Quartermaster Meigs

Remember when one subtitle was enough? Here we have The [emphasis in original] Quartermaster: Montgomery C. Meigs * Lincoln’s General * Master Builder of the Union Army.

So, our problems start with the title. Really, Meigs reads out as Seward’s general, later becoming Stanton’s general (Lincoln appears disinterested from first to last). As for "Master Builder of the Union Army," as I have said before, there were two, McDowell and Franklin, who as staff officers under the direction of Salmon Chase created the tables of organization and equipment under which the Union armies fought. Meigs’ job was to provide the equipment and supplies specified by McDowell and Franklin and approved by Simon Cameron.

"Master builder" appears wordplay on his engineering and construction history. In this builder phase, the Capitol architect called Meigs “a military upstart who happens to have the power to annoy.” More than an insight, this might be a paradigm.

With Quartermaster, the less you know about Meigs, the more enjoyable the read. Author Robert O’Harrow Jr. is a Washington Post reporter who moves the story briskly past multiple scandals and crises. This may be the publisher’s preference. Simon & Schuster’s mass market likely has no time for “scholarly minutiae.” So, when Meigs bungles a foreign procurement early in the war, Congress bans foreign military imports for the duration. No foul, no harm? Certainly, no blame, no details.

The Fremont procurement matter gets a little more attention than Meigs’ many others disasters. Even so, we get the data needed to see that this story is not on the level:

Meigs permitted [Quartermaster Justus] McKinstry to buy as he saw fit and, in an emergency, even to set the prices.

Meanwhile…

Meigs told McKinstry and Fremont to follow proper contracting procedures whenever possible and to send proposals and bids to Washington for review.

This is called a double bind. It is a CYA trap. Consider

Meigs … had passed on every [McKinstry] request for funding to the Treasury with alacrity.

Yet it is McKinstry and Fremont who appear at fault here. (Seek out McKinstry’s detailed rebuttal to the Administration’s charges - they are not mentioned here.)

After Antietam another supply crisis erupted, one where Meigs disputed the number of sound horses delivered to the AoP. Yet by January 1863,

Meigs eventually acknowledged a crucial shortcoming of his system, saying that there were not nearly enough knowledgeable inspectors to cull out lame animals ...

The quantities were significant. The War Department established a Cavalry Bureau to remedy Meigs’ inefficiency but the author implies that this mid-war improvement might be a credit to Meigs. Meanwhile two years of horse shortages have passed.

Meigs’ actual work life is a mystery. He gets in early and stays late but we have no idea what he does to fill those office hours other than exceed orders, redefine his responsibilities and obnoxiously overreach into others' portfolios. One suspects that the largest part of his wartime job was just signing papers and answering questions. That is not building an army. And we don't know if he did this himself or he delegated it.

O’Harrow has access to Meigs’ prewar diaries which raises other questions.

Meigs spends the Buchanan years complaining about Secretary of War Floyd’s corruption – was Meigs a facilitator of that corruption? How much work did he give to Floyd's friends?

O'Harrow also says, introducing G.B. McClellan, that he came from a “rich family.” Actually the McClellan family lived on the earnings of Dr. George McClellan, a colleague of none other than Dr. Charles Meigs (r) at Jefferson College in Philadelphia. Dr. McClellan was a founder of that college and prominent but not rich. How could these two doctors (and their families) spend decades at Jefferson with no social interaction worth recording? Did their children play? Did their spouses socialize? And while “rich” Dr. McClellan never supported his son that we know of, we see not-so-rich Dr. Meigs supporting his own son’s family for many years.

The diaries end before the Civil War. Mistakes continue. For instance Meigs arranges an evacuation of freedmen from Ile a Vache, “a faltering effort by Lincoln to create a colony…” This was not a Lincoln project but that of an entrepreneur named Harold Kock. It is Lincoln who rescues the colonists by directing Meigs to evacuate them.

As we go through the ACW, Meigs is treated as the Administration’s action officer doing a little of this and that. He starts the war as a captain and in terms of the way he is used, remains at that level despite his general’s rank. His large quartermaster war staff, the responsibilities of which we never learn, seems to free him for ever more special projects, projects worthy of an aide de camp.

Thus he finishes as he began.

He was never entrusted with a command; his responsibilities were divided up; and he never escaped the War Department or its intrigues. In his many corruption scrapes, he evaded censure. His attainments were shared attainments. His blunders caused death and prolonged the war..

Publishing industry snapshots

I used to do more with this but for now enjoy this industry site, filled with data and analysis.

Private ACW portraiture made public

The Army and Navy club has put its private art collection online. Have a look here and browse the whole site for more Civil War history paintings.

John Clem

Just encountered club member John Clem in our newsletter. The club account has him thrice wounded by age 13. It gives the number of 40,000 children enlisted and fighting in the ACW.

The internet version of his story are rather flat; he was a colorful celebrity who rejoined the army in peacetime.

Clem's exploits put me in mind of a movie I saw recently with many of the same elements present.

Ten-year-olds who run away from home to join a war and then stick with it are scarcer nowadays.

Civil War beer for discerning Civil War readers (Centennialists, stick to your Kool-Aid)

Antietam Brewery knows what's what. Unfortunately, the website does not include the text on the beer label (right). It says something like

Little Mac was loved by his troops for his concern over their lives, a concern that caused Lincoln to fire him.

That's near-enough history for a beer label, I think. And Mac is the only general honored with a beer label here. (IPA is not my style, but I'll make an effort to hoist some of these.)

The brewery has a Clara Barton beer as well but no Dorothea Dix. Call that a wash.

Civil War history is about choices; beer is about choices. Until Joe J, TJ or REL get honored in this way, beer history now belongs to this outstanding Civil War commander. Satisfying beer, satisfying history and all is right with the world.

The first Union mobilization

Every reader faces that early war event where Lincoln (spoiler alert: not just Lincoln) mobilizes 75,000 “militia” (spoiler alert: very little militia, per se) for 90 days or three months (spoiler alert: it’s not quite either).

We remember this milestone in part because it puzzles at first look: why that number of men and for that duration of service? This post looks at the Federal orders, the underlying law and then how some historians report on this mobilization.

Mobilization orders
The first striking thing about the mobilization order of April 15, 1861 is the signature section. It is signed by Lincoln and William H. Seward.

The second striking thing about it is how it copies the exact language of the 1795 militia act (“Militia Act”), a law that invests certain authority in the president with no reference to the secretary of state. Perhaps Lincoln wrote the order and Seward distributed it under his own name?

A third important thing about this order: it is only half an order. Although Lincoln and Seward refer to calling up 75,000 militia, the length of service is not given, even though the Militia Act specifies limits to that service. Lincoln and Seward refer to further “details” to be issued by the War Department.

A complete mobilization order would need the Lincoln/Seward order of April 15 (number of men) plus the Simon Cameron mobilization instruction dated April 15 (the “details” - duration and mustering information).

Duration of service
Cameron calls his message “the form of call on the respective state Governors for troops.” Thus Lincoln and Seward invoke the Militia Act and Cameron supplies the “how” whereby governors will comply. Cameron accidentally or intentionally crosses a statutory line by saying, “to serve as infantry or riflemen for three months, or sooner, if discharged.”

The Administration here reiterates the Act’s limits on individual service in a context where it really needed to specify the duration of its authority over the militia collectively. The executive branch has no authority over how long the militiaman serves: that is already specified in the law and can have no place in this order. The executive branch must specify the duration of the mobilization of units.

Note that the way the law is written, the emergency can outlive the availability of individuals. Units can be under federal control after their individuals have been released. This distinction is interesting and explains the strife over demobilization in the summer of '61. We have these scenes of officers appealing to their three-month men to volunteer to continue the war under a lawful federal direction that exceeds three months - past the period of statutory personal commitment.

The Act limits the president’s authority over the mobilized units providing a maximum duration of 30 days beyond the convening of the next Congressional session. This is a flexible deadline that could extend for the better part of a year or even several years (theoretically!).

Lincoln called for Congress to convene on July 4; thus his authority over the units could extend to August 3. Cameron, however, emphasizes to the governors the duration of mobilization as keyed to the individual’s three months. Depending on muster speed, Cameron’s units - governed by personal demobilization timetables - could end service as early as July 16. Mind the gap! If it takes three weeks to muster in, only then do Lincoln’s and Cameron’s timelines match up.

The Act says: “no officer, non-commissioned officer, or private, of the militia, shall be compelled to serve more than three months after his arrival at the place of rendezvous, in any one year...” Cameron uses “rendezvous” in his own communiqué to indicate the in-state mustering points. But could not the federal government have instead specified rendezvous points as federal camps in Washington, St. Louis, wherever? This seems another lost opportunity to conserve time.

In Lincoln, David Donald makes this accurate and insinuating comment: “the volunteer force would have to be disbanded earlier if the president called Congress into session earlier.” This implies Lincoln may have chosen his July 4 congressional summons to give him a full three months’ use of the force.

But Lincoln could just as well have convened Congress on September 4. The units would still have been under his authority by then though most of the men who made up the units would have exercised their rights to leave long before then.

Thus, the Administration seemed to view the practical matter of length of individual service as driving the entire mobilization. An interesting take on the law.

Now, once Congress convened it could have amended the Act to extend the individual's term of service and/or the period of mobilization. Why was this not done?

Lincoln and Seward: they specify how many but not for how long.

Cameron: he specifies for how long, shortening the statutory limit of presidential authority by tying it to the individual length of service.

Cameron's modification of the law, Seward's signing the mobilization decree, these are symptoms of the informality and ad hockery that would characterize Lincoln's entire time in office. In his Diary, AG Edward Bates makes no mention of reviewing the language in either Lincoln's or Cameron's messages. He would have harmonized them had he been allowed to.

Mobilizing “the militia”
Gov. Morgan of New York found the form of the mobilization destructive to “the distinctive character of the militia of the states.” The mechanism of that destruction is in Cameron’s message.

The levy on states is given as a number of regiments and a regiment is given as exactly 780 men. So the levy on New Jersey, for instance, is not for men as such, rather it is for four regiments of 780 men each. This devastated some of the existing militia organizations in ways we’ll explore in a later post.

The men of the United States lived under a system of universal military conscription into state militias, per the two federal militia acts of 1792 and the superseding Act of 1795. Every man who ever drew breath in the Civil War was a militia man, whether in federal service or out of it. (The few exceptions are not worth recounting.)

But what was a militia in 1861? There was the compulsory militia and the volunteer militia. The compulsory militia (required by the Act) had deteriorated in many states from active units to a mere roster of eligible men subject to call up. It was a draft roll which maybe held an annual muster. The volunteer militia, on the other hand, was comprised of men who had been exempted from the compulsory militia to form standing, active military units under state charters.

The Cameron message views the militias not as units ready for combat (volunteer militia) but rather as random individuals to be formed into brand new regiments (volunteers from the compulsories). And this is overwhelmingly what the governors supplied.

These were not militia units in any meaningful sense; it’s as if men off the street had joined the U.S Volunteers directly. Cameron: “to cause to be immediately detached from the militia of your state, the quota designated in the table below...”

Although some militia units kept their pre-war character during the mobilization, the militia regiments generally were scratch forces of men mobilized for temporary federal service into new formations.

One imagines the War Department drafting Cameron’s message with an eye toward uniformity, ease of supply, efficiency. Efficiency is not effectiveness.

Who is the author of the number 75,000?
David Donald in Lincoln says Lincoln was acting on Scott’s advice in choosing 75,000 as his force ceiling, despite other advice (not saying from whom) of 200,000 men and 300,000 men.

Michael Burlingame, in Volume 2 of Lincoln: A Life, says “The Cabinet also considered the size of a militia force to call up. Some favored 50,000; Seward and others recommended double that number. Lincoln split the difference and decided to ask the states to provide 75,000 men for three months.”

Goodwin in Team of Rivals matches Burlingame’s explanation of the 75,000 but has nothing to say about the period of mobilization.

McPherson in Battle Cry of Freedom does not explain the 75,000 and cites the Militia Act as reason for the duration of mobilization.

So we have no good explanation of how this number was arrived at and no complete discussions of the mobilization itself. And "splitting the difference" is yet another disturbing thread of informality that runs through this entire episode.

In sum
The Union mobilization of the militia is one of many complex Civil War events glossed over by the storytellers, leaving readers satisfied that they understand an event when they actually misunderstand it. Its deep meanings on many levels should repay much more study.

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Update: The figure 1,780 has been corrected to read 780.

William Manchester exposed

Yet another lying historian... who had no need to lie.

Thinking about statues

I weighed in over at Tom Woods' site.

NYT: Best ACW books

Did not know that the New York Times extended its authority worship or influence peddling into ACW nonfiction, For the authority seekers who crave the Times, this is essential and non-negotiable. The history is settled. For the rest of us, read this for amusement. Let loose the wisecracks.

p.s. The people who think that these are good books are telling us what to think about contemporary issues.

Reading levels

The great thing about being 65 is you read at the 65-year-old level.

Pop quiz

Hello, Civil War readers! Let's take a quiz.

Francis Preston Blair was the father of Frank and Montgomery Blair. We find him advising President Lincoln. The alert reader wonders why this fellow is advising Lincoln and looks to the historian for a clue. The writer feels the need to give a clue and offers one very brief biographical note.

The purpose of this quiz is to see if that note registered with you as with me.

Question for you: Relying only on your memory of past readings, Who was Francis Preston Blair? Aside from father of his sons, what one thing comes to mind?

Please take a moment to consider this before reading further.

If you had asked me any time in the past 30 years, I would have said (as so many historians have said) "an advisor to Andrew Jackson." The reason I remember this is from frustration: why is a Jackson man advising a super-Whig?

Lately I've been reading Frank Blair, Lincoln's Conservative, where the Preston information startled me. Looking into other sources, I see that old man Blair was

* Founder and co-organizer of the national Republican Party
* Chairman of the 1856 Republican Party Convention
* Co-organizer of the Maryland and Missouri Republican Parties
* Sponsor/patron of Gov./AG Edward Bates and Charles Fremont
* Foe and counterweight within the Party to the Seward/Weed faction.

This is my list - I built it from multiple sources. Historians being very stingy with facts and information, I had to gather these crumbs over the period of a week.

Now I ask you, if an historian was going to say just one thing about old Preston Blair, it seems that ANY of my points would take precedence over "an advisor to Andrew Jackson." Advisor to Old Hickory would appear near the bottom of the list. Not relevant but more colorful than party founder and leader.

Is it my bad memory, is it a handful of bad reading experiences, or could this be a more general problem? Perhaps the secret identity of Francis Preston Blair is another indicator that we are ill served by ACW historians.

It's good to mock Civil War pop history

... as Althouse does here:

Wait. I thought the Civil War was inevitable and no President could have averted it.

Is inevitable history even history?

I like the way that here Pierce's debility becomes a cause of the war (an interesting contributing cause?). And I was shocked that no one in the press had enough history to understand Trump's recent Jackson reference. Teach the children:

“I expect soon to hear that a civil war of extermination has commenced,” Jackson said, musing about arresting the Southern leaders and then hanging them....

Sears' "Generals"

The esteemed Russell Bonds finds a few good things in Stephen Sears' latest.

Whenever I feel so inclined myself, I go back and read this post.

Get Nelly

I bought Lincoln's Generals' Wives by Candice S. Hooper to read more about Mary Ellen McClellan. Something on the Internet led me to believe that here were letters and diaries from the Library of Congress used to compile the Nelly chapters. Indeed there were: five letters and a few short, tiny diaries; I did not find these referenced in the notes. It seems likely that Sears used them and Ms. Hooper cited the relevant Sears material.

For indeed Sears is all over this Mary Ellen McClellan account and the recapitulation of Centennial military history makes up the bulk of Nelly's chapters, perhaps 75% or more (citations too to Catton, Williams, even the plagiarist Nevins). Think of this as a meditation on how a very bad man can feed the worst instincts in his wife and you get the sense of it -- except for a plot twist in Nelly's alleged bad attributes also feeding George's.

Like many innocent readers, Ms. Hooper is shocked by McClellan's view of Lincoln and his cabinet, thinking it singular. This is because she has not digested the diaries of Navy Secretary Gideon Welles, Attorney General Edward Bates, the correspondence of Postmaster Montgomery Blair or many of the politicians and generals dealing with the Lincoln Administration. Of course a sensible writer has to explain to readers how anyone and his wife could hold such views.

You know the usual answers: psychological pathologies and character failings.

Depending on secondary sources and pre-packaged primary sources, Hooper misses the fine print in her derivative readings; she does not know that these are the Marcys of the Albany Regency; she has no idea that Lincoln worked for McClellan at the Illinois Central, referring to Civil War "first impressions" that never were. There are no descriptions of McClellan family life here, for she has not touched Max McClellan's papers at Princeton. In her 1864 survey she is oblivious to the project of the McClellan-Fremont fusion ticket and Jesse Fremont's possible role in that.

We don't know what music Mary Ellen liked, what instruments she played, what things she read, what plays she favored, what child rearing she did or even what she thought of McClellan's friends. If she had a social circle, it is not found here.

Child rearing, no; battlefield narrative, yes. Establishing households in Trenton, New York, Orange, no. Psychological speculations, yes. Empathy and interest, no. Elaborations on culpability, very much.

The deficiencies stack higher than at a CCW hearing.

When the Centennialists have so worn down their readers that the fresh material nowadays consists of attacks on the wives of men on the wrong side of Lincoln, we can say a publishing trend has run its course.

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For a good summary of Nevins' crime, see here and scroll down in this link. Such are the critics of Civil War generals. Hooper quotes Nevins' Pathmaker in her Fremont chapters without commenting on its poisoned content.

Civil War operas

Civil War operas are proliferating. A few I missed:

Freedom and Fire!

Cold Mountain

The Dream of a Good Death: A Civil War Folk-Rock Opera

Rappahannock County

My Civil War

What's interesting here is the idea, among producers, that the Civil War history crowd might be as arcane and fringe-y as American opera goers.

Or maybe they think that ACW readers will buy tickets to anything ACW-ish.

The ghost of Civil War past

The Confederacy’s 9th Kentucky Infantry had a drama club.

Among prisoners of war, and "Chess was the principal game, and the demand for chessmen created quite a business for a former prisoner who had erected a turning lathe."

Civil War bands "provided [soldiers] a daily acquaintance with opera melodies..."

During the Great Revival of '63-64, "Night after night troops participated in prayer meetings, worshipped, and listened to ministers proclaim the good news."

These people were nothing like us.

Light my cannon ball

Another one of those stories where the reporters and city officials are too ignorant and illiterate to explain what the problem might be:
Museum calls in bomb squad fearing possible Civil War cannon ball explosion.

Hat tip to a dear reader. Best line in the story, "...the cannon balls and artillery rounds did not have fuses and would not have exploded without having been lit, according to the Associated Press."

Let's have no smoking signs around those cannon ball stacks near the historic cannon displays.

Ramblin Spokes, ACW author: Best ways to blurb

Hello again, readers and aspiring authors!

Many a time has Ramblin been asked to blurb a book he hasn't read. As you become successful, this will happen to you. Let me help.

I  read a lot of blurbs on Civil War book jackets. It's a quick, fast, fun way to save time and energy. The material I find there, I add to my stockpile.

This guy decided to pen a navy book and asked for my opinion. I wasn't going to spend a lot of time plowing through somebody's rehash, so I said

Successfully demonstrates the navy's importance to the Union victory in 1865.

Quick and easy. He was not entirely satisfied, so I added

Places this naval scholarship in the larger context of the war.

I gave him a quick and easy context win. But I didn't want him bothering me again, so I added

A welcome addition to the literature.

Of course, every addition to the literature is welcome.

Different example: somewhere, some fool is writing yet another book about Chamberlain. You would waste time reading it. How do you blurb it? Here are some ideas:

Anyone with an interest in Chamberlain, the Civil War, Bowdoin College, postwar Maine, or any combination thereof, will enjoy it.

Sounds good but is noncommittal. Sort of like "Anybody with an interest in anything will enjoy this."

In the same vein:

His words serve as a reminder that the experience of war remained with the veterans long after the guns fell silent.

I don't even understand that sentence and I wrote it.

Of course, you always need a plan B. If the book is a total stinker and you would be humiliated to endorse it, you can still praise the intro, foreword or both:

His introduction and the foreword supplied ... are the best summary of Chamberlain's life and legend I have read.

Give every book it's due using Ramblin's simple rules of blurbing.

1856

Are there any good books on the election of '56? It seems as interesting, at least, as that of 1860.

We have all of these ACW figures in play (except Lincoln): Seward, Chase and Sumner withdraw from the Republican contest to favor Fremont.

The North American Party features a Fremont vs. Banks effort, with an agreement in which Banks is to throw the nomination to Fremont.

Somehow, our shiftless historians are loath to make connections among these personalities and  events four years later.

Is it not "natural politics" that Lincoln's hand would be forced to find a place for Fremont, the bigger and better Republican star? That he would try to capture the support of Fremont's backers for his own administration?

Is it not natural that Fremont's star backers would support him in the early war?

Is it not natural that Lincoln would try to hamper Fremont politically? That his wrongdoing would backfire into a Fremont reinstatement? That after the reinstatement he would continue to undermine Fremont?

What seems logical and natural to us seems fantasy and science fiction to the consensus historians.

Amazon book sales: protected data?

The activity of Amazon vending is a counterpart to and competition for Ebay selling. Both activities have lots of third party tools on the market to help sellers in either venue.

Recently, I have been looking at one product that provides useful sales-related data on any item you want to look up on Amazon. My feeling is that some of the data is extrapolated from sales rankings and other data is based on ratio algos keyed to the software designer's personal sales experience.

These tools sell well and are not bogus, although the black box element is troubling.

Here is a screen shot of the output from one such tool. The analytics are in the box on the right (click to enlarge). This is generated for anything you look up -- with one product exception.

When you use the tool to look up a book, no such information displays.

Makes you wonder.