Book Review: Southern Cross: A New View of Leonidas Polk and His Clashes with Braxton Bragg

Southern Cross: A New View of Leonidas Polk and His Clashes with Braxton Bragg. By Amanda Low Warren. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2024. Softcover, 242 pp. $39.95.

Reviewed by Lee White

General Leonidas Polk is considered to be one of, if not the, most incompetent generals the Confederacy produced during the American Civil War. Amanda Low Warren takes issue with this view in Southern Cross: A New View of Leonidas Polk and His Clashes with Braxton Bragg. To do so she incorporates a style that seems to be modeled on Stephen Hood’s recent John Bell Hood: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection, of a Confederate General.

Looking mostly at Polk’s military career as one of the senior subordinates in the ill-starred Army of Tennessee, Warren makes her contentions in chronological order of Polk’s tenure and challenges the criticisms of Polk’s character and military actions from his seizure of Paducah, Kentucky, in 1861 to his dramatic death on Pine Mountain, Georgia, in 1864.

Warren explains the premise for her book: “Lieutenant General Leonidas Polk was a distinguished West Point graduate, the first Episcopal Bishop of Louisiana, a university founder, and a Confederate commander, beloved by his troops, esteemed by the public, and killed on the field of battle. In spite of his many accomplishments, historians invariably disparage Polk’s generalship and even his personal character—but is their treatment fair or accurate?”

Warren seemingly takes on all the critiques of General Polk: his cheating while a cadet at West Point; his more notable incidents such as his unauthorized seizure of Columbus, Kentucky, in September 1861; his disobedience to General Bragg’s orders in Kentucky in the Perryville Campaign in October 1862; and his involvement in the Army of Tennessee’s internal conflict politics. With these contentions, she has mixed success. For example, she convincingly argues that Polk should not be singled out for causing the Confederate delay in the advance on Union forces at Shiloh. It apparently was an army wide issue and not solely the Bishop General’s fault. For Warren, the root of Polk’s alleged issues were false accounts that others made—particularly General Braxton Bragg—and that seemed to feed into preconceived notions about Polk. It is then largely issues with Bragg that would continue to arise and trouble Polk for most of his military career.

In between the chapters in the chronological narrative of Polk’s career, Warren addresses what she considers to be other issues that critics have with Polk: Was he conniving? Was he personally lazy? Was he militarily incompetent? Was he the source of all of the internal strife against Bragg in the army? And was his position due solely to his old friendship with President Jefferson Davis? Again, as with her arguments about the criticism of his actions on the battlefield, Warren has mixed success. However, it is the issue of Polk being incompetent that she has her best results, making a strong case that he was indeed competent. The issue though that prevails is that Polk was insubordinate, and even though as she argues he made the right decisions, that is debatable in several instances. Polk repeatedly made calls without presenting a clear case for various actions to his superiors.

In the end, Southern Cross: A New View of Leonidas Polk and His Clashes with Braxton Bragg is a laudable study for attempting to address the many criticisms that have been taken for granted and perpetuated by some historians in recent years. While not wholly convincing in all of its arguments, it is a book that will encourage readers to think about the traditional interpretations surrounding one of the Western Theater’s most important personalities. Southern Cross is probably not be best choice for those just beginning their studies into the contentious Army of Tennessee, but for those more advanced students of the Western Theater, and particularly those who have focused their readings on the region’s premier Confederate force, it a book that certainly provides food for thought.