Don Carlos Buell: Most Promising of All

Major General Don Carlos Buell stood among the senior Northern commanders early in the Civil War, led the Army of the Ohio in the critical Kentucky theater in 1861–62, and helped shape the direction of the conflict during its first years. Only a handful of Northern generals loomed as large on the military landscape during this period, and Buell is the only one of them who has not been the subject of a full-scale biography.

A conservative Democrat, Buell viewed the Civil War as a contest to r...