How many Union generals can fit into a podunk town like Galena, Illinois?

Nine, apparently.

Sesquicentennial: another indicator

It was launched in 2005 but it remains a paltry, undernourished thing. It's the National Park Service's Sesquicenennial website. Event news: absent. Press releases: none. Calendar: none.

If the Sesquicentennial is going to have a national (or federal) character at all it will clearly be not through some national commission doing stuff. The only hope for a national commemoration now is via the NPS staging events at its sites countrywide.

Right now, that does not appear likely, if this website is any indicator.

SCV honors slave

An odd story indeed.

1864 political ephemera

Some nice specimens in one of Rick Beard's show catalogs.

Strategy rears its ugly head

Interesting to see a presidential candidate promise the country a military strategy.

If Lincoln and Davis taught us one thing it is that presidents will at all costs avoid strategy and the associated commitments, timetables, benchmarks, etc. It would be quite rare today to even find a general in uniform who would commit to a strategy, so attuned to the political leadership are they. (Petraeus may be one-of-a-kind.)

Roosevelt had an evolving strategy and he kept it top secret; Nixon campaigned on a "secret strategy" that he would not disclose; Wilson fought a war without even a whiff of strategy; Johnson's "strategy" was body count; and Truman gave up strategy with the Chinese intervention.

On the other hand, Lincoln and Davis were happy to talk about strategy anytime, anywhere and this news story may be closer to that activity than to a real commitment.

The other "General" Pickett

Before there was Arlington National Cemetery, there was Congressional Cemetery which holds the remains of Alfred Pleasanton, Henry Benham, William Emory, and the spymaster William Wood, among the Civil War notables.

One of the more interesting residents, however, is the Confederate John T. Pickett, styled "general" though not listed as such on CSA rosters. By the age of 41, when the ACW broke out, Pickett had served in the Hungarian revolution of 1848; he had filibustered in Cuba with the Round Island expedition of 1849; again, with the Lopez expedition of 1850; and he was enrolled as a colonel in the aborted Quitman filibustering expedition of 1854.

Oddly enough, the Confederates seemed to have used him exclusively for staff work.

Notes on Pope and McClernand

Orville Browning, in a letter to Lincoln, takes a nice swipe at John Pope before allowing Napoleon Buford, in an excerpted letter, to take shots at McClernand and his father-in-law. From the Library of Congress collection:

From Orville H. Browning to Abraham Lincoln, September 24, 1861

Quincy, Ills. Sept 24. 1861

Mr. President

Nothing but the most earnest solicitude for the safety of the Country, and grief at its present condition, would induce me again to trespass upon your time and patience.

But I feel as if it were my duty to address you, even at the hazard of your displeasure, and though the only result may be to annoy you.

I am not easily dispirited, and thus far have kept high in hope, and have exerted myself to the utmost of my ability to infuse hope and spirit into the people. But this morning, I confess, I am somewhat despondent. The storm which overhangs the Country seems to be intensifying in strength, and spreading farther and farther its devastations.

Last night from twelve to fifteen hundred men arrived here from Lexington -- prisoners of war discharged upon their parol not to serve again during the war. Seven hundred more of them are to arrive to day.

They consist of Mulligan's Irish Brigade, and Tom Marshall Cavalry.

They all surrendered to Price. Arms, ammunition, horses, equipments, clothing, provisions, every thing was captured. They were stripped of all except the clothing they had on, and sent here a disorganized mob without an officer among them.

This morning telegraphic communication with St Jo is again interrupted. The wires have been cut, and what the condition of the road is we can not learn. The probability is that the track and bridges are again being destroyed, and that in a day or two more all Northern Missouri will again be over run with rebels. We have no forces there, and none here to send there. Pope was sent up to take command. He passed over the road from Quincy to St Jo and back again, and did nothing, and then left.

Between ourselves, and confidentially, he is, in my opinion, of no account as a general. There ought to be some competent man to take charge of all that part of Missouri north of the River. Had this been done in the beginning the rebellion there would long ago have been suppressed, and many lives and many hundred thousands of dollars would have been saved to the government.

Things in this State are in rather a deplorable condition. The troops at Cairo are neither armed, nor clothed nor fed as they should be. There are broken Regiments at Springfield, in the same condition, and two half Regiments in camp here, without arms, doing nothing except living at the cost of the government. They have been here for weeks, and are no more fit for service now than they were the day they enlisted. I have just received a letter from Col [Napoleon B.] Buford whose Regiment is at Cairo. He requested that I should regard it as strictly confidential, but notwithstanding that I copy a few extracts, and beg you to read them. His Regiment is in better condition than many others. He says

"When my Regiment was assigned me I was asked by friends of Genl McClernand if I had any objection to being placed in his Brigade. I answered no, I came to obey orders. I was informed by him that his quarter master, Capt James Dunlap, his father in law, had contracted for better clothing, arms and equipments than any other Illinois troops.

"I have been in command a month. The Regiment is of fine material -- farmers sons from the 4th Congressional District, and good officers -- but we have not yet been half clad -- poorly fed, and 863 men armed with three kinds of muskets 740 in all, and of different bores -- the ammunition not fitting 240 of the muskets, they being old, Tower English muskets. They do to drill with, and I am making the most of them.

"Quarter Master Dunlap is the author of our lack of clothing. His promises all fail. He is too old, and his contracts are for poor instead of good clothing, judged by the results. It has been difficult to preserve discipline under daily disappointments

"Could you not get my Regiment detached so that I might be armed and equipped &c."

The events in the West, of the few past weeks, have not only disheartened the people, but gone far to demoralize them, and it is now a hundred times more difficult to arouse any true feeling of patriotism than it was a month ago; and enthusiasm is dead.

Is there no remedy for these evils?

We brave soldiers who have been induced to volunteer, to give up the safety and repose of domestic life, and sacrifice all the endearments of home, by the highest and noblest impulses of patriotism, are being every day sacrificed, and the Country hopelessly ruined by the multitudes of infamous rogues who crowd the offices, and get the contracts.

There are, no doubt, many honorable exceptions, but it is still true that a great many, perhaps a majority of those who have got into the quarter masters, and commissary department are men without principle or patriotism, and who hang upon the skirts of the army only for the purposes of plunder, and who would be perfectly willing to see the government overthrown when it shall be no longer worth plundering.

I dont fear the rebels. We can manage them, and put the rebellion down, if we can only save the government from overthrow by the strifes, and contentions, and corruption, and rascality in our own ranks.

There are individual instances within my own knowledge which I might mention, but I forbear.

Now Mr President, you know that I would forfeit my life before I would trafic in the misfortunes of my country for my own individual profit and advantage, or for the profit and advantage of any friend I have on earth. You know that I belong to no clique, and have the interest and advancement of no man in charge.

You know that I am neither asking nor seeking office or contract for myself or any one else, and that what I say to you is said from the sincerest desire for your fame and success as President, and for the true good and glory of the Country.

And I assure you most solemnly that unless a change soon takes place in the condition of public affairs, the spirit of the people will be broken down, and the government irretrievably overthrown. I do not show despondency to any one else. I do not publicly find fault, but always speak with a confidence and hopefulness which I confess to you I am ceasing to feel.

In some way or other, and by some means or other, an end must be put to the wholesale plundering of the government and people which is going on, and villany driven from its coverts, and our soldiers fed, and clothed, and armed, or we are ruined past all redemption

As ever truly your friend

Browning

It's today's talk of the town

Chicago decorates a wall.

E-books grow hyperlinks

It was inevitable.

But the mass market is not at this point yet. (Hasta la vista, nonfiction narrative!)

Grigsby's leaders

We read to understand history but the game designer needs not only to understand but also to convey that understanding in game design.

In Gary Grigsby’s War Between the States, despite (too) many housekeeping decisions in the administrative and logistics areas, leadership stands at the heart of the action; the player delegates control to leader tokens whose inaction, action, and outcomes determine the course of the game.

A simple approach to this is, as in the old board games, would be to assign one or two values to a leader token and perhaps work in some dice rolls to mix things up a bit. Grigsby’s is very much a board game, compete with references to (computer) dice rolls, but the construction of leader tokens here touches new levels of complexity in terms of classes of characteristics. Then, the complex interaction of superior and subordinate leaders adds an additional layer of complexity. The player can – as in chess – spend hours analyzing a position and the leaders managing that position. I don’t spend less than an hour on a single turn, for instance, although it could be taken in less than minute. The Civil War simulation as ship-in-a-bottle. (One turn represents a month.)

Not to recap the manual, but the leader token has classes of attributes. It has a certain combat capacity (various defense, offense ratings), training capacity (varying by combat arms branch), administrative ratings, and a variable Grigsby calls simply “rating” which I call span-of-control. This span represents the maximum number of units subject to the token’s control. It can rise or fall based on events and outcomes. At the start of the war, the Union simulation ranks the Scott, McClellan, Fremont, and Butler tokens near the top with an immense gap down to the next level (McDowell). The McDowell-level tokens have to accrue a lot of experience to achieve Scott, McClellan, or Fremont spans-of-control, which makes it difficult to sideline those other leader tokens. Occasionally a new leader will appear; Burnside, interestingly, is positioned between McDowell and Scott. So too is the Banks piece. The Grant piece appears near this intermediate position while Sherman’s avatar arrives on the bottom end of command capability near the McDowell rating.

This seems to offer an interesting insight; span-of-control values divorced from other values can produce leader tokens capable of directing large armies into situations where the leader’s other characteristics fail or are barely adequate. Your army in front of Richmond could be under your Butler token who butts his head against the wall of a smaller force led by a less controlling general who has high defensive values.

But it’s not that simple because the player controls some of the token characteristics through the conferring of positions and rank. There are two theatre commander positions open at any given time and four army commander positions; if a token lacks sufficient rank for an appointment, the player can promote (award stars) - which costs political points. Thus, your Banks and Burnside tokens at the start could be useful army commanders but lack enough rank for the appointments. They’ll accrue rank “naturally” over time or you can jump them for a painful political price. The same is true of the Grant piece. Once you make such a decision, you’ll have to fire an incumbent, which also costs political points. The game generates death and illness among tokens, so you will have a “natural” opening occasionally.

Now comes the complexity. The capacity to act is represented in a leader token “gaining initiative” and then passing some of that capacity for initiative to subordinates. This is managed through the computer “rolling dice” three times on three factors. No initiative, no movement. With care and cunning, the player can form at least one high-initiative team to manage an active theatre. Under these leaders, the player will want cherry-picked subleader tokens with better offensive ratings.

Interestingly, the player will not want theatre commanders with middling administrative ability. These fellows rarely gain initiative. This is the debilitating factor in making the low-admin-rated Fremont token useless in developing campaigns (an interesting touch). Initiative depends in part on high admin ability.

Initiative results not only from “die rolling” but from the interaction of leaders on different levels. You can really get lost in this. Some combinations work as expected – Halleck over Grant – others can surprise or disappoint. And they filter down to new combinations at the lowest level. With the computer generating random sick leave, combat deaths, convalescence, and natural death, you may have trouble getting and keeping optimum leader combinations. There is also an historical record bias here, so I dare not risk my Mansfield in too many attacks if I want to keep him. On the other hand, I once kept Scott’s avatar "healthy" throughout one entire war.

A final level of complexity involves the leadership, the chain of command, actually feeding units into battle. Having gained initiative, the army leader may occasionally have his entire roster of subordinates also gain initiative. Off he goes into the attack, but for reasons not clear, he is never able to send 100% of the subordinates into combat; likewise the defender never uses the full defensive force. These levels of use are also helped or hindered by commander traits independent of initiative. Moreover - and I find this curiously realistic - the weight of an attack or defense builds serially, unit by unit, as each becomes engaged in sequence.

Control issues are therefore front and center in the gaming experience.

In a previous post, I mentioned the political scoring that determines victory. Leader tokens have political ratings; the Union player totals the ratings of his appointments in the theatre and army command slots to receive a political point bonus each term. These political point allocations are interesting and reasonable. Hardfighting, competent nobodies – like George Meade – keep the player from earning the very necessary political capital that offsets point losses from defeats, setbacks and war weariness. If you could have six Butler tokens, despite the combat values, you would consider the option for the political dividends.

Watching the effects of the “talent pool” you have organized operate through the game is rather like reading a Justice League type of comic book in which the peculiar superpowers of each hero are brought to bear. The Dix token is valuable – you wish you had more, for the Dix avatar, with a broad span of control and a high infantry training rate, turns out trained troops very quickly. The Union General Edward Morgan’s token has a startling good combination of political, administrative, training, and combat values with a large span-of-control to boot. I tend to want this avatar in as high a position as his rank will allow as fast as possible before the program kills him off in battle or with illness.

Purists will not like some gameplay tradeoffs. For uniformity, the North uses the South’s rank and grade system. Cooper (CSA) and Meigs (USA) can wind up in combat which seems odd. The concept of “theatre commander,” invented by McClellan against Lee in Western Virginia, was not institutionalized as here represented. And the limit on army commands (two per side) is arbitrarily restrictive.

Grigsby has clearly and neatly simulated the difficulty Lincoln is thought to have faced in managing appointments - and getting offensives - while avoiding the primitivism of the Centennial historian’s pigeonholing or psychoanalyzing commanders. Had he followed the Centennialists, his tokens would have had just one or two defining characteristics. This richness he makes is doubly interesting because he named his selectable software scenarios after works by Catton, Sears, and McPherson. He read their books, paid homage to them in naming his scenarios, then went about quashing their grotesque oversimplifications by means of an interesting game design.

The broad, ongoing revision of the ACW canon embraces even the world of play.

Jaffa as template

Lew Lehrman is now templating Harry Jaffa. Probably necessary since Jaffa's student Guelzo has turned to talespinning and since he now rejects this sort of thing as non-history.

Must say, however, the Lehrman project looks painfully simpleminded.

Champion Hill documentary

He spent $120,000 to make it, premiered his Champion Hill film and concluded (based on audience reaction?) it "needs polish."

At least we get to meet Sid Champion V.

The meaning of the Fourth

The Fourth of July - a time to proudly display Gettysburg dioramas.

C'mon and celebrate

It's not just the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth in 2009 - it's the bicentennial of President James Buchanan's log house in Donelson, Tenn. "The [preservation] association has already held several special events for the [house's] bicentennial," we hear.

1809. You got your Lincoln. Your Jeff Davis. Your Buchanan log house. Heritage tourism is going to multipurpose the hell out of next year.

Games abound

France's Aegod released their game "American Civil War" a year ago; now we have Gary Grigsby's "War Between the States"; and today I learn that Russia's Totem is developing "Ironclad" - a Civil War navy game. We'll never get any reading done.

Gettysburg braces for 15,000 re-enactors

Whatever it is they think they're doing, this is their weekend.

Abe the Musical

It was inevitable.

Chambersburg places its bets

Heritage tourism roulette: Chambersburg stakes $40,000 on a Gettysburg seminar.

Limits to history

History needs speculation and narrative but their must be limits to both. What those limits might be could make a good topic for a post. Let's start with the notion that the historical material, the record, sets boundaries. It would therefore make a poor project to go where the record is thinnest in order to gin up a thick, colorful volume with loads of imagined incidents and details - and yet this is done to great profit by outlaws who roam "the badly policed borders of fact and fiction."

Imagine histories in which the authors' narrative and speculative impulses have run wild - so completely wild - as to produce what this essayist calls "History in the absence of evidence." He quotes a passage in which one of these intoxicated writers has abandoned the limits of his material to soar high above ... uh ... mere facts?

We do not know whether he was slim or burly, tall or short, handsome or disfigured, his voice deep or nasal, his complexion olive or fair. We know only that he was thick-skinned, that some combination of good genes and good luck bestowed on him a genius for survival. We have no idea what a lover would have remembered about his touch or a fortuneteller would have discovered in his palm, yet we can guess that his hands were strong and nimble, skilled at crafting illustrations of infinitesimal detail yet also adept at handling a harquebus, the unwieldy predecessor to the musket. We cannot say whether he inherited dark eyes from the Gauls or blue from the Normans, but the more we learn about him, the more we are convinced that those eyes, whatever their color, took everything in and gave very little away.

Spread your wings, fool, but don't call it history.

Hat tip to Russel Bonds for the link and to Despair for the graphic.

Gary Grigsby's War Between The States

Games are story machines. They are designed to create narratives in which the real has been replaced with symbols and the manipulation of these symbols in the course of gameplay produces an imaginary reality.

I have been playing a game for the last few days instead of doing my assigned Civil War reading: Gary Grigsby's War Between The States and here are a few elements of the story it tells...

The war is about managing people - not just about putting the right person with the right attributes in the right position, not just about assembling talent pools, but principally about managing the interactions of people on the same side of the war. This is most intriguing and cuts to the heart of my interest in the ACW.

The war is a political balancing act - here it is represented by a point scale with the player trading off political credits for losses in an attempt to maintain equilibrium.

The war is won opportunistically not strategically - as Hattaway and Jones formulated it, here in play is the politician's concept of war: the accrual of a succession of victories (wherever, however) leading to political strength on one side and political debility on the other.

The enemy's army is not your object - a steady-state recruitment engine regenerates armies over time so as the North your object must be territory with factories and resources, elements that assist or impede loss replacement.

The regular reader of this blog can tell how much reading Grigsby and I have done in common and a number of conclusions we might share. Working through the game you notice his thumb in the eyes of a number of Centennial commonplaces. There is one, however, that does survive, albeit in modified form:

Lincoln's re-election is crucial - McClellan's election does not end the game but entails a turn-by-turn political points penalty on the North and a bonus for the South. One could say Grigsby had failed to heed McMurry's The Fourth Battle of Winchester but he is holding true to his view of the war being a political balancing act. While he seems to reject McMurry's premise that politics could not reverse the military course of the war by '64/65, neither does he make McClellan out to be a peacemaker or appeaser (which would be nonsense). I interpret the political "cost" of a McClellan election here to represent (a) a fundamental discrediting of the Republican conduct of the war (a major election theme in '64) such that the ability to prosecute the war on any terms is harmed and (b) that the political divide of a Democratic president and a (largely Radical) Republican Congress would here be unworkable (as the accession of Johnson proved).

All in all, this game was designed by a reader you would want to spend time with. I'll give some gameplay specific notes in a later post, particularly looking at how the interactions among commanders are managed.

Brett had a couple of posts up about the game, which is how I noticed it.

Civil War Talk Radio - the archives work

Hat tip to Brett Schulte for his summaries of Civil War Talk Radio episodes and for asserting that the archives function works (I long assumed it was broken).

The counterintuitive things is you encounter a blank list powered by an obscure interface control here. The "Content Library" list takes time to populate (in my browser) and I did not recognize the microphone head on the right as a scroll button.

Problem: All the recent shows lack titles and descriptions. However, if you scroll down far enough, the older shows are named and described. (See for instance my interview on 10/21/05).

Don't let the glitches put you off - you'll recognize most of the authors, publishers, and bloggers in the archives.

The Refugee: Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada

by Benjamin Drew

From the publisher:
In the early 1850s, white American abolitionist Benjamin Drew was commissioned to travel to Canada West (now Ontario) to interview escaped slaves from the United States. At the time the population of Canada West was just short of a million and about 30,000 black people lived in the colony, most of whom were escaped slaves from south of the border. One of the people Drew interviewed was Harriet Tubman, who was then based in St. Catharines but made several trips to the U.S. South to lead slaves to freedom in Canada.

In the course of his journeys in Canada, Drew visited Chatham, Toronto, Galt, Hamilton, London, Dresden, Windsor, and a number of other communities. Originally published in 1856, Drew's book is the only collection of first-hand interviews of fugitive slaves in Canada ever done. It is an invaluable record of early black Canadian experience.

Benjamin Drew was an American abolitionist from Boston whose work was made possible thanks to the support of the Canadian Anti-Slavery Society and John P. Jewett, a renowned anti-slavery sympathizer from Boston who had unexpectedly reaped a fortune from publishing Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852.

George Elliott Clarke is the E.J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto. An award-winning poet, playwright, and screenwriter, he is the author of Execution Poems, winner of the 2001 Governor General's Award for Poetry.

The natural destiny of every preservation coalition

The Cedar Creek battlefield preservation coalition is breaking up. Given the number of jerry-rigged ACW battlefield ownership consortiums out there, I'm surprised there aren't stories like this every day.

Buy it, own it, be done with it. You don't want the equivalent of a condo board taking decisions about historical ground. And if the ground is hallowed, never ever multipurpose it or you end up like these people.

Here's a high level recap from AP. * More detail from the Winchester Star * And more from NVDaily.

Papers in the attic

Col. William H. Emory's papers were donated to the University of Maryland in 1990. Researchers are still finding ever more Civil War and family papers in the attic of his mansion.

Blog mortality

Sons of Confederate Veterans have started blogging; otherwise the trend is against us with a number of abandonings: Billy Yank, Chris Army, and Don Hogan. Another three bloggers have suspended temporarily (they say) so we'll keep an eye on that as well.

The mailbag, ten years ago

Mark Grimsley posted an inquiry that really brought the memories back. He was asked if he could help identify an art object. If you follow the link, notice the improbable relationship between Mark's publicly shared interests and the inquirer's obscure object. This tenuous metaphysic tends to be a feature of such requests, along with urgency, obtuseness, and rudeness.

I can't remember when I last got a letter like that but I used to get a lot. Help me price this McClellan saddle. Help me identify this coin. What is this Bible worth? Ten years ago, all of us on the Web got an immense amount of continuous email from this kind of freeloader.

It was just astonishing what total strangers would ask you to do for them - and these were not, by and large, patient requests. The bait was that you allowed yourself to believe you were dealing with a reader whereas you were dealing with a searcher. If you were so foolish as to satisfy such inquiries, as Mark has done with his posting, you never heard back from the correspondent ("thanks" or "great"): you had served your purpose.

My response to these folks became, Send me the object for closer scrutiny. And that was that.

And oh, all those genealogists! They needed free research assistants. I am writing to you as a direct descendant of George B. McClellan (Do I tell this oaf his children died childless?).

Remember also the endless basic questions from students? What happened to those student emails? Why aren't the kids still harassing us for answers to their homework questions?

Way back then, Eric Wittenberg was a sort of guest answerman on a Civil War site where he entertained cavalry questions. I remember him blowing his stack a few times when students would try to finagle the better part of a paper out of him. My feelings exactly.

Nowadays, I'll pass the TV while my wife is watching Antiques Roadshow and think - they have their own TV program now. That's where all these bloodsuckers went.

A different kind of Sesquicentennial

Illinois will commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Lincoln-Douglas debates.

They should hire George Will to help. While touting his newest book on the radio yesterday, he called Harry Jaffa's Crisis of the House Divided the greatest work of American history ever written - without qualification.

Missouri joins Sesquicentennial roster

What better way to commemorate the Sesquicentennial than with a new Civil War museum?

The Lincoln-McClellan manpower dialog - Welles remembers

It is a sad sight to see military historians continue to resort to discredited, wildly improbable numbers in order to compare imagined relative field strengths of combatant forces in the Civil War.

If the historian is a talespinner, he has no choice but to gin up some numbers. He needs them to advance the drama. One side will be the underdog, the other the favorite. One leader will have used his resources wisely, one will have squandered advantages. Grades will be awarded by the historian based on these false ratios: for boldness, for relentlessness, for achievment, for good stewardship, for best effort. Take away the numbers and at least half of Civil War history loses all meaning and goes away.

As mentioned in previous posts (see below), Lincoln and McClellan were engaged in a long-running sub rosa dialog - one that could never be made public for political reasons - the outlines of which come to us in snippets of letters and conversation. The most famous bit involves Lincoln's comment about shoveling fleas across a barnyard, a remark stripped of its context (the dialog) in order to provide a witticism that bears no scrutiny.

The fleas were not made invisible on arrival at the AoP; the fleas either never arrived or wandered off their pile. The fleas are the agent, not the shoveler nor the pile across the barnyard. "Shoveling fleas" is about a special kind of manpower crisis, not a McClellan idiosyncracy.

Gideon Welles has an entry in his diary that summarizes the problem in a way even misguided readers of Centennial history can appreciate. In his entry for Sept. 8, 1862, Welles notes Lincoln called on him and while they were talking they were joined by a political appointee, Mr. Barney:

They [The Army of Virginia] were becoming reckless and untameable [Barney said]. In these remarks the President concurred, and said he was shocked to find that of 140,000 whom we were paying for in Pope's army only 60,000 could be found. McClellan brought away 93,000 from the Peninsula, but could not today count on over 45,000. As regarded demoralization, the President, there was no doubt that some of our men permitted themselves to be captured in order that they might leave on parole, get discharged and go home. Where there is such rottenness, is there not reason to fear for the country?

(To understand how, on September 8, 1862, the President and his advisors could still be referring to the AoV as a standing, independent force, you need to scrape off a lot of bad history. Start here.)

Baselining Union strength
The Centennialist takes the payroll numbers and fudges to taste. These are the highest numbers available and therefore the worst. Fox did better; then Livermore improved on Fox by (a) counting which parts of a command were actually on the field and (b) discounting a fixed ratio for detachments and details. Livermore's adjustments show - among many other things - McClellan outnumbered in every battle from Williamsburg to Malvern Hill. But Livermore's numbers, again based on payrolls, were much, much too high, although they produced an apples-to-apples correlation to Rebel figures.

To give you an idea of the state of Civil War history, few authors have yet progressed to the level of using Livermore's rational adjustments of the irrational pay muster counts. And yet, the best figures we have are - and never, ever cite - are the Surgeon General's, published in the late 19th Century. Regimental surgeons compiled and averaged daily roll calls (soldiers present for duty) on a month-to-month basis. In calculating sickness, wounding, recovery, and death, the Surgeon General refused to use the politicized payroll garbage our Civil War historians eagerly ingest. When you count noses you get some sense of Lincoln's fleas and barnyard. I'll quote myself from 2003:

For example, notice the medical department's view of the manpower pool of the Army of the Potomac as it marches towards Richmond:

4/62 - 71,250
5/62 - 72,536
6/62 - 78,733

This is the total count of men available to McClellan to capture Richmond; this is before illness, wounds, malingering, battlefield desertion, and shirking. Doesn't match the pop history version of things, does it?

I go into this in a post called Numbers, Losses, and Surgeons.

The dialog
Our Brave AWOLs introduced the Surgeon General's information. It mentions Lincoln's count of 30,000 Union stragglers within two hours of the start of Antietam and McClellan tasking Meade to show Lincoln the miserable state of strength in Hooker's corps at that battle.

The McClellan / Lincoln manpower dialogue: duly noted by Neely picks up more of the sub rosa strength communication between Lincoln and McClellan as reflected in the Union Divided. "Neely characterizes Lincoln as 'obsessed' with the disparity in AOP muster roll numbers and boots on the ground ..." Would that our historians were so obsessed. In Neely, we find a Lincoln of settled opinion on the matter: "Lincoln tells Browning that the absolute highest ratio of AOP strength that could be brought on to the field was 60 percent." There are more Lincoln anecdotes in the post.

Confederate numbers
I work through some Confederate strength issues in Historians as numerologists: what Mac saw. Why a Union commander could count 200,000 CSA enemy becomes immediately clear when we consider Joe Johnston's testimony and Pinkerton's excellent methodology. This much without even considering Governor Lechter's emergency drafts and militia mobilizations. The question passes from one of whether McClellan was simply outnumbered (Livermore) to a consideration of indications of how egregiously outnumbered he was.

With all their shootings and hangings, were the Rebels better at curtailing straggling and desertion? This post looks at the belief that the Union suffered less straggling than the Confederacy - a position I find counterintuitive. I argue my points in Confederate AWOLS: the glass is half full.

Casualty counts
In Bloodlust of the Civil War historian we join Mark Neely, Jr., in a new book one chapter of which is devoted to analyzing why Civil War historians inflate and manipulate casualty counts. Our problem with numerologists practicing history goes far beyond strength calculations.

Hallam's War gets noticed

Blogger Betsy Rosen is still collecting plenty of reviews for her Confederate-centric first novel, Hallam's War.

Memphis goes for a Shelby Foote hook.

Augusta sees something "crisp" and "sparkling."

Philly deals out the tough love.

Marin County does a feature.

Grave robbers strike

But they're lazy grave robbers and don't dig down the full six feet.

A two-dimensional heaven?

As long as I had to rely on the publisher's description of Awaiting the Heavenly Country, I was intrigued, a potential bookbuyer.

Reading the author's own comments on his book have turned me around. Have a look at this piece on HNN: flat, generic, insight-free, dumbed down to the utmost level while appearing in a venue by and for historians, no less.

Cultural studies without the culture - it's like cream vs. Coffee-Mate. My interest is fading fast.

Scranton's indifference toward Lincoln

Scranton just noticed: a Lincoln monument is missing. It was a bust above and a 16-foot stone structure below dedicated in 1909. It was lost sometime between 1910 - 2008. If you have any information...

The other Lincoln Museum

It's closing its doors but hopes to keep its collection together. Gerald Prokopowicz once served there.

The Blairs did it

Very interesting post by Harry Smeltzer (pointing back at Mark Grimsley) on the subject of the much-hyped "public pressure" demanding an advance in the summer of 1861.

I have myself read every newspaper available published at the time in the New England region that is stored in the Boston public library and I not only found no such clamor but rather the opposite. After the Union defeat at Manassas, the Boston Herald editorialized hat it was those wicked, conniving Blairs who drove Lincoln into this.

James McPherson, book machine

He's giving Harold Holzer a run for his money; James McPherson has at least two books coming out during the Bicentennial and he's already dancing circles around Holzer promoting these unpublished works on the lecture circuit (start here).

Meanwhile, both of these public historians have achieved filmography pages on IMDb (see here and here). Speaking of which, dig the Oscar night poster (right) Pritzker has put out for one of McPherson's lectures.

Ladies and genlemen: for the best synthesis of top-selling narrative Civil War histories ... the envelope please.

If this ambitious pre-publication tour is intended to create buzz for his new titles, the buzz is not showing up on Google; there are plenty of speaking previews, no speaking reviews.

The books in question are Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief (October 7, 2008) and Abraham Lincoln: Presidential Life (February 1, 2009).

For the crowd hitting each other with water balloons to learn about history, these will no doubt be challenging works filled with fresh insights. For the rest of us, indications are not so good.

The publisher's description of Presidential Life suggests that we have here a synthesis of best-selling Lincoln books. Why not? As a coach once told me, "Keep doing what works for you."

We have no publisher's description on Amazon for Tried by War, but summaries do appear here and here. This book stakes a claim to novelty: the idea that Lincoln developed the role of commander-in-chief. I will match Polk against Lincoln in this, precedent by precedent; nevertheless I am jealous beause McPherson has beat me to half of the story I have long wanted to tell.

The role of the general-in-chief needs an historian. Its birth and then long disfigurement during the Scott incumbency is important history; McClellan's attempt to revive it, likewise; and its stunning diminution under Halleck, Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, and Schofield beg to be analyzed.

Any general-in-chief analysis is the flip side of the commander-in-chief coin. The two need to be considered together. As I mistrust McPherson's powers of analysis, his historical knowledge, and his impartiality, I expect this book to pollute a what could have been a pristine spring of inquiry.

But I could be wrong.

It could also be that McPherson has more Bicentennial titles in the works than we know of and that he could overtake Holzer for the title, "Greatest number of publishing opportunities seized during a public commemoration."

The race is on!

(Hat tip to Russell Bonds for alerting me to these forthcoming titles.)

The Davis "problem" and public history

, Oh, the sorry lot of a public historian. This is at the very crux of the limitations of public history:

... the Kentucky History Center will bring some context to these rivals in the midst of a yearlong celebration of Lincoln with a daylong discussion of Davis on June 27 that attempts to put him into the proper historical context.

All you need is a day to do that?

It's not easy, organizers say. While avoiding the hero worship of the "South will rise again" crowd, many folks don't know that before he took the helm of the doomed Confederacy, Davis was a Mexican War hero, Mississippi congressman and senator, and secretary of war during the Franklin Pierce administration.

Note that these folks are defining "context" as a recap of career highlights boiled down to "good" and "bad" episodes that might be balanced using some sort of relativistic formula - if only they could find one. As simplistic (to us) as this non-historic reductionism would be, its "complexity" stymies the public historian:

As John Coski, director of research at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Va., puts it, he [Davis] was a man with many gifts who ended up on the wrong end of history. That makes historical interpretation more difficult.

If you end up on the "right end" of history, public history becomes easy. Again, "history" is to be a simple list of career milestones that will meet approval from casual modern visitors.

"How do you deal with him? What's the tenor?" asked Coski, a symposium speaker. "How do you make him acceptable for a large mass of people and not just leave him in control of the people who wish the Confederacy hadn't lost?

How do you make him acceptable ... welcome to public history, the history that's not.

Harold Holzer, book machine

Harold Holzer, the Webb Garrison of Lincoln authoring, has no less than three books coming out to mark the Bicentennial next year:

"Lincoln President Elect" arrives in late October and shows how Lincoln "faced the most dangerous transition period in American history," Holzer says.

Feel the excitement? Wonder how it turns out.

He is also coediting "In Lincoln's Hand," a companion volume to the Library of Congress's big Lincoln 200 exhibition that opens Feb. 12. It will include scanned reproductions of original Lincoln letters and speeches, each with a comment by a prominent politician or writer—including Toni Morrison (on the Gettysburg Address), John Updike, Mario Cuomo, Newt Gingrich, Gore Vidal and NEWSWEEK's Jonathan Alter.

You couldn't just write captions yourself (Gore Vidal's nickname for Holzer is "the Caption Writer," btw). You've moved beyond that to seize a huge backscratching opportunity. You've commissioned all these cadets to act as your junior Bicentennial rangers.

And for the Library of America, Holzer is editing "The Lincoln Anthology," a collection of 85 writers on Lincoln's life and legacy.

The logrolling never stops. The frivolous literary and political celebs get to write captions for your picturebook; here your scholar pals get their slice of an essay collection.

Looks like the Bicentennial is generating three Holzer books and about 300 IOUs.

(Topside: Holzer speaking a caption for a picture of Holzer.)

Disconnected

The fun and games element used to entice unwilling students into a subject like history can be so disproportionate that there is not even a whiff of content left:

Students at Parkside Middle School [in Minnesota] recreated the battle of Fredericksburg, but instead of guns, they used water balloons. [...] the battle is known one as the most one-sided of the war and a terrible loss for the Union side. The students say this is a great way to learn history.

Jordan Everts, student: "Learning about Fredericksburg, how humiliation is good for the heart and strength can be so powerful, it's fun."

Don't laugh. They enjoyed their water fight and made their "history" teacher feel good about himself.

Commemorate, don't celebrate

The South Carolina Sesquicentennial commission faces a challenge: "The commission should commemorate events, not celebrate them."

Pre-emptive vandalism

The logic of the news reporter never fails to surprise:

One concerned local civil war buff notes the inscription on Elijah’s stone stating he had been wounded at Gettysburg. Fearing it would become a likely target of destruction, he removed the stone to protect it.

Vandalism with honor?

The end of the Civil War

Fox News ended its evening newcast tonight celebrating the end of the Civil War on this day in 1865. Today is the day of E.K. Smith's surrender in Galveston.

Surprised and pleased? I am. Not because Fox got the date right but because they overthrew the myth of Appomattox.

Here are the possible dates for "end of the Civil War" ...

(1) Appomattox (4/9/65) - Rationale: best hope of the Confederacy surrenders.

(2) Durham Station (4/26/65) - Rationale: second best hope of the Confederacy surrenders.

(3) Mobile (5/4/65) - Rationale: third best hope of the Confederacy surrenders.

(4) New Orleans (5/26/65) - Rationale: last army east of the Mississippi surrenders.

(5) Irwinsville, GA (5/10/65) - Rationale: president of CSA captured.

(6) Washington (5/10/65) - Rationale: Johnson declares armed resistance at an end.

(7) Galveston (6/2/65) - Rationale: last CSA army west of the Missisippi surrenders.

(8) Doaksville, OK (6/23/65) - Rationale: Confederate Indian tribes surrender.

(9) Havana (11/65) - Rationale: Toombs, John Reagan, Breckinridge, and Kirby Smith fail to form a Confederate government in exile.

(10) Liverpool (11/6/65) - Rationale: CSS Shenandoah surrenders.

Do you see how extreme the Appomattox position is? What's your choice?

Faust was merely the first

We have a new ACW sub-genre: death studies.

If Republic of Suffering represented a neutral survey of the possibilities of Civil War death studies, Schantz's new Awaiting the Heavenly Country takes some hard and fast positions:

They [soldiers] grasped that death itself might be seen as artistically fascinating and even beautiful. - from the book

"The premise of this very interesting and very satisfying book is that an antebellum American culture of death contributed mightily, even decisively, to the destructive nature of the Civil War." - Reviewer

Not that the survey aspects are neglected:

Schantz addresses topics such as the pervasiveness of death in antebellum America; theological discourse and debate on the nature of heaven and the afterlife; the rural cemetery movement and the inheritance of the Greek revival; death as a major topic in American poetry; African American notions of death, slavery, and citizenship; and a treatment of the art of death--including memorial lithographs, postmortem photography and Rembrandt Peale's major exhibition painting The Court of Death.

"The art of death"... Was the ACW fed by a death culture? If so, this seems like an overture made by one death culture (19th century) to another (contemporaneous). I doubt ours can understand theirs.

Doings at Ford's

Ford's Theatre is tapping into that Bicentennial spirit: see here and here.

Spielberg's Lincoln

Some interesting details on the origins of this film project. The decision to do the movie preceded knowledge of Goodwin's book project, according to Spielberg; also, the director is aiming for a November 2009 release.

For your browsing enjoyment

Land of Lincoln: Andrew Ferguson has written a defense of the Lincoln Memorial for the WSJ.

History in a new form: The former technical writer Nicholson Baker has attempted to write a history of WWII in blog format with disconnected short entries of 100 words or so posted in chronological order.

Military reform: Critic Milan Vego notices the Navy has no understanding of operational level warfare. Blogger Galrahn exlores the question of why no one believes an admiral.

Free State of Jones: One of the top 10 selling books of the last decade at Civil War Bookshelf has been the Free State of Jones. David Woodbury recently ran an interview with the author.

Shakespeare in the Civil War

The Civil War audience's love of Shakespeare is hard to fathom in this day and age. Shakespeare, nowadays, is a byword for excess, unbearable overacting, immense self-indulgence; he seems to entice contemporary players to let their hair down, scream their heads off, and wave their arms like windmills.

What could be more repulsive than the acting in a Shakespeare play in this day and age? The directing, perhaps? Surely, Civil War audiences did not experience Shakespeare as currently presented.

Some representative images from recent productions are interleaved below with quotes about or from Edwin Booth, the foremost Shakespearean actor of the Civil War era (source here):

Reviewer: The salient attributes of Booth’s art were imagination, insight, grace, intense emotion, and melancholy refinement. ... But the controlling attribute,–that which imparted individual character, colour and fascination to his acting,–was the thoughtful introspective habit of a stately mind, abstracted from passion and suffused with mournful dreaminess of temperament. The moment that charm began to work, his victory was complete. It was that which made him the true image of Shakespeare’s thought...
Booth: When I was learning to act tragedy, I had frequently to perform comic parts, in order to acquire a certain ease of manner that my serious parts might not appear too stilted...

Reviewer: In all characters that evoked his essential spirit–in characters which rested on spiritualised intellect, or on sensibility to fragile loveliness, the joy that is unattainable, the glory that fades, and the beauty that perishes–he was peerless.
Reviewer: It is the loftiest type [of acting] that human nature affords, because it is the embodied supremacy of the soul, and because therein it denotes the only possible escape from the cares and vanities of a transitory world.
Booth: ... remember that dignity does not consist of over-becoming pride and haughtiness; self-respect, politeness and gentleness in all things and to all persons will give you sufficient dignity ...

"Team" of rivals - Stanton

"Goodwin has brilliantly described how Lincoln forged a team that preserved a nation..." - James M. McPherson

From the standard Stanton biography - Thomas, Benjamin P., and Hyman, Harold M. Stanton: The Life and Times of Lincoln's Secretary of War (1962):

Stanton declared to Wolcott, "if our people can bear with this cabinet they will prove able to support a great many disasters." (p. 125)

Montgomery Blair announced early in 1863 that he "did not speak to Mr. Stanton on business." He accused Stanton of accepting bribes and said that he "would not be surprised to hear that he was in the pay of Jeff. Davis." In another instance, Montgomery and Frank Blair, Jr., told General Patrick that "we will give it to Stanton someday": and that Stanton was Seward's tool. (p.150)

[Welles] grew to regard Stanton with as great personal aversion as did Blair. (p. 151)

The President, who found himself in the middle of all this [cabinet] scuffling and who never really tried to run his cabinet in a single harness... (p. 151)

As the Army and Stanton moved closer to the radical position on the Negro, he tried to take Lincoln with him, even to the point of acting guilefully... (p. 232)

... he had not tendered his resignation, he said, and did not intend to be driven from the cabinet by Seward. (p. 254)

The intra-cabinet feuding was beyond Lincoln's power to prevent but he let it go on much too long. Further, his willingness to let cabinet officers run their departments almost without supervision, except for the War office, had permitted vexatiously contradictory and independent policies to go on at the same time. (p. 255)

As an administrator, Lincoln had a long way to go to excellence and he never tried very hard to get there. (p. 255)

Postmaster General Blair, Stanton's unrelenting enemy, declared that Stanton "would cut the President's throat if he could," and fancied that the patronage of the State, War, and Treasury departments was being used against the President. (p. 309)

... Bates, a man of cautious legal mind who formed his judgements carefully, also suspected Stanton of secretly working for Chase. (p. 309)

... Stanton had never had a very high opinion of Bates ... (p. 423)

Chase discovered he had few real friends. On the day his retirement was announced, only Stanton and Fessenden of the Cabinet called at his home. (p. 315)

Stanton said: "You must help me defeat that [Lincoln's appointment of Dennison to secretary of the Treasury] Brough, or we are lost. I would not remain Secretary of War an hour after such an appointment."

Lincoln [not Stanton], Seward told diplomat John Bigelow in 1867, "was the War Minister, and a very good one." (p. 385)

Previously: Chase ** Welles ** Bates ** Goodwin **

Logrolling?

Why on earth would you include an essay on "Lost Cause" historiography in a collection called Battle: The Nature and Consequences of Civil War Combat?

Decoration Day

Black Jack Logan started it.

Congratulations

... to ACW blogger Elisabeth Payne Rosen on the occasion of her new novel being reviewed by WaPo.

Sins of omission

Despite the publicity surrounding the Fletcher Pratt Award, Pratt (known to me in youth as a sci-fi author) is fairly representative of that corruption that gripped the Centennial generation of storytellers. In addition to the suppression of evidence to enhance the narrative "reading experience," these gentlemen also dealt in artful omissions to create false contexts that allowed their narratives to work. Pratt offers a fairly stark example of this in this passage from Stanton: Lincoln's Secretary of War:

It would seem, then, that there is little mystery in why the President should appoint to the War Office one of the strongest Union men in Washington, a Breckinridge Democrat, a friend of McClellan, an incorruptible, and a man of unlimited drive and capacity to handle detail.

Pratt is leading us forcefully to the pool of merit – but will we drink up?

Aside from being recommended to Lincoln by Seward, Chase, and Cameron, at the time of his appointment Secretary Stanton was cousin to Ohio powerhouse Benjamin Stanton who had been Republican chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives' Military Affairs Committee up until March 2, 1861. He had just lost a Senate contest to john Sherman but was poised to become lieutenant governor of Ohio.

His joining the Lincoln Administration should be the crux of any Stanton biography and whether these (suppressed) political considerations were decisive in that - this is the true business of Pratt's measely passage. The attempt to manage the story through "sins of omission" is all too common in ACW history. Make that the criteria for a new kind of Fletcher Pratt Award and candidates will abound.

p.s. This post has been corrected (5/28/08). It referred to the Stantons as first cousins, however it was their fathers who were cousins. It also suggested, via its syntax "at the time of [Edwin's] appointment" Benjamin was chairman, etc. Note that he had been chairman in the previous (36th) Congress as shown in the edits above. A lengthy post on Benjamin Stanton is in the works.

"Team" of rivals: David Donald on Chase

"Goodwin has brilliantly described how Lincoln forged a team that preserved a nation..." - James M. McPherson

From Inside Lincoln's Cabinet: The Civil War Diaries of Salmon P. Chase, edited by David Donald, 1954, Longmans, Green & Co. New York

"Chase knew he was able, and he thought his [Cabinet] colleagues incompetent; it was his duty, therefore, to organize the Northern war effort. He began to issue orders, accept recruits, consult on strategy, and plan battles." (Introduction, p.12)

With Stanton's appointment, "He was now informed of military decisions after they were made - sometimes through the newspapers. His advice was seldom sought and rarely followed." (Introduction, p.15)

"After 1862, Chase was almost as remote from the making of political decisions as he was removed from the planning of strategy." (Introduction, p.16)

"But soon it appeared that the [President's] policy was undisclosed even to the Secretary of the Treasury. In fact nobody seemed to know what was going on ... Chase's efforts to introduce some administrative system among the President's advisers were unsuccessful, and soon he, like Bates and Welles, was wondering whether he should bother to attend the 'Cabinet (so-called)'. 'We ... are called members of the Cabinet,' he reported to Senator John Sherman, 'but are in reality only separate heads of departments, meeting now and then for talk on whatever happens to come uppermost, not for grave consultation on matters concerning the salvation of the country ... No regular and systematic reports of what is done are made, I believe, even to the President: certainly not to the so-called Cabinet.'" (Introduction, p.17)

"Measures which Chase might well have supported had he known their causes and their objectives appeared to him blind and wavering. Stanton and Lincoln adopted military policies which appeared to have no consequences except the useless expenditure of more millions ..." (Introduction, p.17)

"The less Chase was consulted on broad matters of governmental policy, the more extreme his views became; and as he assumed the attitude of embattled virtue, it became impossible to consult him." (Introduction, p.22)

"As a good administrator himself, Chase made it clear that the failures, the weaknesses, and the imbecilities of the executive branch rested not on himself and his cabinet colleagues, but upon the President alone." (Introduction, p.22)

"... he instructed an Ohio correspondent in 1863 ... 'Nor should you forget that a war managed by a President, a Commanding-General, and a Secretary, cannot, especially when the great differences of temperament, wishes, and intellectual characteristics of these three are taken into account, reasonably be expected to be conducted in the best possible manner.'" (Introduction, p.22)

Previous posts here and here and here.

Beard spotting - success at last

When Rick Beard took over the Abraham Lincoln Museum and Presidential Library (ALPLM) in 2006 there were no photos accompanying the news stories posted to the WWW. Since that time he has managed to keep any images of himself off of the Internet - as befits a man who surrendered his posh office in order to work out of an obscure office behind some emergency exit doors.

Recenly, however, the Illinois Bicentennial Commission forced a mug shot out of him (right) for its Kremlin Wall. (Let's see how many of these worthies accompany Gov. Blagojevich to prison next year.) The shot is in soft focus and rather indistinct. Is that a mustache? A goatee?

More in keeping with the Mysterion's cryptic persona is the snap (topside) captured by the State Journal Register last week on the occasion of the unveiling of an amateurish portrait of Bishop Desmond Tutu. The blurred little figure on the right is Rick Beard - the first "action shot" of the man we've had in the last two years. He's hovering in the very best docent manner just beyond earshot of the embarassed mutterings of the bishop. In the same manner he managed to avoid mention in the story, which took place in his facility.

We now at least have a general idea to go on, should we encounter him at one of the many dazzling Bicentennial or Sesquicentennial events upcoming.

Previously:
Norton replaced ** Sesquicentennial mysteries ** The mystery continues ** Rick Beard emerges ** Rick Beard makes a move ** It's Abe-a-licious! ** Google scorecard for "Rick Beard" ** Rick Beard sightings increase ** Rick Beard dons his other hat ** Will there be a Sesquicentennial? ** "Setting the bar" ** CWPT on the Sesquicentennial ** Rick Beard plans a Lincoln exhibit ** From multipurpose to any purpose ** A floating signifier **Lincoln Bicentennial: ambivalence allowed

Spielberg's "Lincoln"

The Spielberg/Goodwin Lincoln movie appears to be moving towards filming in 2009; that suggests it will have missed the Bicentennial by time of its release. (Check out the bare cupboard of Goodwin's movie news page.)

A couple of howlers from Liam Neeson, cast as Lincoln:

"He supported live theater, which is terrific."

"I've been to Washington, I've held his wallet..."

(Hat tip to Ted Savas.)

Choose your poison

Fort Reno in the District's Northwest was closed when satellite imagery noted grass discolored in a way indicating the presence of arsenic.

Once, when he had me slapping (British-made) creosote on his fenceposts in Scotland, Grandfather told me that creosote's secret ingredient in keeping bugs at bay was arsenic.

Meanwhile, all those good people who spend so many hours sitting on their arsenic-treated decks have been spared a stroll over buried arsenic deposits at a Civil war site; the NPS closed the place.

Oh wait a minute, never mind: reopened.

"According to the D.C. Department of Health, arsenic is usually only harmful when ingested."

Is public health to science what public history is to history?

Racetrack as battleground

Interesting fight in North Carolina; if the locals have never heard of the battlefield that outsiders are trying to preserve has it lost its historic significance, as the town claims?

Can land lose its historic significance? See here and here.

Honor vs. desecration

I would rate this as closer to desecration than homage. Part of the outrage against the Centennial was the prospect of this abuse of the dead.

The persistent appeal of bad history

In a review of a new edition by the unbearable/unreadable John Steinbeck, Jonathan Yardley agonizes at length: Why are all of his books still in print and selling well? It's a question that resonates across nonfiction as well, where the authors of bad books are lavishly rewarded.

But to begin with Steinbeck: I recall the revulsion Vladimir Nabokov expressed toward Ayn Rand's novels; in treating fiction primarily as a medium for ideas, Rand (Nabokov felt) inverted the merit of a novel putting literary worth at the bottom. Nabokov was stridently against "message" books throughout his life. The people who revere Rand's novels would probably tell us that the ideas within are what make them worthwhile - thus bearing out Nabokov's point. (The same dynamic is at work not only in all sorts of political fiction but in political movies as well.)

To me, until now, Steinbeck has been the primitive, artless politicized non-fiction fiction writer whose sensibility people endorse by buying and reading his books. This is not enough to explain the strong sales of his entire output, however, and here Yardley does good service:

The only reason I can come up with for the high esteem in which Steinbeck is still held is his transparent sincerity. It has long been my pet theory that in the popular marketplace, readers instinctively distinguish between writers whose work draws on genuine feeling and those who rely on art or artifice, and that they reward the former while repudiating the latter. [Note: Yardley says "readers" where I would have said "non-fiction readers dabbling in novel reading" - DR.] From Jacqueline Susann to Danielle Steel, from James Michener to James Patterson, readers have recognized the sincerity of feeling beneath the utter lack of literary merit, and have rewarded it accordingly.

Do you see how useful this anlytic is?

We have, in Civil War history, a marketplace that rewards emotion, intensity, and authorial identification with causes and "characters." This leads, as I lament here often, to manipulation of readers, evidence rigging and suppression, and other pathologies that turn history upside down. The hard work of getting at the truth of an incident is often viewed as "dry as dust," as the founder of American Heritage famously said.

As with the fiction marketplace's non-literature readers, Civil War history is filled with all sorts of bookbuyers not fundamentally interested in reading history; there are the novel readers crossing over, the movie goers looking for more entertainment, the TV watchers buying a souvenir of the show; some would say even re-enactors, all driving nonfiction sales.

"The sincerity of feeling" would explain also the Troiani/Kunstler phenomena, the persistent public championing of such as McPherson, the top-flight sales of Stephen Sears, and so on.

Tip of the hat to Mr. Yardley. Let's try this paradigm on and see if it fits.

A new kind of tourism

Suicide tourism has been discovered. Would that make Vince Foster's death Civil War suicide tourism?

Canadian memoirs

The only substantial account by a Canadian Civil War soldier who returned to Canada has been published. (I suppose most published Canadian veterans stayed in the U.S. postwar.)

"Team" of rivals: comments from Gideon Welles

"Goodwin has brilliantly described how Lincoln forged a team that preserved a nation..." - James M. McPherson

From the Diary of Gideon Welles, Riverside Press edition, 1911. Odd that this has been out of print for 97 years, but the master narrative was set in stone fifty years ago and there is simply no longer a need for a primary source that contradicts the wonderful storylines developed by talented writers. What follows is but a smattering of the relevant material; you'll need to read the entire diary to get a sense of the brokenness of the Lincoln Cabinet.

“He [Stanton] had little moral courage nor much self-reliance when in trouble.” "… he was reckless and regardless of public expenditure." (Undated entry, p. 68)

“Strange that this change of military operations should have been made without Cabinet consultation, and especially without communicating the fact to the Secretary of the Navy, who had established a naval flotilla on the James River by special request to cooperate with the army. But Stanton is so absorbed in his scheme to get rid of McClellan that other and more important matters are neglected.” (8/17/62, p. 83)

“… I was thwarted and embarrassed by the secret interference of the Secretary of State in my operations.” (8/17/62, p. 84)

“Seward came in for a moment but immediately left. He shuns these controversies and all subjects where he is liable to become personally involved.” (9/4/62, p. 110)

"The introduction of Pope here, followed by Halleck, is an intrigue of Stanton's and Chase's to get rid of McClellan. [...] Chase, who has made himself as busy in the management of the army as the Treasury..." (9/8/62, P.108)

“Seward was ready to get rid of Cameron after he went over to Chase …instead … he [Seward] picked up this black terrier [Stanton], who is no better than Cameron … Blair says he [Stanton] is dishonest, that he has taken bribes, and that he is a doubledealer; that he is now deceiving both Seward and Chase…” (9/12/62, p. 127)

“The President has good sense , intelligence, and an excellent heart, but is sadly perplexed and distressed by events. He, to an extent, distrusts his own administrative ability and experience. Seward, instead of strengthening and fortifying him, encourages this self-distrust…” (9/13/62 p. 131)

“The Attorney-General has experienced similar improper interference [from Seward] more than any other perhaps…” (9/16/62, p. 133)

“But I cannot run to the War Department and pay court in order to obtain information that should be given. Chase does this, complains because he is compelled to do it, and then, when not bluffed, becomes reconciled [to Stanton].” (9/29/63 p. 447)

"Halleck, he [Chase] said, was good for nothing, and everybody knew it except the President." (9/29/63 p. 448)

Previous posts here and here. Image by John T. Quinn 3rd.