Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri During the American Civil War

Rating:
Summary: Draws you into a whole new aspect of the civil war.
Review: Dr. Fellman has shown his expertise in the history field with this book. The author has done an excellent job of bringing to light the guerrilla conflict in Missouri. He has taken a previously unstudied event in history and made it available to all to study and become aware of. Backed up with innumerable quotes and primary documents, Dr. Fellman has provided the reader with undeniable evidence of his arguments and conclusions. "Inside War" is an excellent reference book concerning a specific aspect of the Civil War and can be read and understood by any college level student.

Rating:
Summary: Psycho-biography at its best
Review: I usually loathe any historical book which puts its subject on the couch, but this is a notable exception. Fellman infuses this book with his own spin on certain matters, but much of the interpretation is accurate! If you enjoy a "National Enquirer" approach to biography, then this is your bag, though a more intellectual, sobering and accurate analysis of events than a tabloid rag. Fellman delves deeply into Sherman's womanizing and the reasons behind it: Ellen, WTS's wife, was a passionless prig, obsessed with Catholicism and being the type of prim, straight-laced wife that Sherman would ultimately abhor. Can we blame him for repeatedly cheating on Ellen? Of course not.

There is a plethora of new information about Sherman's various affairs: he kept the handkerchief of one of his conquests after their rendezvous and wrote to thank her for the article. There are numerous excerpts from love letters to Sherman from his paramours and they make for some unintended hilarious reading.

Fellman is much weaker on the military end of the biography and his limitations show. There are numerous factual gaffes and the author is on safer ground when restricting himself to purely personal matters. This is hardly the definitive treatment of Sherman, try instead John Marszalek's biography (available on Amazon) for an exceptional and scholarly approach. But if you want a book focused primarily on the private life of Sherman, this nicely fits the bill.

Rating:
Summary: Inside War
Review: This is a very interesting, useful study of mentalities in Civil War Missouri. It covers guerrillas (by which Fellman generally means Confederate guerrillas rather than Jayhawkers), civilians, and Union troops in all their various permutations.

I found Fellman's scholarship to be generally well-founded, though he is sometimes a little credulous of sources -- there's one case where he quotes an unsigned letter to a hostile newspaper as if it were good evidence for an event -- and he makes some mistakes with events outside his purview (misidentifying Early's raid on Washington as cavalry only). In general, though, I found the research credible.

What disappointed me here was the lack of conclusions. We have description, and some analysis, but the book seems short on results. Particularly in his analysis of the combatants' regular army and governmental reaction to guerrillas, Fellman seems to contradict himself: on the one hand he chastises the Confederates as elitist, perhaps prudish, for disapproving of guerrilla warfare, and on the other hand he makes every effort to show just how horrible such warfare really was. At times, he overanalyzes; I didn't find the characterization of Civil War Americans as "Manichaean" convincing. You don't need to be a Manichaean to dehumanize your enemies in a war.

Despite these quibbles, I found the book valuable, certainly worth looking at for the study of mentalities in a region where war was literally at every door.

Rating:
Summary: I'm glad I read this anyway
Review: This was a rather difficult book to read; not so much from any fault of the author, but rather resulting from an effort to comprehensivly cover a topic for which relatively little is known. I found this book provactive from an emotional point of view; the primary sources certainly make the reader appreciate the devastation that must have occured to the (not so?) innocent by-stander. However, the book suffers from a whopping lack of focus in areas, and becomes somewhat repetitive. In addition, the theses of particular sections are often obscure, as are the conclusions. Despite this, "Inside War" is a wonderful book to read, although I felt that it was stuck in a nether region between a descriptive listing of primary sources and a thesis driven examination.

Rating:
Summary: I'm glad I read this anyway
Review: This was a rather difficult book to read; not so much from any fault of the author, but rather resulting from an effort to comprehensivly cover a topic for which relatively little is known. I found this book provactive from an emotional point of view; the primary sources certainly make the reader appreciate the devastation that must have occured to the (not so?) innocent by-stander. However, the book suffers from a whopping lack of focus in areas, and becomes somewhat repetitive. In addition, the theses of particular sections are often obscure, as are the conclusions. Despite this, "Inside War" is a wonderful book to read, although I felt that it was stuck in a nether region between a descriptive listing of primary sources and a thesis driven examination.