A cry for "political officers"

This essay in the Armed Forces Journal calls for Congressional intervention in the selection and promotion of general officers. (Under Clinton and previously, the generals selected each other; under this president the secretary of defense has selected all new three- and four-star generals).

The author, a lieutenant colonel, is calling for intellect and achievment to be recognized. The problem in my view is that regardless of the quality of the general officer, he would be hamstrung by that Civil War ethos that dominates all thinking in the services today (linearity, synchronization, occupation of space, firepower, hierarchy); he would be hampered by a diffusion of authority across hundreds of generals and commands; he would be bound to consult dozens of civilian masters, including under-secretaries of this and that; he would be trapped in a web of "Jointness" (real word) requiring enormous investment in cross-service communications and consensus building; he would be micromanaged by anyone able claiming a stake in his success; and he would never, ever be allowed to pursue strategy because strategy is the death of political ad hockery. Strategy sets goals, timetables, means, and ends under which politicians careers could be crushed.

Furthermore to say, as this author does, that we are at Valmy on the road to Jena, makes the classic error of confusing any commanding general in any situation with the commander-in-chief as head of state (Frederick, Napoleon).

I do want political generals, however, and I do heartily agree that:

If America desires creative intelligence and moral courage in its general officer corps, it must create a system that rewards these qualities. Congress can create such incentives by exercising its proper oversight function in three areas. First, Congress must change the system for selecting general officers. Second, oversight committees must apply increased scrutiny over generating the necessary means and pursuing appropriate ways for applying America's military power. Third, the Senate must hold accountable through its confirmation powers those officers who fail to achieve the aims of policy at an acceptable cost in blood and treasure.

The Civil War was led almost entirely by political generals, chief among them Scott (Seward's creature), McClellan (Chase's creation), Grant (Washburne's project), etc. These were civilians who had left the service and returned to it at an exalted rank; and there were also civilians who donned the stars with no experience, as in WWII. The exceptions are few: Meigs, FJ Porter, Franklin, Tim Sherman all had unbroken service up until Sumter but even these were promoted far beyond their experience as a result of political decisions based on political patronage.

The post-ACW professionalism wrought by Grant and Sherman had to be radically modified for the Spanish-American war, two world wars, and Korea. Its implementation by MacNamara under Kennedy and Johnson, leavened with his management philosophies, might reasonably be declared a failure at this time.

Frederick the Great admonished, "You officers amuse yourselves with God knows what buffooneries and never dream in the least of serious service..." We can say nowadays that ours amuse themselves with the accoutrements of professionalism: procurement, seminars, reports, management training, social experiments, programs, policy development, and briefings, briefings, briefings.

There was a famous quote: "I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University." It has some applicability to this case of extreme professionalism, the number of Army generals on duty being set at 302.

(More of the same subject here.)

Confederate Memorial Day

Someone please tell them them the difference between family heritage and political heritage:

Today is Confederate Memorial Day [in Georgia] in honor of the more than 90,000 [Georgian] men who served the Confederate States of America during the Civil War ... In honor of the Confederate Memorial Day Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue has proclaimed April as Confederate History Month, according to Col. Rusty Henderson of the Georgia Civil War Commission.

Let me say this once again: Perdue is the governor of a reconstructed state with no connection to the Confederacy or slavery. We are all for Reconstruction at this point. If he wants to celebrate the CSA and/or apologize for slavery, he has to repudiate Reconstruction first. Even then, he cannot recreate the broken historical link to Georgia, CSA. This little political gesture is irrational.

The only connections in Georgia to the CSA are familial. Most Georgian residents have no Georgia background to speak of and for the few who do, from a familial perspective it would be irrational and unseemly to honor the Confederate dead in preference to their dead kin from other wars.

As to a history month of some sort, I can have no quarrel.

In other Georgian Civil War news, a man says, "General Leonidas Polk was killed in my front yard."

I would get a new front yard.

Dad: Hey, sweetheart, don't play with your dolls over there. That's General Polk's spot.

The Lincoln bicentennial

This Lincoln bicentennial could have evil repercussions.

The lesser danger is to us, the general public. For our part, we face an extended, inescapable fifth grade civics lesson delivered by pile drivers for the duration. The most primitive Lincoln sound bites will have sway in the mass media and the electronic murmur of happy talk will comprise our daily bread.

On the other hand, Lincoln scholars will be in even worse shape. Not only will they have to deliver a year’s worth of bite-sized up-with-people- color-me-glad history pap, they will face unprecedented scrutiny from their peers outside the like-minded world of Lincoln studies.

Every scholar, professor, and deep reader from whatever discipline beyond Lincoln-land, will be locked in the same media madhouse as you and me, delivered to the same electro-shock therapy from Lincoln-loving talking heads bent on making it simpler and easier for us to love Lincoln as deeply as they love Lincoln - every day, in every way. Outside scholars will not be amused to be so imposed upon, just as you and I will cease to be amused after the initial bicentennial media blitz.

The question is how fast and with what fury the respectable, informed intellectual backlash against Lincoln scholars will begin. Professors embroiled in controversy within their own fields are not going to look benignly on the we-love-consensus Lincoln students. They may view the field as undisciplined, phony, and clubby. (Not to put words in anyone's mouths, of course.)

Once scholarship-at-large decides Lincoln students are advocates, not scholars, the game may be up for Lincoln studies. The field may be relegated to the status of military history.

My advice to Lincoln scholars is therefore to begin seriously dealing with Lincoln’s many personal, professional, ethical, and managerial failings and with the serious, principled opposition to his actions and policies.

I'm willing to help restore discipline to the field. Let me therefore begin to propose feasible - not polemical - topics for a hypothetical bicentennial conference on Lincoln. I'll make it a series of short posts.

Spring is for wine

While bumbling around in some out-of-the-way Virginia wine store looking for a dry Riesling I encountered the most unusual wine find ever earlier this month. I wish I had bought it, for when shall I find such again?

It was a red - blood red, let's say. It came from the Lake Anna Winery. It was called Cold Harbor, IIRC, and had a grisly battle painting for a label. The backside label, where you normally find the name of the grape or the history of the winery had a description of the battle with no wine information.

Odd, eh? Lake Anna's web site genericizes its wine descriptions, so I can't point you to a page that proves the existence of Cold Harbor wine. But I saw it, handled it. Hmmm.

He: "Hon, I'm feeling like murder tonight, let's open up some Cold Harbor."
She: "Okay dear, but this time we'll honor flags of truce after the third glass."

Was this produced for the Cold Harbor Festival ? Weirdness squared.

p.s. Blogger Dezel has a review of the winery in question. The picture top right is from a Topps card set that rekindles the effect the label had on me.

Spring is for bumper stickers

The Civil War crowd seems to lag behind in the bumper sticker department. This seems pretty boring but it's the liveliest I could find on the Web:

Maybe this blog should have one. "It's the primary sources, stupid" That's obscure, but pithy with clarity is hard to do. Hat tip to Neptunus Lex for a way out:

Indeed.

BTW, there's a comment on Lex's post that reflects my experience as well: "the cars with the largest number of, and usually most strident, bumper stickers on them often also have the most body damage (dented fenders, broken windows, body rust, etc). Or show obvious lack of maintenance or cleaning."

Draw your own conclusions.

The allure of fakelore

There comes a point in our compressing and redacting the truth when facts become worthless soundbites. Thus:

"The 'byline,' as newspaper authorship is known, was a legacy of Civil War coverage, historian Brayton Harris said Saturday. Joseph Hooker, a Union general, made reporters 'sign' their stories because of concerns about sensitive military information being printed, Harris said.

Actually, who gets a byline and under what circumstances has been an editorial decision from before the Civil War. Bylines were not invented by military decree. In the course of the early ACW, the pressure brought on reporters by commanders caused writers to make their bylines disappear - for personal safety and to obscure who printed what secret. Consider the origins of AP in 1861:

Reporters in the field, facing censorship challenges, use the anonymous byline “Dispatch to the Associated Press.” Their stories are sent to AP’s Washington, D.C. agent Lawrence Gobright, who telegraphs them to New York.

Hooker therefore restored the byline by compulsion; additionally, some writers, operating under his purview, were bylined though they might not have met their own papers' editorial test for the honor.

Beware of gee-whiz "facts."

(Top right, reporters' CW memorial arch at Crampton's Gap.)

Friends don't let friends do archaeology

The first thing they should teach in archaeology school are skills that enable one to tell 150-year-old ruts from 400-year-old ruts. Meanwhile, these NPS archaeologists need to be taken off Roanoke and retrained.

Reminds me of a story. Ran into a party of U. of Penn archaeologists digging off a main highway in Cyprus during the early 1980s. In the course of chit chat, we discovered they did not know where or what Cyprus was; what language the locals spoke (despite billboards); nor whether or not cold beer was sold in such a country. We asked them, "How on earth do you know what you are digging for?" and they came back with gobbledygook: "We specialize in era 79 of the Tell Culture Alpha," or some such. It was the most amazing display of mind-crippling specialization I have ever seen.

Meanwhile, these two budding teenaged archaeologists knew exactly what they were after, and the NPS has hit them pretty hard. Digging up a bullet, you see, leaves a small hole.

"They have destroyed the context of understanding that portion of the battlefield," said Smith. [...] People who violate [these] laws can be fined up to $250,000 and sentenced to two years in prison.

Can you imagine? People who can't identify a rut sure know the value of a hole.

Our Civil War Army (cont.)

A new column from William Lind explores one aspect of why ours is a Civil War army:

Second Generation tactics, like those of the First Generation, are linear. In the attack, the object is to push a line forward, and in the defense it is to hold a line.

... most American units have only one [offensive] tactic: bump into the enemy and call for fire.

Read it all.

In a few years, we will be observing the 150th anniversary of our current tactical art as well as the start of the Civil War.

p.s. What the hell ever happened to vertical envelopment?

The limits of re-enactment

In a "Civil War" wedding, are characters (avatars) married or are the underlying humans married?

"I'm excited about the wedding," Shelby [the bride] said. "It's a great opportunity for people to witness what it was like in that time period." [...] The day will include an encampment and drills. An exposition in the library Reception Hall will feature exhibitors and vendors ...

Exhibitors and vendors no less.

April, this week

As an historical event associated with this week, Lincoln's death (April 15) is at the tipping point and may disappear. The week is taking on an entirely different significance.

April 15: Lincoln's death (1865).

April 16: Virginia Tech massacre (2007).

April 17: Lundgren cult brutally kills the Avery family (1989).

April 18: Beirut bombing of U.S. embassy (1983).

April 19: Waco (1993). Oklahoma City bombing (1995).

April 20: Columbine massacre (1999).

There is a thread that connects these events (excepting Waco): atrocity staged as drama.

"Booth immortalized himself by staging one of history's greatest dramas," Kauffman writes. "In the process, he accomplished what every actor aspires to do: he made us all wonder where the play ended and reality began."

(Lincoln in state - photo via Ron Rietveld)

Cunningham's Shiloh

Drew Wagenhoffer has some thoughts on the revisionist Shiloh and the Western Campaign of 1862. He likes it much but still clings to some old standards.

Our hallowed hot dogs

Avaricious heritage tourism officials in states with second-tier ACW attractions had better ponder this headline before they start banking future visitor dollars:

Some hope Civil War tour will boost Gettysburg tourism

* Some ... not all. Not all are that optimistic.
* Hope ... not plan.
* Gettysburg ... the premier attraction of the 150th anniversary.

Sorry to say, this headline is the best part of that report. The story is about a guidebook that anticipates the anniversary: Journey Through Hallowed Ground. The thing about the book that excited news reporters was the journey among hallowed cash registers: "They take hot dogs very seriously in Gettysburg, you can really get good dogs,' said travel writer David Lillard."

Note also, business owners have a lot to gain from Journey if it works the way organizers hope. "This will benefit the wineries, the historic downtowns. It offers a richer palette of choices (to the visitor)," said Journey vice president Kat Imhoff. "It is not single-themed and can really offer you everything from Native American history to 20th century history and do it in a cohesive manner."

This is what passes for anniversary prep, folks. And heaven forbid the anniversary of the Civil War should be single-themed. It's all hallowed now ...

The root causes of Retrocession

We are all taught, when young, that the District of Columbia was formed by combining bits of Maryland and Virginia. Many people, like me, go through life with that story in mind.

Along the way, we encounter modern, up-to-date maps like the one shown at right - you recognize that familiar diamond shape immediately, I'm sure, with part of both states inside the dotted line. In fact, Avis is handing out diamond shaped maps to renters at this moment.

Got an atlas handy? Behold the diamond. Ask a child to draw the capital, behold a diamond.

It was not until I began to work here that I realized all these diamonds were zirconium. The District was carved out of Maryland only. The Virginia pieces were retroceded to the state in 1847. According to this site, Retrocession was tied to the controversy over slavery.

From Retrocession to Secession. Somebody write the book.

I wonder what the Union's war would have been like if part of DC had not been retroceded, if Virginia's 1861 occupation of Arlington had actually been an occupation of the District. Would Lincoln have been less obsessed with protecting the capital? Would that rebel occupation have been an innoculation of sorts?

Meanwhile, gaze upon the strangeness that represents the true shape of DC.

Beecher bio wins Pulitzer

The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher, by Debby Applegate (Doubleday) has won the 2006 Pulitzer for biography.

In case you were wondering, here's how to win a Pulitzer:

Debby Applegate has written a highly readable story of Henry Ward Beecher. Biography is most successful in the hands of a good storyteller. Applegate knows how to spin a tale - H-Net

It is a riveting story with a larger-than-life protagonist who was sensational both in his celebrity and in his flaws. - Amherst Magazine

The book contains reference notes and a bibliography. - Twain Web.

Good thing the prize committee didn't notice this last item:

At times, however, her narrative loses its force in a thicket of personal details. [...] She also rushes through the story of the notoriously complex adultery trial, leeching it of the theatrical qualities that captivated newspaper readers at the time. - International Herald Tribune

Our struggle against half-wits

If my email correspondence is any indication, this ACW field is rich in readers struggling against the negligence and ignorance of "experts." Today, John Robb offers a turn of phrase from his sphere that captures the problem in ours:

I agree with John Boyd in [that] the term "expert" is akin to "half-wit" since expertise in a rapidly evolving field of knowledge is only valid on the first day it is attained. After that, you become a dogmatist unless you are constantly engaged in the synthesis necessary for updating your ideas.

We look at the great names in Civil War publishing and we see no updating. Dogma galore, though.

Morgan's tactics

What tactics would those be?

Tom Allison said said Morgan was “A warrior, a gentleman, and a general leader of men.” He said many of Morgan’s war tactics were not popular during the Civil War, but are now used regularly by today’s armed forces.

What This Cruel War Was Over

From this review, we have a book dedicated to proving both sides in the ACW felt it was over slavery: it appears to be an extended argument.

"Manning's footnotes and research notes cover 110 pages."

That part works for me.

The Logic of Failure (cont.)

The Logic of Failure presents patterns of failure in complex, dynamic situations. The heart of the book's data is taken from psychological observations made during role-playing games.

Here I have chosen a few of the author's observations with Civil War readers in mind. In the excerpts below, "good" and "bad" refer to successful and unsuccessful actors in the simulation. Success means the actor reached multiple goals across a complex simulation.

See what you make of these in an ACW context:

[G]ood participants made more decisions than bad ones.

The good paricipants acted more "complexly." Their decisions took different aspects of the entire system into account, not just one aspect.

The good participants ... tested their hypotheses. The bad participants failed to do this. For them, to propose a hypothesis was to understand reality... Instead of generating hypotheses, they generated "truths."

Also characteristic of the behavior of bad participants is a high degree of "ad hocism."

... bad participants are all too ready to be distracted.

... we also find among the bad participants ... single-minded preoccupation....

... good participants often reflected on their own behavior...

.... bad participants were frequently inclined to shift responsibility...

This closing thought is worthwhile: "An individual's reality model can be right or wrong, complete or incomplete. As a rule, it will be both incomplete and wrong, and one would do well to keep that probability in mind"

Especially when the pop historian invites you to pass judgement on historical figures.

The Logic of Failure

I have been having a good time reading The Logic of Failure and applying it to Civil War literature.

The author does a fine job of mining complex failure for lessons and then proposing tools and behavior to reduce failure in difficult situations. I can't help but compare it to the accounts of failure in popular Civil War literature.

In the Logic of Failure, one coping strategy is to reduce the number of variables facing you in an uncertain situation as setbacks accumulate. This translates into the general of a smitten host (or victorious host) standing still or moving away to plot next steps in a more stable environment. And that also happens to be a recipe for drawing venom from the author of pop literature.

Failure in pop literature is subject to literary requirements. First, the decision point has to be reduced to one or two factors to enable ease of writing and reading; second, the decision has to be framed in terms such as the reader can pound his armchair in vicarious participation; third, decisions should be cast as dramatically smart or stupid; fourth, the reader is invited into a world of clarity where the participants groped through "intransparency." Which is one reason "fog of war" writing is such a hard sell.

I'll post more on this subject here later tonight.

(Make that Saturday.)

The Compensated Emancipation Act

Tax filers have noticed that this year they have an extra couple of days to send in their papers and payments, thanks to a Washington holiday celebrating compensated emancipation in April, 1862.

The federal government ransomed District slaves for a price of $300 a head. liberating 3,100 souls, according to this government website. The freed were then offered $100 to emigrate outside the U.S.; it would be nice to see the payment figures for that expense to see how many ex-slaves took up the offer.

The Compensated Emancipation Act - Nevada's on board with that, too.

Welshmen in the ACW (cont.)

Tim Reese, of Welsh descent, helped me out with a recent post. I said, I see also some things I cannot pronounce: "Abraham Lincoln had a grandmother who was a Cadwaladr, hailing from the Cerrigydrudion area between Llangollen and Betws-y-Coed."

He writes:

"...Cadwaladr, hailing from the Cerrigydrudion [care-rig-ee-drudge-eeuhn] area between Llangollen [thlan-go-thlen] and Betws-y-Coed [beh-toos-ee-coyd]." In Welsh the accent is always on the penultimate syllable. I won't attempt to instruct you on how to properly pronounce the Welsh double L. It's a slurred hybrid of TH and L. Etymologists estimate the language's likely age at 7,000 years, Goidelic Celtic.

Czars and stars

I owe readers a long piece on civil-military command relations since the Mexican War.

The entire history of an office - general-in-chief - has been lost, with Civil War readers generally oblivious to or misled about this post. The fallout has been a lot of ahistorical nonsense written about Scott, McClellan, Halleck, and Grant.

The complexity of the topic is putting me off, so meanwhile, I offer Civil War readers this news item to chew over. If you can't put it into an ACW context, I don't blame you. I'll try to do so here soon:

The White House wants to appoint a high-powered czar to oversee the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with authority to issue directions to the Pentagon, the State Department and other agencies, but it has had trouble finding anyone able and willing to take the job, according to people close to the situation.

Welshmen in the Civil War

There's a new website addressing the Welsh ACW experience, offering a selection of obits and letters. I see that Cadwallader is a Welsh name. I see also some things I cannot pronounce:

Abraham Lincoln had a grandmother who was a Cadwaladr, hailing from the Cerrigydrudion area between Llangollen and Betws-y-Coed.

Not many know a Cadwallader but everyone knows a coed.

Desertion then and now

A modern note for all those readers who count on payroll musters to derive Civil War strengths:

But some unit commanders, wary of scrutiny from their superiors, go out of their way to improperly keep deserted soldiers on their rosters, and on the Army’s payroll, two officers said in interviews. To counter that, the Army adopted a new policy in January 2005 requiring commanders to formally report absent soldiers within 48 hours.

Other parts of today's news read like a page from the ACW as well:

Army prosecutions of desertion and other unauthorized absences have risen sharply in the last four years, resulting in thousands more negative discharges and prison time for both junior soldiers and combat-tested veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Army records show.

The increased prosecutions are meant to serve as a deterrent to a growing number of soldiers who are ambivalent about heading — or heading back — to Iraq and may be looking for a way out, several Army lawyers said in interviews. Using courts-martial for these violations, which before 2002 were treated mostly as unpunished nuisances, is a sign that active-duty forces are being stretched to their limits... [additional unwarrented journalistic inferences deleted] .

We went to some lengths ourselves, during the Vietnam war, to keep AWOL soldiers off the desertion rolls as long as possible. Often, we were concerned about the soldier embarked on some sort of mistake. Desertion also reflected on the command. Imagine the suppression of AWOL reports if we had been elected by our privates.

It is a terrible mistake for the Civil War reader to use payrolls as indication of unit strength; to then compare both sides' unit strengths on the battlefield; and then to make sweeping judgements about personalities based on numbers thought to be real when they are in fact false.

That falsity rests in part with desertion and the natural feeling against reporting desertion.

Coal Black Horse

Every spring publishing season, there seems to be a big ACW novel in the works. Remember the hoopla around Widow of the South? The March?

A forthcoming Civil War novel, Coal Black Horse, is generating a great deal of press. Thank AP for that... a lot of papers picked up this wire story. There's more here and a review here.

Doesn't look like my cup of tea. Robert Olmstead: "They lay with their broken legs twisted and contorted so, to even unfold a man in the attempt to configure him as a man would be near impossible."

I prefer the economy of Emily Dickinson: "'Tis populous with bone and stain / And men too straight to stoop again."

The re-enactor controversy

The mobilization of re-enactment units for duty in Iraq has been controversial. If you haven't made up your own mind about this issue yet, David Woodbury has a link to some thorough discussion of the topic.

The Stevens Battery (cont.)

Received a remarkable Easter egg in the mail tonight and I need to thank two men who made it happen.

Some time ago, Roger Todd came across my post on the Stevens Battery and was moved to send me some wonderful scans of British proceedings, after the Civil War, on the merits of this ironclad design. I still need to share those with you and haven't forgotten.

Roger put be in touch with a generous Dr. Bil Ragan, whose extensive collection of Stevens Battery material arrived this evening. Wow - many, many thanks Bil.

I think I now have an implied task: transcribe the Stevens material I found in Governor George B. McClellan's papers years ago and share that with my generous (new) friends.

For now, I should repeat to you Bil's reminder (to me) that the Stevens Floating Battery fought the Civil War as a modified, smaller proof-of-concept vessel, the Naugatuck (shown above).

Off to the cosy chair with some very special reading. See you next week.

Our Civil War army in Iraq: people are talking

It's good to see that a public discussion of the state of our Army is beginning to take place, even in the midst of this pacification effort in Iraq. One would prefer that the mass media understand how ours is a Civil War era army. Instead, Time magazine notes simply that the force is broken.

Time's piece has elements of the oldie (but goodie) 1990s Procurement Spiral of Death meme (even Foreign Affairs picked up on it). The Spiral of Death is a natural, though perhaps not inevitable, outgrowth of a Civil War military's value system: linearity, synchronicity, alignment, red tape, and a horror of national strategy - strategy that would sort means and ends.

One can see the Death Spiral at work in military readiness - but the forces that spiral towards procurement program implosions are now complemented by bills coming due after Peter has been robbed (ad naseum) to pay Paul.

Note also, per this Time piece, that units going off to war now are about as-well prepared as the New York Heavies were prepared to storm infantry positions on foot. As undrilled as the newly recruited regiments thrown into the line at Antietam (Sears estimated them at one-third the U.S. force that day). Note that those of us in combat arms during the Vietnam War got no more training than the poor devils described in this Time piece; call that an historical continuum.

The "professionalism" cherished by Grant and Sherman has now reached its uttermost extreme in tolerating conditions no political general would have countenanced for a minute. They succeeded too well in eliminating those political generals . Here we are.

Rick Beard sightings increase

It's spring and the gophers emerge from their dens
Easter approaches -
And Rick Beard once again
Walks among men.

That poem may need some work but it's chock-full of up-to-the-minute factual content:

* Mary Todd Lincoln exhibit planned at presidential library

* Springfield's Union Station scheduled to reopen today

* Lincoln museum unveils exhibit on Lincoln's wife

Harper's Ferry dodges the bulldozer

This might be a victory won by CWPT:

Park chief: Battlefield development 'a desecration'

Charles Town rejects annexing proposed development

Another day

... another group of Civil War graves vandalized.

Georgia's lesson in avarice (cont.)

Now, a newspaper in Japan has picked up this story:

"Georgia keying on Civil War anniversary to boost tourism"

What a disgrace. Or put another way, our national disgrace has gone international.

The state press office had better get Georgia's hacks to stop talking up avarice before another reporter wanders within earshot.

Are artifacts history?

Again, we have elementary school students being "taught" about the Civil War and again, it comes down to handling artifacts and experiencing mild, generic discomfort.

A Meadowlark teacher, Lee Zuck, hopes the students weren't just entertained. "Hopefully, they get more of an understanding of what the Civil War was about," Zuck said.

Why does history have to be the curriculum of hoped-for results?

I could have written this post

Except the part about sounding snobbish.

Meanwhile, Brooks Simpson says "I wonder whether the general reader or the person whose intense interest in the Civil War is matched only by a vast ignorance of the literature (and perhaps fundamental facts) really cares about whether what they are reading is original."

Indeed, I wonder too.

He raises the possibility that ACW historians are viewed, within the academy, as servicing fans: "After all, if many of my peers outside my field of interest think that all I do is to cater to the undiscriminating palate of wild-eyed buffs (many of whom, I suspect, don’t read much at all), why not simply live down to my peers’ expectations and proceed laughing all the way to the bank?"

Here's a possible answer; as long as you keep a foot in both camps, you should be able to do both without your professional identity becoming subsumed by your popular identity. On the other hand, the professional identity of, say, David Eicher cannot help him. He's an astronomer, so the Civil War author part of his identity will be rooted in pop culture. The same would be true of me - if I went down the pop road to riches, I would have no recourse to a "true" identity as the practitioner of an honest history.

But Brooks Simpson, and many others, are positioned to do both. There will be no harm in it unless they read and believe the rave reviews their pop histories earn; unless they buy into the prizes awarded for trashy nonfiction; unless the bright lights of C-SPAN turn them around; unless they get used to being called the "greatest living" whatever based on sales figures.

And I believe there are historians strong enough to do both things without becoming confused about which part of the work is worthwhile for what ends.

Not just for fiction

We read our nonfiction and then (some of us, occasionally) pick up an "alternative history". The interesting thing about these alternative histories to me is that they rarely reverse the bias built into the underlying nonfiction, but rather explore an alternative storytelling viewpoint from the same set of biases.

The Overcoming Bias blog says "The lack of interest in bias-reversed stories suggests we aren't that interested in overcoming fiction biases."

Nor non-fiction biases.

But our bloggers do seriously err, the way many technologists do, when they say,

We do try somewhat to not let fiction overly influence our beliefs about the real world. But surely we fail in many ways; the task is just too hard. How can we do better?

One approach is to prefer apparently true stories, such as biographies, news articles, reality TV, or grampa's war stories. Of course lots of fiction slips in, but at least these can be fact-checked.

No, they can't be fact-checked where 90% of them are interpretive conclusions and the underlying microdata has been selected to favor a vested interpretation.

Nor does it do any good to fact check them when Pulitzer winners want to argue contrary interpretations. The appeal to authority is crippling in our field and has been for 50 years.

A friend of this blog recently received a letter from a history Pulitzer winner asking him to discount a piece of archival evidence in analyzing events because it may have been tampered with by unknown parties at an unknown time in the past for unknown reasons (although it showed no evidence of tampering). The winner, needless to say, is a great storyteller.

Anyone arguing on a debate team has to practice internalizing bias reversal. Let the ACW historian try it.

"Drunk enough to bend a bronze statue"

This fellow wants to add a new figure of speech to our language.

Now you can see what Burnside saw

But wouldn't it be what Cox saw, actually?

Mark Grimsley has been there.

Georgia's lesson in avarice

"Georgia keying on Civil War anniversary to boost tourism"

How many more of these headlines have to come out of Georgia before the backlash begins?

How many more stories do we have to read about the state officials who cannot wait to count the coins that fall from our pockets during the Sesquicentennial?

I have a tip for heritage tourism officials: stop generating stories about how you are going to fleece every fool who crosses your border with an ACW guidebook in hand. Start planting stories on how tourists are going to be pampered and spoiled, the wonderful experiences they will have, the improvements your staff is making for their comfort and what you are doing for the cause of local history.

How about a message that blends the specialness of the locality with insights of historical importance? If all else fails, talk about the freebies you are going to heap upon visitors who stop at your state visitor centers [sound of raucous laughter in the wings].

Some readers understand that these suggestions, made above, are absurd. Making them gives me an odd satisfaction anyway.

I know that when some state tourism hack gets a little access to newspaper ink, he is going to trumpet how economically useful his position is to the state, how much dollar value the state gets or will get from his office, his staff, and his budget. He is going to use a reporter's visit to talk indirectly to his bosses and the local taxpayers and the voters, not waste it on generating tourism.

I understand that all these economically-themed Georgia stories are local and the audiences are local too and that we see them thanks to the accident of Internet publishing. They were not meant for our eyes. Nevertheless, even a locally-focused story must have some element of why people will come and what Georgia will be doing to attract them - unless that element is not there. And it isn't there.

The closest we get is the news that in some way, somewhere down the road, Resaca may be developed if funds are made available. Still working on the plans though.

Very compelling.

Also, Georgia's solons are wrestling with grand historiography instead of local history: "We have the opportunity now to really take a step back and look at it from a variety of perspectives and tell a complete story that really helps define where we have been and where we are as a people."

Who thinks they need to travel to Georgia to wallow in locally crafted, politicized, feel-good pop history? Not a magnet, folks. Sorry.

These news stories show no inkling that the state, on a tourism basis, will be competing with major Civil War destinations. There is no sense, even given the repulsive and avaricious value system of heritage tourism, that Georgia will be in a popularity contest with other heritage tourism organizations.

Apparently Georgia thinks its job will be, at the appointed time, to physically exist and have enough T-shirts and hotel rooms to go around. In this state's view, a developed Resaca will be a bonus for visitors, if it happens. Some kind of approved spiel will be recited by the state history robotniks and lapped up by the rubes. Knick-knacks will fly off the shelves, restaurants will overflow, cash registers will ring, and infrastructure will suffer little wear and tear in return for all that out-of-state revenue.

Something tells me, it's probably not just Georgia but Georgia leads the pack in these kinds of reports.

Meanwhile, some unplesant reading for Georgia's economists:

* Suffolk, Virginia has downgraded its annual Civil War weekend to a generic festival

* Gettysburg has been shedding tourists for years.

Amazon promotes Bruce Catton

Recognizing me, the Amazon website sought to draw my attention to Stillness at Appomattox with these amazing words: "If every historian wrote like Bruce Catton, no one would read fiction."

Think about what that says about the general run of nonfiction readers.

Brian K. Burton, Russel Beatie and a certain peninsula

Three authors I respect (Mark Grimsley, Brooks Simpson, and Steve Woodworth) have enabled Brian K. Burton to publish a Seven Days touring guidebook.

If I am not mistaken, the estimable deep reader Drew Wagenhoffer, game designer, relied heavily on Burton's Extraordinary Circumstances (a Seven Days history) to design a game. Another plus for Burton.

Myself, I am remiss in not reading Extraordinary Circumstances which has long been at hand. The frightening aspects of EC, for me, are the kudos and acknowledgements. These are overwhelmingly weighted with secondary source Centennial doctrinal scripture. Or to put it another way, Burton is personally inspired by that ACW history that repulses me the most - the non-negotiable belief system constructed by the editorial directors of American Heritage Magazine 50 years ago. My poison, his pleasure.

The impressive thing about Burton, what impelled me to buy his book, is his concentrated neutrality and his personal struggle to overcome the biases of his authorial heroes. Burton does not seem to engage in the Centennial standard practices of reader manipulation, emotional appeal to ignorance, nor to gameplay using archetypes or stereotypes. Nor does he synthesize - a la James McPherson - crappy secondary sources to construct a nominally "compelling narrative" on foundations of sand.

The question in reading his opus will be how much the suppression of evidence by his heroes affects his own research and conclusions. I'll report back on this. Whatever the result, I don't think I'll hold it against Burton personally. I'm too impressed by his "love these guys, got to do my own thinking" ethos.

There are other straight-shooters coming out of the Centennial matrix, it's an interesting phenomenon. Gerald Prokopowicz is pretty open about his Centennial intake and inspirations and he can interview gadfly complainers like myself in a spirit of equanimity. This makes for good radio. Given the people in Burton's corner, I need to read the book that precedes the touring guide.

Now for my own shortcomings. I have a view of the Peninsula campaign based on available but suppressed sources that I have seen nowhere, anywhere, until reading the proofs of Russel Beatie's Army of the Potomac Volume III. And Beatie has more sources than me, which makes for even more interesting reading than I could offer, should I decide to stop wasting time blogging and carping.

Beatie's Volume III does not get as far as the Seven Days, however - he is reported to be working on that in the next volume now. It will be interesting to compare Beatie's account of the Seven Days with Burton's. Meanwhile, I'll take the word of trusted advisors GS&W and buy Burton's guidebook. Got my rubber Wellies handy in case of an outbreak of mud. Got my walking stick. Might leave some attitude behind.

Edwin Booth returns to Washington

What a great idea. See "... the man behind the legend as he opens a trunk of costumes bequeathed to him by his infamous brother, John Wilkes Booth."

A one-man show: "... actor Gary Sloan—along with his collaborators—has adapted Booth’s letters and selections from the actor’s famous Shakespeare roles."

The show will not run on April 14, by the way.

(Booth with his daughter shown at right.)

The history buff demographic

As heritage tourism gears up for the ACW's 150th anniversary, we are being put under a microscope:

The survey, conducted by Washington research group Synovate, found that 56 percent of the history buffs earned $50,000 or more. Sixty-four percent of those surveyed were 45 or older. They tended to travel as a couple and without children.

Winfield Scott loses a match

Some say, even today, that Paul Morphy of New Orleans was the greatest chess player of all time. It's been a couple of years since I posted on Winfield Scott's chess game with Paul Morphy and since then have found only one scrap with some details.

The encounter material is poorly sourced. For what it's worth, the year is 1846, Morphy is approaching nine years old.

The Evening Post relates this story:

"Gen. Winfield Scott ... had many aquaintances there (at a chess club on Royal St.), some of them quite intimate, and knowing the habits of the members he repaired to their very comfortable rooms within a few hours after reaching the city. It may be said to have been one of his vanities as well.

He [Scott] was in the front rank of amateurs in his day....he turned to Chief Justice Eustis and asked whether he could play a game of chess in the evening...."I want to be put to my mettle!"

"Very well," said Justice Eustis, "We'll arrange it. At eight o'clock tonight, if that will suit you."

At eight o'clock, dinner having been disposed of, the room was full. Gen. Scott, a towering giant, was asked to meet his competitor, a small boy of about 10 [actually, he was eight and a half] and not by any means a prepossessing boy, dressed in velvet knickerbockers, with a lace shirt and a big spreading collar of the same material.

At first Gen. Scott imagined it was a sorry jest, and his tremendous dignity arose in protest. It seemed to him that his friends had committed an incredible and unpardonable impertinence. Then Justice Eustis assured him that his wish had been scrupulously consulted; that this boy was....quite worthy of his notice.

So the game began with Gen. Scott still angry and by no means satisfied. Paul won the move and advanced his Queen's rook's pawn. In response to the General's play he advanced other pawns. Next he had two knights on the field; then another pawn opened the line for the Queen, and at the tenth move he had the General checkmated before he had even begun to develop his defense.

There was only one more game.

Paul Morphy, after the sixth move, marked the spot and announced the movement for the debacle - which occurred according to schedule - and the General arose trembling with amazement and indignation. Paul was taken home, silent as usual, and the incident reached the end.

The few survivors of that era still talk of Paul Morphy's first appearance in public, but only by hearsay. Gen. Scott lived to wonder that he should have ever played with the first chess genius of the century, or for that matter, of any other century."

I have cleaned up the punctuation; by the look of it, this was scanned, not edited, and then posted on the Internet. My guess is that the undated news clip part comes via an old Morphy biography.

My problem with this account, historiographically, is that Winfield Scott is here arriving in New Orleans under arrest; Gideon Pillow (right) had had him arrested in Mexico and Scott was being repatriated to Washington to stand trial. Scott had the pleasure of having Pillow arrested as well, but the consolation must have been small.

It seems a little loosey-goosey to allow Scott, under arrest, the freedom of the town this way. (I know, back then, terms of arrests of officers could be quite liberal. Still, to plan an evening on the town...)

If Scott did meet Morphy as described, he had much on his mind before play began. Being made a fool of by Pillow had him in a bad frame of mind to be made fool of again by a mere child.

***

Chess notes on "Paul won the move [drew the White side] and advanced his queen's rook's pawn."

This could refer to a2 - a3. In that case, you might think it represents Anderssen's Opening. It would but not under that name. Oddly enough, the name "Anderssen's Opening" appears to have originated when Adolf Anderssen used it himself three times in one famous match against Paul Morphy in 1858. Did Morphy invent Anderssen's Opening? We find no trace of it in his recorded early games. People call this a time wasting move but it allows the White player to make himself Black by exchanging the initiative. If Morphy drew White and wanted to play Black against Scott, this move would serve that purpose.

"Advanced his queen's rook's pawn" could also refer to a2 - a4. In that case, Morphy would be playing the Ware Opening. This opening also exchanges the initiative but is weaker than a3 because it exposes the pawn to attack. Morphy played Preston Ware in New York 11 years after the match with Scott and the opening played was more conventional. BTW, Ware was seven years older than Morphy and not likely to have had an opening named after him at the time Morphy played Scott.

Birthday boys visit Maryland

I missed it: the "10th annual Maryland and the Civil War: A Regional Perspective." Eric Wittenberg and J. David Petruzzi spoke.

I see from this post that they are both very young with long writing careers ahead of them.

Thomas Publications and those eBay documents

Fascinating. Thomas Publications, the Civil War imprint based near Gettysburg, was instrumental in cracking the National Archives/eBay document case:

Roughly 20 years ago, Dean [Thomas] was doing research at the Archives and made a photocopy of one of the documents. He then used that information in a book he wrote entitled Round Ball to Rimfire: A History of Civil War Small Arms Ammunition. "I called the Archives [after seeing the document on eBay] to see if they were having a sale," Dean said with a laugh.

The quality of your readers and reviewers

I would be embarassed to have this reader give my book a good review. I would wonder what I was doing wrong.

Do authors ever feel that way?

Correction

Good catch by Mitch Hagmaier. I was excerpting a Libertarian's analysis of Lincoln and one has to be be more careful in that situation.

Apologizing for slavery, celebrating rebellion

According to my own primitive understanding of Reconstruction, each reconstructed state experienced a legal and constitutional break with the (rebellious) state government that preceded it. A new government was constituted to replace the old.

It makes no sense to me, therefore, that a modern state which is historically, constitutionally, and legally connected to its reconstructed predecessor can take responsibility for laws or events preceding Reconstruction. The Confederation could not apologize for decisions taken by royal governors in the 13 Colonies; the United States could not own the actions (or debt) of the Confederation without adopting these through legal process.

How, then, can reconstructed Virginia apologize for the actions of Rebel Virginia? What is the connection between the two?

Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, Missouri are different. They are unreconstructed Southern states that had slavery. There is an historical continuity in their governments, Missouri and perhaps Maryland being possible exceptions. If a case were made for apologies, it would have to rest on continuity. In these cases, there is continuity. Here, it would be logical to apologize for slavery but illogical to celebrate a Confederate heritage.

Now, for Georgia or Virginia to celebrate the Confederacy - these states are in the news on that count - this indicates that two states not in the line of the Confederacy are staking a claim for continuity with Rebel governments. It's as odd as if Floridians celebrated the birthday of the King of Spain and thought themselves obliged to apologize for Spanish imperialism.

Even if, on some metaphysical level, the majority in a state could pretend to own the heritage of the Rebellion, it does not follow that it actually "owns" that past, the past of repudiated political organizations, institutions, and personalities. New political institutions were formed specifically to break with that past. That past was legally and historically buried by the most powerful means available to federal and local government.

Any vicarious psychological identification with a destroyed government and its personalities is a curiosity, not a charter for moral posturing as heirs of a destroyed constitutional order.

I hope this last thought is not too confusing: it may be internally consistent for those modern governments celebrating the heritage of Rebellion also to apologize for slavery. But consistency does not make such apologies legal or logical - it just means that this weirdness is internally consistent and has been taken to the next level.

You can't own a Confederate past by staging Confederate celebrations if you have been reconstructed. You can't apologize for slavery if there is no connection to the Slave Power.

Gaming Amazon for authors

Someone has figured out that there are authors with wallets as big as their egos willing to pay for a top sales ranking on Amazon or B&N.

Atlanta honors Father O’Reilly

He saved Atlanta's churches in 1864 and is in the news today:

Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin posthumously recognized Father Thomas O’Reilly with the Phoenix Award, which was placed by his marker at Atlanta City Hall on March 9.

With good reason:

It was in the fall of 1864 that Father O’Reilly first heard of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s plan to destroy the entire city of Atlanta by fire. Father O’Reilly was outraged and Patrick Lynch drove the priest to speak to Gen. Henry Slocum, a subordinate of Gen. Sherman. “In this meeting, Father O’Reilly argued that the order to burn homes and churches was beyond the normal confines of warfare,” Mears said. “Father O’Reilly pleaded for a compromise that would spare Atlanta’s five churches.”

At first Gen. Sherman rejected the priest’s proposal. But Father O’Reilly would not relent and reminded the general that many of his own troops were Catholics and would create a mutiny if Catholic churches were burned. As a result of Father O’Reilly’s heroics, five churches in Atlanta—St. Philip Episcopal Church, Central Presbyterian Church, Trinity Methodist Church and Second Baptist Church, as well as the Catholic Shrine of the Immaculate Conception [top right, shown in 1848], were spared. In addition, Atlanta City Hall, the Fulton County Courthouse and a residential area between Mitchell and Peters streets were saved.

There was a parallel effort, by such of the city fathers as were still on the scene, to head off a holocaust of starvation, disease and exposure. This was sent to Sherman on 9/11/64:

Sir: We the undersigned, Mayor and two of the Council for the city of Atlanta, for the time being the only legal organ of the people of the said city, to express their wants and wishes, ask leave most earnestly but respectfully to petition you to reconsider the order requiring them to leave Atlanta. [...] As you advanced, the people north of this fell back; and before your arrival here, a large portion of the people had retired south, so that the country south of this is already crowded, and without houses enough to accommodate the people, and we are informed that many are now staying in churches and other out-buildings.

This being so, how is it possible for the people still here (mostly women and children) to find any shelter? And how can they live through the winter in the woods—no shelter or subsistence, in the midst of strangers who know them not, and without the power to assist them much, if they were willing to do so?

This is but a feeble picture of the consequences of this measure. You know the woe, the horrors, and the suffering, cannot be described by words; imagination can only conceive of it, and we ask you to take these things into consideration. [...]

Sherman's response, on 9/12, is demonic:

GENTLEMEN: I have your letter of the 11th, in the nature of a petition to revoke my orders removing all the inhabitants from Atlanta. I have read it carefully, and give full credit to your statements of the distress that will be occasioned, and yet shall not revoke my orders, because they were not designed to meet the humanities of the case, but to prepare for the future struggles in which millions of good people outside of Atlanta have a deep interest.

This is the same letter from which Sherman's celebrated quote comes, "War is cruelty and you cannot refine it." He uses the occasion of a plea for mercy to make a speech justifying his cruelty before the ruling Republican Party and before posterity:

We must have peace, not only at Atlanta, but in all America. To secure this, we must stop the war that now desolates our once happy and favored country. To stop war, we must defeat the rebel armies which are arrayed against the laws and Constitution that all must respect and obey. To defeat those armies, we must prepare the way to reach them in their recesses, provided with the arms and instruments which enable us to accomplish our purpose. Now, I know the vindictive nature of our enemy, that we may have many years of military operations from this quarter; and, therefore, deem it wise and prudent to prepare in time. The use of Atlanta for warlike purposes is inconsistent with its character as a home for families.

At the end of this little political speech he has returned, somehow, to the topic of what is in the best interest of the families he is about to destroy: "

There will be no manufactures, commerce, or agriculture here, for the maintenance of families, and sooner or later want will compel the inhabitants to go. Why not go now, when all the arrangements are completed for the transfer,—instead of waiting till the plunging shot of contending armies will renew the scenes of the past months."

Sherman as welfare case officer. The city officials have just told him why not - the city is made up of single parent families with no means of sustaining themselves. They can "get by" in the city now, or try to. To leave is to accelerate their doom.

So O'Reilly succeeded in saving a few buildings and is celebrated in a small way. Mayor Calhoun failed to save uncounted lives and is forgotten. Sherman, needless to say, is revered and readers invited to revel in his hard war policies. They get his cute quotes minus the shocking pleas.

It's Civil War history in a nutshell.

***

(Photo: Sherman's death mask.)

Good news and bad news from Savas Beatie

Savas Beatie's new book Shiloh and the Western Campaign of 1862 shipped yesterday.

This has quite a story behind it, being a never-published thesis powerful enough to influence a generation of revisionist historians. The author (Edward Cunningham) is/remains deceased (+1997), which underscores the power of the manuscript he authored.

Long-dead author, unpublished ms and yet great influence. Impressive.

The introduction to this work is a wonderful piece of historiography and I hope Ted Savas makes it available on his site (in the style of Amazon's "Look Inside" links).

This good news is accompanied by word that Russel Beatie's Army of the Potomac Vol. 3 is just now going to press after a delay. Patience. It will be worth it.

OT - New search engine

I need to try out some ACW keywords in this new search engine. Maybe it's better than Google.

ACW document theft

The big Civil War news today is that a volunteer working in the National Archives stole 165 ACW documents and sold them on eBay. They say he was a cultured man recommended to the archives by a university.

An incompetent news story was filed with the Associated Press and is being run nationally ("The office of U.S. Attorney Patrick Meehan said that all but a handful of the items have been recovered.").

Thanks to a press release, we learn the exact count - that 161 of the 165 documents were recovered. We don't know which ones are missing or if the count represents the sum total of thieving.

Computerworld had sense enough to look up the seller's eBay satisfaction rating and found it at 100%. They also found the accused thief's website. This is the kind of color reporters used to build into reporting before they became less informative than a press release.

More details are available from the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Philly's Daily News augmented the flimsy AP report.

We are living in a society that struggles (unsuccessfully) every day to understand that pederasts volunteer to work with children, pyromaniacs join fire brigades, and thieves offer to work with rare objects. Each new lesson somehow fails to stick.

Veterans form writers' battalion

Hmm. Veterans are organizing in strange new ways: say hello to the Military Writers Society of America.

A little short of touring weather

The shad are running (need I say?) and up and down the East Coast annual shad festivals are popping up like daffodils. Their roe is in the shops but at Ball's Bluff, snow still covers the ground through another weekend; the first wave of local bulb plants has been crushed by ice and frost and my second trip to the battlefield has been postponed yet again due to weather.

The first trip was a fiasco. The markers made no sense to me. I could not figure the limits of the battlefield. I could hardly find the battlefield, belted as it is by suburbia and dead-end streets. The forest service which owns the battlefield has made sure it is covered with trees that were not there in 1861, further complicating things.

About Christmastime, I bought A Little Short of Boats: The Fights at Ball's Bluff and Edwards Ferry to help me sort it all out. It's a fine book with lots of maps and pictures. Eric Wittenberg's company published it and it's going into guidebook service as soon as I can get a fine day off.

There will still be mysteries, though. Author James Morgan III writes, for instance,

Not much more of substance is known about the Baker [grave]stone... What has not been verified is who erected it, exactly when it was erected, or whether it actually marks the site of Baker's death.

Nothing about Ball's Bluff is easy, you see. Nothing at all.

***

On a chat board, Morgan noted that he was confused by his own first trip to the battlefield and provoked to do research by the trashy state of Ball's Bluff information: "The writings on Ball's Bluff tend just to repeat each other. There seems to have been very little original research over the years." (Is he talking Ball's Bluff or ACW literature generally?) More chat info here. Scroll down.

Morgan spoke with Gerald Prokopowicz here. A review of the book appears here.

The strongest high-level analysis of the battle's meaning appears in Russel Beatie's second volume of Army of the Potomac. Activity in Leesburg was mistaken for a Rebel evacuation; it would have been the enemy's third pullback from the Potomac line in weeks and it would have led to the third such Union occupation of enemy positions.

The antebellum South: "Non-integrating gap"?

Have been mulling over Tom Barnett's paradigm that divides the world into an integrating core group of states and a non-integrating gap group - this, in light of Civil War history.

If you've drunk deeply of literature'sFugitives and their meme of Southern resistance to economic integration and business culture, Barnett's idea tends towards this motif, especially his claim that "Disconnectedness defines danger. "

I'm not sure I'm ready to post on the antebellum South as a non-integrating phenomenon: more thinking and reading is needed. However, the openness of statements like "diconnectedness defines danger" can be misleading, for Barnett is a hardened determinist. Witness: "...it is always possible to fall off this bandwagon called globalization. And when you do, bloodshed will follow." If the Fugitive critique works, that last statement would explain the inevitability of the Civil War. But some of us are not in the market for inevitiability in historiography.

Thus, if you are not a determinist, the Barnett package may not work for you.

Unfortunately, Barnett's blog is frivolous to the point of being unreadable, perhaps a side effect of his years of two-minute TV and radio interviews. His books and articles offer better.

Meanwhile, Neptunus Lex this week published notes from one of Barnett's briefings and they are worth looking at (including reader comments under the posting).

Don Vandergriff

If you were going to bring our current Civil War-era U.S. Army into the 20th Century (never mind the 21st), where would you start?

For Don Vandergriff, the answer has always lain with the personnel system. After decades of crying in the wilderness, Vandergriff retired in 2005 and immediately expanded his influence. TRADOC - the Army's Training and Doctrine Command - hired him (through a consultancy) to shape its young leaders.

Personally, I think that when you create "adaptive" leaders (as he calls them) and place them at the disposal of a 19th Century hierarchy and its rigid bureaucratic value system, that system will exploit "adaptiveness" to pile on more rules, more controls, more formal process. By creating "adaptives," you increase the red tape coping mechanisms that will facilitate even more red tape.

This effect is the natural complement to the tendency to use new technology in the service of the same 19th Century value system.

So it seems to me. But judge for yourselves.

Thermopylae or Ball's Bluff?

To hell with Thermopylae. Why do I even need to say that?

I say this as an infantryman who once faced (modern) spartans - facing them not as a small P persian but as a small A athenian. The Thermopylae of history may be a paradigm for spartans across eternity but are you that eternal spartan? Do you even know what an (historical) Spartan was? Is this vicarious identification offered you by moviemakers sensible, decent, or authentic?

My friends, some Hollywood talespinners have inveigled you into the worst sort of ACW-type of nonsense.

Ball's Bluff is the appropriate paradigm for all small A athenians. Die on your own terms with no hope of turning the battle, no paeans, no glimmer of success. The best men from the best backgrounds led by the best of motives came to grief with no recourse, no court of higher appeals, no redemption trancending their own personal honor, decency, and spiritual destinies. There was no history to appeal to - they were writing it.

No one could ever say, "This chap, at least, did a great job at Ball's Bluff." These Union men died in a fiasco.

I went into this briefly with Gerald Prokopowicz when I said that McClellan's wartime story was our daily reality, our truth, while Grant's story is our fantasy, an indecent lie that sustains us. Ball's Bluff is McClellan's fate writ large; it is often the best we can hope for and defpite being a fizzle demands no less from us than would a glorious victory.

The defeated at Ball's Bluff did not kill enough (p)ersians to earn a screenplay but they earned a few words from Emily Dickinson (right). My punctuation and capitalization:

My portion is defeat today
A paler luck than victory
Less paeans - fewer bells
The drums don't follow me with tunes
Defeat - a somewhat slower means
More arduous than balls
'Tis populous with bone and stain
And men too straight to stoop again
And piles of solid moan
And chips of blank
in boyish eyes
And scraps of prayer
and death's surprise
stamped visible in stone
There's somewhat prouder, over there
The trumpets tell it to the air
How different victory to him who has it
and the one who to have had it,
would have been contenteder to die.

Lincoln's salary

George Washington and Abraham Lincoln drew the same salary - $25,000.

Washington became president in 1789. By the time Lincoln began drawing his pay in 1861, he would have needed to be paid $24,100 in order to maintain parity with Washington according to the Consumer Price Index. Lincoln's $25k/year was worth more because the dollar had increased in value.

For the incumbent to have drawn the equivalent of Lincoln's pay in 2005, he would need to have gotten $309,210 per year. Fortunately for him in 1999 his income was raised to $400,000.

Have a look at this fascinating Web toy.

Google scorecard for "Rick Beard"

Top 10 results on Google when searching for the ALPLM's "Rick Beard."

(1) Ancient news story announcing the mysterion's accession.

(2) "Beard" featured in an ancient press release.

(3) A banker in Utah who does not head the ALPLM.

(4) That banker again.

(5) A repeat of (2).

(6) Amazon's listing of a book edited by the mysterion.

(7) A repeat of (6).

(8) An inaccessible nine-year-old interview with "Rick Beard."

(9) Contact details for a 25-year-old living in Steger, IL, who does not head the ALPLM. He is single and a Pisces. He does not want kids.

(10) A posting on my blog.

Top 10 results searching Google news for "Rick Beard"....

(1) "Rick Beard of the Bank of American Fork recently presented a check to American Fork for $79000..."

Nought in positions (2) - (10).

The new CWPT top 10 list is out

Once again the rankings are too idiosyncratic for my taste.

The dynamic behind the list seems to be a calculated play for local press coverage. In other words, sites appear to be selected on the basis of where local press might make the most difference rather than a considered ranking of where the greatest danger threatens battlefields in this year.

The Schofield effect

One really can't say enough good things about John M. Schofield and the Politics of Generalship.

In my case, readers know I have been following ACW "professionalism" from the purge of "political" officers by Grant and Sherman down to the present day pathologies of job hopping, ticket punching, micromanaging, and promulgating war-fighting values that even John J. Pershing tried (and failed) to reform way back in 1918.

In my case, my blaming Grant and Sherman for a long string of dark institutional developments appears to be over-reaching, especially in view of the analysis supplied by Schofield author Donald Connelly.

Given the complexity and depth of his material, the limitations of blogging as a medium, and the timespan covered, allow me to touch on a few points of interest. These are gross simplifications:

* Schofield (top, right) had a certain aptitude for politics that was further developed by the types of assignments he held in the ACW. As a member of the West Point fraternity, the men remaking the army after the ACW viewed him as a thorough professional. But by his skills and nature he was political.

* The politically retarded Sherman, assuming the top Army position, weakened it significantly in his losing turf battles with the SecWar and bureau chiefs. Sherman actually moved his offices to St. Louis largely abandoning his job and its responsibilities; this was a replay of Scott's decamping from D.C. to work out of New York after losing turf battles to SecWar Davis.

* Sheridan, replacing Sherman, could not make up Sherman's bureaucratic losses; he lost ground himself, especially to SecWar Robert Lincoln (right). He also lost interest in his work, becoming another derelict general officer (in Schofield's words, "General Scott went to New York and General Sherman to St. Louis, while General Sheridan stayed in Washington.").

* Schofield assumed the chief general's position at Sheridan's death and began a program of reform and reclamation. His political experience and inclination helped him much in dealing with the major (bona fide) politicians and the minor practitioners operating out of the Army bureaus.

What kind of reformer was he? Connelly: "In many ways Schofield was an early Progressive. While military Progressives were often different from other Progressives, they shared an obsession with rationalization, regularization, and above all, expertise."

These are core attributes of what Col. John Boyd would have called Second Generation warfare and today's officer corps is nowhere near finished developing them yet. Should we blame Schofield for being ahead of his time when the current generation is just a few weeks ahead of him?

I will have more to say about this and about Connely's book and what it contains, for it appears to me now that Schofield's legacy is more relevant to our present oversupply of spoliated "professionalism" than Grant's, Sherman's, or Sheridan's.