Right Hand of Command

by R. Steven Jones

With thorough scholarship, Jones presents an enlightening view of the use of personal staffs by four general officers during the Civil War. The author attempts to correct the paucity of information on... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811714519
• ISBN13: 9780811714518
• Release Date: January 2000
• Publisher: Stackpole Books
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Incredible

This book is, without a doubt, the BEST book available on the subject. The author obviously invested a lot of time and effort into the research that made the book possible. Jones is a Civil War scholar par excellence. What other reviewers don't seem to realize is that this book was a doctoral dissertation, and so it requires highly critical and in-depth study where there is little source material to go on.

Civil War Staffs: a neglected topic

You would think that there has been so much written about the Civil War that no one would be able to come up with a fresh topic, but that is apparently untrue. Recent works (which I haven't read, (un)fortunately, include studies of sex, songs, and even food during the war. The present book studies something more fundamental to the operations of the armies, the machinery of a Civil War Staff. While staffs could be crucial to an army's operations, they could also be marginal or even detrimental to them, and this study attempts to discover how they worked, or didn't.Rather than discuss staffs for all generals in all theaters, the author decided to study those of four generals in the Civil War. Those four generals are Robert E. Lee, George McClellan, William T. Sherman, and Ulysses S. Grant. Each of the first three has a chapter devoted to him, while Grant gets three chapters to himself, as the author discerns an evolution of his staff and what he concieved of the staff's functions.The idea here is to study how staff officers were used in the army in this war, and this is the first problem. Most men of the era, soldiers or not, regarded staff work as very unmanly, compared with fighting for the cause, whatever it might be. As a result, staff officers often wrote books where they told about their experiences in the war, typically serving with a famous general, but they tended to gloss over or just ignore their own duties in favor of speaking of whichever general they served with. As a result, there's little material that's useful for a study like this, and the book suffers for it.So, when we get to the first three generals, the staffers are really obscure. You don't get a feel for them and their individual functions much. Often, there's an accompanying photograph identified as "staff officers" of some general or other, with a caption telling you that none of the names of the individuals are known. As a result, this part of the book is somewhat dissappointing, vague and ill-formed.When the author gets to Grant, however, there's more material for him to work with, and the book improves markedly as a result. Grant had a number of staff officers who served with him during the war, several of whom left enough material for us to look at what they were doing and make sense of their functions. At the same time, Grant, ever the pragmatist, evolved his staff from a typical one (copying orders and acting as couriers) to a more modern one, advising subordinates on what the general would want and interpreting orders from him, also. This is the better part of the book, frankly, because the author has more to work with.I enjoyed this book, and would recommend it to Civil War buffs. It's a rather scholarly subject, but the author does a good job making it interesting and informative, and given the paucity of material, this is a very good book on a neglected subject.