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Chargement... The Right Hand of Command: Use and Disuse of Personal Staffs in the American Civil Warpar R. Steven Jones
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With thorough scholarship, Jones presents an enlightening view of the use of personal staffs by four general officers during the Civil War. The author attempts to correct the paucity of information on the functioning of Civil War staffs with this well-presented historical study. Focusing on the personal staffs of Generals McClellan, Lee, Sherman, and Grant, Jones reveals that no one appreciated the amount of staff work required to run a large, complex army efficiently in the field. Armies were just too big for one commander to handle all the administrative, logistical, and operational details himself. Civil War armies required a 'corporate nature of leadership, ' says Jones, with a personal staff complementing the efforts of the commander. He finds that McClellan dithered with his staff as he did with his army, Lee's staff was used for little more than record - and housekeeping, Sherman's approach was traditional, and Grant was the most innovative and demanding of his staff. Jones discusses staff selection, training, use, and relationship to the commander. This book is an informative addition to Civil War history and is recommended for public libraries Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)973.7History and Geography North America United States Administration of Abraham Lincoln, 1861-1865 Civil WarClassification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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R. Steven Jones chose a very hard subject to write a study about; the evolution and usage of a general's personal staff during America's civil war.
Why hard to write? Because there is almost no information extent about such a subject for a writer to plum. There was no official staff organization for the US army until 43 years after the war, no president or Army commander created a formal system, no foreign systems were studied or implemented, and no real standard of usage was set out for American generals to adopt.
It was left up to the individual generals to create and implement their own conception of what a command staff should be. Some succeeded, some failed. But few of them wrote much about their staff organizations during or after the war. This left writer Jones with a dearth of source material, and little paper trail in army records.
However, Jones did an admirable job bringing together a study of his subject none-the-less. He chose the four biggest generals in the war and did his best to reveal the inner working of their respective staff work. Generals Lee, McClellan, Sherman and Grant served to show us four very different conceptions as well as proving the main point that there was no such thing as a staff organization during the war.
The most successful staff organization was Grant's and filled more pages in Jones' book than the other three (most likely because there was more info out there than there was for the other three). But Grant only arrived at his final formation after fits and starts of various failures and successes earlier in the war. Lee's staff was overworked and understaffed, Sherman's was micromanaged by a commander who's manic energy was set on high throughout the war, and McClellan's just wasn't used very effectively despite McClellan's vast experience observing foreign armies.
In any case, this is a good starting point to begin to learn about civil war staffs, a study that will have to serve as biographies of many and varied generals to be completed. Jones' efforts deserve a thank you.
Jones' work is certainly not scintillating, and might be thought of as a tad dry.... but the subject is not really one that leads to excitement, after all! Though, it is somewhat amusing that once done with the book you realize you read 219 pages expounding upon a subject that does not, in the end, exist, namely that of a system of personal command staffs of the civil war! ( )