Career journalist and ordained Episcopal minister Huston Horn's biography of the controversial “Fighting Bishop” of the American Civil War is as evenhanded as it is engagingly written. Taken alone, any number of passages from his long profile of Polk (six hundred pages of text, endnotes, bibliography, and index) might be read as proof of Horn's commitment to redeeming the reputation of his protagonist. In chronicling the difficulties Polk faced in his efforts to rid Missouri of Federals, for example, Horn concludes that Gideon “Pillow's impertinence, [Jefferson] Davis's second-guessing of his decisions, and the faulty intelligence with which he was routinely supplied were the irritants that came with Polk's job” (176). As soon as one might sense a hagiographic trend in the approbatory language employed in assessing Polk's actions, however, an equally critical assessment of Polk is offered. In describing Polk's obstinacy toward his commanding general in the days before and after the Battle of Perryville in Kentucky in 1862, for instance, Horn concludes that “Polk's high opinion of his own military judgments … inured him to how close he came to subordination, a grave offense” (263). In the end, Horn's ability to deal as honestly with Polk's definitional faults as he does Polk's likewise essential virtues results in an impressively objective and scholarly examination of an extremely complicated man.

Leonidas Polk's begrudging willingness to exchange his scepter as Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana for the sword of a Confederate officer was disparaged by religionists in the North and South alike. But as Horn chronicles, it was not for his previous avocation alone that Polk became the most controversial “political” general of the Civil War. Their longstanding friendship and religious accord led Confederate President Jefferson Davis to imagine Polk's future martial success a providential certainty in 1861. Therefore, “before awarding a battlefield command to a civilian with nothing more than classroom experience,” Horn writes, Davis “decided to up Polk's rank from brigadier to major general” (159). For reasons recounted in rich detail in the book's last two-thirds, Davis's hopes for Polk's achievements were not realized. Participating in most of the important battles in the Western Theatre prior to his death outside of Atlanta in June 1864, Polk met most frequently with disappointment; alas even after Chickamauga, the Confederacy's only meaningful victory in the West, Polk was immersed in controversy. Polk's critics considered him militarily inept, a characteristic rendered even more dangerous, they charged, by Polk's unwillingness to receive counsel. By the war's midpoint, foremost detractor Braxton Bragg considered Polk an “old woman, utterly worthless” whom Bragg had nevertheless “dry nursed” since their first pairing. And Bragg's disdain for Polk was more than reciprocated, for it was Polk's “lofty contempt” for his commanding general that “lay at the root,” Horn concludes, of Polk's “subsequent, even recurrent defiance (when not actual insubordination) of Bragg's authority” (247).

Unflinchingly reported by the author, such battlefield vexations and frequent disputes gave rise, over time, to the deleterious image of Leonidas Polk with which students of American military history are familiar today. Unlike previous authors who have considered Polk the soldier however, Horn recognizes the humanity and dimensionality of his protagonist. Adored by his men as a devout yet convivial commander and esteemed highly by his President, the tender-hearted Polk cared for his soldiers’ physical and spiritual wellbeing as ardently as he did that of his beloved new nation. Personally courageous to the point of near foolhardiness, Polk's prewar lack of combat (if not command) experience was soon forgotten by even those who found fault with his strategies. Moreover, Polk was not always wrong in assuming the folly of those above him. General William Hardee, for example, opined after one celebrated disconnect between Bragg's orders and Polk's actions that had “Polk followed Bragg's instructions at Bardstown … the army would have been destroyed” (263). Because the author is so adept at recreating the campaigns and battles in which Polk participated and the after-battle imbroglios in which he found himself, Horn's balanced biography will be of great value to those interested in the military side of the ledger. There is more to Huston Horn's Leonidas Polk, however, than just a provocative warrior.

Roughly the first third of Warrior Bishop of the Confederacy details Polk's life before the Civil War, and what a life it was. The son of slaveholding planters, Polk attended West Point before embracing the Episcopal faith and answering the ministry's call. Once possessed of a religious heart, Polk rose quickly through the ecumenical ranks, and by the end of the antebellum period found himself in one of the most celebrated offices in American Episcopalianism. His spirituality did not squash his speculative objectives to be sure, and Polk the sugar planter was as much a man of the market as he was a man of the cloth. Lastly, and perhaps most notably in terms of Polk's legacy, Polk was the founder of the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. These prewar elements of Horn's biography help the reader understand the humanity of Polk the soldier in a way that earlier studies have not. Leonidas Polk thus emerges from Horn's meticulously researched Leonidas Polk: Warrior Bishop of the Confederacy as the extremely contradictory man that he was, and not as the caricature so often presented instead.