Unknown portrait of George Thomas

Have not seen this portrait of George Thomas in the literature before. It seems based on a photograph. The picture hangs in the Army & Navy Club in DC and no date is given, no artist is credited. Have seen it often but decided to snap it at lunch yesterday using my crappy phonecam.

If you are planning on writing a George Thomas bio (possible theme: America's unknown hero), go get a better photo for your cover art.

The Mysterioso returns

Rick Beard is back in the public eye, his background totally erased by the New York Times. (They're really good at removing and revising information, I think.)

Scroll down to the bottom to read his spiffy new legend.

(H/T to RC)

"To Antietam Creek" with Scott Hartwig

How odd this is: D. Scott Hartwig, the supervisory park historian at Gettysburg writes a book, and it is The Maryland Campaign of September 1862. The Maryland Campaign! (The first volume, To Antietam Creek, is out now.)

And, if you were the supervisory park historian at Gettysburg with an itch to write about Maryland, of all topics, what one major qualification would you bring to the table? What is the main thing you have learned at Gettysburg? That thing that defines your job? That thing that the public pounds into your skull every day of your waking life and again at night, in your dreams?

You would know controversy. You would know it as well as any man can know anything. And for you to know controversy through Gettysburg and then march your readers through 794 pages of the Maryland Campaign as if it were a controversy-free zone, that is very odd. I can’t even say how strange that is.

If you tasked me to write about Gettysburg, I would research and write outwards from the points of scholarly contention to the general account. I cannot imagine another way. And yet here ...

Perhaps “controversy-free zone” is overstatement for this new book. There are whiffs of controversy in the end notes but these are shrunk smaller than pick six tickets and then resolved with speed and certitude or sidestepped entirely.

For instance, the command crisis of early September would easily make a 794 page book of its own, but Hartwig spares much ink by deciding that Halleck’s unsubstantiated testimony to the CCW is the whole story: Lincoln ordered McClellan to the field. Lincoln contradicts this, McClellan contradicts this but in Hartwig’s lottery system, he picks one answer out of hat and declares it the winner.

In related strangeness, Hartwig gives kudos to Ethan Rafuse’s McClellan War which reports the command crisis correctly and in some detail. Could he trouble himself with a comment to say why he rejects Rafuse's account?

Sometimes, these bizarre resolutions work in the reader’s favor. Hartwig has no use for the ridiculous claim that McClellan issued no directives after finding SO 191; he discusses a couple of afternoon orders in particular. Again, he does so without bringing on a general engagement with the authors who he says influenced him. Let’s refresh our memories on this point:

Every writer agrees that Little Mac erred egregiously when he failed to order an immediate march toward the west on the afternoon of September 13. [...] Instead, McClellan squandered the afternoon and evening of the 13th, sending orders after dark for a two-pronged advance the next morning... A. Wilson Greene, "I Fought the Battle Splendidly," Antietam: Essays on the 1862 Maryland Campaign, Gary Gallagher, ed.

A full 18 hours would pass before the first Yankee soldiers marched in response to the discovery of 'all the plans of the rebels.' Stephen Sears, A Landscape Turned Red

Instead of setting his troops in motion immediately, McClellan made careful plans and did not order the men forward until daybreak on September 14, 18 hours after he had learned Lee's dispositions. As things turned out, this delay enabled Lee to concentrate and save his army. James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom

The LOL foolishness above is quoted en bloc because these very authors and these same books are named explicitly by Hartwig as having influenced his own work.

In fact, these three plus Harsh, Carman, and Rafuse are almost the only secondary sources named in the context of influencing our author’s work. Praise for them is fulsome. But why if their views are put to curb like broken furniture? Can’t we then call Hartwig's praise insincere or meaningless?

The impression given by the end notes is that Hartwig built this book out of the OR, some diaries, Landscape Turned Red, Sears' bio of GBM, and what Hartwig imagines to be McClellan’s "letters to his wife." That is a simplification but that's what the notes convey. The severe shortage of secondary source analysis is unforgivable. The absence of Harsh and Rafuse here is especially striking.

So, bad controversy and evidence handling prevail over good. Hartwig first narrows the field of contestants in a controversy, then picks a lottery winner without resorting to argument.

Let me give a severe but representative example.

McClellan had ridden out of the city limits to meet Pope’s returning command. Hartwig recaps Jacob Cox’s account of the encounter of McClellan, Pope, and McDowell and he notes the account with an aside: “For McClellan’s fanciful and largely innacurate account of this meeting, see McClellan, McClellan’s Own Story, 537.”

So there are two versions of the event, one by a principal (GBM) and one by an observer (JC) and we are to take the observer’s version as real and the principal’s as “fanciful” and “innacurate.”

Why? No answer is given.

The distinctions in the two stories are simplicity and complexity. Cox tells a simple story: Pope’s party, looking tired, approached, received orders where to position units, saluted, and moved on. McClellan’s version recounts the substance of the conversation with Pope aside from the matter of positioning units in the defenses. The content of this conversation had to do with status of units and firing in the distance. This is what Hartwig says is “fanciful” and “largely innacurate.”

Hartwig continues in his note to say, “Also see Sears, George B. McClellan, 262, for Cox’s comments on McClellan’s account.” We turn to that work with high expectations and on said page we read: “In preparing a review of McClellan’s Own Story, Cox, a witness to the encounter, jotted in the margin of his copy, ‘Certainly not true.’”

And there you have it. Cox is the winner through the magic of simple assertion. We now know what happened when McClellan met Pope. All we had to do was debit GBM's account 100% and credit Cox's the same amount.

I could go through the end notes compiling a list of these, where a variant account is acknowledged in the back of the book and then disposed of by coin toss or lottery.

If history were only that easy. Gettysburg teaches us that it isn’t.

I have a couple of suspicions about this book.

- Hartwig started the book one way, many years ago, and resolved not to be influenced by the many new works or their implications before he finished his study.

- He believes the determinative outcome on all controversies lies with the author; the author must make the call.

- He believes that once the author makes the call, the qualities of the narrative and the reading experience, not the evidence, will determine for the reader if the calls were right.

- He believes he has written an authoritative account of the campaign.

And this takes me to another assumption. In my 794-page first volume, I see an introduction of two and one-tenth pages length. I see a bibliographical essay of three and one quarter pages length. Astonishing. My surmise is that Scott was compelled to add these by his publisher and did so with the greatest haste (if not reluctance).

We have in this large volume nowhere that the the author states his case for this book, why he wrote it, what it’s supposed to do for us, how it relates to the field in which it appears.

And that is the oddest thing of all.
--

p.s. It is with great reluctance that I criticize at length someone’s labor of love, especially someone with the good-guy reputation of D. Scott Hartwig. This book is readable and on levels enjoyable. I found things I did not know and Mr. Hartwig, to my great fun, rolls over some conventional wisdom like a steamroller when his sources lead him to do so. The extended criticism in this post is a recommendation with caveats - I don’t link to authors I can’t recommend.

The problem is his is no broad view of the evidence; there is narrative driving analysis; there is a haste to close open questions and to avoid engaging in controversy in a deep or meaningful way.

Epistemology is at the root of history - why do we believe that we know this or that as “fact”? Evidence handling flows from that. If we don’t ask the right questions we are left with a story that obeys the inner logic of fiction plotting.

I am going to post on some individual topics out of this book and dissect them in detail in the weeks ahead. This is not an all-out assault on Scott Hartwig but an opportunity to review failings across the spectrum of Civil War history.

This is a criticism blog and critics will be critics.

p.p.s. Harry has an interview with the author here.

A UFO sighting called "Lincoln"

It's not out yet but IMDb has 916 users who rated the Spielberg film "Lincoln" an aggregate 7.9 stars out of 10.

How do they do that?

An unfinished version of the film was shown in NY recently. Here's the report, here's a review.

Lincoln isn't as sentimental as you might expect from Spielberg ... Lincoln veers too often toward becoming a somnolent period piece ... Though it might have worked better as a tighter, purely political thriller...

I'm hearing OSCAR, baby!

Meanwhile, here's a compendium of twitter reviews from the watchers. Do we like on twitter? Or is that facebook? Because I like:

Not as bad as the trailers suggested but not interesting enough to watch again...

... [watch] only for hilarious overacting ...

Maybe this is a template, Shakespeare for the Americans. Lots of shouting, arm waving, "scenery chewing." Why should a lot of out-of-control stage actors own all that excess?

(Lon Chaney Sr. would have made a great Spielberg Lincoln.)

Gardening advice

The host of a gardening show this morning observed (paraphrase follows):

I've been at this for 50 years and I still struggle to understand things. But if you go into the big box store and the clerk reads you something off a product label, that's now expert opinion.

Do you go to the big box stores in Civil War history (McPherson, Davis, Gallagher, etc.)? They have tiny labels on their products that solve all sorts of Civil War problems. Is that where your "expert opinion" is coming from?

Gardening is harder than that.

The London bookshop map

Give it time to load.

Sludge alert - Lincoln edition

A correspondent kindly sent me a little item.

Get ready for a lot more of this with the Spielberg movie coming out.

“Sidney Blumenthal, journalist, author, historian, and former senior adviser to President Clinton, is completing a book titled The Man Who Became Abraham Lincoln: How He Won the Civil War and Was Assassinated.”

Indeed, the more of a hit this Lincoln film is, the more bad Lincoln books will clog the bookstores.

Don't expect Lincoln scholars to put up a fight, though. They rolled over for Cuomo, Goodwin, O'Reilly and McPherson.* They will welcome their new sludge overlords.

It's become a habit with them.

*Small Caveats for Guelzo and Foner however, for remarks against Goodwin's book made in reviews.

Update, 10/19:
Our correspondent writes,

And what’s with that awful book title? You could envision a series:

The Man Who Became John Kennedy: How He Wooed Marilyn and Was Assassinated

The Man Who Became James Garfield: How He Pissed off Charles Guiteau and Was Assassinated

The Man Who Became Elvis: How He Became a Star and Was Found Dead on the Toilet

The Woman Who Became Margaret Mitchell: How She Wrote Gone With the Wind and Was Run Over by a Taxi

Maybe we should go easy on him - is it his first book? Isn't everyone's first book about Lincoln?

The greatest thing about Civil War history

This blog was founded oh so many years ago in violent reaction to the low standards in Civil War history. Over the last decade it has stayed "on topic" - in other words, it has remained dour, pessimistic, bitter, and critical.

The next post will be number 4,000 and so I wanted to log a kudo to a field that may be unique in this one very important respect. Civil War history is powered by self-taught aficionados who do original research, publish books and articles, and search for the truth on a path by which they learn good historical practice, ethical evidence handling, and judicious evaluation. I am continuously impressed by the vibrant subculture. I am continuously impressed by amateurs who discover and maintain the highest professional standards.

You might even say that the ACW subculture is actually the dominant culture. That is very, very cool and what other scene can touch that?

I came to this field from from 20 years reading in modern European history. They don't have this. Their professional standards are infinitely higher than a McPherson's, but they don't have a vibrant subculture of independent researchers concerned with truth over narrative.

As the Internet and its manifestations enable one to break down "authority" with deeply researched challenges, the ACW buff is/was already there before the Web with pamphlets, tour guide spiels, roundtable talks, USENET posts, and the dark private mutterings issued over every primary source discovery that overturns conventional wisdom.

The ACW scene had all the potential of a self-policing discipline. My involvement with USENET and FTP in the mid-90s showed me the promise of a search for "new knowledge."

Today, we ACW readers have our professors, we have our Pulitzers, and God help us. So does every other corner of the historical publishing trade. Believe me when I say that absolutely everyone else has better of such than we - much, much better.

Nevertheless, we do love our few good professors (Harsh, Clemens, Simpson, Rafuse, Rowland, Reed, some others). And yet our real ACW juice is coming from self-taught scholars who are concerned with the ethical treatment of sources, contradictions in the master narrative handed down from the Centennial, and concerned with new research. They are enabled by small publishing houses, self publishing technology, and the Internet with all its publishing ramifications.

The headlock we as ACW readers have been held in from the nightmarish 1960s until the founding of this blog has been broken through the efforts of the self-taught researchers following moral rather than narrative compasses. They have been aided and abetted by the Savas-Beaties of the world and by other independent and adventurous publishers, often university presses.

Unless the day comes when we readers get swamped again by another tidal wave of ignoramus readers inspired by some future Ken Burns' "Civil War" schlock or by a pulp novel bestseller like Michael Shaara's "Killer Angels," we should do well. We deserve to do well.

This new century looks very promising indeed.

Foner and Hobsbawm

Blogger Ron Radosh uses the matter of fawning obituaries for Eric Hobsbawm to apply a few lashes to Eric Foner's hide:

Naturally, writing in The Nation, the left-wing’s most prominent historian and Pulitzer Prize winner, Eric Foner, lauded Hobsbawm in very different terms. Playing the old Popular Front game, Foner ignored even commenting on his defense of the old Soviet Union and of Stalin’s terror. Rather, Foner simply called him a “life-long advocate of social justice.” Obviously, in Foner’s eyes, anyone supporting Stalin and the old Soviet cause was simply revealing his concern for the peoples of the world and their persistent struggles for equality. Hobsbawm never gave up his beliefs, Foner writes- although Foner never tells readers what these were- saying only that Hobsbawm stayed firm because “out of respect for the memory of comrades who had suffered persecution or death for their political beliefs.”

Not a word from Foner about the many who were persecuted or went to death in the Soviet system that Hobsbawm (and Foner) so revere. This is not surprising. In 1994, Foner attacked Eugene D. Genovese’s Dissent essay “The Question,” writing that Genovese was prone to “right-wing ideology” because he dared to acknowledge what Foner and Hobsbawm never could — that in supporting the Soviet Union, the Left was as guilty as Stalin, and that “social movements that have espoused radical egalitarianism and participatory democracy have begun with mass murder and ended in despotism.” To Foner, the great sin is anti-Communism, and he believes that supporting left-wing tyranny is excusable and understandable.

Foner concludes that “Hobsbawm’s historical writings brought to bear a sophisticated Marxist analysis that saw class conflict as a driving force of historical change but rejected narrow economic determinism and teleological frameworks. Like Marx himself, Hobsbawm saw capitalism as a total social system, which had to be analyzed in its entirety, and rejected notions of historical inevitability. He insisted that people must strive to envision a more humane social order, but that history had no predetermined trajectory.”

So we are not surprised that Eric Foner thinks Hobsbawm to be a great historian. How could he not, since he shares with the late scholar a fond remembrance for the old Soviet Union and a nostalgia for the good work engaged in by the old Communists, like Foner’s own parents and uncles.

A commenter chips in with this note:

You mention Eric Foner. He’s best known as the author of the standard (don’t ask me why) history of Reconstruction in the United States, but the book of his that I read was an essay collection titled “The Battle for History” or some such. In it, he recounted some of his early life and background. His father taught (if I remember right) history at Columbia, and lost his job during the height of the McCarthy Red “Scare” for what Foner thought were completely bogus reasons. Anyway, after telling you of this, the author recounts that he was at an awards dinner with Gabor Borritt, a reasonably well-known Civil War historian who was born in Czechoslovakia, participated in the “Prague Spring” as a teenager, and fled in the aftermath, winding up in the United States. Borritt tells Foner that he grew up in a totalitarian state where freedom of expression was brutally suppressed, and Foner responds that he was brought up in such a country, too… ‘Nuff said…

I think I could have put this whole case more simply. Anyone who applies dialectical materialism to the study of history is building paradigms, not doing history. Whether Foner is in that group, I don't know.

Cats of the Civil War

Not that I visit cat sites, but is this true? The cartoonist says Abe kept four kitties in the White House. As for Lee, his cats would have to inhabit various field HQ, which seems unlikely.

Cats of the Civil War - a coffee table book concept that will eventually have its day.

Sesquicentennial beers

The full story is here with a derivative report here.

I drank a glass of Antietam Ale with my oysters last week.It was way too hoppy - left me thinking the brewers did not understand the bitter style of ales. On the other hand, they could be following demand and right now, in the beer world, hopheads are ruining it for absolutely everyone else.

IIRC, Col. Wainwright, in Diary of Battle, remarks that visitors to Burnside's tent/HQ were offered a choice of hard cider, wine, beer, or porter (the darker, fuller bodied beer whose heaviest incarnation is known as "stout porter"). Quite an incentive to coordinate.

Frederick radio, meanwhile, had a news report last weekend from a beer festival, that mentioned the porter style and explained it to the general public as being dark because it is brewed with malt.

Sorry to go all Michael Jackson on you. (Chris Wehner got to this first.)

Civil War tours of Connecticut

"Civil War sesquicentennial fever is gripping Connecticut."

Who am I to gainsay?

Celebrate Columbus Day

Here's a 572-page book that argues Columbus was Portuguese, Jewish, and an agent planted on Spain. For one cent per copy is the risk worth the expenditure?

Authors who stop writing

Very interesting topic. H/T Instapundit.

I have an ACW list: you do too.

Mine starts with Edward Steere. Yours?

Faust pities the cheaters

Drew G. Faust, the Civil War historian at the head of Harvard,

blames the current cheating scandal raging on campus, which involves as many as 125 Harvard students, on societal “pressures” and a lack of intellectual “excitement.”

This is another way of saying that her customers are determined to get the credentials they are paying for. (Link)

The Crimson reports,

Harvard first launched an investigation of 125 students in Matthew Platt’s government course “Introduction to Congress” in May after teaching fellows suspected that students may have plagiarized answers or inappropriately collaborated on the class’ final take-home exam.

The tenured professors are cheating by having "teaching fellows" handle the grading, if not the teaching. But that's not the scandal we're talking about here. And just think. An introduction to Congress - that's got to be an unbelievably hard subject. It's a tribute to our educational system that young people would even enroll in a course so daunting.

If I were Faust, I might say, "Why in Civil War history, we don't even know what plagiarism is." But that again is a different scandal and I don't know if it would help the cheaters.

Speaking of history, in the middle of the last century, Harvard ceased being a finishing school for the regional gentry. Today, it is a diploma mill for manic strivers nationally, kids who at age four are already signed up for the very best pre-kindergartens. Now the funny thing about manic strivers is that they tend to strive maniacally.

This cheating therefore opens an interesting question. If you cheat, does than make you more of a striver or more of a slacker? Because if it makes you more of a slacker, Harvard is right to be outraged to its very core and no punishment will be harsh enough. But if cheating makes the striver even more of a striver, well then, yeah societal pressures, blah blah blah, we understand, etc.

In her comments, Faust may be signalling that cheaters are the more intense flavor of what Harvard is really all about.

Update, 10/09: Meanwhile there's money to be made off of strivers:

Gerald and Lily Chow say in their suit filed in U.S. District Court in Boston that they gave Mark Zimny more than $2 million to get their sons into an elite American university, preferably Harvard.

Thanks for visiting!

If you see an idea you like here, take it, claim it as your own and run with it. You'll be helping me drain the noxious swamp that is "Civil War history."

Civil War history and the larger problem

Just when you think the social sciences have reached an acme of corruption and incompetence, Nature rides to the rescue. Scientific papers: Fraud, fraud, fraud, and fraud.

I'll give this to the natural sciences, however. I have NEVER heard of an ACW paper or book being retracted due to to errors.

Either we do a much better job than the scientists or uh ...

Charles Wilkes, in thoughtful retrospect

Wilkes was something of a loose cannon in the American navy. James McPherson, War on the Waters, 2012, p. 44

"This was the last straw for Navy Secretary Gideon Welles, who now considered Wilkes a dangerous loose cannon." Item description, Raab Collection, 2011.

"CHARLES WILTS [sic] IS A LOOSE CANNON ON A ROLLING DECK." - comments section, C-Span "Person of the Year, 1861" program, 2011.

"Captain Wilkes was what one might call a bit of a 'loose cannon,' so to speak." Paul Culliton, "What Might Have Been," 2010.

"Wilkes was a loose cannon..." Kirkus Reviews on Sea of Glory, 2004

"It wasn't until years later, finally promoted first to captain then rear-admiral, that [Wilkes] this 'loose cannon' finally became too much of a liability ..." Discussion board, 2004

"Wilkes was an egotist, a little bit of a loose cannon..." James McPherson, interview, World Socialist Website, 1999

Death of an historian

The fawning obits over historian Eric Hobsbawm's passing triggered this little thought experiment.

p.s.,Thought for the day from this obit compendium:

Most historians are by nature either short-story writers or novelists...

More the pity.

p.s. I last blogged about Hobsbawm in 2006. Kevin Levin complemented the posting. If you ride the "Lost Cause" hobbyhorse (if you believe there is such a thing as a "Lost Cause" tradition), you have to read Hobsbawm and the concept of "invented traditions," no excuses. Then you have to read Popper on what a conspiracy theory is and ask yourself if you belong to one.

Self-plagiarism webinar

This was addressed to me but I see no reason why you couldn't enroll. I'm not shilling, I'm interested in a little-discussed ethical area where our ACW friends love to romp:

Hello Dimitri,

What exactly is wrong with re-using one’s own work? Why do publications care? Join iThenticate and three expert panelists for a free, 1-hour webcast to address this widely debated and misunderstood area of misconduct.

Date/Time: Thursday, November 1, 2012 at 11:30am PST

Highlights:

Hear why self-plagiarism is a significant concern in scholarly publishing
Explore the reasons for the rise of self-plagiarism
Get insights into journalism ethics, publication ethics and how to best avoid self-plagiarism
Panelists:

Kelly McBride, Poynter
Rachael Lammey, CrossRef
Jonathan Bailey, Plagiarism Today

Register now

Spots are limited, register early! We look forward to seeing you online in a few weeks.

Best regards,

iThenticate Team