Customer Reviews

Young Lions, The

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A marvelous, if brief look at four military institutions in the South before and during the War for Southern Independence. At times bittersweet, Conrad does an excellent job of telling this tale. A nice side-bar addition to anyone's Civil War library, particularly those of interest in the Confederacy.

Excellent book. Conrad did his homework before putting pen to paper in writing this book. His knowledge of the subject, and his passion for telling the story of the confederate cadets at war, comes through loud and clear.

This is new material, not a re-hash of a previous work. This story needed to be told.

excellent book! I would have liked to have seen the author delve into several more of the cadets' lives, but what's there is great.

James Lee Conrad has written a good, solid book here that looks at the South's four major military colleges (VMI, GMI, South Carolina Military Academy, University of Alabama) just before the war and throughout the war years. What we find are superintendents and teachers who had to be resourceful due to a lack of funds and young men who constantly were tempted to quit school to "see the elephant." The ones who stuck it out often were called in to service and only got to go to class intermittently.

Conrad is a grad of VMI and this was obviously a labor of love for him. The book is written in a very matter of fact style, which can be equally good and bad. At times, it makes the book flow. At other times, it kinda bogs the book down. Overall, though, the book is highly informative and easy to read. This will be the standard text on the subject for a while.

Part of the reason I gave the book 4 stars rather than 5 was that the book has a smattering of grammatical errors, which does detract from the book overall at times.

For readers in search of tales of combat and action, James Lee Conrad's "The Young Lions" gets off to a slow start. But for readers interested in the South's military colleges and the special challenges they faced during the War Between the States, there's more than enough here to meet that need.

Conrad traces the history of four schools: the Virginia Military Institute; the Arsenal and Citadel Schools in Charleston (Conrad covers them as one institution, which they later became); the Georgia Military Institute; and the University of Alabama, which was founded as a civilian institution but adopted a VMI-style military system in 1860. In the early years of the War, as Conrad describes, these schools saw little military action. Their major focus was on survival: many cadets wanted to leave and join the fighting immediately; many military leaders saw the cadets more or less as shirkers, going to school instead of going to the front; and food, supplies, and academic materials were hard to come by. Although the schools were much reduced in size, all retained at least some cadets and were able to maintain at least some level of academic integrity.

It's during this period that the cadets at all four schools rendered what Conrad sees as their most important -- if not their most glamorous -- service to the Confederacy. As well-drilled military students themselves, cadets were excellently equipped to instruct new recruits in the manual of arms and other basics of military service. Conrad estimates thousands upon thousands of Confederate fighting men had their transition from civilian to military life directed by "young lions" from the South's military academies.

As the war progressed, however, and Federal armies moved farther south, the time came for all four schools to take to the field. VMI's participation in the battle of New Market is the most significant example of this, of course, and Conrad does this battle justice. But cadets at all the schools saw combat to some degree. As the author summarizes, "Cadets fired the first shots of the war at the 'Star of the West' and some of the last at a band of Federal raiders in South Carolina. In between, their service indicated that they were among the best state troops fielded during the conflict" (p. 158).

Readers interested in military education, the history of these particular schools, or an interesting corner of Civil War history should all find James Lee Conrad's interesting book a worthwhile addition to your shelves.

This book was a much needed addition to the already large library of works on the Civil War. The only problem that I had with it was that he did not go into enough detail and really only told the story of a few of the cadets.