Old and Improved -- Now on Substack

As I grow older, my sense of time becomes more distorted. 

One day my brother and I were driving in the neighborhood of one of my past employers. I said, "Let's stop by the office and say hello." After a moment's reflection I realized something like 15 years had passed. Truly.

Recently, I decided to edit some of these posts from oldest  to newer and publish them on Substack. A little voice inside said, no, come on, they've been read already. After a moment's reflection I realized that was more than 20 years ago. A whole generation has passed.

 Well, if you are ever in the mood for black and white reruns, have at it.

 

 

The Rialto in Richmond: The Money War Between the States & Other Mysteries of the Civil War

 This odd work with an odd title (The Rialto in Richmond: The Money War Between the States & Other Mysteries of the Civil War) has just a little to say about "the money war" and just slightly more to say about Confederate continuity of operations (or "COOP" in modern fedspeak). 

Confederate COOP is a deep subject which will eventually be studied by future scholars, perhaps in the 22nd Century, and it will affect history's treatment of the Northern war effort. Here author Josph Farrell surprises himself with the discovery that Rebels tried to carry on after the fall of Richmond. He is new to this field and can be forgiven. COOP gets truncated by more experienced ACW authors who like to keep it simple for themselves and the stupid.

We note that the fall of Richmond did not end the war, nor did the later capture of Jeff Davis, nor did the various captures or surrenders of CSA cabinet members after Davis was taken, nor did the Confederate victory in the battle of Palmito Ranch in May 1865 which turned out to be the last battle of the war. The war ended when Kirby Smith decided, rather idiosyncratically, to surrender his undefeated army and well provisioned territory in June, 1865.

Had the elements of a rump Confederate government reached Smith's department before then, one wonders about the result.

Interesting to consider the attitude of Joe Johnston, his subordinates, and Jefferson Davis during McClellan's first advance on Richmond. Recall the incredulity with which modern historians (largely Northern and Lincoln-centric) consider Johnston's apparently planless, successive retreats toward his capital. There, too, are Davis's horseback visits to the front with never a "stand and fight" order to Johnston. The capital is at stake but he sticks to his principle of non-interference with the commander.

Judged through the prism of Lincoln's dread of losing Washington, the Confederate attitude during the Johnston's movements before McClellan seems almost nonchalant. 

Hey, we relocated from Montgomery to Richmond, we can relocate right back to Montgomery.

Perhaps, considering this implied difference, we could infer a real difference in the importance each side ascribed to the potential loss of its capital. This, together with consideration of the actual way the war ended, makes nonsense of the idea that McClellan could wind up the war with a capture of Richmond. 

Of course, as Civil War readers, we deal with a lot of nonsense.

As the fixation on Richmond as war-ending talisman waned, the Union attempted a headlines war in which a series of bad news reporting for the enemy was expected to collapse resistance. This seems to have been an act of projection. By the same token, enough positive press in the North, both hither and yon, east west north or south, in any theatre at all and in any sequence at all would somehow bolster the Northern cause.

Yet, the North, and today's historians so sympathetic to northern Republicans, never learned their lessons despite the many defeats on both sides. Catastrophes mounted for the USA and CSA but the war continued. Headlines didn't matter. 

Atlanta? The claim that news of the fall of Atlanta clinched the 1864 election is just such a claim and needs a much closer look.

How the war ended remains a big and open question. Appomattox is not the answer.

To return to Farrell's Rialto, he started the book, got caught up in the research and various speculations, and at some point realized the work was not finished. He published it anyway, then wrote a separate, second volume (not reviewed here), which may or may not finish what was started. If you have a solid, book-buying fan base, you can get away with that kind of reader abuse.

An item of interest here is Farrell's reporting around the seals of the Confederacy and their disappearance. Their purpose and potential are not discussed, however. Another interesting topic was the amount of gold and foreign currency carried off by the fleeing government, which would have enabled continued payment of foreign debts and thereby validate the viability of the rump Confederacy.

Once we have a better understanding of the facts around the end of the Confederacy, we can begin to analyze what the correct Northern strategies should have been.

The Free State of Southwest Virginia

Hattaway and Beringer mention The Free State of Southwest Virginia in their Jefferson Davis book but I can find no trace of it on the WWW or elsewhere.

This site would have provided a natural home for it ... but no mention.

Civil War memes in Zamoyski's Napoleon, A Life

I was startled by the number of Civil War history memes found in Adam Zamoyski's Napoleon, A Life.

Marches
Recall a topic as trivial as the length and duration of a military march. Short marches infuriate Civil War authors, yet,

The Austrian Army operated like a machine, observing tested routines such as only marching for six hours in twenty-four.

Six hours in 24? In their marching, the armies of North and South outdid Bonaparte's professional nemesis time and again.

Cultivating the troops
Historians' accounts of soldiers' love for their Civil War generals feature McClellan and Joe Johnston. More ink is spilled on McClellan's techniques than Johnston's but both resonate here:

His treatment of the troops under his command had been designed from the start not only to make them more effective as fighting men, but also to turn them into *his* men.

He had developed a gift for talking to the men as equals.

While he tightened discipline, he took care to flatter the soldiers' self-esteem, making throwaway statements such as "With 20,000 men like that one could conquer Europe!" He described their feats of arms in superlative terms in his proclamations.

A mixture of growing self-confidence and the urge to earn praise fed their eagerness to live up to their expectations of them.

Political relations
One Zamoyski's threads concerns Napoleon's flattery of the Directorate. In our sphere, McClellan is best known for his private disdain for his political masters. But note that

He [Napoleon] had experienced a great deal over the past year, and had learned much about himself and others, about war, politics and human affairs in general. Most of it ... had lowered his opinion of human nature.

Historians give McClellan pride of place for antagonism towards an entire government and Joe Johnston gets a runner up spot for his antagonism towards a president. Yet historians tend to overlook McClellan's efforts to cultivate his political masters just as they cast a veil over Robert E. Lee's relations with Jefferson, whitewashing these as "close" or "ideal" instead of sycophantic. (Seek out all the flattery in Lee's communications to take your own measure.)

Meanwhile, if Grant seems apolitical, read Simpson's Let Us Have Peace. See also Meade's letter to his wife gloating that neither he nor Grant voted in the 1864 presidential election. That looks apolitical but shows disdain for both Lincoln and the Democratic ticket.

Complaints about supplies and support
The ACW historian often credits Southern supply shortages while disputing Northern claims of such from McClellan, Buell, Rosecrans, etc.

Bonaparte's despatches to the directory were no less hyperbolic. [...] At the same time he stressed his lack of equipment ... To Carnot he expressed his "despair, I could almost say my rage" at not having the tools with which to do the job...

Throne or scaffold
Zamoyski gives us a thought that sums up the fate of outsize military figures.

... one of the army victuallers ... wrote to a friend that he could see "no end for him [Napoleon] other than the throne of the scaffold."

In Civil War history, only three men made it to this crossroads: McClellan (scaffold), Grant (throne) and Lee (scaffold).

The new revolutionary war

With the fall of Richmond, Jefferson Davis proposed to carry on the war in the style of the American revolution.

This is as much as we get from those historians who write past Appomattox and it leaves much to the imagination. The clarifying explanations are in the record, however.

As early as the fall of Vicksburg, Davis wrote to BG Reuben Davis (emphasis added):

I hoped that the popular confidence in Genl. Johnston would have given him large reinforcements by the uprising of the people. Why was it not so? [...] Let every man who can bear arms rush to the rescue. Regard the army as a nucleus, not as the force on which the country depends solely for defense.

Very helpful text and no great burden on the reader's comprehension, considering the light it sheds on this topic.

It seems a peculiar ask of Johnston, though, to have him organize a mass uprising. IIRC, he and Beauregard, with "large reinforcments" of  Virginia militia at their disposal, had them dig trenches at Centreville. This particular "armed uprising of the people" finished Bull Run as laboring bystanders.

It also seems odd that Davis, whose government by 1863 relentlessly drafted state-enrolled militiamen, could envision any armed uprising of the populace. What people, with what arms? The design of the CSA war machine made this impossible.

That tiny residue of militia husbanded by Gov. Joe Brown against the depredations of Davis' government gave good service against Sherman's march and a glimpse into a potential revolutionary war that might have survived April 1865 had the Confederate military been organized on a completely different basis.

[Quote from Jefferson Davis, Confederate President by Hattaway and Beringer]

When history repeats itself

Mr. Lincoln's Army, Catton, 1951

Mr. Lincoln's Navy, West 1957

Life in Mr. Lincoln’s Navy, Ringle, 1998

Mr. Lincoln's Brown Water Navy, Joiner 2007

"Mr. Lincoln's Navy," National Museum of the American Sailor 2019

Francis Preston Blair (Sr.) remains history-proof

At that time at which Fremont is relieved, and later when McClellan must be restored, there appears in Civil War military histories a shadowy advisor to the president named Francis Preston Blair, sometimes styled "senior."

He is introduced, if at all, as a former confidant of  Andrew Jackson. To military historians, politics is so marginal, so irrelevant to their narratives of personal achievement and earned rewards, that only to them can this equation make sense: Anti-Whig Jackson + Super Whig Lincoln = Special Advisor F.P. Blair, Sr.

Deep readers are baffled by such nonsense. We have wondered, since the Centennial, what a Jackson stalwart was doing in Lincoln's confidence (and vice versa). The answers are easy to access but seem to be unknown even to political and general writers.

Look at this.

Doris K. Goodwin, in Team of Rivals, makes many references to Blair.

* He "prophesies" Edward Bates winning the 1860 election
* He gives a speech for Bates
* He recommends his son for postmaster general
* Lincoln "liked" him
* He advised Lincoln on the Sumter crisis
* His family supports McClellan as commander
* He dissuades McClellan from sending a letter of protest after relief
* His family defends a Maryland man in a controversy
* Lincoln keeps his door open to "the Blairs."
* Lincoln accepts a message from him
* He comments on Chase resigning from the Cabinet
* He conveys son Montgomery's offer of resignation from the cabinet
* He has "never been turned away" from "private audience" with Lincoln
* He seeks a new post for his son
* He meets Chase after Lincoln's death

At no point do we learn who he is or why he has access to Lincoln. Goodwin does not seem to know that Edward Bates was Blair's checkmate to the Seward nomination, making Lincoln's presidency possible. She seems not to know that Blair had two cabinet members, both Montgomery and Edward Bates. She neglects much more.

James McPherson, in Battle Cry of Freedom, makes only a few references to Blair.

* He is a Republican leader (undefined)
* Bates versus Seward in 1860 is a Francis P. Blair plot
* "The Blairs" were "border state tycoons"
* The Early raid on DC damaged Blair homes
* Late war peace negotiations were an intrigue by this "old Jacksonian"

And that's it. We don't even have him conferring with Lincoln, although we now know he is some kind of Republican, that Seward is his foe and that Bates is his puppet. This is good but wasted by underdevelopment. The reference to tycoon is important, more on which below.

Reading between McPherson's lines, one could surmise that the "team of rivals" represented a split into two Republican factions, "the Blairs" and Weed-Sewards.

David Donald in Lincoln provides the least information.

* Blair was an "associate" of Lincoln
* He "forced his way into Lincoln's office" during Sumter
* Lincoln relied on "the Blairs" for "guidance" on Missouri politics
* He favored deportation of blacks
* He favored McClellan
* He favored son Montgomery's plan to remake the cabinet
* He was involved in the dismissal of Montgomery from the cabinet
* He was a "loyal conservative advisor"

Anyone reading this has the right to wonder if Donald knew anything at all about the senior Blair. However the reference to being an "associate of Lincoln" is important.

Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, A Life:

* Blair commented on the formation of the 1860 cabinet
* Lincoln used him to offer R.E. Lee command of the Union Army
* "The Blairs" backed Fremont's Missouri command
* "The Blairs" promoted colonization schemes
* Quotes correspondence of F.P. Blair
* Refers to Blair support of Lincoln in 1864
* Involved in Montgomery's resignation
* Urges Montgomery's appointment to office

If we took all these snippets together, we would have the beginning of a rationale for why Blair might have had continuous access to Lincoln. For my part, I assumed him for many years to merely be the "family spokesman" for brothers who were key politicos in Missouri and Maryland, this despite the demerit of himself having been a Jacksonian.

Francis P. Blair, along with his "associates" Lincoln, and Weed-Seward, founded the Republican Party at the national level. He (and Weed-Seward) competed to fund races nationwide and build the party from early days, Blair using his "tycoon" funds. Blair chaired the first Republican convention. He engineered Fremont's presidential nomination in 1856. In the second national convention, he engineered Seward's defeat which created Lincoln's opportunity.

Until 1864, who could tell whether Blair or Weed-Seward would come out on top in the national Republican Party? Lincoln kept both factions close.

Blair's end is marked by Montgomery's failed cabinet reorganization plan. His father would have become a special advisor to the president, such as to be a virtual "dictator." He aspired to be the head of government, a role that Seward attempted to secure in 1861 and likewise failed.

And in the nominating process of 1864, the key role of Francis P. Blair is superseded.

Expect Civil War history to continue to spare you such useless and painful minutiae.

(This post reworks elements found here.)

A new year revelation

The New York Times list of top Civil War books may be the saddest thing you ever read but this can make you sad as well.

Pop history is an impersonator, roaming the room soused, boasting its history credentials, breathing its cheap sensibilities into your face, offering nothing but the drunk's stock-in-trade of nostalgia, stories, emotions, drama and "life lessons." You finish whatever show/book/podcast recalling the smell of puke.

Good news: I'm growing wiser. I used to hold Civil war history in unique contempt but have learned that pop history is all bad, everywhere, and at all times.

I won't be as hard on our wretched ACW books any more. Perspective at last.

Happy New Year

Much to share in 2019. Humble request, however. If you are not subscribed to this blog, please stop accessing it.

Thanks!

Quartermaster Meigs

Remember when one subtitle was enough? Here we have The [emphasis in original] Quartermaster: Montgomery C. Meigs * Lincoln’s General * Master Builder of the Union Army.

So, our problems start with the title. Really, Meigs reads out as Seward’s general, later becoming Stanton’s general (Lincoln appears disinterested from first to last). As for "Master Builder of the Union Army," as I have said before, there were two, McDowell and Franklin, who as staff officers under the direction of Salmon Chase created the tables of organization and equipment under which the Union armies fought. Meigs’ job was to provide the equipment and supplies specified by McDowell and Franklin and approved by Simon Cameron.

"Master builder" appears wordplay on his engineering and construction history. In this builder phase, the Capitol architect called Meigs “a military upstart who happens to have the power to annoy.” More than an insight, this might be a paradigm.

With Quartermaster, the less you know about Meigs, the more enjoyable the read. Author Robert O’Harrow Jr. is a Washington Post reporter who moves the story briskly past multiple scandals and crises. This may be the publisher’s preference. Simon & Schuster’s mass market likely has no time for “scholarly minutiae.” So, when Meigs bungles a foreign procurement early in the war, Congress bans foreign military imports for the duration. No foul, no harm? Certainly, no blame, no details.

The Fremont procurement matter gets a little more attention than Meigs’ many others disasters. Even so, we get the data needed to see that this story is not on the level:

Meigs permitted [Quartermaster Justus] McKinstry to buy as he saw fit and, in an emergency, even to set the prices.

Meanwhile…

Meigs told McKinstry and Fremont to follow proper contracting procedures whenever possible and to send proposals and bids to Washington for review.

This is called a double bind. It is a CYA trap. Consider

Meigs … had passed on every [McKinstry] request for funding to the Treasury with alacrity.

Yet it is McKinstry and Fremont who appear at fault here. (Seek out McKinstry’s detailed rebuttal to the Administration’s charges - they are not mentioned here.)

After Antietam another supply crisis erupted, one where Meigs disputed the number of sound horses delivered to the AoP. Yet by January 1863,

Meigs eventually acknowledged a crucial shortcoming of his system, saying that there were not nearly enough knowledgeable inspectors to cull out lame animals ...

The quantities were significant. The War Department established a Cavalry Bureau to remedy Meigs’ inefficiency but the author implies that this mid-war improvement might be a credit to Meigs. Meanwhile two years of horse shortages have passed.

Meigs’ actual work life is a mystery. He gets in early and stays late but we have no idea what he does to fill those office hours other than exceed orders, redefine his responsibilities and obnoxiously overreach into others' portfolios. One suspects that the largest part of his wartime job was just signing papers and answering questions. That is not building an army. And we don't know if he did this himself or he delegated it.

O’Harrow has access to Meigs’ prewar diaries which raises other questions.

Meigs spends the Buchanan years complaining about Secretary of War Floyd’s corruption – was Meigs a facilitator of that corruption? How much work did he give to Floyd's friends?

O'Harrow also says, introducing G.B. McClellan, that he came from a “rich family.” Actually the McClellan family lived on the earnings of Dr. George McClellan, a colleague of none other than Dr. Charles Meigs (r) at Jefferson College in Philadelphia. Dr. McClellan was a founder of that college and prominent but not rich. How could these two doctors (and their families) spend decades at Jefferson with no social interaction worth recording? Did their children play? Did their spouses socialize? And while “rich” Dr. McClellan never supported his son that we know of, we see not-so-rich Dr. Meigs supporting his own son’s family for many years.

The diaries end before the Civil War. Mistakes continue. For instance Meigs arranges an evacuation of freedmen from Ile a Vache, “a faltering effort by Lincoln to create a colony…” This was not a Lincoln project but that of an entrepreneur named Harold Kock. It is Lincoln who rescues the colonists by directing Meigs to evacuate them.

As we go through the ACW, Meigs is treated as the Administration’s action officer doing a little of this and that. He starts the war as a captain and in terms of the way he is used, remains at that level despite his general’s rank. His large quartermaster war staff, the responsibilities of which we never learn, seems to free him for ever more special projects, projects worthy of an aide de camp.

Thus he finishes as he began.

He was never entrusted with a command; his responsibilities were divided up; and he never escaped the War Department or its intrigues. In his many corruption scrapes, he evaded censure. His attainments were shared attainments. His blunders caused death and prolonged the war..

Publishing industry snapshots

I used to do more with this but for now enjoy this industry site, filled with data and analysis.

Private ACW portraiture made public

The Army and Navy club has put its private art collection online. Have a look here and browse the whole site for more Civil War history paintings.

John Clem

Just encountered club member John Clem in our newsletter. The club account has him thrice wounded by age 13. It gives the number of 40,000 children enlisted and fighting in the ACW.

The internet version of his story are rather flat; he was a colorful celebrity who rejoined the army in peacetime.

Clem's exploits put me in mind of a movie I saw recently with many of the same elements present.

Ten-year-olds who run away from home to join a war and then stick with it are scarcer nowadays.

Civil War beer for discerning Civil War readers (Centennialists, stick to your Kool-Aid)

Antietam Brewery knows what's what. Unfortunately, the website does not include the text on the beer label (right). It says something like

Little Mac was loved by his troops for his concern over their lives, a concern that caused Lincoln to fire him.

That's near-enough history for a beer label, I think. And Mac is the only general honored with a beer label here. (IPA is not my style, but I'll make an effort to hoist some of these.)

The brewery has a Clara Barton beer as well but no Dorothea Dix. Call that a wash.

Civil War history is about choices; beer is about choices. Until Joe J, TJ or REL get honored in this way, beer history now belongs to this outstanding Civil War commander. Satisfying beer, satisfying history and all is right with the world.

The first Union mobilization

Every reader faces that early war event where Lincoln (spoiler alert: not just Lincoln) mobilizes 75,000 “militia” (spoiler alert: very little militia, per se) for 90 days or three months (spoiler alert: it’s not quite either).

We remember this milestone in part because it puzzles at first look: why that number of men and for that duration of service? This post looks at the Federal orders, the underlying law and then how some historians report on this mobilization.

Mobilization orders
The first striking thing about the mobilization order of April 15, 1861 is the signature section. It is signed by Lincoln and William H. Seward.

The second striking thing about it is how it copies the exact language of the 1795 militia act (“Militia Act”), a law that invests certain authority in the president with no reference to the secretary of state. Perhaps Lincoln wrote the order and Seward distributed it under his own name?

A third important thing about this order: it is only half an order. Although Lincoln and Seward refer to calling up 75,000 militia, the length of service is not given, even though the Militia Act specifies limits to that service. Lincoln and Seward refer to further “details” to be issued by the War Department.

A complete mobilization order would need the Lincoln/Seward order of April 15 (number of men) plus the Simon Cameron mobilization instruction dated April 15 (the “details” - duration and mustering information).

Duration of service
Cameron calls his message “the form of call on the respective state Governors for troops.” Thus Lincoln and Seward invoke the Militia Act and Cameron supplies the “how” whereby governors will comply. Cameron accidentally or intentionally crosses a statutory line by saying, “to serve as infantry or riflemen for three months, or sooner, if discharged.”

The Administration here reiterates the Act’s limits on individual service in a context where it really needed to specify the duration of its authority over the militia collectively. The executive branch has no authority over how long the militiaman serves: that is already specified in the law and can have no place in this order. The executive branch must specify the duration of the mobilization of units.

Note that the way the law is written, the emergency can outlive the availability of individuals. Units can be under federal control after their individuals have been released. This distinction is interesting and explains the strife over demobilization in the summer of '61. We have these scenes of officers appealing to their three-month men to volunteer to continue the war under a lawful federal direction that exceeds three months - past the period of statutory personal commitment.

The Act limits the president’s authority over the mobilized units providing a maximum duration of 30 days beyond the convening of the next Congressional session. This is a flexible deadline that could extend for the better part of a year or even several years (theoretically!).

Lincoln called for Congress to convene on July 4; thus his authority over the units could extend to August 3. Cameron, however, emphasizes to the governors the duration of mobilization as keyed to the individual’s three months. Depending on muster speed, Cameron’s units - governed by personal demobilization timetables - could end service as early as July 16. Mind the gap! If it takes three weeks to muster in, only then do Lincoln’s and Cameron’s timelines match up.

The Act says: “no officer, non-commissioned officer, or private, of the militia, shall be compelled to serve more than three months after his arrival at the place of rendezvous, in any one year...” Cameron uses “rendezvous” in his own communiqué to indicate the in-state mustering points. But could not the federal government have instead specified rendezvous points as federal camps in Washington, St. Louis, wherever? This seems another lost opportunity to conserve time.

In Lincoln, David Donald makes this accurate and insinuating comment: “the volunteer force would have to be disbanded earlier if the president called Congress into session earlier.” This implies Lincoln may have chosen his July 4 congressional summons to give him a full three months’ use of the force.

But Lincoln could just as well have convened Congress on September 4. The units would still have been under his authority by then though most of the men who made up the units would have exercised their rights to leave long before then.

Thus, the Administration seemed to view the practical matter of length of individual service as driving the entire mobilization. An interesting take on the law.

Now, once Congress convened it could have amended the Act to extend the individual's term of service and/or the period of mobilization. Why was this not done?

Lincoln and Seward: they specify how many but not for how long.

Cameron: he specifies for how long, shortening the statutory limit of presidential authority by tying it to the individual length of service.

Cameron's modification of the law, Seward's signing the mobilization decree, these are symptoms of the informality and ad hockery that would characterize Lincoln's entire time in office. In his Diary, AG Edward Bates makes no mention of reviewing the language in either Lincoln's or Cameron's messages. He would have harmonized them had he been allowed to.

Mobilizing “the militia”
Gov. Morgan of New York found the form of the mobilization destructive to “the distinctive character of the militia of the states.” The mechanism of that destruction is in Cameron’s message.

The levy on states is given as a number of regiments and a regiment is given as exactly 780 men. So the levy on New Jersey, for instance, is not for men as such, rather it is for four regiments of 780 men each. This devastated some of the existing militia organizations in ways we’ll explore in a later post.

The men of the United States lived under a system of universal military conscription into state militias, per the two federal militia acts of 1792 and the superseding Act of 1795. Every man who ever drew breath in the Civil War was a militia man, whether in federal service or out of it. (The few exceptions are not worth recounting.)

But what was a militia in 1861? There was the compulsory militia and the volunteer militia. The compulsory militia (required by the Act) had deteriorated in many states from active units to a mere roster of eligible men subject to call up. It was a draft roll which maybe held an annual muster. The volunteer militia, on the other hand, was comprised of men who had been exempted from the compulsory militia to form standing, active military units under state charters.

The Cameron message views the militias not as units ready for combat (volunteer militia) but rather as random individuals to be formed into brand new regiments (volunteers from the compulsories). And this is overwhelmingly what the governors supplied.

These were not militia units in any meaningful sense; it’s as if men off the street had joined the U.S Volunteers directly. Cameron: “to cause to be immediately detached from the militia of your state, the quota designated in the table below...”

Although some militia units kept their pre-war character during the mobilization, the militia regiments generally were scratch forces of men mobilized for temporary federal service into new formations.

One imagines the War Department drafting Cameron’s message with an eye toward uniformity, ease of supply, efficiency. Efficiency is not effectiveness.

Who is the author of the number 75,000?
David Donald in Lincoln says Lincoln was acting on Scott’s advice in choosing 75,000 as his force ceiling, despite other advice (not saying from whom) of 200,000 men and 300,000 men.

Michael Burlingame, in Volume 2 of Lincoln: A Life, says “The Cabinet also considered the size of a militia force to call up. Some favored 50,000; Seward and others recommended double that number. Lincoln split the difference and decided to ask the states to provide 75,000 men for three months.”

Goodwin in Team of Rivals matches Burlingame’s explanation of the 75,000 but has nothing to say about the period of mobilization.

McPherson in Battle Cry of Freedom does not explain the 75,000 and cites the Militia Act as reason for the duration of mobilization.

So we have no good explanation of how this number was arrived at and no complete discussions of the mobilization itself. And "splitting the difference" is yet another disturbing thread of informality that runs through this entire episode.

In sum
The Union mobilization of the militia is one of many complex Civil War events glossed over by the storytellers, leaving readers satisfied that they understand an event when they actually misunderstand it. Its deep meanings on many levels should repay much more study.

---
Update: The figure 1,780 has been corrected to read 780.

William Manchester exposed

Yet another lying historian... who had no need to lie.

Thinking about statues

I weighed in over at Tom Woods' site.

NYT: Best ACW books

Did not know that the New York Times extended its authority worship or influence peddling into ACW nonfiction, For the authority seekers who crave the Times, this is essential and non-negotiable. The history is settled. For the rest of us, read this for amusement. Let loose the wisecracks.

p.s. The people who think that these are good books are telling us what to think about contemporary issues.

Reading levels

The great thing about being 65 is you read at the 65-year-old level.

Pop quiz

Hello, Civil War readers! Let's take a quiz.

Francis Preston Blair was the father of Frank and Montgomery Blair. We find him advising President Lincoln. The alert reader wonders why this fellow is advising Lincoln and looks to the historian for a clue. The writer feels the need to give a clue and offers one very brief biographical note.

The purpose of this quiz is to see if that note registered with you as with me.

Question for you: Relying only on your memory of past readings, Who was Francis Preston Blair? Aside from father of his sons, what one thing comes to mind?

Please take a moment to consider this before reading further.

If you had asked me any time in the past 30 years, I would have said (as so many historians have said) "an advisor to Andrew Jackson." The reason I remember this is from frustration: why is a Jackson man advising a super-Whig?

Lately I've been reading Frank Blair, Lincoln's Conservative, where the Preston information startled me. Looking into other sources, I see that old man Blair was

* Founder and co-organizer of the national Republican Party
* Chairman of the 1856 Republican Party Convention
* Co-organizer of the Maryland and Missouri Republican Parties
* Sponsor/patron of Gov./AG Edward Bates and Charles Fremont
* Foe and counterweight within the Party to the Seward/Weed faction.

This is my list - I built it from multiple sources. Historians being very stingy with facts and information, I had to gather these crumbs over the period of a week.

Now I ask you, if an historian was going to say just one thing about old Preston Blair, it seems that ANY of my points would take precedence over "an advisor to Andrew Jackson." Advisor to Old Hickory would appear near the bottom of the list. Not relevant but more colorful than party founder and leader.

Is it my bad memory, is it a handful of bad reading experiences, or could this be a more general problem? Perhaps the secret identity of Francis Preston Blair is another indicator that we are ill served by ACW historians.