Michael B. Ballard (1946–2016)

Being a once-over-lightly of military action in Mississippi during the War of the Rebellion. It's not really a guide in the sense of having much in the way of directions to or walking or driving tours of cemeteries or battlefields, though some sketchy ones are appended, as much as a YA level outline. The author writes fairly well, but was not well-served by his editor, who should have saved him from his tendency toward homonym errors, or his publisher, who should have plunked a good map of the state right at the start instead of the outline maps showing little detail at the end; they're pretty much useless even if one knows that they are there. There are numerous battle maps, but they aren't very good. The author writes very clearly and he offers up a lot of opinion worth consideration on command decisions on both sides, and he indulges in little if any bias.… (altro)

Besides giving you the general sweep of the campaign to take Vicksburg, Ballard does two things particularly well. One is that the naval side of operations is well integrated into the general narrative, and Ballard never loses sight of the overall impact that Union naval supremacy had on events. Two, Ballard also gives you the complete impact the war had on the area's civilian population, what he calls the "hard war," and the ever increasing misery the people of the state of Mississippi endured.

However, I do have some problems with this book as a military narrative, and I should have been tipped off from the start when Ballard speaks of treating both the tactical and strategic levels of the campaign. Seeing as you're writing about a campaign as an integrated whole, why not write about it from the operational perspective? I'm not even sure that Ballard is aware that there is such a level of analysis.

What also gives me pause are scattered anecdotes about friction in the Confederate command structure, as Pemberton is torn between Pres. Davis' insistence on holding Vicksburg for its own sake and Joe Johnston's desire to trade space for time and concentrate his forces. Ballard goes out of his way to excoriate Johnston, describing him as "a general who would not fight;" which seems just a tad unfair to me. Later, Ballard goes so far as to suggest that Robert E. Lee mounted his 1863 Pennsylvania campaign so as to avoid sending troops to the western theater of the war; with no analysis to back up this claim. The irony here is that Ballard winds up grudgingly admitting that Johnston was right in his operational concept! This all suggests to me that Ballard takes this campaign more than a little personally (the author hails from Mississippi), and also appears to be in thrall to the revisionists of a generation ago, such as Connelly and Nolan. This represents a pitfall to the student of the war who is relatively new to the field.… (altro)