Technology and Culture

150 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE trestles, and iron rails faced. Inconsistency, occasionally incompe­ tence, were the watchwords of the general’s railroad policy. Lash is clear about the ways in which railroads could have been used, and the complexities of finance and transport, and misses nothing. That is why this book will please the researcher into the Civil War more than it will the general reader. Often the story is told in such minute detail that the larger picture vanishes from view; many a Civil War buff’s head will droop as he presses through the off-again, on-again competence of Johnston during the 1861—62 campaign. There is no liveliness of style to beguile, and the distaste for Johnston is unconcealed. Yet, in the end, the weaknesses only underline the strengths. It will be hard for anyone, coming to the end of Lash’s book, to disagree with his conclusion that Johnston’s modest reputa­ tion was one well earned, or not to wish that Lash would take the other generals and apply the same scrutiny to them. Mark Wahlgren Summers Dr. Summers is professor at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. He is the author of Railroads, Reconstruction, and the Gospel ofProsperity: Aid under the Radical Republicans, 1865—1877 (Princeton, N.J., 1984). Fortress America: The Corps ofEngineers, Hampton Roads, and United States Coastal Defense. By David A. Clary. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990. Pp. xiii + 222; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00. From the formation of the nation until the end of World War II, protection of the U.S. coasts from seaborne attack depended on fixed cannon in carefully prepared defenses. The Corps of Engineers was responsible for the design and construction of defensive works large and small, and many remains of those structures still survive. The study of coast defense is often neglected by scholars, and David Clary has done much to bring attention to it. He sets for himself a large task: his volume is at once an overview of the involvement of the corps in planning coast defenses, the development of coast defense as a national policy, and the growth of the Hampton Roads defenses as a national paradigm of that policy. This is a rich area for those interested in the development of military technology because the period Clary covers includes the dramatic expansion of the defenses in the years following 1885. During that time, progress in civil engineering combined with advances in such fields as metallurgy, communications, and optics to produce a remarkable array of forti­ fications in the United States and its possessions. One of the difficulties with Clary’s work is that he gives little credit to the introduction of new technology. For Clary, the importance of the corps’s work is best exemplified by Fort Monroe, the rambling TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 151 masonry construction that took shape at the entrance to Norfolk Harbor in the years before the Civil War. The building of such defenses Clary calls the “Golden Age of Coastal Fortifications,” although the more challenging task of designing and building a more elaborate and technically enhanced fortification system at the close of the 19th century is covered in a chapter titled “The Decline of Military Engineering.” Clary could have elaborated more on his interpretation of these disparate construction episodes. That problem underlies a fundamental difficulty with the work as a whole. Clary’s topic is too large to be handled successfully in so small a volume; the actual text is only 175 pages. The topic is also too complex to employ Hampton Roads as a national paradigm. Although historically the area may be the oldest position continuously served by defenses, larger harbors in the United States—Boston, New York, and San Francisco are examples—offer much more instruction in the prob­ lems and successes of fortification designers in defending U.S. ports. Clary does not deal substantively with innovations in defense, usually staying with larger generalizations. Perhaps as a result, some ofthe detail he employs is flawed. For example, he presumes that mortar batteries and dynamite guns were to be used in the same fashion (they were not) and that the...