The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 100, July 1996 - April, 1997 Page: 521

Book Reviews

Acknowledgments, introduction, conclusion, notes, bibliography. ISBN o-
87404-198-8. $12.50, paper).
Lt. Rankin Dilworth, a native of Ohio, was a West Point graduate in 1844 at
age twenty-two and a battlefield corpse at age twenty-four. Buried in a hastily dug
grave outside Monterrey, Nuevo Le6n, Mexico, he had led a short and mostly
unspectacular life-in the long view of history. He did, however, leave behind
five-and-a-half-months worth of jottings on his service with the First U.S. Infantry
Regiment in the Mexican War. This book is the edited version of his diary.
This slim volume came to the attention of Lawrence Clayton while he was visit-
ing with its owner, Charles Passel of Abilene. Clayton, enlisting the aid of Mexi-
can War expert Joseph Chance, decided that Dilworth's words needed to be
made available for future generations. They were right.
Dilworth's diary is most useful as a steady and clear-eyed view of the early
months of the war. He participated in no great battles except for Monterrey, in
which a Mexican cannonball tore off his leg and killed him. His first entry is dat-
ed April 28, 1846, and announces that companies C, E, and K of the regiment
are bound for Texas. From there the diary proceeds with the mundane occur-
rences of getting ready for the war, traveling to the war, and moving to meet the
foe. Even so, this book captures well the sense of fraternity of the regimental of-
ficers. Readers are given a glimpse into relationships between West
Point-trained officers and their interactions with each other and their men. For
students of Texas history, the names of soldiers in this book reads like a who's
who of frontier fort names and Dilworth's entries do shed some interesting light
on conditions in the lower Rio Grande valley and northern Mexico early in the
war.
Nicely edited, organized, and illustrated, The March to Monterrey lacks any excit-
ing revelations about the war itself. There are no descriptions of combat. Com-
pared to some recently published primary accounts of the Mexican War,
Dilworth's little book is certainly not gripping. Even so, it does add depth to the
study of that conflict and should find its way to the bookshelf and bibliography
of most serious students of the period.
McMurry University DONALD S. FRAZIER
Lee the Soldzer. Edited by Gary W. Gallagher. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, Pp. xxxv+[lo]+62o. List of illustrations, list of maps, acknowledg-
ments, introduction, illustrations, contributors, index. ISBN 0-8032-2153-3.
$45, cloth.)
Chancellorsville: The Battle and Its Aftermath. Edited by Gary W. Gallagher. (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, Pp. xvii+263. Introduction, illustra-
tions, bibliographic essay, contributors, index. ISBN 0-8078-2275-2. $22.95,
cloth.
In a short space of time Gary W. Gallagher, formerly archivist at the Lyndon B.
Johnson Library and a doctoral graduate of the University of Texas, has gained

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