Lincoln Disneyfied

I look at Brian Dirck's series on "Lincoln's Warts," then think about what motivates the series. It seems to be a reaction to saccharine.

Then, it occurs to me that the Abraham Lincoln Museum and Presidential Library has not been Disneyfying Lincoln. Lincoln was long ago Disneyfied - the ALMPL is a lagging indicator of that. The shocking thing about the ALMPL and the streets of Springfield is that they deliver to us the visual equivalent of the history we love to read.

When we see beloved readings rendered as 3-D trash, our reflexive reaction is defense of our understanding gained from reading. This can't be the essence of the Lincoln story!

Oh but it is - and it is faithful to the story as currently received.

Civil War term papers for sale

And man, do they look bad...

"This 3-page paper discusses the contributions of African-American soldiers to the Civil War."

"This 3-page paper discusses the North's naval blockade during the U.S. Civil War and how it ultimately defeated the South."

"This 4-page paper tries to answer the concept of "slave power," how the North offered solutions to the South on this, and how the South responded."

"Benign deity" or golden calf?

McPherson's new book is out, and the reaction is typical. From the Washington Post...

One of the many reasons why James M. McPherson is the pre-eminent contemporary historian of the Civil War -- perhaps the pre-eminent historian of that war, period -- is that he knows historical truth...

... another reason why McPherson ... stands above all others: Not only does he read everything, but he is always open to judgments that differ from his own and facts that demand new interpretations.

McPherson presides over it [ACW history] like a benign deity, issuing occasional thunderbolts of disagreement but generally cheering on his fellow historians as they pursue ever elusive Truth.

Over and over again, McPherson seeks to separate myth and fantasy from fact ...

(Found on Amazon.)

Pause to salute these headline writers

"Civil War battle has two names." Whoa!

I like this one too: "Cashing in on the Civil War - Georgia looks to 150th anniversary."

Speaking of blogs

Is Mike Koepke's kaput? In IE it flashes and then blanks out.

Update: it's back and it works (2/27/07). But Eric Wittenberg's seems to be on the blink.

Or maybe I should just switch browsers.

Death of Randy's blog

Randy's "Battle of Gettysburg & the American Civil War" has been officially abandoned. As with so many previous postings, Randy has taken pains to explain. Have a look.

There is a sadness in the last postings tending towards morbidity, a worry about ennobling war, and fretting about failing to secure Joe Avalon's attention, oddly enough.

Blogs of this type are rare. Each entry in BGACW represented a major writing and thinking effort and taken together with the copious (good) photo stills, each entry represented a small production. Nothing coming down the pike is going to be this atmospheric or produced.

I found it strange that Randy wanted to protect his identity by showing half a name; that he eschewed the all-pervasive blogroll; that his internal post links, rare they were, tended to link to himself only; strangest of all, that he put such stock in the weakest of all his writings, the analysis of Gettysburg casino development.

But bloggers are idiosyncratic and his work was the unmistakable emblem of a personality. The result was a damn fine blog.

Civil War Talk Radio looks at publishing

Ted Savas ("Savas Beatie") is featured in this episode of Civil War Talk Radio. Asked which published Savas Beatie title is his favorite, he did not hesitate: Wittenberg's and Petruzzi's Plenty of Blame to Go Around.

The tone was positive. Ted offered only one author horror story. Compare that to an October piece in Gawker, where a trade house editor was much harsher on these craftsmen: "... authors are the craziest, meanest, strangest, cluelessest people you've ever met."

Don't ever imagine that applies to blog authors like myself. No way.

Ted's former publishing partner David Woodbury ("Savas Woodbury") tells an author story in his latest blog entry ... it would even scare Gawker's anonymous editor, if she were to read it.

I was recruited by one author to do some maps for his Civil War installment in the University Press of Kansas' Modern War Studies series, about 9 years ago. I spent whole weekends on three difficult maps, got them to the publisher on deadline, and never heard from the up-and-coming professor again—not even in response to my email informing him that they were delivered. Eventually the book came out. No mention of maps in the acknowledgments, no credit lines on the maps themselves. No simple "thank you" by email. I had offered to do them for free—for exposure in the university press world—so wasn't looking for payment. Just courtesy. I had to write to the publisher to get a copy of the book.

How awesomely strange, mean, crazy and clueless. (Do you think this is a story about Earl. J. Hess, Craig Symonds, or Michael Fellman?)

Lincoln and Taney

I had hopes for Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney. It took a certain amount of brass to elevate Taney to the level of a weighty anti-Lincoln and I liked that. But the warning signs were there too.

The title told all that this was aimed at audiences who don't know Taney was chief justice. Uh oh.

The index then told that there would be no discussion of Seward's many illegal arrests and incarcerations, nor Stanton's: in other words, that the broad criminality of the Lincoln Administration (if that is what these arrests suggest) would be veiled in favor of spotlighting a few manageable showcase issues involving Lincoln himself, such as the use of martial law and Burnside's arrest of Vallandigham. Trouble!

Worst of all, my litmus test for a book of this sort would be to see how it managed the evidence (or absence of evidence) concerning Ward Lamon's claim that he carried an arrest warrant for Chief Justice Taney signed by Lincoln himself. No mention of this famous claim here. This would be the very book for it.

In fact the Taney vs. Lincoln approach almost guarantees a narrative format in which legal and constitutional issues are personalized ... and here they are. The narrative bent is so strong that although the author gives himself a summing up sort of analytic epilogue, even there the analysis is little and feeble.

Are the few legal nuggets scattered here bona fide? It would take a lawyer to vett them.

Furthermore, the book alternates chapters between Taney and Lincoln as a storytelling strategy. As a Taney ignoramus, I enjoyed the Taney material while wincing at the stale stuff in the Lincoln chapters.

We have the germ of a very interesting idea here. A full bore treatment would have been thrilling. Sooner or later we will need a serious study of the claims Lincoln made for his war powers; of Taney's counterpoints; and of the general atmosphere of conspiracy, transgressions, and lawlessness that shaped Taney's Civil War milieu.

Where to begin reading?

A poster on Usenet asks where he should begin reading about the Civil War:

I have been reading James M. McPherson's "Battle Cry of Freedom", Larry Schweikart's "A Patriot's History of America" (the Civil War sections), Bruce Catton's three part series, and General Grant's memoir. I assume many of you are more educated on the Civil War, and are better read on its various subjects. What do you think of these books? Will they contribute effectively to my understanding of the war? Will they give me good insights into the essentials of what caused the war, how the war was fought, and what the war caused?

Somebody got this fellow started on a reading list, selecting "the usual suspects" for him (with the exception of Schweikart). I like the fact that he's suspicious of these authors after starting his reading.

After thanking people for encouraging him, he asks just the right follow-on question:

I'm also interested in a study of the relationship between the philosophy (the ideology) of the time, and how it motivated the start of the war and the actions of the generals in the war. I've studied a bit, and writers usually have used the terminology of Whig, Know-Nothing, Republican, Democrat, etc. These party names don't tell me much about the uniting and fundamental ideology of each side, and how these ideologies lead men to take cerain actions. Sometimes the constant switching of parties and party titles and party ideology is just plain confusing. Is their a book particularly devoted to explaining these things...

I felt compelled to answer the second post at length:

Why not start with The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, a great introduction to the parties leading up to the ACW with plenty of background on the pre-ACW activities of major personalities of the war? Then, when you go to a McPherson or Catton, and they mention the name of a political personality, you'll have the full dossier.

There's lots more here.

Book sales 2006: Goodwin's numbers

Goodwin's 2006 sales numbers, estimated here, were scrutinized here earlier this month, evoking promises to look deeper into the matter.

I have done some follow-on research. Before getting into that, a mea culpa. I equated low hardcover sales with total sales performance and misled you (and myself) based on that. I failed to check for paperback and other formats, check their ISBNs, and total their sales. I have now done that for 2006.

You will recall that a Publishers Weekly sales number of 620,000 was given in this article. The article is dated 3/27/06 and purports to be total sales figures for 2005. If these numbers hold for 2005, then my Ingram based estimates are absurd for 2006. Or are they? In fact, Publishers Weekly explains its figures this way[emphasis added],

"As always, all our calculations are based on shipped-and-billed figures supplied by publishers ... These figures reflect only 2005 sales, and publishers were instructed not to include book club and overseas transactions. We also asked publishers to take into account returns through January 31; it would be safe to surmise that not all did.

As we shall see.

For Team of Rivals, I surmise that Simon & Schuster submitted "shipped but not returned figures" - not sales figures per se. I had said there was a large overhang of unsold Rivals and I still believe this to be true. Here's the nub of the matter. The hardcover came out Oct. 25, 2005. Applying the standard 90-day book returns policy, returns of Team of Rivals would not begin shipping back to the publisher until January 25 and the shipments would not begin arriving until several days later crowding the January 31 target set by E&P. Simon & Schuster could not comply with the instructions it was given but it submitted "sales" figures anyway.

Team of Rivals even has a double asterisk in Publishers Weekly denoting that "Sales figures were submitted to PW in confidence, for use in placing titles on the lists." [Emphasis added.] S&S has given us a valuable clue as to the size of the ordering but not the succes of the title.

I should mention that in dealing out Ingram numbers, I have the option of giving out order numbers or warehouse stock but I tally sold copies. Here are the 2006 copies of Team of Rivals sold through Ingram:

HB: 15,545 (released October 25, 2005)
PB: 39,033 (released September 26, 2006)
CD: 1,535 (released October 25, 2005)
Cassette: 235 (released October 25, 2005)

Total: 57,639

You'll notice the HB total just slightly higher here from what I gave earlier. I learned from this drill that if you call too soon after the new year, Ingram gives you a number not accounting for all the returns made in December. Better to call in February for annual sales totals.

Can we reconcile the Ingram figures of 2006 with those given by S&S for 2005? No, because we have two different years and for 2005, S&S gave a hypothetical figure based on shipped copies, not sales and not including returns.

Do we have to treat Ingram-based estimates with care? Yes.

Museum of the C*********y

Yesterday's news:

The Museum of the Confederacy will likely drop the word "Confederacy" from its name when it moves its collection to a new home.

They don't want to use the correct, historically meaningful word in polite company, it seems.

Simon Cameron needed this?

If you want to understand then versus now, picture this organization under Simon Cameron providing him with "decision support." All this to determine "Centerville now or later?"

Never mind the blurry typography, you get the idea: cumbersome. Also, just as in Civil War literature, the political is missing. It's a closed loop between the decisionmaker (secretary off to the top right corner) and his huge input feed.

Yes, the secretary is a political appointee, but this scheme imagines strategy decisions being made away from political influences (Congress, the president, the press).

If Lincoln taught us anything at all it is that political leaders will never, ever set strategy during war waged by a republic. The contingency-loving politico understands, in a way few Civil War readers grasp, that strategy commits resources now to events later in a constraining way; strategy is measurable, meaning the policymaker will be held to a standard and graded; strategy marches to a timeline oblivious to changing political will and fortune; strategy solicits the public's support on specifics, much more difficult to secure than public support for general principles; strategy is a very dangerous political trap for the politician-in-chief.

We don't find Lincoln reviewing and approving strategy, despite the material submitted to him by McClellan and Grant. What we find is presidential approval (or rejection) of specific operations of limited scope and duration. That is, we find political pragmatism driving operations within a limited window of opportunity. As Archer Jones has suggested, the optimal outcome in Lincoln's concept of war was a series of victories generating ever larger headlines thus increasing political support for the GOP while sapping enemy and Democratic Party support. It would not matter where the victories occurred, nor in what geographic sequence, nor need they be associated with any military concept.

Take this political conception of war to an extreme and understand that the ACW could have been fought entirely in Antarctica and won there based on glowing newspaper coverage. You would not need strategy or geography, just a series of encounters that could be "won" in newspaper terms and broadcast as victories. The loser, in headline terms, would have been voted out of office. That is something like what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan even now. You have a military that cannot devise a strategy, or make a case for one, and you have a political class with no use for strategy, which however inspired works against expediency (which is a higher value in political terms).

Of strategy in the Civil War, there was none. Of strategy in the future, there shall be none.

Some ideas will always be bruited about but no national strategy. If WWII appears rich in U.S. geostrategy - an exception to this rule - it is an illusion, a post-facto stitch-up of ad hoc decisions taken as situations put decisions within reach. So it will ever be. Kings and dictators may have strategies, republics will not.

The SecDef (SecWar) is therefore always more in need of politcal decisionmaking machinery than strategy vetting processes. Politics is where Cameron went wrong, anyway.

The diagram comes from a proposal from these people. (Click link to read the whitepaper and see the diagram clearly.)

Publishing factoids

If you string some disparate publishing data together into a storyline, you can really depress yourself. These bits were collected on Dan Poynter's site:

* 58% of the US adult population never reads another book after high school.
* 42% of college graduates never read another book.
* 70% of US adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.
* Only 32% of the U.S. population has ever been in a bookstore.
* Most readers do not get past page 18 in a book they have purchased.
* 2002: 37% of the books sent to stores were returned.

A note for prospective Civil War authors

Book proposals. Compare and contrast.

I would add the following ingredients to Nathan's recipe:

(1) Where he says "clearly differentiate your project from the other books that have already been published on the subject," that is also a good place to use your Ingram numbers to present rough sales information - order of magnitude info - for the niche you will occupy. In Kevin's case, estimate sales for books on Civil War memory and public history.

(2) Give your marketing plan. Your own marketing plan for how you will sell your book. Not the publisher's plan, your plan.

(3) You must provide a page count.

(4) Keep rewriting until the overview is irresistible.

Here's the point: your agent or editor must act as your advocate. You are equipping someone to paint a picture of achievable success and helping them to overcome objections.

Civil War opera

Who can get enough of it? Not David Woodbury. (Check out Manny's comment on that post.)

Not Tim Reese.

Not Cincinnati or Detroit.

Not me. Not me. Not me. Not me. Not me. Not me. Not me. Not me.

Not Lincoln: noticed a great anecdote about Abe and Gen. James Wilson attending the Magic Flute together. Must post it this weekend.

(Cartoon via Tony Millionaire.)

Backlash against Faust

Written by a fan of "public history" - Faust has carved out a niche for herself all-too-typical of the intellectual provincialism characteristic of many of this generation’s scholars, having fashioned a career scribbling about vacuous constructions of “gender” and “ritual” during a time period in which they had little acknowledged meaning.

Anti-Faust conjurers predict the future - Stephen H. Balch... said that he feared that Faust would push to use gender and perhaps racial criteria in hiring and tenure decisions. “The greatest worry”, Balch said in a statement, “is that as president, Faust will further ratchet up the pressure on Harvard’s great scientific research centers to subordinate personnel decisions to the needs of social engineering.”

Her name seems to be a byword for group preferences - Drew Faust ... head[ed] a Task Force on Women Faculty. That Task Force won a $50 million commitment to increase faculty “diversity efforts” at Harvard. In the past, the call for such “diversity” has been a code name for greater ideological conformism, since those appointed through it are expected to share the ideological premise that brought them the job.

She keeps company with a bad crowd - Faust runs one of the most powerful incubators of feminist complaint and nonsensical academic theory in the country.

I am ashamed to admit that I care more for Civil War history than for Harvard. If she ruins that place, I don't care. The ACW books she has written needed to be written; the example she now sets the public historians needs to be set; if her example can influence the direction of Civil War history towards analysis, monographs and cross-disciplinary work, that's long overdue.

Meanwhile, if a brand-name college collapses into faddish navel-gazing, that is a problem for the alumni, not society at large.

Am I polarized, yet?

Good luck Jenny

"The Learned Foot is the pen name of runner, attorney, and Civil War buff Jenny Goellnitz." She likes Rosecrans but today, like Rosie, she is suffering certain "duck hit over the head" symptoms.

Very best to you.

(I didn't use that word you hate, Jenny.)

This is progress?

I said it about today's Army; it applies to today's Marines as well. The U.S. land forces are "second generation" Civil War armies

... committed to "alignment, synchronicity, spatial management, and the micromanagement of undertrained subordinates" and all new technology is put at the service of these values.

In terms of tactics, this second generation warfare culture is committed to the artillery (or air power) destroying and the infantry occupying as it was in the days of Verdun. Under our current WWI/2GW approach, moreover, the infantry is a 19th Century militia in terms of capability, reliability, and fragility*. It polices the streets, it occupies bombed terrain, it awaits the foe behind earthworks, it is never out of supporting range. Unlike 19th Century militia, however, it is rarely entrusted with live ammunition or discretion in using it.

Now, columnist William Lind notes a certain Marine general is promoting "distributed operations." He concludes that what is meant is operating as classic light infantry. He quotes his general as saying that in distributed operations

"... general purpose forces, operating with deliberate dispersion, where necessary and tactically prudent, and decentralized decision-making consistent with commander's intent to achieve advantages over an enemy in time and space. Distributed operations relies on the ability and judgment of Marines at every level..."

This does not point to a return to older light infantry doctrines to me but to temporary suspension of the requirements of strict control at the highest levels and synchronicity with all surrounding forces. Problem: under current norms, "decentralized decision-making" could mean that full colonels should boss tiny squads instead of generals bossing them. Look at the quote with my additions:

"... general purpose forces [infantry], operating with deliberate dispersion [patrols, pickets, outposts, ambushes, recon], where necessary and tactically prudent [temporarily permitted by the brass], and [exercising] decentralized decision-making consistent with commander's intent to achieve advantages over an enemy in time and space [not letting the enemy get away while awaiting approval to shoot]. Distributed operations relies on the ability and judgment of Marines at every level..." [Not just the Pentagon level.]

Is this even a tiny step forward out of the 19th Century or is it random noise?

One of the many failures of American generalship as it stands now is a complete breakdown of the concept of hierarchical work. In the Civil War, a mass levy of amateurs needed pro guidance in realtime down to the squad level. The colonel was operating in near-real-time and depended on his real-time company-grade officers to run things. The modern mode is to use technology to insert the genius of generals into platoon operations. Martin Börjesson recaps this in non-military terms, but the point stands:

Focus on Quality - a time span of 1 day - 3 months
Focus on Service - a time span of 3 months - 1 year
Focus on Praxis - a time span of 1 - 2 years
Focus on Strategy - a time span of 2 - 5 years
Focus on Intent - a time span of 5 - 10 years

You might substitute for the first item, focus on tactical operations and take the metaphor from there. The point is that time horizons change as one ascends the hierarchy and assumes different responsibilities.

The mania for control at the general officer level is sometimes attributed to pathological risk aversion - the events of but a day during a two-year tour of duty could spoil a career. Each day bears close watching!

And this is where the system breaks down - in the temporal realm. As Martin writes, "at this level of work [proper level for say the general officer's level] we have almost completely left the realm of managing the current and entered into the realm of steering into the future – a place without either feedback, right or wrong. Instead this realm is full of theories, models and ideas." Our generals reject that realm.

Work not being hierarchically organized, the wrong centers are expending the wrong effort in the wrong places. Lind's general is proposing a loosening of puppet strings that works against every general's perceived self-interest (career), every general's temporal sense (now!), and every general's rejection of the responsibility inherent in hierarchical divisions of labor.

Our 19th Century military shall therefore continue to march on the route selected.

***
* Fragility or brittleness refers to a threshold, expressed in stress or casualties, where the cohesion of a unit breaks down and it becomes ineffective. The less brittle or less fragile units will break up under stress later rather than sooner.

Perryville

"Imagine a 747 crashing every 17 minutes for five hours..."

Harvard and the Civil War

I have been missing the excitement surrounding the appointment of Harvard's new president. She's a woman, which seems to be one of just two complex facts the news outlets can digest. The other is that she's a social scientist - a history professor.

More imporant, for us, is that she's a Civil War author of long standing. (Hat tip to Richard F. Miller for wakening me from my news slumber.)

The elevation of Drew Gilpin Faust in combination with the retirement of James McPherson from the academy and from the presidency of the AHA sets up the expectation for a potentially new "greatest living Civil War historian." I'm not going to ride this McPherson hobby horse any further today, except to say that Faust writes an infinitely more respectable sort of history than "the people's historian" with his gross simplifications and impossible generalizations. To the extent that she rises while he diminishes, we will be well served.

Consider this blurb from LSU Press:

Drew Gilpin Faust argues that coming to a fuller understanding of southern thought during the Civil War period offers a valuable refraction of the essential assumptions on which the Old South and the Confederacy were built. She shows the benefits of exploring Confederate nationalism “as the South’s commentary upon itself, as its effort to represent southern culture to the world at large, to history, and perhaps most revealingly, to its own people.”

That is the most Voegelinian statement I have read in the last five years. History as understanding a people's representation of itself to itself in the midst of an epochal crisis. That breaks the Voegelin meter.

On a more frivolous note, I have long had this habit of referring in private conversation to a certain kind of Civil War narrative as pornographic. Faust also uses the term pornography to characterize certain Civil War history - and in the same way.

HNN notes that the Manhattan Institute issued warnings about Faust's radical feminism. But Faust's concerns strike me as profoundly conservative in a way today's movement conservatives will not easily grasp. The radical meme of "meaningless war," for example, she rejects. She is paraphrased as saying, Thus we [historians] are the ones who give meaning to war. Her "Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South" - a Faustian book topic - has interested the Unionist right since Mencken's seminal "Sahara of the Bozart".

The point is not to deduce her politics, but rather suggest that she represents an earlier type of public intellectual and that here is a cultural conservatism that interests itself in truly large and complex historical problems. She appears to me therefore to be a credit to the field of Civil War history.

A couple of background notes. She is publicly aligned with the Gilder / Lehrman / Boritt camp of Lincolnology rather than the Holzer crew. She has been a Virginian teaching at Harvard following a University of Pennsylvania higher education. As to the count of books she's authored, here's my own tally:

(1) Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War
(2) James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery
(3) A Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South, 1840-1860
(4) The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South
(5) The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830-1860
(6) Southern Stories: Slaveholders in Peace and War
(7) A Slaveowner in a Free Society: James Henry Hammond on the Grand Tour, 1836-1837
(8) Moment of Truth: A Woman of the Master Class in the Confederate South

There's more here.

Now let's see if this corner of the nonfiction world can get a little respectability.

***

p.s. Good to see Brian salute what he calls a "real scholar." Kevin is happy with Faust's "level of scholarship and sophistication." Those are criteria I like. Good-bye "readable and popular." You had your turn.