CWPT

I have recently found out that if you get snail mailings from Civil War Preservation Trust, you tend to be more up-to-date than what the web site presents.

 

Based on the mail, I am very pleased to see CWPT take on ever more risk and more financial commitments as they struggle to raise $12 million for the Slaughter Pen.

 

An institution loading up on major risks - I want to encourage that behavior with a donation of my own.

Numerology and Union command

Will kick this series off on Monday.

Unlikely ACW blurbs of the future

Can you imagine blurbs like these on the back of a Civil War dust jacket?

Here is a work so controversial that some will barely be able to sit still as they turn the pages.

... ambitious new paradigm...

This study, highly original in both conception and content...

I suppose they could put that stuff on Tom Carhart's book but the publisher opted for James McPherson instead: Mr Nihil Obstat, Mr Goodhousekeeping Seal of Approval, Mr. Tom Carhart's professor.

That's significant, my friends. But the significance I leave to you.

Those blurbs could also have been attached to Beatie, pehaps Detzer, perhaps Rafuse, maybe Harsh. Richard McMurry wanted to be associated with "a New Civil War Paradigm," but he didn't leave it to the marketing department, he put it in the title of his book. ACW controversy: scary. Risky for sales.

That's significant too, my friends. Consider the significance.

And yet, love them or hate them, many ACW readers are contentious ... worth risking a little controversy on when you can get them off the skinny fringe of American Heritage doctrine.

The blurbs above come from the King's Three Faces an attempt to debunk the foreshadowing of Revolution in Colonial history. I bought the book on the basis of the blurbs. (It is not to be confused with The King's Two Bodies, a treatise on metaphysics in medieval politics.)

Bravo, UNC Press. Something tells me one of your editors, Gary Gallagher, was on vacation when this provocation passed over the transom.

And - on a more personal note - I sorely need someone to pave the way for my future romantic, heroic pop history biography of Guy Carleton (top right), the Chiang Kai Shek of American Nationalism and counter-revolutionary extraordinaire, plotting victory from the Formosa that was once Manhattan.

You think I'm joking. But that will be a work so controversial that some will barely be able to sit still as they turn the pages...

Willmott's CSA

Will be watching Confederate States of America this weekend and will pass on my reactions.

Updates tonight

Sorry for your wasted trips to this site - will post late tonight. Thanks for visiting.

Ray Raphael

Wow, I have (finally) spotted a counterpart in the Revolutionary War field named Ray Raphael - "True history and good stories work at cross purposes." Amen.

Look at this page! I need to do the same for the works of McPherson, Sears, and the whole host of talespinners. Ray, you make me feel so lazy.

Hat tip to HNN's myth pages.

Blog mortality (cont.)

HNN now has more dead blogs (10) than living ones (8). See here.

Meanwhile, say hello to the strangest Civil War blog you have ever read...

Numerology

I've been looking at Confederate numbers from the point of view of an early war Union commander - doing a little self-imposed fog of war - and have been coming up with some startling perspectives. Will shape it into a series of posts for later this week...

Shaara has a big idea

Jeff Shaara has a new idea for a Civil War novel:

"There's a great story that I haven't told, which is the western theater," he said. "Sherman is a great story."

I think E.L. Doctorow would agree with him. Perhaps this idea was inspired by Doctorow's sales figures this year. But don't call these products "novels" in front of Shaara - who says he is not a novelist.

"That's so pretentious to me," he said. "I'm a storyteller."

Can we call you "a hack" instead?

Literature by (e)mail

A new use for technology: have bite sized pieces of Grant's memoirs emailed to you daily. (Attention Brian Downey!)

 

Speaking of whom, Brian recently met guest poster Harry Smeltzer in Sharpsburg and glazed his eyes with a little technobabble: see this nice post.

History grad students as cheaters

When I saw the news that "MBA students are the biggest cheats of all graduate students, with 56 per cent admitting to misdemeanours such as using crib notes in exams, plagiarism and downloading essays from the web," it roused my curiosity about history graduate students.

The people who did the study, Academy of Management Learning & Education, appear to have collected data across many disciplines, but what is percolating through the mass media just now is a little too general to be interesting: "And even among the most honest group, the social scientists and those studying humanities, 39 per cent admitted cheating." I'm not sure "most honest" can be applied to a group with a 39% cheating rate. Perhaps when the compete study is released, we'll see a history student breakout.

Interesting that the second biggest cheaters were engineering students (54%), followed by grad students in the sciences. As these cheaters are entirely self-identified, I consider the numbers low. We could more accurately say "shameless cheaters" number 54% among engineering grad students, although the total proportion of cheaters is not known.

This bit appeared in the University of Virginia's paper in the best tradition of faculty slapstick (emphasis added):

Donald L. McCabe, professor of management and global business at Rutgers Business School and one of the report's authors, said the increased cheating was due to students coming from business backgrounds where a different mentality is present.

Oh, the pain, the defilement of the academy! But wait: don't the faculties of MBA programs themselves come from business backgrounds? And yet they are themselves purified somehow while their students remain contaminated. Magic.

I suppose the cheat-crazy engineering and science grad students are also bringing "a different mentality" but whence?

One sees a report in which the academy is overwhelmed with cheating at the higher levels of admission and instruction; it floats on a stream of professorial ethics scandals; and the MBA crowd is at fault with their "different mentality."

I'm not an MBA - don't know that crowd as a student body - and therefore don't know how realistic this statement is, however it seems possible to me that MBAs among all the students surveyed were the most forthcoming about their ethical lapses.

Dr. McCabe should check in with Rutgers' ag students to help him sort out forest from trees. Meanwhile, we'll await further news on history cheating.

Blog mortality

Some die...

Sean Dail, Trans-Mississippi Times

Some are born...

My year of living Rangerously

What the horses of your army have done...

Randy takes a look at Lincoln's wisecrack and answers the question - in detail - about what McClellan's horses had done.

I would add just one point: McClellan failed to embark most of his cavalry for the Peninsula - the formations not embarked when the "hold order" was issued fell to McDowell. Organized by Pope for his campaign, they were then ruined by the time McClellan got them back for the Maryland campaign. Let that set the stage for what Randy presents.

The trouble with military history

David Woodbury has been running an interesting series of posts around the centrality of military history in accounts of the Civil War (see here and here).

As a reader, I abandoned military history about 27 years ago. Could not hack it anymore.

I'll give you two points now, maybe more later.

(1) The military historian all too often follows (relies upon) a few underlying sources. Example: I recently - accidentally - picked up a volume called The Teutonic Knights thinking it was a history of the religious order. It was a military history and typical of the failure and incompetence of military historians. It simply mined a handful of sources for military anecdotes and allowed itself immense gaps (with laughable discontinuity) where the sources stopped. Warning label needed for readers: You are not losing your mind - you are reading military history.

This is relevant to ACW history. Rich in sources, the ACW military historian automatically acquires a patina of rationality through the grace of having enough stuff available to bridge gaps in any chronological narrative. Underneath it all, however, the ACW military writer may be as crazy as the author of The Teutonic Knights, because even in resource-rich ACW history there are too few sources to refine and purify the account of a single event or action in more than a few cases. The apparent continuity in ACW military narrative often rests - here and there - on a single pylon of data.

This would not matter much were the military historian not rendering judgements of competence and art and science on real people - people more knowledgeable of the underlying events and circumstances than said miliary historian.

My (perhaps tedious) argument with the Civil War history, as handed down since 1950, has been about the management of sources: suppression, redaction, amendment, interpretation, selectivity. We all wish, divinely as history readers, that every contemporary account be accounted for. But we side with the devil when we all wish, as literature readers, that all loose ends be tied up regardless.

The corruption in Civil War history, military or political, has been to tie up loose ends regardless. Teutonic Knights lacks the sources to do that, freeing us to laugh at lacunae. Any given Civil War history conveys the illusion of completeness.

One example that comes to mind first is the account of any battle where Rosecrans executed but Grant commanded. The modern Civil War reader has no idea that there is a Rosecrans version of events and that Rosecrans is 180 degrees out of phase with Grant's account of these same battles.

Hey, so what, how many accounts of events do you need?

Nor is there the least need to account for any such difference, thanks to the standards of military history.

Where an absolute judgement is rendered about a military figure based on an incomplete or suppressed set of records, military history breaks down and reduces itself from history to mere military writing ... exposition on a military topic.

(2) The military historian is supremely careless about the origins of an idea or decision. In the infantry, we had a saying: the commander is responsible for everything that is done or that fails to get done. This saying separated the issue of legal and professional culpability from the mass of collaborative activity. It represented a sort of philosophy of liability. How and when military historians adopted it as a principle of historical method, I wish to know. Tell me.

Say, fellows! Stop researching! The commander is responsible for this idea, that movement, and that plan! Done and done!

Again, the ACW military historian enjoys an edge in the primitivism of American staffwork 1861-1865. The ACW commander was in the retarded state of Frederick the Great, a general with two aides. With the emergence of modern staff in WWI, military history becomes completely unreadable given the sloth of authors and the obscurity of records.

All this is not to let ACW military historians off the hook here; the origin of - for example - the idea of the water approach to Richmond is immensely complex and far transcends "McClellan commanded, McClellan is responsible." Got forbid we should untie ends and make loose what was once bound.

I don't wish here to offend friends who are military historians. I recognize efforts at reform, striving for completeness, and efforts at fairness. I salute the works of Grimsley and Wittenberg. But I want to explain my own aversion to military history as a discipline as it stands.

p.s. David Woodbury is responsible for everything I said or failed to say.

Rafuse and McClellan's War

It was interesting to see Johnny Whitewater's analysis of McClellan's War: The Failure Of Moderation In The Struggle For The Union set against the context of the McClellan's Society's views.

Compared to what the members of the Society believe, he concludes that "in reversing McClellan historiography, Rafuse's book is but one small step."

Let's add to that ... small perhaps and yet major. For example, consider the first four AOP commanders, as we have here - endlessly and falsely represented as products of meritocratic date-of-rank consideration. If Civil War historians cannot even touch on their political personas, we have a problem so large that a task on the scale of a partial reappraisal of McClellan looms utterly enormous.

So for Rafuse to point McClellan historiography ten degrees here or there, he also has to fix a 360 degree base of accidental and willful misunderstanding. The win is not whatever opinion Rafuse makes about the general, it is in shifting the entire ground of the discussion off of falsehood and contrived ignorance toward the truth embodied in a more complete public record.

Back in 1997/1998 we had an important book from an historian named Tom Rowland brought out by the respectable Kent State University Press; it gently and humorously mocked McClellan criticism as it had deeloped since the Centennial. Rowland was not interested in rehabilitiating McClellan as a general or in revisiting the controversies. What interested him was the over-the-top behavior of Civil War historians coming into contact with the subject McClellan. Johnny, in his posting, noticed the uniformity of McClellan treatment. So did Rowland and he had a lot of fun with it.

Sears, stinging under Rowland's chiding, lashed out in print repeatedly, drawing attention to Rowland. One would think, therefore, that post-Rowland historians would mind their excesses in writing about the general. And in general, I think they have begun to exercise some sense of self restraint, whether Rowland brought this about or not.

The drawback for these people, post-Rowland, was that although their emotionally charged reactions to McClellan might be under better control, they still operated on a wide and broad foundation of false or incorrect data - in fact a data set contrived to convict McClellan (and other famous "goats" in the ACW) in the court of public opinion.

And so - here in this blog and elsewhere - we address the small stuff. Corps commanders. Commissions. Pope being named field commander in the Maryland campaign. Bits and pieces that undermine the prevailing nonsense. Rafuse (and for that matter Beatie) do more faster; they apply wholesale changes to the (false) public record through a combination of proper use of known evidence and new research.

Thus Rafuse (and Beatie and Harsh) make the old McClellan bashing impossible to the extent that the field must confront and assimilate their work. Yes, Taaffe has simply chosen not to; he baldly excludes their work from his bibliography. Yes, Gallagher blurbs Harsh while painstakingly excluding him from any compilations or anthologies.

And they make themselves ridiculous in so doing. Ridiculous. That is progress.

One can say that Rafuse has helped push the pendulum. Will the pendulum swing back again? No, that energy is not yet played out.

Our starting point was restricted use of sources and the suppression of evidence to advance literary ends. We are moving away from the subordination of history to literature. I see it in every new catalog.

That is what is important about McClellan's War among other new books.

How to become a corps commander: McDowell

In his new book Commanding the Army of the Potomac, Stephen Taaffe breaks with Centennial doctrine – in three out of four cases - to suggest that there was more than date of rank behind Lincoln’s appointment of McClellan’s corps commanders.

I have abstracted all relevant comments on events leading to McDowell's corps appointment from Taaffe. I compare these to the material in Beatie’s Army of the Potomac and material from my own private research. This is the last in the corps commander series, I think, and I urge you to break out the books and compare what past historians have (so lamely) said about these appointments.

As down as I have been on Taaffe, as miserable as his little concessions may appear in comparison with the fuller historical record, let us rejoice in what these concessions represent for Civil War history - the beginnings of an acknowledgement that the record must be considered and that the storyline may not be allowed to trump the facts.

Taaffe
McDowell "never makes the transition" from peacetime to wartime officer * Both Scott [!?!] and Chase lobby for his appointment to the field force that fights Bull Run * The Committee on the Conduct of the War urges Lincoln to replace McClellan with McDowell in 1/62 * Radicals saw him as an alternative to McClellan

Beatie
(Army of the Potomac, Vol. 1): Chase arranges McD’s promotion to general over the objections of Scott; Ohio Gov. Dennison also backs him * Chase wants McD to have one of the MG slots in the Regular Army but McD demurs * Scott makes an issue of McD’s promotion demanding the same for Mansfield * McDowell and Franklin help Chase draft General orders 15 and 16 in spring, 1861 * (Army of the Potomac, Vol. 2): McDowell urges McClellan on Dennison for the Ohio Volunteers (4/61)* Asked by Scott for ideas on whom to make general, McD suggests McClellan and Buell * McDowell proposes corps to McClellan in September of 1861 * McDowell and Franklin meet in Chase’s Treasury offices to plan the spring campaign (1/11/82); Franklin wants a campaign up the York, McDowell is against it; Franklin suggests informing McClellan, Chase quashes the idea * Chase begins to consider McDowell as a replacement for McClellan in February of 1861 * Rumors in the army say McDowell will replace McClellan; many officers prefer McDowell’s partner Franklin (Beatie here cites a Kearney letter from 2/62)

The following items follow on after McDowell's appointment and may be of interest:

Mrs. Lincoln receives Mrs. McDowell (3/21/62, Lincoln Day by Day) * Lincoln meets with McDowell during the day and again at night (3/21/62, ibid) * Lincoln brings Chase and Stanton to meet with McDowell on Aquia Creek. McDowell does not show up. (4/19/62, ibid) * Lincoln, Chase, and Stanton meet with McDowell on Aquia Creek, then bring McDowell back to Washington with them. (4/20/62, ibid) * McDowell receives a visit in the field from Lincoln (5/23/62, ibid) * Chase receives military affairs telegram from McDowell in the field. (Inside Lincoln's Cabinet) * Lincoln directs Chase to meet with McDowell in Fredericksburg to expedite McD's movements. (5/23/62, ibid) * Chase tells McD that he asked Lincoln to urge McD forward and failed to get Lincoln to issue an order; he then tells McD to act without waiting for orders from Lincoln (6/6/62, Lincoln the President, Vol. 1, J.G. Randall) * McDowell meets with Chase in his office "attributing our ill success to the conduct of McClellan." (9/4/62, ibid) * McDowell visits Chase at home in the evening to plan his military future. (9/5/62, ibid) * McDowell breakfasts with Chase and Lincoln. Lincoln asks McDowell what he will do. Later the same day sees Chase in his office. (9/6/62, ibid) * Meets Chase (Sunday) on the street. Calls on Chase that afternoon at home. (9/7/62, ibid)

Myself
Dennison seeks his cousin Irvin McDowell to head the Ohio USV but has to settle for McClellan instead (McClellan’s War by Ethan Rafuse, Donnybrook by Daid Detzer) * Chase relies on advice from McDowell, who proposes more aggressive schemes than his boss Winfield Scott (Donnybrook) * Lincoln invites McDowell and Scott to a Cabinet meeting. (6/29/61, Lincoln Day by Day, Morningside Press) * The Boston newspapers publish reports that McClellan is considering corps (11/61) * Sen. Zach Chandler and the CCW meet with Lincoln and the Cabinet to discuss replacing McClellan with McDowell (1/6/62, Inside Lincoln's Cabinet: The Civil War Diaries of Salmon P. Chase by David Donald) * Lincoln invites McDowell and Franklin to Cabinet meetings (1/10/62, 1/12/62, 1/13/62, Lincoln Day by Day). * McDowell and Keyes see Chase in his office. (1/11/62, Inside Lincoln's Cabinet) * Halleck writes McClellan to warn him of intrigues in Congress and in "the abolition press" to promote their favorites (2/24/62, Lincoln the President, Vol. 1, J.G. Randall)


See also:
How to become a corps commander: Taaffe
How to become a corps commander: Heintzelman
How to become a corps commander: Keyes
How to become a corps commander: Sumner
How to become a corps commander: McDowell (this post)

Related:
Understanding Keyes and Company
Pinkerton on the corps commanders
Doubleday (on the corps commanders?)
Preamble: McDowell
Sprague in a nutshell (tangent: McDowell providing cover for Sprague and Chase)

Spinoffs from this thread:

McClellan and U.S. Cavalry doctrine (tangent = Sumner)
Sumner, McClellan, Johnston, and Davis
Sumner, McClellan, Johnston, Davis, and Hardee

McDowell's brother and hat (tangent = McDowell)
McDowell's hat, revisited
Col. John A. McDowell - brother to Irvin?
Case closed on hat and brother
Tidball remembers McDowell
Topping off "McDowell's obnoxious hat"

That late-night noise in the kitchen

It's just Abe Lincoln playing chess with a talking beaver. Or reading a newspaper. Don't worry. Go look.

Civil War poetry in the news

Is it okay to borrow copyright-expired poetry for use in your lyrics? Without attribution?

Bob Dylan is on the hot seat for repurposing the work of the Confederacy's Virgil, Henry Timrod (right).

Personally, I view most Civil War poetry as a liability. Consider this from Timrod, from A Cry to Arms:

Ho! woodsmen of the mountain side!
Ho! dwellers in the vales!
Ho! ye who by the chafing tide
Have roughened in the gales!
Leave barn and byre, leave kin and cot,
Lay by the bloodless spade;
Let desk, and case, and counter rot,
And burn your books of trade.

It has its charm but suffers from a dread mid-19th Century malady called filler - filler used to pad a line or stanza, to round it out, to make it conform or rhyme or scan. This is better, from 1866 - "Addressed To The Old Year." The "coming reign" refers to the new year:

A time of peaceful prayer,
Of law, love, labor, honest loss and gain --
These are the visions of the coming reign
Now floating to them on this wintry air.

Not bad, except for HT's self-consciously archaic manner.

This news of Dylan's interest in Timrod is as off-putting as the old news that his contemporary, the late James Dean (right, with cigarette excised), showed interest in John Greenleaf Whittier, another ACW-era versifier:

Under the great hill sloping bare
To cove and meadow and Common lot,
In his council chamber and oaken chair,
Sat the worshipful Governor Endicott.

When I read that I hear it in the voice of Bullwinkle J. Moose. Dean also liked James Whitcombe Riley producer of ACW lines like this:

When the army broke out, and Jim he went,
The old man backin' him, fer three months;
And all 'at I heerd the old man say
Was, jes' as we turned to start away,
"Well, good-bye Jim:
Take keer of yourse'f!"

Take gud keer indeed to steer clear of most ACW poetry.

More on the Bob Dylan - Henry Timrod plagiarism here.

Heintzelmann is coming

Apropos of the corps commander series of posts here, Drew Wagenhoffer has pointed out to me the imminent arrival of a new Heintzelmann biography.

General H's notes and diaries are so steeped in political content I wonder how the biographer will manage that, given the tendency of ACW authors to shield readers from such harmful substances.

Anyway, my last post in the series, on McDowell, will go up this weekend.

Topping off "McDowell's obnoxious hat"

I read John Hennessy and I forgot. Harry Smeltzer read and remembered. Harry:

Return to Bull Run, pp 7-8: "Some men even questioned McDowell’s loyalty, suggesting that the prominent hat he wore, 'which looked like an esquimaux canoe on his head, wrong side up,' served as a covert signal to the enemy that he was present and 'all was well.'" The footnote reads "for debate over McDowell’s obnoxious hat see the National Tribune, issues of November 12, 1891, March 31, 1892 and April 14, 1892."

His obnoxious hat! An Eskimo kayak! Tim Reese adds:

I have to agree with Harry. This is no proof that McD's helmet ever had a spike. Still, the allusion to "white" draws aside the veil of doubt somewhat. As before conjectured, he [McDowell] probably acquired one of the generic types pictured at top center of my montage. These were more often described as a coal scuttle turned upside down, rather than a canoe. Their white canvas was usually dyed with tea to deaden the glare, faint concession to camouflage.

When was Averell writing; postwar I presume after the spiked, white cork helmet had come into US service, however briefly. I'll wager that McD's had a pugri, a folded cloth wound about the base w/curtain (Havelock) at rear, this to deflect/absorb saber blows...

As an amusing aside, it was customary and traditional for British troops returning from the East to cast their battered toppees overboard when reaching the western terminus of the Suez Canal near Port Said. East meets West, so to speak. Ah, back to civilized head dress.

Postscript added 9/14/06 after Harry dug up Averell's unfinished memoir. Harry writes:

The manuscript of Averell’s memoirs (Ten Years in the Saddle) was begun in 1891, and was unfinished at the general’s death in 1900. On page 289 he describes McDowell’s appearance on the morning of 7/16/61, as his army began its movement on Manassas Junction:

"The scene presented on the gran portico of Arlington House on that day when McDowell came forth arrayed for the field in the uniform of a Brigadier General and otherwise distinguished by his white helmet with the bright lance-head on top, and followed by a well appointed staff, was impressive."

Anything is possible: McD may have had a lance head on the helmet, perhaps even custom fit it himself; Averell, writing in old age, may have mis-remembered, and morphed McD’s helmet with those that became popular in the intervening years; or Averell may have added the spike for dramatic effect - the polished spike representing the high hopes of the man and the nation as the campaign kicked off, the broken lance-head at the exhausted McD’s feet symbolic of the broken man and the broken dreams of a quick end to the war.

Many thanks to Harry and Tim for their input on this.