CIVIL WAR in the OZARKS by Phillip W. Steele and Steve Cottrell

Published in 1993 by Pelican Press.
This book was revised and re-released in 2009

I believe I purchased this book nearly 30 years ago at the St. Louis Gateway Arch, before its current setup.

The Arch seems like a cheesy tourist trap, but it is actual a great place for lovers of history. I've been there three times - each about 20 years apart.

The Arch itself is overwhelmingly immense and worth at least one close look. In the current configuration, there is also a first-rate museum under the arch with a gift shop. Sure, the gift shop has glassware and keychains, but it has always had an impressive book store. 

You can also travel to Cahokia Mounds in Illinois and climb on top of the largest Native American pyramid structure in the U.S. and look to the west and clearly see the Arch. Anyone with a sense of history gets a chill down their spine when standing on an ancient monument and looking miles away.

I bring all of this up because this is precisely the kind of connection that this book does not offer.

This is the type of Civil War book that people that say they hate history pick up and try to read and it just reinforces their impression that history is a series of dry facts recited in the order that they happened.

I really couldn't find much to criticize in what is included in this book. It tells the story of armies being assembled, troop movements, battles, and casualty counts and not much jumped out at me as being overtly inaccurate. The authors don't really take one side or the other in their re-telling of the events.

But, they miss the best parts of telling a history. It's not the numbers of the dead and wounded that make the story worth hearing, even though those are essential facts. It's the motivations of the people involved - their relationships to one another, their quirks that make them precisely the person for this moment, or precisely NOT the person for this moment (see below with Frémont.)

The authors make frequent references to how this border area between free and slave states led to a lot of swirling debates about the secession crisis and slavery. Families were split, disputes between families became infused with the external energy of the war and the whole area became a tinderbox of anger and violence. The problem with this book is that they didn't even provide more than what I wrote in the previous sentence - with one exception.

There is an addendum to the book about Jesse James and his gang. There is a lot of heartbreaking detail about the war crimes that were inflicted upon him and his family that turned him into an unflinching partisan, even long after his companions officially surrendered and long after the war was over.

If this sort of detail had been supplied throughout the book - not just about famous people like Jesse James but about regular people and why it made them join the fight, this would have made the book nothing but better.

There is a glaring example of an almost criminal lack of explanation about the most famous person in the theater throughout the entire war - John C. Frémont. Frémont entered the war as literally the second most famous member of the U.S. military, only slightly less famous than its leading general Winfield Scott (maybe even more famous.)

Frémont was famous because had led 5 highly publicized survey expeditions of the West with his wife sending reports back East (in his name) that were re-published in all of the newspapers. He had a nickname - the Pathfinder of the West. He also led an expedition in the Mexican War, was one the first two Senators from California, and the first Republican candidate for President in 1856. He had also married into one of the most powerful political families in St. Louis. He thought he was immune and this controversy and Frémont's independent attitude set the agenda for the Union war effort in the first few months of the war. 

The book notes that Frémont was slow to move, lived an ostentatious lifestyle in a mansion in St. Louis and was removed from command. It fails to note that he was removed from his position because he issued an Emancipation Proclamation for Missouri more than a year before Lincoln issued his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation for the entire Confederacy. Lincoln told him that he couldn't have a general making such monumental policy choices on this own, but Frémont refused to take it back.

Not even having a light discussion of the issue is ridiculous for a book called Civil War in the Ozarks and a discussion of this matter would have gone well with a discussion of how this issue pushed some men into this fight.

This wasn't the only topic they failed to discuss along these lines. For example, why did they not discuss why the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma fought alongside the Confederacy. They mention that African American soldiers from Kansas fought in several battles. There was no discussion about these soldiers, except to note that they had heard rumors that they would be murdered if they surrendered in battle. How did pro-Confederate families react to them? How did they end up stationed in Kansas? 

This book could have been so much more. I rate it 2 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Civil War in the Ozarks by Phillip W. Steele and Steve Cottrell.