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Title: West Pointers and the Civil War

Subtitle: The Old Army in War and Peace

Author: Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh

Narrator: Stephen Hoye

Format: Unabridged

Length: 8 hrs and 57 mins

Language: English

Release date: 11-15-09

Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Ratings: 5 of 5 out of 3 votes

Genres: History, American

Publisher's Summary:

The task for those in charge of professionalizing the military in the first half of the nineteenth century and transforming it from a militia-led army to a highly disciplined standing army was a difficult job. Americans had long supported a tradition of militia and distrusted professional soldiers. However, by the time of the Civil War, the high command positions in the Union army and the nascent army of the Confederacy were filled with graduates of West Point, who had served in the U.S.-Mexican War and who had been taught in the European military tradition. The sorts of campaigns the armies would wage, the rules of those engagements, the understandings of victory, all were in a sense predetermined by the military training and experience of the professionals called in to organize and lead the opposing sides. In examining the role of the institutional military in the Civil War, Hsieh makes use of manuals, reports, letters housed at West Point, newspapers, diaries, and numerous secondary sources.

©2009 University of North Carolina Press; (P)2009 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Critic Reviews:

Most Civil War generals were graduates of West Point, and many of them helped transform the U.S. Army from what was little better than an armed mob that performed poorly during the War of 1812 into the competent fighting force that won the Mexican War.

"Hsieh challenges studies that have argued that field fortifications and rifles gave the advantage to defenders, insisting instead that other factors, such as leadership, morale, and troop strength were more influential in success or failure. Smart and genuinely stimulating, West Pointers and the Civil War will be controversial in the best sense of the word." (Joseph T. Glatthaar, author of General Lee's Army: From Victory to Collapse)

Members Reviews:

Some Decent Insights in a Dense and Turgid Work

You may note that I gave West Pointers and the Civil War (WPCW) three stars. If I could I would have given it four stars for those with a solid basis in CW history and two for novices.

I saw Hsieh speaking on television on his book and was impressed by his insights and his ability to express relatively complex concepts in clear and direct language -- and I immediately ordered WPCW. If he could only write as well as he speaks. His prose is, at times, repetitive, dense, sometimes indirect, and often straying from the topic at hand. Hsieh has the defining characteristic of many academic historians -- if he made a note of an item of information, he will include it in the text without regard to how many other notes illustrate an identical point. In the text, many of his insights are little more than a collection of antebellum characterizations of a frontier constabulary that succeeded in its one great test - the Mexican War. He does provide valuable insights into civil-military relations and how the tone set before the war carried into the CW itself. And how the education provided at West Point was reflected in the commonality of both Union and Confederate officers.

Further his observations on the resources and approaches used to create huge armies from the melding of a few professionals with lots of recreational militia and raw volunteers was valuable.