Union troops to penetrate deeper into Texas. In the end, the Union penetration of Texas failed, just as Sibley's Brigade failed to take the desert Southwest. It was only fitting that the regiments of Sibley's brigade were present at the freeing of Galveston from Union control.

I recommend this book as a starting point in learning about the Union blockade of the Confederacy and the Rebels' efforts to thwart it.

Cottonclads! The Battle of Galveston and the Defense of the Texas Coast presents a good account of the many naval operations along Texas. The book has good details; it includes battles ranging from Galveston to Sabine Pass. The book provides a good starting point for the interested reader to research and learn more.

Dr. Frazier's book on the Galveston campaign is a very important and readable work on this often over-looked battle. It is well worth the read.

The author deals with Chickamauga at the division/brigade level. This makes it easy for the reader to follow this complex battle over the three days it was fought. My only compliant was the Confederate Order of Battle in the appendix. B. Johnson's Division is missing completely, which includes the brigades of Gregg, McNair and Fulton. A good introduction to a reader who knows little about this battle. The maps are very well done, and add an important tool in describing this complex battle.

Most Civil War buffs concentrate upon the war east of the Mississippi. By comparison, the two battles of Pea Ridge and Prairie Grove are obscured by their distance from the main scene. I was interested, as my g-grandfather set up and ran a field hospital at Fayetteville, during the battle of Prairie Grove, Arkansas. The book is one of the best I've read in it's description of the tactics employed. Even better, the timely maps are simple, clear and placed closely to the verbage they cover. Similarly placed are short biographies of the major officers on each side of the battles. Unit narratives seldom drop below company level and the book cannot be considered an exhaustive study. But, at the end of 126 pages, a reader will have a sufficiently clear view of the events to gain a good grasp of the strategy and tactics used in these two important battles.

I'm always amused to find people from distant places trying to tell our people our history. McWhiney knows of what he speaks, and though his brushstrokes are broad, his essential thesis is strong.

My people were southerners, and were English, Scots and Irish. The point that many miss is that "English" is not itself a singular cultural group, and was heavily influence by the so-called "Celtic" ways as well. This is where McWhiney's thesis stumbles; I'd like to see him deal with the poor English versus the southern English, perhaps. My grandmother's mother still used the term "sothren" with considerable disdain.

To the German gentleman (and others reading this feeling similarly), please read a true account of the south, and know that your stereotypes of southerners are quite wrong. It's a far more complicated story, however the history books have been written by the victors in the war of northern aggression (aka the "American Civil War").

Why is the South so different from the rest of the country? It wasn't always so. In our revolutionary period, Southerners were just as angry at British offenses in the North as Northerners were, while Northerners cheered South Carolina's victory at Sullivan's Island just as passionately as Southrons did. Virginians like George Washington and Daniel Morgan fought in the North while the greatest general of the Southern theater was the Rhode Islander Nathaniel Greene.

Why did Northern and Southern unity quickly become mutual suspicion and eventually dissolve into hostility? Was race the only reason? To Grady McWhiney, the question is largely a cultural one. McWhiney feels that Southern culture was and is Celtic. Most of the original settlers in the North came from England, while most of the South's early settlers came from the most Celtic regions of the British Isles(Ulster, Scotland, Cumberland, the West Country, etc). These settlers put a Celtic stamp on the South, influenced all who settled there, Celt or not, and brought with them their age-old hostility to the English, a hostility that was(and continues to be)reciprocated by the "English" of the North.

Celtic influence on Southern culture cannot be seriously disputed. Anyone who has ever heard bluegrass or country music can hear just one aspect of it. And that North and South are still mutually hostile is also unarguable. The uneducated bigot in the movies usually has a Southern accent and prominently displays a Confederate flag. But I think McWhiney oversimplifies. Celtic influence was there, but it was not alone. As Charles Hudson pointed out in The Southeastern Indians, Native American influence on Southern culture(which McWhiney ignores)was considerable, a fact well known to many of us with families from the southeastern US who have unsuccessfully tried to untangle our genealogies.

In short, Cracker Culture is worth your time. Just don't stop with it.

Dr McWhiney's book is a classic. It states the obvious, i.e. in the course of early American history and the movement of Europeans into the New World,the Celtic fringe of the British archipelago peopled the American South; which has had a profound influence of Southern society. Native Irish, Ulster Scots, Welsh, Border English, Hebrideans, etc., sort of a Celtic soup of sorts, peopled the early South. His book is only controversial to Anglo-centric historians who are still in denial that Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, etc., are actually part of our history and who like to pretend they are just footnotes of English history. And also, controversial to politically minded people who use 'history' to further political objectives. The book is great; a good read, with quantitative research and anecdotal research. It is just pure research with no agenda, a pleasant change in fact. It can be read straight through or by jumping around by topic. Great nighttime reading, full of full facts and oddities of the Old South. One wishes more histories were like this.

I would not buy this book because the Monitor fought a Confederate Ironclad called the C.S.S. Virginia. The Virginia was built upon the salvaged hull of a union ship called the Merrimack (with a "k"). There was another ship built by the union, called the Merrimac (without a "k") but it was a paddle wheel boat and it never fought the Monitor.

This is a very well-put-togther, informative book about the ironside USS Monitor and its Confederate counterpart, the CSS Virginia. The title of the book was obviously off-putting to one reader, since it referred to the Merrimac (the name of the Virginia before it was re-fitted and re-christened by the Confederacy), but don't let that stop you!. This book delves into a fascinating part of American military history. The battle between the Monitor and the Merrimac changed the course of naval history, and had repercussions all over the world. This book is a great introduction into that period in history.
For those who are still concerned about the use of Merrimac as opposed to Virginia: 1) the US gov't never formally recognized the Confederacy as a sovereign state, therefore the Confederacy would have had no authority to re-christen the ship (ergo, the original designation of Merrimac is, in fact, correct); 2) even during the Civil War, in both the North and the South, the name Merrimac was still widely used to describe the ship -- and remains the more widely recognized and acceptable of the two.

The story of these two ironclads is one of the most famous incidents in naval history. As stated in the Ken Burns Civil War Series, "for a moment, every other navy in the world stood obsolete." This book is very effective in chronicling the story of these ironclads, and should be viewed as such, instead of focusing on petty details.