New books

There's a new George Thomas book out today that strives to offer "a more balanced, nuanced picture than has previously been available." It also seems to use fog of war: "Einolf depicts the fighting from Thomas's perspective to allow a unique look at the real experience of decision making on the battlefield."

Also new (this goes into our baffler files), a title that collects essays from "the best-known Civil War historians" in order to present an "alternative view" of the ACW.

Let's see: the people most invested in a meme are going to rock their own boats. Sure.

Civil War cosplay (cont.)

Funny follow-up email from fellow blogger and anime guru Mitch Hagmaier on Civil War cosplay:

Hah! I used to run that anime convention. If the fanboy hordes we delivered to the Inner Harbor made your life ever so briefly more surreal, then our job was done.

In recent years, it's degenerated into an insanely bloated fun-house version of high school, and I got tired of playing bursar & over-aged hall monitor to a swarm of oddly-dressed, hypercaffienated teenagers.

If you want to see ACW-themed cosplayers, wait and see if somebody does a popular or semi-popular historical anime set during the period. There was Gun Frontier, but I think I was one of about ten people in North America to buy that series, to judge from their sale numbers. And the kids don't like to dress as random thug #2 (unless their costume consists entirely of a sign reading "random thug #2", which I have seen - lazy sod) but rather some distinctive supporting character or protagonist or love interest.

There is one guy on the artist alley circuit - he runs a fly-by-night manga adaptation company, or at least he did the last time I took note of him - who wears a butternut kepi. That's probably the closest you'll get to ACW cosplay - a Japanese guy named Bennett wearing a Confederate kepi & cross-dressing as "Sailor Venus".

[Shudder]

A Sailor Venus otaku, top right, minus kepi. Shudder indeed.

"Lincoln on Communication" - no joke

Does this make you laugh out loud? It's a DVD: "Lincoln on Communication" ...

How would you feel if Abraham Lincoln could speak to your class or seminar, your course on business communication or interpersonal communication? You’d be thrilled, of course. Now you can do the next best thing. By showing Lincoln on Communication, you will enable your students to learn Lincoln’s communication secrets, the tactics and strategies that made him effective at interpersonal communication as well as a great writer and speechmaker.

January 15, 1862 - Stanton is appointed Secretary of War; General-in-Chief McClellan learns after the fact. Lincoln tells McClellan he felt no need to inform the general because Stanton was McClellan's "friend." (His "friend" didn't tell him either.")

February 9 - New York Times Editor Henry Raymond writes to New York BG James Wadsworth to tell him the decision has been made to relieve McClellan of the general-in-chief portfolio and that McClellan will be commander of the Army of the Potomac only.

March 8 - Lincoln confronts McClellan with charges of "traitorous intent".

March 11 - Orders demoting McClellan are issued by Lincoln. He sends the governor of Ohio to to tell McClellan.

March 12 - McClellan reads of his demotion in the newspapers. He writes a goodwill letter to Lincoln. He receives a "shape up" speech from the governor.

March 13 - McClellan learns of and protests the appointment of Wadsworth to the Washington defenses.

March 15 - Stanton offers the job of commander to the AoP to Ethan Allen Hitchcock who refuses.

April 2 - Stanton asks a senator to propose Napoleon B. Buford to Lincoln as commander of the AoP.

April 2 - Wadsworth and Hitchcock report that the capital is not safe.

April 4 - Lincoln and Stanton divide McClellan's old department into pieces without informing him. His I Corps is withheld. McClellan must now coordinate his operations with equals in the theater of operations. He is also placed in the department of John Wool, who retains department command. Wool insists he outranks McClellan.

Back to the DVD:

Discover the most powerful tool of executive leadership: effective communication

Develop interpersonal communication by finding out more about Abraham Lincoln's leadership style

And may heaven help you.

Come celebrate grumpy Wednesdays

This is one for Ted's or Sarah's blog. It's an author story.

On the day of publication of a certain book, Amazon and B&N give descriptions of the book but do not list its author(s). Meanwhile, I cannot find the book's publisher on the web. I post what info I have about the release on the day the book comes out with a note about not finding the authors. (This transpires at CWBN.)

One of the authors writes later to identify himself as such and to ask that the blog entry show his name and those of his co-authors. He says I can find the names of his co-authors at a certain URL.

Puzzling over this special task set for me, I go to the URL and see it is a publisher's site with no search function. I browse a minute, then write him back that I cannot find his book and can he name the authors in an email. He graciously replies with the names of the co-authors and directs me to Amazon, where they are now listed. (Amazon was not where he initially directed me.)

More authorial weirdness: In the first email exchanged, he referred to his book by a name other than its title. Perhaps it was the original working title; it confused my search efforts. In his second email, he referred to the title of his book by a different variant - still not the title.

I guess authors have as many nicknames for their books as they would for their pets.

Oh, you authors. Not as blackly humorous as this, but still.

Baldy Smith's quote

Reader Paul Martini has generously supplied the quote I was looking for here. He says it "came from Ernest Furgurson's Not War But Murder on page 235."

And it was Baldy Smith, the corps commander who had been farthest forward with his troops on June 3, who asserted years later that the concept of that assault -- "an attack along the whole line -- is denounced by the standard writers on the art of war, and belongs to the first period in history after man had ceased to fight in unorganized masses. Giving up the few advantages belonging to the assailants, it increases largely the chances of successful defense, and would never be adopted by a trained general, except perhaps under certain peculiar conditions, where also the attacking force had an overwhelming superiority in numbers."

Over the Topps

I once owned a few of these myself. Strong on narrative, weak on analysis.

Tom McMahon did a nice post on them back in June.

"Cosplay"

Will Civil War re-enactors eventually wander cities in uniform to congregate at streetcorners "simply for the objective of showing off their 'cosplay' capabilities and marveling at the outrageous attire of fellow otaku"?

If Japan is an indicator, yes.

p.s I was stopped at a light in Baltimore a couple of years ago and became fixated on reading and rereading the ungrammatical bumper sticker in front of me. It was trying to say, "In case of rapture, this vehicle will lose its driver." As I untangled the syntax, my car became surrounded by jaywalking otaku - ever increasing numbers of otaku. Ah, the rapture has arrived. After I came to my senses, I noticed the hundreds of insanely costumed strollers were filing into the convention center for an anime confab.

Holiday giving

If you are looking for Christmas or Hannukah gifts, you could patronize one (or all) of the small presses that specialize in Civil War titles.

This list is not inclusive but here we are:

Eric Wittenberg's Ironclad Publishing is well worth your time: I particularly enjoyed A Little Short of Boats and intend to buy Dave Smith's Pemberton book next.

Butternut and Blue keeps a low profile but this is a must visit for a copy of Tim Reese's High Water Mark, central to understanding McClellan's intended outcome for the battles in the gaps.

Morningside Bookshop is a book store that publishes a long list of titles. The quality of the paper and bindings exceeds the standards enjoyed in the heyday of publishing. My Baldy Smith bio came from Morningside.

The Camp Pope Bookshop is another retailer/publisher. The books look very well made and focus on regimental level material in the western theater.

Westholme publishes a lot of ACW titles, though it's not exclusively about the Civil War and it's larger than the publishers listed so far. I will be enjoying Stealing the General by Russel S. Bonds during my Christmas vacation.

Savas Beatie is like Westholme in terms of size and focus. We speak much here of Army of the Potomac, but this house publishes important Civil War books consistently. I'm a little bit off topic in my S-B reading currently with Indian War Veterans.

If you can encourage a Civill War publisher this season, why not do so?

Union corps commands - final installment

I am tallying the best corps turnover data I can from multiple sources and will make this "good data" the final post of the series when completed.

Union corps commands: chaos at the top, 3d/4

Apologies, apologies - the citations are not at hand.

I gave away my review copies of Ernest B. Furgurson's Not War But Murder and Gordon C. Rhea's Battle of the Wilderness after the hardbacks came out in the same season at least five years ago. In one or the other - I can't recall which - there is a fascinating quote from William "Baldy" Smith (right). He said the Army of the Potomac in 1864 had reverted to a form of warfare from the earliest period of human history. (This observation does not come from his memoirs, BTW, in which the same thought is formulated verbosely.)

Given that Smith had a grudge against Grant (and perhaps Meade) we should nevertheless consider the extreme terms in which Smith portrayed a regression from the early war in which he was a division commander and later corps commander. He could have called Grant or Meade imbeciles in the idiom of the day, but he chose instead to express the AoP's predicament not in terms of failed leadership, but with an institutional metaphor. That is a fascinating choice and has much to do with the insane turnover at corps levels.

As noted previously, evidences of regression in the AoP abound and they are not necessarily about personalities (Grant and Meade) - they are signposts of an institution in catastrophic disarray.

Consider incidents of the late war in the East. I bring them up in the order that I encountered them, as best I remember, and they are but a sampling.

Charles Wainwright, in his diaries, notes on May 8 1864 that his movements as commander of I Corps artillery reserve in a night march were blocked by a huge column of infantry moving 1/2 a mile per hour. A veteran of the 1862 Richmond campaign, he says "Never before did I see such slow progress made." Assuming that night marches implied urgency, he sought out Meade's HQ to report the obstruction and found Meade and his staff sound sleep. Meade - this is me speaking - was relying on corps commanders to execute his orders, corps commanders some of which would reach the extreme limit of their experience after two months.

Charles Wainwright, Furgurson, and Rhea all note the phenomenon of snarled traffic at crossoads in 1864. To an early war reader, this is simply incredible. The AoP commander had fixed this problem in 1862 on the Peninsula with protocols to be followed anytime different units encountered each other at crossroads. The Meades and Hancocks had successfully followed those protocols in the early war. By 1864 all was forgotten. The AoP was now tending toward the popular concept of imbecility. Nor is there any way for Grant and his Western imports to discern that this was happening, whether the disintegrated AoP of 1864 was any different from that of 1862.

Wainwright, messing with senior AoP officers on June 26 1864, took especial delight in encountering potatoes and fresh vegetables. Another show-stopper for early war readers. These had been introduced into the enlisted man's daily diet on the Peninsula in 1862 following the recommendations of the Sanitary Commission. By 1864, they had devolved into an eccentric novelty in the mess tents of the senior-most officers.

Furgurson and Rhea quote from the unpublished diary of Captain Washington Roebling (photo right), General Warren's ADC, who refers to the AoP's 1864 night marches as unguided lunges into Egyptian darkness (referring to the Egypt of Mosaic plagues) in search of positions never reconnoitered. Again, to the early war reader, this is beyond shocking: the AoP of 1862 was led by engineers and ADCs in to the precise position intended for them. In the Mexican War Meade himself had been such an engineer-scout for Zachary Taylor; McClellan would argue his ACW reconnoitering engineers into alternate positions after his own, personal reconnaissances of corps positions. Egyptian darkness = archaic regression.

In his military history classic, The Wilderness Campaign, author and park historian, the late Edward Steere, is continuously (and erroneously) baffled by what he considers to be Meade's errors in the field. But Meade is delegating to a changing cast of characters with no institutional memory at corps level - they are the corps commanders du jour, accidental battlefield tourists. Meade's failure - if I can interpose here - seems to be that he imagines himself in some sort of time continuum connected to 1862 whereas in fact he exists in a fractured time-space in which all that was known in 1862 has been irretrievably lost and must be learned again. Grant, if I can again interject, appears as would a Martian landing in the middle of the Eastern theater in 1864 with only day-to-day realities to guide him towards norms.

Meade does not know he has regressed; Grant cannot know Meade has regressed; the corps commanders - the pounding engines of regression - live from moment to moment until their 60 - 90 days of fame is up. They are the time travelers who bring the AoP back to Smith's earliest phase of human warfare.

And so we find in Steere provacative section headings: Awkward Dispositions; Meade Withholds His Blow; Meade Miscalculates; Faulty Communications; General Offensive Bogs Down; Defective Planning and Faulty Execution; Blame is Shared; An Abortive Offensive; Grant Stops a Panic. We find observations like "It therefore seems incredible that a tactician of Meade's ability..." But it is not about Meade and Grant. Their share of blame is dwarfed by a personnel fiasco in the general officer ranks. 1864 is about the total breakdown of institutional memory through turnover in the high command.

There comes a point in 1864, perhaps I'll calculate it sometime, when the Union's enlisted turnover exceeds 100%. There comes a point in 1864, perhaps I'll calculate it sometime, when the Union's corps command turnover exceeds 500%. This is the point of certifiable institutional imbecility. This is Baldy Smith's earliest phase of human warfare. This is the point where Smith, in his memoirs, puts the cherry on the cake:

The great Civil War will hereafter afford many texts to show the ignorance of military principles and the utter absence of military genius but it developed no new principles and has left few examples other than those that serve for warning to future generals.

My word

Renee Tyree likes the word "slapdash" to describe the ACW.

(I think she means the Union war effort since "slapdash" is from Catton and the Union's war was Catton's subject.)

My word to describe the Union war effort would be "jiggery-pokery."

A challenge worthy of evasion

Harry Smeltzer has double dared me to read the new Slocum bio. I'm going to browse it in a bookstore and then probably declare myself defeated without a full reading effort. Until about five years ago, I was compulsive about finishing a book regardless of how trashy. That is probably how I built up an endless rage against pop historians. He has made me afraid to read the new bio.

OT: I used to drive by Slocum's Bowl-a-Drome near Trenton (NJ) wondering about the strange name "Slocum." One day, in the company of an Englishman we passed the sign and he burst out, "Slocum! That describes how you bowl after a few beers."

If you are wondering how pop history ends up as trash, Harry gives a clue on his blog:

As I began my research, I asked the advice of some folks who have had success in Civil War publishing. I was told that my approach was all wrong. Rather than starting from square one and just letting the information lead me, I was assured that the only way to go about the project was to start off knowing what I wanted to produce (an article, a book), and to also have a pretty good idea of the story I wanted to tell. Needless to say, I didn’t take that advice.

I notice Harry has some Sprague material on his blog. I once took exception to Salmon Chase being called his daughter's pimp, but the more you learn about Sprague (who looks drunk in the picture on Harry's site), the more the circumstantial evidence mounts in favor of pimping. Let's see, richest man in America; needs cotton to stay rich; ACW cuts off cotton imports but Chase gets Lincoln to authorize cross-border cotton trading; Chase protege McDowell is put in charge of inspecting cotton transactions with Secessia; voila! Riches! Daughter has the means to take care of papa.

Shame old Sprague had to get mixed up in gun smuggling to the Confederacy but Stanton did well to hush that up. Then he had to go and divorce the belle of Washington.

Kate Chase-Sprague, a recent biography noted, ended her life selling eggs and milk to neighbors to stay out of the poorhouse. Her father ended on the Supreme Court as a Democrat. Sprague ended in the proverbial gutter.

Who says the Civil War is boring?

(Photo: Slocum's death mask. Apologies for linking his memory with a bowl-a-drome.)

Go team!

The Adams - Jackson feud lives on. It lives on through the internalization of the partisan politics of that day in the heart of a history writer who conveys an impression of "slaveholding imperialists like Andrew Jackson and James K. Polk" (those are the reviewer's words, not the author's). The vehicle is a new book, What Hath God Wrought.

The reviewer just quoted, perhaps a rabid sports fan, cannot take fandom out of the picture: Adams is "heroic" and "Jackson, meanwhile, subverted the rule of law, ethnically cleansed the South of its Indians, and hobbled the otherwise burgeoning American economy by destroying its federal banking system."

History: all about finding and promoting personal heroes. People in history are fashion accessories that help make that very special statement about you.

If this kind of polemically loaded recounting of history looks familiar, the reviewer takes the trouble to mention his admiration for James M. McPherson and the possibility that this book, What Hath God Wrought, could serve as a prequel for McPherson's polemically loaded Battle Cry of Freedom.

Got a museum?

If you have a museum with humidity control, the National Archives would like a word.

Irony fails me

DVD Review: Horses of Gettysburg. 116 minutes.

... unlike most documentaries about this battle, which focus on the military and human components of the war, this film focuses on the 72,000 horses and mules that took part in this conflict.

An officer of the Polish Brigade (CSA)

Soldiering for Glory: The Civil War Letters of Colonel Frank Schaller, Twenty-second Mississippi Infantry

This is a very well written (and edited) collection featuring the life struggles of a Jewish German Rebel officer whose early career embraced the CSA's Polish Brigade.

Considering that one of the co-editors here is descended from Frank Schaller, the tone of this work is refreshingly critical. Schaller is rarely taken at his own self-worth and yet the reader develops a sympathy and curiosity that keeps the pages turning. Well worth a piece of your leisure-reading schedule.

(Cross-posted from Civil War Bookshelf.)

New "Lincoln" pic

A man, in a stovepipe hat, with beard, photographed from behind, at Gettysburg, real real blurry.

Try to control your euphoria.

It looks like the "potato masher"

I've been meaning to run this badly scanned image for some time. It's a Rebel hand grenade and appears in Never for Want of Powder. The pressure detonator has been withdrawn and is the pin-type of assembly to the left. In the German stick grenades, the detonator was the entire head assembly.

Unlike the "infernal devices" left at Yorktown, this model was designed to be thrown. Interesting that each one comes with a canvas strap attached.

Union corps commands: chaos at the top 3c/4

The note introducing this post is here.

June 17, 1964:

The attack this afternoon was a fiasco of the worst kind: I trust it will be the last attempt at this most absurd way of attacking entrenchments by a general advance in line. It has been tried so ofen now and with such fearful losses that even the stupidest private now knows that it cannot succeed, and the natural consequence follows: the men will not try it. The very sight of a bank of fresh earth now brings them to a dead halt.

June 26, 1864:

I found that the loss of this army since we left Culpeper Court House is very generally set down at 90,000; a perfectly fearful amount. Gibbon says that the Second Corps has lost thirteen brigade commanders.

August 2, 1864:

Burnside made no arrangement for his column to get out of his own works! Nor did any of his subordinates think of it. ... no arrangements having been made ... the men could not get through without breaking ranks or marching by the flank. Imagine an assaulting column with a frontage of four men!

Where was the common sense of the division and brigade officers who commanded the assaulting column, that they did not themselves see that such a matter was provided for? Surely such a lot of fools did not deserve to succeed...

- A Diary of Battle: The Personal Journals of Charles S. Wainwright, 1861-1865.

Interesting new books

Out yesterday:

Revisionism by Mark Neely.

Also, Diehard Rebels: the Confederate Culture of Invincibility.