The Confederate Military Forces in the Trans-Mississippi West- William Royston Geise |
- By Hog Farm
Publishing details: Geise, William Royston (2022). Forsyth, Michael J. (ed.). The Confederate Military Forces in the Trans-Mississippi West, 1861–1865: A Study in Command. El Dorado Springs, California: Savas Beatie. ISBN 978-1-61121-621-9.
The core of this work is a previously-unpublished University of Texas at Austin PhD thesis from 1974. Geise was a WWII veteran who spent over 20 years in the U.S. military. He later received his doctorate and was a professor for a number of years before dying in 1993. According to the introduction, this thesis was recommended to Savas Beatie for publication by Bryce Suderow, who is probably best known for his book on the Battle of Pilot Knob. The manuscript was then lightly edited by Michael J. Forsyth, a long-time veteran of the U.S. military who was a staff officer for the Alaska NORAD Region and was (as of 2022) a PhD candidate at a Canadian military college. Geise's original notes/citations are clearly delineated from Forsyth's by the separation of the author's and editor's commentary by two backslashes.
This work is focused on the Confederate high command in the Trans-Mississippi Theater of the American Civil War and is not intended to be a traditional battle/campaign history of the theater, which is still needed. While the major military operations in the theater are discussed as appropriate, this is done as a summary of the operation, without the traditional focus on individual battles. Some operations of limited long-term strategic significance, mainly cavalry raids, are not really discussed at all, with Marmaduke's First Missouri Raid and Shelby's Great Raid being the two that stood out to me the most. In a few cases, I felt that omitting references to specific events excluded some necessary context (the most glaring of which were the lack of a reference to the Camp Jackson affair in the discussion of divided civilian attitudes in 1861 Missouri and a description of the Battle of Mine Creek as "the last fight of [Price's Missouri Expedition]" (p. 164)), but on the whole Geise was able to appropriately balance the strategic and tactical level views.
What Geise does focus on is the Confederate administration of the region. Geise lays out the effects of the lack of unified command in the region early in the war, and the effects of both uncoordinated and sometimes overlapping division of the region into districts and subdistricts. Confederate departmental commander Theophilus H. Holmes comes under criticism from Geise, which is the consensus view. A topic of emphasis is the necessity of Edmund Kirby Smith's military administration to take over much of the civilian administration of the region after the Siege of Vicksburg cut off the Trans-Mississippi from the Confederate central government. The most unique aspects of Geise's study are the chapters dealing with Confederate logistics in the Trans-Mississippi and the relationship between the Confederate military administration and the Confederate civilian state governments of the region, particularly after Kirby Smith took over a number of areas that in the American tradition have been handled by the civilian authorities, such as certain economic policies and the postal service.
Forsyth's footnotes are mainly intended to point to post-1974 additions to the scholarly literature on the Trans-Mississippi. What are now the definitive works on operations such as Wilson's Creek, Pea Ridge, Hindman's fall and winter 1862 Ozarks offensives, the 1863 operations in Arkansas, and Price's Missouri Expedition post-date the 1970s, along with most of the modern literature on the Red River campaign. Geise was an English major, while Forsyth was not, which is the cause of the somewhat ironic circumstance where the editor's annotations are less well-edited than the primary text. Many of the other notes are Forsyth applying his experience as a staff officer to the command and control problems faced by the Trans-Mississippi Confederates.
All-in-all, I would consider this to be an essential text for those studying the Trans-Mississippi theater of the war.