This fine study of the American Civil War's western theatre, stretching from the Mississippi River eastward to the Appalachian Mountains, offers something old and new. The old part comes in the way Hess tells his tale, which is as a traditional military campaign narrative. One finds good summaries of all the major movements and principal battles on land and water, from the first clashes in Kentucky to the Confederacy's death throes in North Carolina. He also tells the story mostly from the perspective of the principal Union commanders, especially, though understandably, through Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman. Glimpses of Confederate strategy are sporadic and fleeting. Likewise, men in the Union ranks seldom offer their perspectives on the war.

This is not to say that Hess's approach lacks merit. Far from it. Most importantly, he is quick – and correct – to emphasize that the war was won and lost in the West, not in the eastern theatre. His is also the first comprehensive analysis of the western war that does not interpret events through the experience of a single army or military commander. He also emphasizes more effectively than previous writers the importance of geography. The western theatre was vast, some 270,000 square miles, much of it dotted with mountains and swamps, and honeycombed with formidable (though often useful) rivers. As Hess decrees, “Geography, more than any other factor, made the Civil War in the West unique” (xi). Similarly, he concludes that Union victory there, while clearly dependent on superior manpower, equipment, and supplies, may be attributed primarily to a logistical system that was able to “mobilize and manipulate those resources to overcome all difficulties of time and space” (307–8).

Which brings us to the “new” dimensions folded into Hess's story. His careful delineation of how Union armies overcame their logistical problems certainly fits that category. So, too, does his consideration of the unexpectedly complex administrative problems that accompanied the occupation of enemy territory. First came the disciplining of Union troops, who at different places and at different times were prone to plunder and bully the civilian population. This promoted the need, as civilian governments disintegrated or lost their authority in the wake of invasion, for “political regeneration” (62–63). At the very least, local governments had to be reestablished; ideally, loyal state governments could be created. While such issues are part of most military narratives, Hess pursues them more consistently and in more detail than do other authors.

Along those same lines, he includes apt discussions of how Union occupiers handled the conundrums of trade and slavery. The former was of especial concern in the Mississippi River valley, where the Federals had not only to disrupt southern trade, particularly in cotton, but also to protect Union commerce along the river. What to do with the millions of slaves in the western theatre was an even thornier problem, at least until the Lincoln government clarified its policy with the Emancipation Proclamation. Early on, for example, some one hundred slaves were among the 1,400 Confederate prisoners of war captured at Fort Donelson in February 1862 and sent to a northern prison camp.

Most impressive of all, Hess acknowledges the crucial role of guerrilla warfare in the West. He limits his discussion to the problems posed by rebel guerrillas for the Union army, rather than including the equally important struggle between unionists and rebel irregulars, and he does not fully appreciate the influence of rebel guerrillas in shaping Union occupation policies, but his narrative integrates the guerrilla story far more effectively than do most accounts, save Benjamin Franklin Cooling's three volumes on the war in Kentucky and Tennessee. In the end, as well, Hess notes quite rightly that “the Federals never really won the guerrilla war in the West” (311).

In covering such an array of topics in the largest military theatre of the war, Hess naturally leaves some things undone. For instance, while dealing extensively with the war along the Mississippi, he pays little attention to naval and guerrilla actions on the Tennessee, Cumberland, and other rivers. Also, by following the usual practice of treating the Mississippi as a dividing line between the western and trans-Mississippi theatres, he downplays the role of the river as a link between them. Devotees of the eastern or trans-Mississippi theatres may also bristle when Hess identifies Shiloh as “the first major battle of the Civil War” (45). But while that judgment depends on how one defines “major,” Hess, by any definition, has written a well-researched, carefully reasoned, and soundly written analysis of how the Union won the (western) war.