Most civil wars do not spring up overnight, and the American Civil War was no exception. The seeds of the conflict were sown in the earliest days of the republic's founding, primarily over theexistence of slavery and the slave trade. Although no conflict can begin without the conscious decisions of those engaged in the debates at that moment, in the end, there was simply no way topaper over the division of the country into two camps: one that was dominated by slavery and the other that sought first to limit its spread and then to abolish it. Our nation was indeed “half slave and half free,” and that could not stand.Regardless of the factors tearing the nation asunder, the soldiers on each side of the struggle went to war for personal reasons: looking for adventure, being caught up in the passionsand emotions of their peers, believing in the Union, favoring states' rights, or even justifying the simple schoolyard dynamic of being convinced that they were “worth” three of the soldierson the other side. Nor can we overlook the factor that some went to war to prove their manhood. This has been, and continues to be, a key dynamic in understanding combat and the professionof arms. Soldiers join for many reasons but often stay in the fight because of their comrades and because they do not want to seem like cowards. Sometimes issues of national impact shrinkto nothing in the intensely personal world of cannon shell and minié ball.

Getting the Message Through, the companion volume to Rebecca Robbins Raines' Signal Corps, traces the evolution of the corps from the appointment of the first signal officer on the eve of the Civil War, through its stages of growth and change, to its service in Operation DESERT SHIELD/DESERT STORM. Raines highlights not only the increasingly specialized nature of warfare and the rise of sophisticated communications technology, but also such diverse missions as weather reporting and military aviation. Information dominance in the form of superior communications is considered to be sine qua non to modern warfare. As Raines ably shows, the Signal Corps--once considered by some Army officers to be of little or no military value--and the communications it provides have become integral to all aspects of military operations on modern digitized battlefields. The volume is an invaluable reference source for anyone interested in the institutional history of the branch.