Civil War postmodernism

For at least a decade, regimental histories, diaries, memoirs, and letter collections have dominated the titles published in Civil War history, joined lately by "memory" books. These were originally sold on their own merits - the light they shed on events.

Someone got the idea that in their specificity these kinds of books cannot appeal to the general audience. They need a broader, new "angle." This someone tends to work in marketing departments.

Now there is a framing of works in pomo terms of market: race, class, gender, etc. When you pick up one of these titles, heavily promoted for contemporary relevance, you are always surprised (possibly disappointed) to see that the book is the same thing it would have been if no marketers had ever existed and no postmodernism had ever been evoked.

It is as if the authors wrote the books they wanted to and the marketers dressed them up as something else.

Postmodernism is entirely analytic. The amount of analysis in these Civil War works hovers just above zero. But a pomo work takes the record as a starting point and then elaborates interpretations. Those elaborations are the gist of the book. But in our Civil War diaries, letters and memoirs, the diaries, letters and memoirs tend to be the whole story and are left to interpret themselves.

Get past the dust jackets and Civil War readers are in comfortable, familiar territory. It appears that the authors write the books they want to write in the way they want to write them with the publisher layering on some spin after the fact.

I have at hand two randomly chosen examples, both from university presses.

The first is A New Southern Woman: The Correspondence of Eliza Lucy Irion Neilson 1871-1883. This is edited Giselle Roberts and her being credited as an editor is a tipoff that she subordinates herself to the underlying material. We have a second clue as to the editor's historical (not pomo) intentions in the title A New Southern Woman as it alludes to the New South, a named historical period. Here, it seems, we will meet a woman representing her era. Standard stuff.

Now let's look at the dust cover, back blurb: "... it provides new insights into the effects of the Civil War on the lives of elite white southern women..." From the inside jacket: "... by celebrating both the traditional and nondependent ideals of womanhood, they [the Irion women] made a dynamic contribution to the creation of a New South." From the Introduction:

With their exclusive claims to political power in tatters, defeated Confederate soldiers redefined their masculinity and racial supremacy around domestic virtue and governance. Without slavery, marriage became the legal crucible of the postwar household and the lifeline available to white men in their struggle to regain their independence and public prowess. [...] To rebuild demoralized soldiers ... southern women subordinated themselves within the domestic sphere to become the last legitimate terrain of domination for their men.

Whatever you think of the foregoing, it disappears into the smoke of Mrs. Neilson's long, frivolous, personal, chatty letters without so much as a pomo footnote or analytic editorial aside to disturb any experience of a conventional collection of letters. Here's a random example (emphasis in the original):

Are you alarmed at this mammoth sheet of paper?; & do your eyes hurt in anticipation of the task of perusing its many lines? Well! I don't wonder if neither of the two feelings should fill your breast - but this I will promise, - not to write any more than I can possibly help, & to write it "werry loud," so that your poor eyes won't suffer any more than absolutely necessary! - I could find no other paper about the house, & so was obliged to content myself with some of Mr. Neilson's account-book; for I could not postpone answering that precious letter of yours, so much wished for, & so eagerly devoured!

And so on for another three pages. The notes to this chapter give "werry loud" as a Dickensian allusion. There is no pomo content in the letter of the dozen or so endnotes. The whole book is a mass of nerve-wracking prattle. And yet this is womens' studies somehow.

A second example comes through the mail as Nature's Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia. This is an interesting short work, perhaps the length of a long New Yorker article, and part of the interest is in its peculiar organization.

Young author Kathryn Shively Meier wrote it as a contribution to "environmental history" - she calls this the lens through which she viewed her historical work. She credits teacher Gary Gallagher for getting her original manuscript and ideas into this final form.

This lens of environmental history blocks out essential light. Meier addresses soldier health and how the environment affected that health with an entirely self-conscious purpose of excluding all medical history from her writing (although she does resort to medical data here and there). This is a contortion that keeps you reading. You expect she will have to acknowledge some standard works here or there but it never happens, generating quite some suspense.

In considering the effects of nature and the shaping of nature in camp life, if you wanted to limit yourself to that, there would be much to say nevertheless. But here we have just five short chapters, some topically peripheral: "Health and the American Population before 1862," "At War with Nature," Soldiers and Official Military Health Care," "Becoming a Seasoned Soldier," "Straggling and the Limits of Self-Care," and a conclusion.

The contents of these chapters is light, very much easy reading, and the effect on the reader is one of having a read a sort-of-interesting magazine article.

Ms. Meier wrote the book she wanted to write and then she and Gallagher formed its pieces into "environmental history." Which is not history at all but historicism, just as womens' studies is historicism.

But then neither is it "environmental history." It is an idiosyncratic book that has its own merits and demerits but one which has been dressed up as something it's not.

If you promise pomo, give me my pomo.

Consider the contrast drawn by Marx between "naive socialists" and "scientific socialists." There seem to be rigorous pomo writers and then a great flock of vague, loosey-goosey types. Our Civil War contingent seems to fall between the loosey-gooseys and the outright fakes.

Shepherdstown battlefield and Gettysburg Magazine updates

A nice local piece summarizes progress in collecting bits of Shepherdstown land. Scroll down for the significance of the battle (cute).

In other news, Gateway Press announced via email today that University of Nebraska Press is picking up Gettysburg Magazine. Check out their want ad for an editor-in-chief.

Gettysburg remains open for hide and seek

Tourists are playing "catch us if you can" as Gettysburg park rangers are out in force to prevent park visits. A poster to a discussion board says, They

are rousting people and if they catch them more than once, they are citing them. Like it or not, it's trespassing.

Sounds like more work than leading a leisurely tour.

The official blog of the Gettysburg National Military Park has officially stopped posting as that could also be considered labor.

At Kennesaw,

Chief Park Ranger Anthony Winegar stood guard at the entrance of the parking lot all day Tuesday, trying to keep park attendees from driving into the parking lot.

He was being paid that day to be an anti-park ranger. One imagines they'll send in the drones next.

In Mississippi,

It’s the one hundred and fifty-first anniversary of the Battle of Corinth and National Park Service employees were supposed to hold educational programs for visitors at The Crossroads Museum ... But we don’t have that right now...

Meanwhile, Manny offers compensatory photos for would-be Antietam visitors while Kevin feels for the NPS employees.

Folks, we have to get all hallowed ground out of the hands of the federal government. That's a no-brainer.

Unusual gallery of historical photos

No previous photograph of Lincoln with a cat has been found.

The drama of Yalta apparently had many lighter moments.

Patton was rarely photographed with whiskers.

These unusual artifacts were curated here.

Don't fake your Amazon reviews

The New York Attorney General's office has made it their business to prosecute people who post fake reviews. And this is no chickenfeed operation: investigators "snag[ged] 19 companies writing phony reviews on Yelp and other websites ... a year-long sting operation ... fined each [perp] between $2,500 and $100,000 ..."

Amazing.

OT: AJP Taylor remembered

For those of us studying central European history in the '60s and '70s, AJP Taylor and Hugh Trevor-Roper were inescapable in exactly the same way that McPherson would be inescapable to a Civil War student today.

This piece is an overlong but occasionally interesting appreciation of Taylor. Both Taylor and Trevor-Roper became media stars, opining on certain topics and they were used in electronic media in the same historical-color way as Doris Kearns Goodwin is used on the Imus show and similar god-awful venues.

In my sixteen years of annual summering in Scotland, they became familiar faces to me, very much corrupted by punditry. Taylor had a tendency to cut to the quick, which TV liked, and which showed him well against more reflective counterparts.

Taylor's quippery reminds our author of a very fine Evelyn Waugh observation:

We remember the false judgments of Voltaire and Gibbon and Lytton Strachey long after they have been corrected, because of their sharp, polished form and because of the sensual pleasure of dwelling on them.

That covers a lot of ACW pop history as well.

"... even at his worst he warranted public attention ..."

That is the epitaph of a public intellectual, not of an historian.

Civil War 150, a going concern

The Washington Post's Sunday supplement "Civil War 150" continues, with "Chapter VII" appearing Sunday. The "chapters" label suggests odd time intervals, but the advertising is robust. Let me therefore be the first to predict that this supplement will continue after the Sesquicentennial (Bezos permitting).

It's not just the WaPo's advertising that makes my case: ACW books are well advertised elsewhere, even in such incongruous places as the NYRB and the Claremont Review.

One problem with publishing history in a newspaper, however, is that the material is corrupted by newspaper values. One article this weekend had a sidebar with pictures of real human beings, who had suffered and endured, headlined "Cast of Supporting Characters." Characters!

In the same way, other headlines were overly dramatic; stories were heavy laden with human interest and cute little bits; emphasis was skewed for story payoffs; the whole sickening panoply of infotainment is here regularly applied to what deserves more respect. Emphasis has to be on what is most interesting or amusing.

Why be surprised though? American Heritage magazine, journalism to its innermost core, pioneered this way of dispensing history and was rewarded for it over several decades.

American Heritage was everywhere. This, at least, is contained.

Creative anachronisms

In 2008, an airline executive named John Adams published a book, If Mahan Ran the Geat Pacific War, Alfred Thayer Mahan being the great naval strategist (and son of the teacher of Civil War generals, Dennis Hart Mahan). In this thought experiment, Adams applied extracts from Alfred Thayer Mahan's work to the decisions and ad hockery of the U.S. war against Japan. He proposed Mahan's doctrines as substitutes to the then current doctrines of naval warfare.

There is merit in this kind of anachronism.

Previously in this blog, we have asked readers to consider the modern (but now superseded) doctrine of "effects based operations" as a rationale for Jefferson Davis's strategy. We have mentioned Rowena Reed's wonderful Combined Operations in the Civil War, which borrows implicitly from the WWII era doctrine of the same name and which the reading public in her day was generally familiar with.

Often the Civil War reader is exposed to the 20th Century doctrine of "total war" (although ACW authors give this lip service rather than the full treatment). Personally, I have toyed with ideas for a number of posts addressing the relevance of several interesting modern doctrines, especially the interwar "industrial web" theory and the "double effect" doctrine, among others.

The problem may be one of interest. Over the last 60 years, at least, military science has been the missing ingredient in military history. Readers are not used to it and it can be jarring where the bookbuyer expects a low-intensity cozy.

The point in Civil War publishing often seems to be to write a book that will read as easy as a detective novel. The narrative is paramount. There is a story arc and loads of human interest. Villains and heroes contend. No matter what the struggle, micro or macro, the outcome advances us to a dramatic resolution.

Of course, there are those few books that are dense with military science and resemble publisher excretions of completely indigestible matter. Or maybe they are atonements for all the talespinning pushed out into the marketspace, rather like the odd "highbrow novel" published by a trade house.

Brent Nosworthy authored two works specifically to address the military science deficit. Archer Jones tried to tackle the strategic level issues. Clayton Newell, like Adams another moonlighter, wrote about the evolution of operational theory in the early western Virginia offensive. There are some more examples of course.

Some readers, way into battle data, may protest that they are neck deep in military content. But this is not theory or doctrine. Battle books may have a reference to contemporary tactical doctrine, esp. regulations, but mainly address who stood where and in what formation and maybe, in a really good book (rare), what some movement formation might have been, who ordered it, and by what reason (in this, see especially Edward Steere on Longstreet in the Wilderness for a model exposition).

Adams did not write his Mahan book to punish naval history readers and he did not enroll them in an tough military science course. He attempted to enrich them by opening vistas of thought, analysis, and imagination. He tried to provide a deeper reading experience. Certainly, Civil War history needs the same.

A case study in Lincolnology

I had a chance to work through all of the McClellan references in Abraham Lincoln, Esq.: The Legal Career of America's Greatest President by Roger Billings and Frank Williams. The volume presents 12 chapters on different topics by different authors.

No one chapter deals with his railroad career. Four mention his railroad lawyering in passing, typically referring to the Illinois Central case of 1852 as an example of his billing ethos. And that's it - Lincoln the railroad lawyer is nearly expunged from a book about Lincoln the lawyer.

Needless to say, none of these authors seems to have the slightest idea that Lincoln worked for McClellan. That tells us about the low standards in Lincolnology.

There is a little good news, however, in that the authors avoided retelling or even paraphrasing Herndon's account of the imaginary billing showdown between GBM and AL. From Herndon's biography:

Probably the most important lawsuit Lincoln and I conducted was one in which we defended the Illinois Central Railroad in an action brought by McLean County, Illinois, in August, 1853, to recover taxes alleged to be due the county from the road. The road sent a retainer fee of $250. In the lower court the case was decided in favor of the railroad. An appeal to the Supreme Court followed, and there it was argued twice and finally decided in our favor. This last decision was rendered some time in 1855. Mr. Lincoln soon went to Chicago and presented our bill for legal services. We only asked for $2,000 more. The official to whom he was referred was supposed to have been the Superintendent, George B. McClellan, who afterwards became the eminent General. Looking at the bill he expressed great surprise. "Why, sir," he exclaimed, "this is as much as Daniel Webster himself would have charged. We cannot allow such a claim." Stung by the rebuff, Lincoln withdrew his bill, and started for home.

That's not the end of the story but enough.

Now Lincolnology is "sophisticated" enough not to mix McClellan up the matter because he was not at the railroad in the relevant timeframe and Herndon told variants of the story without McClellan. (See here, p7-8 for more.) Herndon got the story second hand from AL and recounted it later in life, so this anecdote is not one to take to the bank. He has this colorful quote embedded in a second-hand story which he misremembers.

And yet the story survives intact with McClellan excised in favor of "an official." Being wrong on the detail of McClellan rejecting the bill, the Dan Webster quote was too cute to let go. Look for it in your favorite pop history Lincoln biographies.

General Grant and the Rewriting of History

General Grant and the Rewriting of History is the first of a series of books by Frank P. Varney. This one deals with Grant vs. Rosecrans, the next one with Grant vs. Warren. Author Varney builds solid cases, controversy by controversy, for a "pattern of deceit" in Grant's records of events. He examines primary sources to show how deeply committed modern historians are to Grant's late-life memoirs for their "authoritative" accounts of events.

The work is analytical but uses an episodic narrative structure to anchor the reader in events and timelines. Each chapter addresses a discrete military episode. This allows readers to dip into topical chapters in the order of what interests them most.

A typical chapter divides into sections: (1) the context, (2) the controversies, (3) what the historians say, (4) charges, (5) evaluation, (6) historiography.

(1) “The context” is a brief overview of events, including a high level timeline.

(2) “The controversies” lays out the Grant position.

(3) “What the historians say” is a smattering of statements representing the common wisdom. These tend to mirror the Grant position, often to the embarrassment of quoted historians.

(4) “The charges” takes the assertions of Grant and the historians, frames them as charges against Rosecrans, and then examines them against the evidence. This is the exciting part.

(5) “The evaluation” is the author’s summary of the examination of the charges.

(6) “Historiography” recapitulates selected primary source quotes. This section is fun to read but intrinsically weak. It needed to be a listing of all known sources touching on a given controversy and where the support of such sources fell.

The episodes covered are Iuka, Corinth, Stones River, Tullahoma, Chickamauga, and Missouri.

Additionally, Varney covers the relief of Rosecrans after Chickamauga and he has a chapter on Shiloh which absents Rosecrans but represents a paradigm for Grant’s “pattern of deceit” in dealing with matters of record. His first and last chapters are bookends: “What We Think We Know” and “What We Know.” If you are like me, when challenged you ask yourself, "Why do I think that? What's my source?"

Mr. Varney makes hay with a problem we have bemoaned in this blog from day one. Historians, mainly pop historians, summarize historical problems in a single statement attached to a single source. (For this sin against history, see especially anything by McPherson or Goodwin). Not to flog a dead horse, but an event shrouded in controversy is resolved by “that’s the way it is” and a note citing a single source that summarizes the author’s position. This is terribly offensive to the deep reader and what Varney has found is that Grant’s memoirs are single sourced repeatedly to put paid to messy history.

In this work Brooks Simpson comes out well (chided for judgments, not evidence handling) and Steve Woodworth quite poorly (chided for sole sourcing his controversies). Our friend Wiley Sword is up to his Hood-y tricks and Perret, Catton, Fuller and many others provide cannon fodder for Varney’s analysis. I think Varney cheapened his arguments by wasting time on plagiarist Jean Smith and polemicist Edward Bonekemper as if they were worth correcting.

I am all for historiography and this is that good thing. My weakness is a limited familiarity with the primary sources in these matters and I am forced to yield to the strength of Varney’s presentation and (provisionally) trust him in his evidence handling. If this seems extravagant, consider that Varney has written a book about evidence handling (this one) and seems unlikely to commit the sins of Grant authors as he castigates them for their bad behavior.

Those of you who read Lamers’ biography were certainly struck, as I was, by the case for Rosecrans and especially Grant’s “participation” in the battles of Iuka and Corinth.* We Lamers readers have been puzzled by Civil War history for some time and Varney helps us directly with our confusion.

General Grant and the Rewriting of History is dual purposed. It presents a critical review of the Grant literature, much needed, much desired; and it presents a rehabilitation of Rosecrans, who is denigrated in the ubiquitous Grant literature. I believe that this is too much for one book. It undermines the literature review by allowing the unhappy targets of Varney’s analysis to claim he is a Rosecrans partisan, not an honest broker, etc.

In Civil War game design, if one can use that as a proxy for pop culture, one constant seems to be the high quality ratings assigned to the General Rosecrans tokens. I think the bad opinion of Rosecrans is limited to the ranks of Grant authors rather than the reading public. In other words, Varney may have compromised an important lit crit with a defense that needn’t be made. But the author gets to pick his fights, whether or not the reader approves.

Now to quote extensively from this work would explode the length of this post. Let me ration myself to one issue. I would have liked to post Varney’s debunking of the myth of the “cracker line,” but he has at it from so many directions using so many sources that it would take many posts to cover the ground he does. More manageable is the report that Rosecrans broke down and wept at Chickamauga.

Most historians simply report Rosecrans as a weeping wreck and cite [Captain Alfred] Hough [of Negley’s command]. [Author] Glenn Tucker, however, says that Hough cited an unnamed eyewitness, which would greatly lessen the reliability of the story. However, it is even worse than that. Hough’s letters make no mention whatsoever of the supposed episode of Rosecrans sobbing to his confessor. That entire account owes its existence to a margin note in the manuscript of Hough’s autobiography - a margin note written by his son. It was he [the son] who gave the undignified scene to us, that Rosecrans was so distraught that he was unable to even give orders to Hough - which directly contradicts the eyewitness account of his father. Alfred Hough made no mention - in his letters or autobiography - of the episode. The only reason we have it is because [of] his son - who said that he heard it “only once” from his father ... [In] the written accounts Hough did leave us ... Hough said that Rosecrans gave him orders for Negley and Thomas.

[Emphasis in original]

I may have overstated my reservations in the sense that I recommend this book without reservation. Varney’s is the kind of work we need: deliberate, analytic, corrective. Anyone with Grant books on the shelf needs to go through this in order to get the full sense of a critical alternative view, not just of Grant but of the entire war in the west.

I look forward to the response of Grant authors and to the volume on Warren.

*In 2001, there was a book published on acoustical shadows which devoted a chapter to explain Grant’s failure to assist Rosecrans at Iuka as due to this phenomenon. Another chapter explained McClellan’s failure to assist Rosey at Rich Mountain due to the same effect. An interesting book with Rosey twice victimized by nature, as it were.

How I spent my summer vacation

Well, it hasn't been a vacation really: a half day here and there. But I am awaiting a book delivery that will enable me to conclude my McClellan-Lincoln Illinois Central RR research/writing and I am terribly pleased at what I have found so far. I'm not stopping for nothing ... I think I have run out of material.

When you put the scraps together, the dots produce wonderful surprises. Stay tuned.

Author Conclave July 28-30

The Savas-Beatie author conclave convenes shortly. It's free and these are wonderful authors.

Some Sam Hood interviews

My intention was to dissect some of the Wiley Sword assertions about Gen. John B. Hood using author Sam Hood's new book and the OR references Sword used. But there is a lazy way out: link to some good Hood interviews given in 2012.

Here is Eric Wittenberg's with its overview of the content of the discovered Hood family papers.

Kraig McNutt, part 1, is not an interview with Hood but a collection of reactions from authors with "skin in the game" to the discovery of the papers. Sword has two responses, well worth reading, and the authors in general are very protective of the established work. Hood responds to them in the comments section.

Kraig McNutt, part 2, offers a single question and answer with the author and presents comments with responses from Hood.

(Here's a link to all of the relevant McNutt postings.)

I am impressed by Hood's criticism of Sword's handling of sources in John Bell Hood, but I say that as one without familiarity with the relevant material. I should also confess that how deeply I hate pop culture outbursts like these Swordisms collected by Hood for what might be called the Beauregard edition. Page numbers are in parentheses:

"Beauregard was thoroughly shocked" (107); "exasperated" (107); "very much disturbed" (107); "fuming about the callous treatment by Hood" (107); PGTB was "determined to retaliate" (110); "callous treatment by Hood [caused] smoldering resentment until finally another heated confrontation occurred" (110); Beauregard was "livid" (111); "frustrated" (110); "exasperated" (110).

The best parts of this new book is watching author Hood disassemble each emotional assertion using Sword's own sources. And Sword is not the only one getting this treatment. Our problem in Civil War history is much bigger than Wiley Sword.

Wiley Sword - an interesting historian

From Sam Hood's John Bell Hood. The author is quoting from Sword's book The Confederacy's Last Hurrah and has added the emphasis:

"Already when en route to South Carolina, he [Gen. Hood] had passed through Augusta and probably met with a distant relative, Gustavus Woodson Smith, the crusty old army engineer who was Hood's good friend. Hood apparently poured out his bitterness to Smith, who then may have published the long, rambling article that appeared in the Augusta, Georgia, Daily Constitutionalist on February 5, 1865."

Now that's history made interesting!

Cannonballs are terrifying...

... if you don't know shot from shell.

You wonder how artillerymen mustered the courage to handle these mysterious, unstable and unpredictable items of "ordinance."

(H/T R. Bonds.)

Fuller and Hawthorne on older generals

From JFC Fuller's Generalship: Its Diseases and Their Cure:

In my book – The Generalship of Ulysses S. Grant – I pointed out that, in 1861, the average age of twenty Federal and Confederate officers who, as generals, played leading parts in the war, was thirty-eight and a half years. [...] In war it is almost impossible to exaggerate the evil effects of age upon generalship, and through generalship on the spirit of an army. In peace time it may be otherwise, but in war time the physical, intellectual and moral stresses and strains which are at once set up immediately discover the weak links in a general’s harness. First, war is obviously a young man’s occupation; secondly, the older a man grows the more cautious he becomes, and thirdly, the more fixed become his ideas. Nothing is more dangerous in war than to rely upon peace training: for in modern times, when war is declared, training has always been proved out of date. Consequently, the more elastic a man’s mind is, the more it is able to receive and digest new impressions and experiences, the more commonsense will be the actions resulting. Youth, in every way, is not only more elastic than old age, but less cautious and far more energetic.

From Nathaniel Hawthorne's article "Chiefly About War Matters":

... we were received by the commander of the fortress [John Wool] with a kind of acid good-nature, or mild cynicism, that indicated him to be a humorist, characterized by certain rather pungent peculiarities, yet of no unamiable cast. He is a small, thin old gentleman, set off by a large pair of brilliant epaulets,—the only pair, so far as my observation went, that adorn the shoulders of any officer in the Union army. [...] There can be no question of the General's military qualities; he must have been especially useful in converting raw recruits into trained and efficient soldiers. But valor and martial skill are of so evanescent a character, (hardly less fleeting than a woman's beauty,) that Government has perhaps taken the safer course in assigning to this gallant officer, though distinguished in former wars, no more active duty than the guardianship of an apparently impregnable fortress. The ideas of military men solidify and fossilize so fast, while military science makes such rapid advances, that even here there might be a difficulty. An active, diversified, and therefore a youthful, ingenuity is required by the quick exigencies of this singular war.[...] It is a pity that old men grow unfit for war, not only by their incapacity for new ideas, but by the peaceful and unadventurous tendencies that gradually possess themselves of the once turbulent disposition, which used to snuff the battle-smoke as its congenial atmosphere.

(Wool would have been 78 during Hawthorne's visit.)
p.s. Of related interest...
General Wool writes a letter
Generals who faint
"Why senior military leaders fail"

And for a blow-by-blow account of Wool's machinations against McClellan during the first Richmond campaign, see the most recent volume by the late, great Cap Beatie.

Trenton Iron Works - some notes and conjecture

It was something like a couple of decades ago that Trenton historian Charles Webster and I were sitting in that city's library speculating about the oddities of G.B. McClellan being posted to Trenton and then being buried there (along with his wife and father-in-law Randolph B. Marcy, sans Mrs. Marcy).

Charlie proposed that the outcome was tied to Trenton Iron Works, where Marcy had served as an Army inspector and where the owners had been influential Democrats. He didn't have anything specific but was working on it. We filed what "explanation" we had under "ties to the city."

I am not sure Charlie called it Trenton Iron Works. We locals called the site "Cooper Iron Works" and the business went through name changes. At one time there was a 19th Century companion firm, same owners, called Trenton Steel and Iron Works. For purposes of this post, I'm going to refer to the complex as Trenton Iron Works.

To get where we are going, we'll need a timeline.

1838 - New York's illustrious Albany Regency ends with the defeat of William Marcy (D) at the hands of William Seward and Thurlow Weed (W) in the NY governor's election.

1847 - Trenton Iron Works is incorporated by Peter Cooper (photo, right), Abram Hewitt, Edward Cooper (son) and James Hall, strong, moneyed New York Democrats.

1848 - The barnburners split the Regency, burying this Democrat faction. Peter Cooper is a barnburner.

1849 - Capt. Randolph Marcy, of the Regency Marcys, blazes the Marcy Trail, from Fort Smith to Santa Fe.

1851 - Marcy is on the Belknap expedition in Texas.

1852 - Marcy and McClellan are on the Red River expedition.

1855-1859 - Maj. Robert Anderson is "... assigned to the light duty of inspecting the iron beams produced in a mill in Trenton, New Jersey for Federal construction projects."

1856 - Gustavus Woodson Smith (a civilian) becomes chief engineer of the Trenton Iron Works (Odyssey of a Southerner). Marcy is on a Texas survey. G.W. Smith introduces McClellan to Abram Hewitt, co-owner of Trenton Iron Works and director of the Illinois Central Railroad (McClellan's War, Odyssey of a Southerner).

1857 - Marcy wars on the Seminoles and then "received national fame for a winter march of over a thousand miles" during the Mormon war. McClellan resigns from the army for a position with the Illinois Central (McClellan's War). G.W. Smith becomes a director of the Illinois Central (Odyssey of a Southerner). McClellan begins his supervision of a contract railroad attorney named Abraham Lincoln.

1858 - Marcy prepares his book The Prairie Traveler. G.W. Smith goes to work for Peter Cooper, co-owner of Trenton Iron Works, as the deputy NYC Streets Commissioner. Cooper resigns after six months and Smith steps up to the full title(Odyssey of a Southerner).

1859 - Marcy becomes a regimental paymaster. Peter Cooper founds Cooper Union.

1860 - Peter Cooper sells out his stake in Trenton Iron Works to the other owners. McClellan takes up the presidency of the Ohio & Mississippi RR Eastern Division through the good offices of S.L.M. Barlow, Democratic activist.(McClellan's War). Barlow is a member of New York's Union Club as is Edward Cooper, co-owner of Trenton Iron Works. Abraham Lincoln is offered position as staff legal counsel to the New York Central Railroad based on his work for McClellan and the Illinois Central (Abraham Lincoln as a Railroad Attorney and, better, Ellis and Ellis in Billings).

1860 - (Worth its own entry and emphasis) G.W. Smith becomes Chairman of the National Democratic Committee for the City and County of New York. (He backs the Breckinridge ticket.)

Perhaps this is too nebulous for many readers, but I find it interesting. One missing piece here is Randolph Marcy. His whereabouts are given to show what few opportunities he would have had to be posted to the Trenton Iron Works, as Charlie believed he had been. The Marcy-Trenton connection remains mysterious.

Anderson's place here might also confuse but there is a familial McClellan connection that appears in Whitelaw Reid's history of Ohio in the ACW. Robert Anderson, worked with Smith, the Coopers, Hewitt, and Hall for years. As McClellan settled into Cincinnati society in 1860 (his entrée into the principal literary club having been managed by John Pope), his military future is taken up by the city's business roundtable headed by one Larz Anderson II, nephew of the major. Larz and company petitioned both Gov. Dennison and Ohio's politicians in Washington for McClellan's leadership of Ohio troops. Perhaps there was an Ironworks connection at work.

Lincoln's possible connection to the Trenton Iron Works is a notion "under development," if it ever gets developed. The offer of a job with the NY Central would have come from the company of a powerful New York Democrat, Erastus Corning, who knew the Regency, likely had dealings with some combination of Barlow, Cooper and Hewett and who certainly had many dealings with Lincoln backer Thurlow Weed. Interlocking boards? Word of mouth? And from where? More work to do.

Democrats Edward Cooper (Peter's son) and Hewitt would both eventually serve as mayors of New York, Hewitt gaining fame as the man who planned for a city subway system. The New York mayor who opened the subway system for business was Max McClellan, the general's son. Will the circle be unbroken? Not in 1904, anyway.

Meanwhile, here's Marcy's obit. The Trenton burial is not explained although we know GBM has predeceased him and we guess his daughter has committed to be buried in some future time next to her husband. Could this be the motivation for siting Marcy's gravesite?

We have not solved the mystery of McClellan's (or Marcy's) posting to Trenton but have some meat for informed speculation - the best kind.

The Ironworks were a political mill where power, money and Democratic politics mixed with military celebrity.

Ethan Rafuse

Ethan Rafuse has opted "to spend my time in other ways than blogging." This is a good thing since he is one of a small number of Civil War authors doing new and interesting books. We need the books more than the posting, so I have wished him a good riddance from Civil Warriors.

Earlier this year, Brooks Simpson linked to an interesting paper by Rafuse that I intend to write about here. I have also sketched notes for a long post collecting what we know about McClellan's supervision of Lincoln before the war -- relying much on Ethan's research and the work of another, more obscure author.

So, one can still be in the blogosphere without having to be of the blogophere.

Hood on Hood

Sam Hood weighs in at Kevin Levin's blog on the subject of my book review of a few days ago.

p.s. I have a medium length post in preparation illustrating the sins of Wiley Sword ennumerated by author Hood.

Comic book heroes

I thought this painting by Ann Null was over-the-top.

But then I looked at the source/inspiration. Super Stonewall comes to you courtesy of Manassas National Battlefield Park.