Kill-Cavalry: The Life of Union General Hugh Judson Kilpatrick

Rating:
Summary: Interesting, but less than completely satisfying.
Review: Civil War aficionados will find this book interesting, well-researched and, ultimately, less than completely satisfying. Kill-Cavalry is a competently written straightforward narrative history. Given its subject, that's the problem: The story of a character as colorful as Hugh Judson Kilpatrick, acting in a time as rich in drama as the American Civil War, deserves more than a mere recitation of events. The author is obviously an accomplished non-academic historian and the length of the bibliography attests to his dedication as a researcher. Perhaps the most serious obstacle with which he had to contend is the lack of personal papers from his subject. It can be assumed that an individual as pathologically narcissistic as General Kilpatrick evidently was would have left a trove of documents. Unfortunately, these were all destroyed by Kilpatrick's daughter many years after his death. The after action reports and other official correspondence which survive give some sense of his personality, as do the quoted comments of his contemporaries. The author provides codas to each chapter which are accurate summations of his subject's actions and motives. However, a writer with more novelistic gifts would have been able to bring a poltroon such as Hugh Kilpatrick more to life on the page. As it is, the book is filled out primarily with descriptions of skirmishes and battles involving the units with which General Kilpatrick was affiliated, regardless of his actual contributions. Having said all that, I am going to recommend this book--not to a general readership, but to anyone with a specific interest in the American Civil War. I think such readers will find useful and interesting the very commendable clarity with which the author has presented the record of Kilpatrick's campaigns. These, and the descriptions of Kilpatrick's interactions with his contemporaries--among them Meade, Sherman and Custer--give an authentic flavor of the times. Hugh Judson Kilpatrick's life deserves to be remembered; certainly not out of esteem for the kind of man he was, but for the part he played in the times in which he lived. NOTE: There is a volume by this same author, copyrighted 1996, also titled "Kill-Cavalry" but subtitled "Sherman's Merchant of Terror." I would be curious to learn if it is identical to this current version.

Rating:
Summary: Insufficient research
Review: This author falls into the same trap that's been laid for researchers for the past 135 years. The most glaring example is the standard portrayal of Kilpatrick at Gettysburg, all of which is based on one source who admitted years later he was never a witness to what actually happened or was said on the field that day. Like researchers before him, the author missed this glaring truth.

Here are two hints of Kilpatrick's character and performance: (1) His men held him in such high esteem that they petitioned Lincoln to have him promoted to general (a rare occurrence in the CW); and (2) after the battle of Gettysburg his men presented their commander with a Damascus sword in appreciation for his leadership on July 3.

In short, an author who doesn't dig deeper than his predecessors is dancing to the worn-out tune of incredulity.

Rating:
Summary: Not all bad.
Review: This book smacks of a work done by someone who had a thesis and then did everything he could to prove it, rather than letting the research bring him to a conclusion.

Fortunately, I did get the feeling that the basic history of Killpatrick was decent and reasonably fair-minded. At the end of each chapter, however, Martin adds his commentaty about how the foregoing information shows that Kilpatrick was a horrible leader, womanizer, thief, etc. At one point, Martin suggests that the attempt on Jefferson Davis' life introduced the idea of assination, even to the point of possibly leading to Lincoln's murder. Right.

Killpatrick's womanizing, thievery, etc comes out, for sure, but were his casualities really highter than comparable commanders? That's not clear. He won some battles and lost others--like most Civil War leaders.