Nothing but Victory

Starred review from September 5, 2005
The Union's military effort in the first half of the Civil War remains essentially defined by the Army of the Potomac: earnest and willing, but consistently outfought and outgeneraled. A similar image accompanies the Army of the Cumberland, the second most familiar Union field army. But in the Mississippi Valley, the North developed an army that defeated all comers from Shiloh to Savannah, participated in the war's decisive battles from Fort Donelson through Vicksburg to Atlanta, and raised some of the war's finest generals.
Until now, the Army of the Tennessee has been relatively neglected—perhaps because it fails to fit the Union stereotype of triumphing by force rather than finesse. Woodworth, a historian at Texas Christian University who has written several books on the Civil War (Beneath a Northern Sky
; A Scythe of Fire
; etc.), corrects this oversight in what is arguably the best one-volume history written to date of a Civil War field army. Combining impeccable scholarship and comfortable style, Woodworth describes a force whose tone was set by volunteer regiments from the farms and small towns of the Mississippi Valley: Iowa, Illinois, Missouri. Already accustomed to hard work and rough living, these men readily learned how to march and fight.
Though Woodworth credits the army's unique combination of steadiness and aggressiveness to its first commander, Ulysses S. Grant, he details how the Army of the Tennessee learned war from other masters as well: West Point graduates, like William Sherman and James McPherson; civilian corps commanders, like "Black Jack" Logan and Frank Blair; and hundreds of field and company officers who learned their craft on the job and who led by example rather than by order. They made the Army of the Tennessee the Union's whiplash in the West and one of the three or four most formidable large formations in America's military history.

October 1, 2005
A veteran Civil War military historian, Woodworth specializes in the western campaigns, in which the Union's premier force was the Army of the Tennessee. Raised from Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin, its commanders over time were Grant, Halleck, Sherman, and McPherson, and Woodworth's narrative duly oscillates between the headquarters tent and the soldiers' campfire. Typical of Civil War armies, this one was affected at the top by political machinations, whose negative effects on field operations Woodworth astutely analyzes; Grant's eventual surmounting of these obstacles earns the author's unqualified respect. For to the extent any military unit possesses a personality, this army had Grant's. Woodworth concludes that, besides strategic acumen exhibited in the Vicksburg campaign, Grant imparted to his officers the principle of relentless advance, which kept morale high and Confederate forces off balance. As to the soldiers' thoughts, which were of home and victory, Woodworth ably crafts them into his account of the army's battles, from Shiloh to Chattanooga to Georgia. Balanced and readable, Woodworth's work is an exemplary army-level unit history.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)