General Grant and the Rewriting of History: How the Destruction of General William S. Rosecrans Influenced Our Understanding of the Civil War, Frank Varney

c. 2013

Wow, this is a tough book to sort out. It is incredibly well-written, detailed, with a great dust jacket, great font, great binding -- a treasure to hold (the hardcover).

I have not read much Civil War history; most of my understanding of the Civil War in the southern theater is based on US Grant's Memoirs.

The problem I have with Varney's book is his heavy-handedness: from the very outset he says Grant is a liar and Rosecrans was destroyed by Grant. He says that on every page, and it seems, in every paragraph. It gets tiresome.

Others have said Varney made factual errors; I have no idea but it's a book that every student of the Civil War should read. My hunch is that this would have been a much better book had the author simply written a history or biography of Rosecrans, and making mention of how Grant and others reported the story. That would have let the readers come to their own conclusions whether Rosecrans was as bad as Grant made him out to be by Varney.

I will have to go back and re-read Grant's Memoirs; I don't recall such harsh language about Rosecrans but I wasn't looking.