Book Review - Son of the Morning Star by Evan S. Connell

 Son of the Morning Star: General Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn by Evan S. Connell

London: Picador, 1986 (first published 1984)                                       ISBN 0330293400

I wish I had read this book twenty years ago. Twenty years ago (give or take a few years), I had the fortune to visit the valley of the Little Bighorn, and walk over the battleground where Custer and so many of the Seventh Cavalry lost their lives that fateful June day in 1876. Evan Connell has written the most wonderful account not only of that day, but of Custer, the West as it came to be up to the battle, the white American mindset, and of the Indians, what happened to them up to and after the battle, and what now remains - the legacy of violence, misunderstanding and dispossession that continue to this day.

Connell was better-known as a novelist before this book was published, and he has used a novelist's mind to create this book, with its tangents, loose ends, unknowns and climaxes. While it covers much familiar territory to those of us with an interest in the battle and the American West more generally, it does so in new and different ways. The book begins with a description of Reno's fight on the bluff from the viewpoint of the soldiers, before segueing into the history of Reno himself, and on to Benteen, before taking a step back in time to see how the fates led Custer and co. to their destiny on June 25.

Connell investigates the "facts" that surround Custer and so many of the men and women associated with this story: sometimes the stories that cloud around these people obscure whatever truth there may have been to find (names in particular, not only of the Indians, but so many of the white participants seem to have varied names, names that changed or have been half-remembered... a kaleidoscope of faces that can't be pinned to a particular). He is not afraid to vent his opinion about some of the histories that have been written of those times, and can be scathing of those whom he thought had exaggerated in search of fame or a dollar.

Some surprising facts pop up throughout the text. One that struck me particularly is that the last living witness to the battle died the same year my wife was born. What seems like ancient history is only just out of reach really. The fog of battle is often impossible to pierce, yet it seems fairly certain that Custer was shot from long range and died "with a smile on his face". While it is pure speculation on my part, Connell describes a character in Custer, that may have been smiling because he knew his name would go down in history. There is no doubt that he was incredibly vain, self-centred and reckless, and it seems he deliberately disobeyed the orders given to him by Terry to wait for the main force to join him before attacking the Indians, most probably so that he could take all the glory for himself.

His wife burnished his legend (she died only in 1933) so that he seemed - until revisionists such as Connell appeared on the scene - like a god, a genius at battle, a wonderful leader to his men, as well as kind to animals, and the greatest Indian fighter of the US Army. That he was none of those things Connell makes clear. He was personally brave, of that there is no doubt, and he was assiduous in trying to work his good fortune in battle into promotions and appointments (it seems plausible that he was thinking of running for President at the time of Little Bighorn).

To his men Custer was a hard-driving martinet, not afraid to use the lash, or to punish them for minor misdemeanours, all the while working hard to minimize his own transgressions, which were not infrequent or insignificant. His leadership against Indians in battle was at best one-dimensional, which is what got him into so much trouble in June 1876. He should have been more circumspect and waited for Terry (although Connell seems to think that even the addition of Terry's men wouldn't have led to a US victory).

Connell spends as much ink on the Indian side of the story as he does on Custer. The Indians had a well-deserved reputation for savagery, which was partly due to their warrior culture, but mostly a response to unrelenting harassment by the white invaders. That they were invaders is without doubt, as it was the US Government itself that gave the lands around the Black Hills to the Sioux "for ever" eight years before the battle. Connell writes that even then, just before Little Bighorn, Indians were willing to negotiate, but the Army did not allow time for that to happen. In so many ways, the disaster was of white man's making...

Son of the Morning Star is very well-written, taking the reader on a journey into the West, and giving as many sides of the story as is possible, even to the point of four or five differing versions of the same story - although unlike an academic tome Connell is quick to let the reader know which version he favours. The book deserves the accolades it received, it is a hinge between "old fashioned" Custer history and the newer more nuanced writing, and is just a wonderful read! 

(This Picador edition suffers from the maps being almost illegible - the Bibliography is good, but the index is terrible.)

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant

 Memoirs and Selected Letters : Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, Selected Letters 1839-1865

by Ulysses S. Grant

New York : The Library of America, 1990                                ISBN 9780940450585

Many times when I have been reading military history have I come across a statement alluding to the classic nature of the Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. I have long been meaning to read them, and now I have. I should probably have read much more of the American Civil War before I did so: for while this is a great book, I struggled with the narrative owing to my lack of knowledge of the progress of that War, and of Grant's role in it. Despite that I found this book hard to put down.

While the book is entitled Personal Memoirs, it does not cover the whole of Grant's life, merely his life up until the end of the Civil War. He of course went on to become President of the United States for two terms before his death from cancer in 1885. The book focuses mostly on Grant's military career, from his enlistment through to the end of 1865.

Grant had a frontier childhood, where he learned to be self-sufficient at an early age (he was entrusted with overnight journeys to town in his early teens), and where he developed a love of horses. His father pulled some strings to enable him to enrol in West Point, where he was a middling to good student. Grant states that fighting was not something that really interested him, and in fact he spent the early part of his time as an officer trying to get the position of teacher of mathematics back at West Point. That did not eventuate, and soon enough he found himself fighting in Mexico, where he got a taste of what it was like to fight, and what it was like to command. 

Grant never saw himself as a leader, and in fact left the army after a period of time spent in Oregon and California. He worked in business with his father and brothers until the Civil War broke out. As a former regular army officer, he was asked by the Governor of Illinois to assist in gathering the militia units for initial training. At first Grant declined all offers to lead troops, but was eventually persuaded to fight, and soon became the commander of the armies in the West, where he won many victories and opened up the Mississippi for the Union.

He was then appointed to overall command of the Union troops and drove the Confederates to surrender with a strategy of denying them their supplies combined with relentless campaigning, relying on the Unions' greater numbers and industrial capacity to overwhelm the Confederates. In this he succeeded, and famously took General Lee's surrender at Appomattox to effectively end the War.

His Memoirs show Grant to be a man who, like many truly great generals, loathed the pain and wastage of war, and who was constantly seeking to find ways to reduce the carnage and to find peace. It seems ironic to write in such a way of a man who oversaw so much slaughter, but it's clear from his writing that at all times the battles he fought were fought for what he saw as good strategic reasons: on more than one occasion in the Memoirs he bemoans attacks and expeditions that he sees as merely a waste of lives and material without any advantage to be gained.

He also bemoans so many lost opportunities to follow up victories with action, missing the chance to perhaps end the war early. The failure to take Mobile when the Mississippi battles were won being a point Grant returns to in this book more than once. The politics of the Civil War were labyrinthine, intense and damaging, more so than many other conflicts: there were many reasons for this: obviously partly because the Civil War was truly a case of brother fighting brother (Grant knew many Confederate officers personally, and liked some of them on a human level) but also partly because of the way the Union army was raised and run.

Because much of the Union Army was comprised of volunteers, who enlisted on a state-by-state basis under officers who were often politicians or other leaders of society rather than military personnel, the command and control that Grant had over his forces was not absolute. Add to that the political interference from Congress, the President and other members of the executive, and Grant sometimes had a very hard task to implement strategies and even tactics that he knew were most beneficial. Time and again in the Memoirs we read of a General not obeying Grant's orders, or of Grant having troops taken away from his command when he was on the verge of a bigger victory. Sometimes the past is another country, and it bodes the reader of these Memoirs well to remember that while Grant was a General, he was not a General as we think of them now.

However, Grant is one of the major figures that imagined a time when modern generalship could come to be. He fully understood the importance of logistics, and while striving hard to destroy the logistical structure of the Confederate forces, he always was thinking carefully about the supply of his own troops. It was this attention to depriving the enemy of the tools of war while ensuring his own access to them that was decisive in his final victory.

While anyone who writes a Memoir is going to be self-serving, the Grant we get to know through these writings is essentially a humble man, who was trying to win a terrible war for the country that he loved. While he didn't hate the Southerners, he hated what they had done to his beloved Union. He wanted to win the war in the quickest way possible, and that led to him approving of the tactic of destruction undertaken by Sherman and Sheridan during their campaigns in the Shenandoah Valley and through Georgia. It was ugly, but it was effective in bringing the South to its knees without having to engage in huge set-piece battles. Grant knew he had to destroy the Confederate armies to win the war, but tried to do so without exterminating them.

This Library of America edition of the Memoirs contains much more besides: a selection of his letters, which show other sides to Grant than he chooses to reveal in his book, more political, more troubled about money and investments, as well as showing him to be a loving husband and father. There is a useful and detailed chronology of his life, as well as some of his final notes to his doctor, written when his throat cancer stopped him from being able to talk.

Which takes me to the final point that I think is worth making about this book: it is amazing that we have it at all. Grant had always said that he would not write a memoir or anything about the war, but his mind was changed by the fact that he lost all his money after a bank in which he had invested went bankrupt. He turned to writing to help pay his bills, firstly with some articles on the Civil War for magazine publication but then, encouraged by Mark Twain (who was a friend of his) he embarked on his memoirs. This was also about the time he learnt of his cancer, and it was literally a race against time for him to complete the work before his death. That he did so is a fact for which we can all be thankful.

I can see why many praise this book highly. This Library of America edition is wonderful, and after finishing it I realize that I have started my journey into the Civil War - I wonder where to next?

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Last Days of George Armstrong Custer by Thom Hatch

The Last Days of George Armstrong Custer by Thom Hatch

New York: St. Martin's Press, 2015                ISBN 9781250051028

Hagiography. The inherent danger in seeing no wrong in a person, especially if you are claiming to write history, is that you as historian may be hoist on your own petard. Thom Hatch, with his worship of Custer, has blown himself so high that he may never hit the ground. While the dust jacket tells us that Hatch will "set the record straight" all he actually does is make the reader question his interpretation of events.

And there is plenty of interpretation on offer to everyone, not only about the Battle of the Little Bighorn itself, but in many other aspects of Custer's career. Hatch, in every interpretation he makes, sides with Custer, and at times what he doesn't write in his book tells the reader as much as what he does.

Despite what the title suggests, this book not only delves into the last days of Custer's life, but also gives us over a hundred pages of preliminaries, covering most of the life and career of Custer. Hatch passes over Custer's less-than-stellar time at West Point, excusing his record number of demerits and low pass mark as the result of "youthful exuberance". Whilst not going into great detail, Hatch writes of Custer's Civil War as a triumphal progress as he does of his subsequent efforts against the Indians. By this part of the book it's clear to the reader that we are reading a one-sided account of events.

Hatch then goes on to describe the prelude to, and the Battle of, Little Bighorn relatively accurately. It is when he comes to his analysis that we again see his bias emerge. He is determined not to allow any opprobrium stick to his glorious General.

Hatch puts the entire blame for the failure of the Cavalry at Little Bighorn onto Major Reno's failed charge on the Indian village. While on one page he is equating Reno's failure to carry out Custer's order to the letter as a capital offence, in the next he incidentally shows us several reasons why Reno acted as he did: he thought Custer was coming along behind him, and Reno had no experience fighting Indians. One could, contra Hatch, just as easily argue that, given Custer knew Reno had not fought against Indians before, that he should have been much more explicit with his order, and in explaining what his tactics were to be. If - as Hatch contends - Reno's charge was the key to victory or defeat, it would have been well for Custer to do so. Reno was in fact second-in-command on the day and it would have been reasonable and even expected that Custer would discuss his overall tactics with him.

It is clear that Reno suffered from Battle Shock after the first contact at Little Bighorn, and his behaviour was far from what should have been expected from an officer, but it is a long bow to draw to place the entire failure of the Cavalry down to his ineffectual charge.

The irony of this excoriation of Reno for not following orders to the letter, after praising Custer for doing the same during the Civil War, is not lost on the reader, although it seems to be so to the author. Even with Hatch's idolisation of Custer throughout this book, it is clear in these pages that while Custer was no doubt personally brave, he was also reckless and impulsive. To attack what was as far as is known the largest Indian encampment ever seen on the Plains without even a reconnoitre of the lay of the land, or knowing if the River was passable, was reckless in the extreme, even if time was of the essence to catch the Indians by surprise.

Hatch describes how Custer almost had a "set play" for his battles against Indians - attack the front of the encampment with some troops, outflank and catch the Indians as they regroup or flee with the rest. This worked previously, but it seems that this time, under the aggressive leadership of Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and Gall the Indians had decided to stand and fight. They outnumbered the Cavalry by five-to-one.

There is no knowing what the outcome of the Battle would have been if Reno had continued his charge; Hatch assumes that Custer would have come in on the flank to an easy victory. An equally realistic scenario is Reno and his men being cut down in the maze of tepees while Custer was held off at the river before the weight of numbers forced him to retreat, or to suffer defeat.

The reality of course is that no one thing caused the disaster. If General Crook had notified Terry and Custer of his battle on the Rosebud, if Custer had better knowledge of the size and location of the village, yes, if Reno had charged into the village, if Benteen had kept moving toward Custer with the pack train, if Custer had retreated toward Benteen and Reno when he was still able, if Custer had got his men together in a defensive position early enough, if, if, if. The enormous amount of Little Bighorn literature spawns from these ifs, and a lot of it is better thought-out and argued than Hatch's book.

Hatch also, to my mind, borders on the offensive when he brands the Indians as enemies of the United States, and of progress, writing "The United States had every right to expand its boundaries to include the Great Plains West. Oddly enough, many moder scholars believe there was something honorable about the Sioux fighting to defend their right to roam free. The West was becoming too small and populated to allow a group advocating violence to close off thousands of square miles.....Peace entreaties had been made and were dismissed." The disingenuousness of this paragraph, the last sentence in particular, is astounding. Peace entreaties had indeed been made, and regularly broken, by the United States Government. The Black Hills had been given in perpetuity to the Indian tribes and then taken away, as had many other locations across the West. What resort did the Indians have but to try to keep what was theirs by force, as negotiation and treaty had failed time and again. And surely there is honour in fighting for your freedom: I have no doubt Hatch, a Vietnam Veteran, would claim that himself. To state that there is honour in fighting for your way of life is not to denigrate the bravery of Custer, or of the Seventh Cavalry, who were on the right and wrong side of history at the same time, as were the Indians. By pushing his feelings too far, Hatch undermines himself, the petard explodes again.

There are better places to start with the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Custer, and indeed the American West, than with this book.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The American Civil War by John Keegan

The American Civil War : a military history by John Keegan

New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2009                             ISBN 9780307263438


What a strange and disappointing book. John Keegan was a well known military historian; one of his books, The Face of Battle, broke new ground in the description of the experience of fighting, from generals to the humble private. Unfortunately, the book under review does not attain the standard of that earlier work.

I picked up this book after watching the film Lincoln, which I enjoyed immensely. I realised while watching the film that my knowledge of the American Civil War was pretty sketchy at best, so I thought I'd remedy that and Keegan was close at hand.

Keegan calls his book a military history, yet the first description of battle does not appear until the reader is one third of the way through the book. The hundred pages or so before our first taste of battle is filled with a confusing mash of discussion  - a brief and inconclusive foray into the causes of the war, and then a description of the armies involved which actually tells us more about what was going on in Britain at the time rather than America, and a treatise on the "Military Geography of the Civil War", which is simplistic and repetitive.

Repetition is in fact the bane of this book - Keegan is forever jumping forward or backwards in the Civil War chronology to make a point, most annoyingly referencing battles that are yet to occur to illuminate a point about the one he is currently writing about. He continually makes the same points about the advantages and disadvantages of the rivers in the battle areas, and of the railroads. It almost seems as though the chapters of this book are a collection of separate essays that have been brought together, without any editing process.

For a war that had, "By common computation, about 10,000 battles, large and small", the book intersperses the major battles sparsely throughout the text, with much intervening material. The reader gets no feel for how close in time battles might have been to each other, or how wins or losses affected the public at large, apart from brief glimpses.

Once Keegan actually gets on to the fighting, he takes us up to the Fall of Richmond, and then proceeds to wander off the chronological path again, with chapters on Black Soldiers (which restates much he has already stated), the Home Front, Walt Whitman, and chapters on Generalship, Battles, and on whether the South could have survived (which again is a re-hash of earlier sections of the book). Only after this 50 page foray does he get to the final climax of the War, which is then followed by a very strange section which purports to show how the Civil War inoculated the American worker against Socialism!

This book is really all over the place, and the good points - some of the battle descriptions, the pen portraits of the major Generals - are overburdened by the meandering repetitious nature of much of the rest of the book.

The maps are sometimes helpful (although there are not enough of them), and the apparatus is OK (although there are some gaps in the index), but overall, I'd have to recommend not to read this book if you want to be any clearer on the American Civil War. In fact I've found it difficult to write about in any coherent way. One for aficionados - if only to pick holes in.


Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell