CWPT's Larry Tagg interview

CWPT's Hallowed Ground is a newsstand-worthy glossy mag that you won't find on newsstands. You get it the in the mail if you are a member. (In my case, I recently got two back issues instead of the current issue. Perhaps those are the just desserts for all who join at a discounted member rate.)

The magazine is online and there you will be able to access quite an interesting interview with Larry Tagg. Or not - the link is broken. [Update 10/26: fixed here.] Let me reprise the key Q and A here:

Q: There are hundreds of Lincoln books out there. What makes yours [The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln] different?

A: I continue to be amazed that nobody has written this book before. Every book about Lincoln makes occasional mention of opposition to this or that policy, but there has never been a full treatment of the length and breadth of that opposition, which was so vehement, so relentless and so ubiquitous - coming from all sides, Republican as well as Democrat. My book goes against the grain of mainstream Lincoln literature, which almost invariably takes a reverential tone, and leaves out the rabid ravings of the opinion-makers of the time. This conventional treatment has left the false impression that Lincoln governed from strength, when the more interesting truth is that he accomplished so much in the teeth of violent dissent. To me, this adversity is what makes Lincoln great.

I might have phrased this differently, with a Tolstoyan filter: It is what makes Lincoln (to me) so interesting as an historical figure, this lurching and stumbling through innumerable blunders, this squandering of goodwill in every personal relation, this functioning out of a matrix of systemic personal, physical, and political weakness with monumental results to show for it.

Lincoln offers - in my view - an inescapable historical lesson in counterintuitive results (style, capability, efficiency vs. outcome). I personally credit a lot of the Lincoln criticism, Democratic and Republican, and wish to stress that in a news-driven culture, it is quite natural for a public to seize on every error, compile a bill of particulars, and update this list with each headline, rumor or editorial. The impression of incapacity will be "logical" and justified but the trees obscure the forest for great and transcendent results can emerge from the smoke of daily accidents and bad choices.

Can Lincoln's incapacity coexists with a greatness of legacy? To me, obviously. It did and does. The record is indisputable, but subjected to interpretive rationalizing by simplifiers. His critics were not fools, nor were they delerious. But in the current mainstream Linconology, the record must be rewritten, errors righted, wisdom discovered, and Lincoln's critics silenced or demonized. Modern Linconology cannot extract greatness from weakness.

I am often amazed by deep Civil War readers/authors who cannot articulate the War Democrats' hawkish indictment of the Lincoln Administration circa 1862-1864. The Peace Democrats have constantly been brought in to distract and confuse. Not knowing the War Democrat position, not suspecting hawks savagely critical of Lincoln's softness-on-war, McClellan's candidacy is a mystery to readers because in a grotesque projection of Centennial "history," they subscribe to associations of the McClellan candidacy with peace and (anti)emancipation issues. Tagg's book can start to correct this.

Lincoln was McClellan's employee before the war, McClellan was Lincoln's employee during the war. This reminds one of the sides of a coin; each operated under amazing handicaps, each producing dramatic counterintuitive results. Lincoln and McClellan, historically, were aspects of the same paradox, one beyond any who have not drunk deeply of Lincoln criticism.

We know the McClellan criticism by heart. Learn the Lincoln criticism. Take the Tagg book as a starting point for your own investigation into contemporary views of this very interesting politician. You don't have to give up your warm and fuzzies - but you have to get away from the ahistorical mainstream of Linconology.

p.s. It may be helpful to read Hans Trefousse in conjunction with The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln. Trefousse is at one with Lincoln's critics on the left but he crafts his narratives such that Lincoln is able to escape censure on most Republican controversies, leaving the "traditional" reader with an icon intact and a deepened appreciation of and sympathy for progressive animosity towards this secular saint. On the other hand, to get a full grasp of the War Democracy's frustration with Lincoln, you'll eventually have to read the papers of that era after time spent with The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln.

p.p.s Jim Campi wrote a nice note to say CWPT uses different mailing services which can affect when and how the magazine is received.

The better Abby responds

Abby reaches for some ACW content.

Dear Abby: My husband and I are Civil War re-enactors. (My husband is a cannon soldier and I am a nurse re-enactor.) We would greatly appreciate it if you would remind your readers that if they come to any of the re-enactments to please not talk to the participants while they are firing weapons in "battle" because it could distract them. Something could go wrong and they could be badly injured. Thank you, Abby. -- CIVIL WAR RE-ENACTOR IN ELMIRA, N.Y.

Dear Re-enactor: Some people want to engage with history, others are content to be entertained. Let's encourage engagement. Fire your guns during private moments alone with friends - your mission publicly re-enacting is not about firepower but history power. - Dimitri van Buren

WaPo puts the squeeze on Latschar

Gettysburg Park super John Latschar will feature in a great many blogs this week, so let me facilitate with a roundup.

Sept. 17 - Latschar cleared of 17 allegations by a DoI IG report. ("...we discovered no evidence of criminality or conflict of interest in contracting practices providing construction management services for the museum and visitor's center.")

Oct 16 - Latschar wins National Trust prize (his "contributions to historic preservation cannot be overstated.") He is a no-show.

Oct 19 - WaPo: "Report ignored explicit images found on park official's computer." ("The Inspector General's Office would not comment on why the findings of Latschar's improper use of his office computer were omitted from the report.")

It was a year ago that Eric Wittenberg denounced Latschar's proposed move to the Gettysburg Foundation, a move that would have jumped his salary by $100,000 - a move the WaPo now says was put on ice when the super learned law and policy "would prohibit him from performing many [Foundation] job duties, including 'any communication to or appearance before an employee of the United States.' " Eric is the first to weigh in on the new revelations.

Novus Livy at Gettysblog was happy last month when Latschar was cleared; he views the Gettysburg Times as ginning up fear, uncertainty and doubt about the super. He'll not be happy that WaPo has intervened. He and Eric hold reverse sides of the question.

Myself, I got roughed up on USENET a few years ago discussing Latschar's brainchild, the public-private partnership (hate it).

WaPo reports that as of today, Latschar remains at his post. Russell Bonds sums it up:

Another ill-advised "frontal assault on the breastworks" at Gettysburg.

p.s. BTW, Latschar's retirement and assumption of Foundation duties remains on the NPS website even today. No footnote, no redaction a year after the non-event. Perhaps the webmaster needs a public-private partnership to update some information.

Keegan's Civil War

I never had much use for John Keegan except to enjoy his work as one would op-ed pieces. The views are occasionally enjoyable but the level of generalization (coupled with a lack of historic sensibility) will eventually irritate the careful reader.

I mentioned here some years ago his starting the American Revolution on the wrong year (and then, McPherson-like, defending the factual error on literary grounds). Here are a couple of typical annoyances culled from a NYT book review of his new The American Civil War:

Because the South had few if any large cities to attack, Mr. Keegan notes, its army “presented itself as the only target at which to strike.”

Which ignores other geography, such as fertile valleys, railroads, rivers, and the forts guarding same.

“Southern women are a distinctive breed even today, admired for their femininity and outward-going personality.”

The generalist observes no limits in generalizing.

The linked review is friendly but negative.

The press discovers "cannonball"

Refreshing! Reporter uses the word "cannonball" instead of "bomb," "grenade," "shell," or "explosive." Big city reporters may be trainable.

Meanwhile, what are the chances that alcohol was involved in this accident?

The Lees of Stratford Hall

Quite a long and good article here on the Virginia Lees and their ancestral home, ending with notes on Robert E. Lee. (BTW, there is a contemporary house of similar magnificence erected by the Maryland Lees that sits near Crampton's Gap in a lovely grove.)

Camp Pope liquidation

Clark Kenyon has sent a card to his mailing list announcing the closing of Camp Pope Bookshop as a retail operation and the staging of an inventory liquidation sale starting October 15 at www.camppope.com. On Nov. 15, when the sale ends, the website will present Camp Pope publishing (his marque's own books) while offering publishing services. This after 20 years of direct mail retail ...

Gusher

As I play catch up compiling titles for listing on Civil War Book News, I am overwhelmed by the number of cheaply rushed-to-market reprints with no value added. Publishers are going to print with bicycles and seashores on their insta-covers; most shockingly, they can't be bothered to write a description of the book for Amazon or B and N where the title is listed.

Here's someone who did design a cover and write a description but he pioneers a new shortcut to market. From the description:

This is an OCR edition with typos.

Beautiful.

I have never excluded titles (except juvenile) from listing at that site but have had to make a new policy: If you're a reprint with no description listed, good luck.

May extend this exclusion policy to all paperback editions previously listed in HB as well as simple reprints lacking revision.

Ugh!

A general uses his French

Shades of Halleck! (and Hardee and McClellan, et al).

Lincoln's councils vs. Jomini's councils

Lincoln's persistence in forcing on McClellan councils of war reminds me of a passage in JFC Fuller's The Foundations of the Science of War in which he quotes Jomini at length. Fuller sets up the quote with an observation close to my own heart: during peace, generals "are always talking about command, and the qualifications of the commander, [then] the first thing they do when war is declared is to abrogate it." (Nowadays they are delighted to surrender command either in peace or war.)

Then comes Jomini:

It has been thought, in succession, in almost all armies, that frequent councils of war, by aiding the commander with their advice, give more weight and effect to the direction of military operations. Doubtless if the commander were a Soubise, a Clermont, or a Mack, he might well find in a council of war opinions more valuable than his own; the majority of the opinions given might be preferable to his; but what success could be expected from operations conducted by others than those who have originated and arranged them? What must be the result of an operation which is but partially understood by the commander, since it is not his conception?

I have undergone a pitiable experience as prompter [aide] at headquarters, and no one has a better appreciation of the value of such services than myself, and it is particularly in a council of war that such a part is absurd. The greater the number and the higher the rank of the military officers who compose the council, the more difficult will it be to accomplish the triumph of truth and reason, however small be the amount of dissent.

What would have been the action of a council of war to which Napoleon proposed the movement of Arcola, the crossing of the Saint Bernard, the manoeuvre at Ulm, or that at Gera and Jena? The timid would have regarded them as rash, even to madness; others would have seen a thousand difficulties of execution, and all would have concurred in rejecting them; and if, on the contrary, they had been adopted, and had been executed by anyone but Napoleon, would they not certainly have proved failures?

In my opinion, councils of war are a deplorable resource, and can be useful only when concurring in opinion with the commander, in which case they may give him more confidence in his own judgment, and, in addition, assure him that his lieutenants, being of his opinion, will use every means to ensure the success of the movement. This is the only advantage of a council of war, which, moreover, should be simply consultative and have no further authority; but if, instead of this harmony, there should be difference of opinion, it can only produce unfortunate results.

The careful reader, noting the use Lincoln made of his cabinet's counsel, understands that it was never really about councils of war anyway.

Habitats of the great spotted errata

If you've ever tried to correct an error in Civil War publishing (or pontificating), have a laugh and be glad we aren't reading physics. (Incident is certified true in the first addendum.)

McChrystal and ACW strategy

Civil War readers who want to stretch their strategy legs a bit might enjoy reading Stanley McChrystal's report to the sitting administration. Spoiler alert: don't read further down if you want fresh impressions from the link. Read the linked document first.

***

My view of the current general officer corps is reflected in an earlier post, and it strikes me that this is what you'd expect from that cohort: a policy brief asking for policy commitments rather than a strategic assessment with recommendations. It goes without saying that Civil War authors and readers become positively unhinged when they see policy discussed by generals, especially in certain Harrison Bar letters, so you likely caught this yourselves.

What was required was a paper that says, "If you define victory as this, here's what we can achieve; if you define it as that, here's what we can achieve; if you want status quo, here's what's needed." Also, "Here's what's happening as I see it."

Sometimes, today's bureaucrat in uniform will will excuse himself from reviewing and presenting any options to civilian leaders by saying "There are no good options." That leaps to a policy conclusion (not the job of a soldier) without investing work in option development for civilian review. The current chair of the Joint Chiefs is an absolute master at this as was his predecessor.

This report has its merits and it is interesting to see history unfold, especially when it puts to use our reading and thinking from another sphere.

The antebellum duel

As conceived by Tony Millionaire.

Journalist massacres Centralia story

Curious news: the Daughters of Union Veterans of the Civil War appears to be dedicating a memorial to the Union victims of the Centralia massacre on Sunday. A memorial honoring the Rebels has been on the site since 2006, says the AP.

Union catch-up after locals honored Bloody Bill Anderson?

More likely, the crack journalists of the Associated Press have confused the Centralia Massacre with the Battle of Centralia days later, and perhaps mixed up the honorees.

"Confederate soldiers who died in the battle have been honored at the site since 2006," says the wire. What site? Is AP referring to this historical marker as a Confederate memorial? It's not on the battle site and it's not a memorial.

Let's disentangle some professional journalism to get nearer the truth:

(1) Union soldiers killed in the battle have been honored since 1957 by this Centralia memorial. It's in a graveyard.

(2) The Daughters are erecting a memorial to Union victims of the train/depot massacre (which triggered the battle days later).

(3) There is a battlefield info station in Centralia Park that explains the clash that followed the massacre. It is not on the battlefield.

(4) There appears to be no collective memorial to Confederate battle dead at Centralia, nor to the butchery of Bill Anderson, unless it is on private property and kept quiet.

The biggest question is where is the new monument? AP began its story: "A Civil War battlefield in central Missouri has a new monument..." Do they mean a public park is getting a new monument?

Perhaps this is misinformation from the Daughters. Why would victims of a massacre at the depot be honored on a battlefield? Especially since that battlefield land is inaccessible, not public. (Again, the battlefield marker is itself in a geographically irrelevant public park.)

Have you ever seen a story in which almost every piece of information is wrong?

Missouri readers, help us out here.

History majors

History majors 1970/71 to 2003/04 ("the last academic year with available figures") declined from 18.5 percent to 10.7 percent of the undergraduate body.

The author lumps history's decline in with that of the "literary humanities."

ACW blogging

Larry Tagg is actively blogging again but the topics are presidential rather than ACW per se. I was worried about Larry but did not label his blogroll link "inactive".

In fact, some inactive listings have come to life (glad I kept them on the blogroll).

Billy Yank is back but the lure of the daily headline keeps him out of Civil War topics.

Brian Dirck, whom I also labeled inactive for awhile, has the latest Lincoln movie news.

Civil War Sources is now quite active.

And I'll round up the newly dormant links in a separate post.

Earl Hess in the Trenches

There is much to like in Earl Hess's In the Trenches at Petersburg: Field Fortifications and Confederate Defeat -- and I like it very much. This is a book that fills a gap, rounds off a good series, and breaks new ground. It has interesting (and necessary) information on nearly every page. The photos and diagrams add information and pleasure.

Although Trenches may be an author's triumph it is – sadly - an editor's failure.

Hess has drawn his target and placed the shot square in the center. But the target is too narrowly drawn and the important data is off his periphery; his editors needed to counsel him. This is the main problem. The second issue is in editors not forcing the issue of the details not being detailed enough (as a former builder and user of entrenchments there is much more that I want to know). Finally, overlaying it all, seem to be some general publishing decisions that really rankle. Let me start with those.

The titles, main and sub, are misleading. "In the Trenches" implies an Osprey-like approach that puts the reader hard in the material world of dug mud. This is where you live; this is how you eat; here's how supplies are distributed; here's how you repel an attack; your latrine is over there; your parapet is this high. That's not what this book is about.

If the title is misleading, the subtitle is obnoxious: Field Fortifications and Confederate Defeat. Hess has an ill-conceived throwaway line in the preface that may have been sourced for the subtitle: "Field fortifications helped to bring about final Confederate defeat in the Civil War." When you make such a statement, you are committing to a line of argument. When you put it in the title, you're doubling down on a promise to show how entrenchments used by all defeated one side but not the other. That promise is never seriously taken up. This has the appearance of cynically greasing the skids to a broader audience by enlarging the scope of the work (virtually, not in fact).

The press release for this book, by contrast, gets it right: "This book covers all aspects of the [Petersburg] campaign…" A title should have been crafted to reflect that. Note the campaign content in earlier titles: Field Armies and Fortifications in the Civil War: The Eastern Campaigns, 1861-1864; Trench Warfare under Grant and Lee: Field Fortifications in the Overland Campaign.

What we are looking at here are campaign histories with an emphasis on field fortifications. If you come to this book expecting a monograph on entrenchments, forget it.

And this may explain our next glaring editorial failure. As this is the third title in a series, we would expect an essay that acts as a capstone, telling us where we've been, how and what changed, and what it all means. There is not even a single paragraph summary at the end of Trenches to tie the three works together. If the editors viewed these as stand-alone narrative histories with no analytic connection, only then could we arrive at such a decision.

Moreover, Hess in this work recasts the historiography of Petersburg offensives – an innovation. He rejects the current structure of classifying offensives and creates his own – which undoubtedly is offered here for future use to other historians. The effect is to tilt the emphasis even further away from analyzing field fortifications towards an overall weighting as campaign narrative.

By allowing Hess to draw the topical circle so narrowly, major issues loom to trouble the reader. What did the builders of the trenches intend? How did they fit into the operational plan – if there was an operational plan (or do trenches signify the abandonment of operational planning?). What did Grant and Meade think they were doing? Never mind the lip service of past historians, what were they or their subordinates trying to do?

Opportunities for comparison abound and since Hess wrote books about earlier uses of entrenchments, we would expect comparisons, but these are missing -- another odd editing anomaly.

In Battle Tactics of the Civil War, Paddy Griffith pointed out that the manpower-per-foot of entrenchments faced by the Union at Yorktown was much denser than that faced at Petersburg: he gave his calculations. Why wouldn't more comparative data like that be rendered here and then analyzed?

Another striking thing for the early war historian is the conduct of the siege at Yorktown compared with the entrenching done around Petersburg. The overriding Union purpose at Yorktown was to prepare for an extended, obliterating artillery strike, followed by an advance with an amphibious landing behind the shattered lines. Artillery – and the will to use it – are afterthoughts in Hess's book. Entrenchment seems to be an end in itself rather than any means to an end. The entrenchers are not campaigning at all but seem to be acting out the very parody of siegework as misportrayed by Republican editorialists early in the war. This raises historiographic issues which again are left outside the scope of the work.

Viewed as a campaign narrative we lack here the various commanders' intentions; viewed as a monograph on trench warfare, we lack structure, analysis and depth; viewed historiographically, we have here a new way of counting the battles around Petersburg; viewed as the last part of a trilogy, we have lost our train of thought. I think Earl Hess had in mind a book that interested him and he wrote it for himself, not a bad thing at all. I encourage you to read it.

His editors, however, missed their chance to make the "interesting" important.

Civil War drawings shown

A large stash of vivid, unpublished Civil War drawings is on display in Boston. Unfortunately, they are illegible in this news story. The museum site offers better views and the 650-picture collection has its own site. Best is the browse-by-subject page.

Shown above: detail from McClellan's Laurel Hill pursuit of Garnett. The on-the-scene artist wrote, "Raining in torrents. Mud over ankles. Men worn out. At first cannon shot they waked up and at every shot quickened their steps till the[y] came in leaning forward and going double quick. Military stores of all description scattered on the road."

Sesquicentennial news

From Kentucky, from Alabama, from South Carolina.

A complete guide

The Complete Gettysburg Guide is a new kind of guidebook. It doesn't set up a new paradigm for guidebooks, but rather adjusts each standard component to produce a large overall change. This makes it as different from ordinary guidebooks as an army staff ride is from, say, a battlefield tour.

Consider a basic, conventional guide. There's a map, usually B&W, showing roads but little detail, with numbers that key to explanatory text. The idea behind the numbers drives the organization of the guide. The spots on the ordinary tour map can be there based on popularity; accessibility; efficiency of touring; and, very often, "ownership" (belonging to a park). The sequence of stops can be based on covering-the-most-ground-in-a-day; or "must see" criteria; or places being closest to the road; or richness of historical data for that spot. This builds a high degree of arbitrariness into most tour guides. Here, author J. David Petruzzi and his publisher address arbitrariness as a matter of "completeness." The title, The Complete Gettysburg Guide, could as well have been The Rational Gettysburg Guide, or The Historian's Gettysburg Guide, chronology providing the motive organizing the "spots" in this work.

The work (which has its own website) follows the time sequence of days, beginning with opening cavalry clashes and finishing with follow-on battles. (It includes , at the end of the book, visits to cemeteries and rock carvings, which are obviously off the timeline.) The narrative is keyed, not to your day, or an allotted time you will spend in any one spot, but rather to the event, with events broken up intra-day (you might say into "phases"). Each of these phases gets its own beautiful map by Steven Stanley adorned with a clock. The map shows dispositions as they were on terrain as it was; the clock allows the visitor to align time of day to the tour; and the historic description of events allows visualization of events in place.

I mentioned adjusting components. The maps are spectacular, as anyone who receives Stanley's maps in CWPT mailings could expect. The minimum position for publisher Savas Beatie would have been to provide a route map; here we see many top-notch battle maps as a kind of bonus. The clock aspect is also important in maintaining fidelity to timeline – the organizing principle for the whole tour.

Another adjustment: the battle narrative. These are not here compiled or recapped from same-old-same-old; J.D. Petruzzi has researched and written material that would otherwise stand alone in a splendidly written work based on new accounts and including fresh contemporary (and current) imagery. There is a great deal of good reading here, irrespective of touring.

So we have these vivid, and interesting battle descriptions – good history - graced by fascinating maps and novel imagery inhabiting a guide book done completely in color, the "guide" part of which is also special.

On a mechanical level, the guidance, the driving instructions, is at a level of detail rarely seen, involving tenths of a mile and GPS numbers. GPS is becoming more common in guides, but here the driving instructions are painstaking and perhaps idiot proof. (Let me try them out before certifying them idiot proof.) More important, Petruzzi is moving the reader around a lot, intra-spot. The user is looking at an event from multiple angles - and I do mean multiple!

One charming thing is that the directions are boundary free. You may wind up in someone's field or driveway or parking lot; the points of interest are not organized on the principle of park limits.
The book design and production are another area in which the idea of the guide book is kicked up a couple of notches. This reasonably priced hardback is done entirely in color, as I said, and it follows the best principles behind magazine design - Steve Stanley did the design as well as the maps. It is laid out better than your glossy ACW mags and includes sidebars, breakout quotes, and more and better relevant imagery. It is a completely thought-out book that may remind older readers of the joy once brought to them by the American Heritage History of the Civil War. Kudos to the team: to J.D., Steve Stanley, and their publisher.

A final word that seems never to make it into guidebook reviews. Whether an author intends it or not, the guidebook is a produced and directed artistic experience. I'm not referring to the physical book but to the effects on the user who is being directed. There is little doubt in my mind that J.D. Petruzzi has distilled into his directions and narrative a specific - and beautiful - experience that he wants me to have. Guidebooks like this are rare and ambitious; a Russian mystic once said that great art attempts to produce the same reaction in all experiencers. This looks like an attempt in that class.

This is a tome that can be thoroughly enjoyed without leaving home – perhaps an unintended consequence of its excellence. I intend, however, to use some of these glorious, dry, cool September days to try the book out. If any guidebook deserves to be exercised, this one does.

Russell Bonds

Thinking about what I wrote yesterday: as I go deeper into the immensity of War Like the Thunderbolt, it becomes plainer that there is bigger story.

This is a long book (517 pp in the advance reader's copy) sustained at the highest literary standard in which Russell Bonds maintains - despite the limits of a narrative structure - an honest historic sensibility with justice to evidence for all. There may be quibbles, and the author does like the occasional sly-and-dry dig, but he is all about getting at the facts of the matter rather than slighting evidence to pour formula down the throats of the reader.

Friends, those who read Sears while despising his dogmas, say to me they buy his books out of love for his writing. Here is a better writer with fewer dogmas. They like the vividness, the knitting together of contemporary testimony Sears offers. Here, there is more testimony, and it is fresher. They like the campaign focus in title after title combined with an epic perspective in each. Thunderbolt has this, in greater proportion here, as if matched to the broader geography encompassed in the story.

So, it seems to me possible that Sears, no longer able to deliver new works at reasonable intervals, is to be overtaken in the marketplace by one who writes better English, writes better history, and who satisfies more reader needs than those that made Sears a top-seller. I am not only comparing Bonds to Sears per Sears but more to the point, Sears as the leading popular Civil War author ... the survivor of a once popular genre. To see the (to me, close) interval between Stealing the General and Thunderbolt, and considering the quality of each work, stamina speaks out and the potential seems to be here for the first major new Civil War author in a generation publishing general works at intervals to a standard that generates (and deserves) an enthusiastic following.

This is all market talk and something of an injustice to the author's inherent merits, but I want to finish in the same vein. His many virtues we'll take up another time.

The end of Centennial dominance of ACW publishing has arrived as we knew it would. The authors have died out; among the survivors, results are meager, activity is low. Exciting new studies appear with discoveries and analysis faster than the old guard can assimilate them or discredit their authors. The pot has been heating but has not come to a boil.

My own anti-narrative biases led me to hope that the big change we long for would come not just through new content but through new forms, non-narrative forms. Grandpa would be thrown out with the bathwater. I was naive. Thunderbolt suggests that narrative will replace narrative in the same market and for the same readers, except that it will be better narrative informed by better history dealt out by an honest broker aimed respectfully at a knowing audience.

This may then be how the Centennial ends, and this therefore is no place for any petulance over historiographic form. Whomever frees us and however he gets here, we need to be free.

Thank you Russell and thank you new and future narrative historians. It will be your skill and sensibility in managing narrative that sets you above what went before.

"War Like the Thunderbolt"

The Wall Street Journal has excerpted a chapter from Russell Bonds' new book, "War Like the Thunderbolt." This is accompanied by an book review by Winston Groom - which seems to have been written by one of Groom's characters, Forrest Gump. It's accompanied by a similarly distracting comments section ("I'm no expert but I got this a few years ago from watching BookTV and I forget the author's name...").

But good for Russell - two placements in the Journal, three cheers. Could it be his publisher, Westholme, has some juice?

Graced with an advanced copy, I can say that this is beautifully written narrative history. It is exactly what the Civil War nonfiction buyer is looking for. Bonds is careful in his research, artistic in his assembly of testimony, deliberate in his analysis, cautious in judgement, gentle with reputations, measured in his tempo, and interesting throughout.

Narrative history is not for me. This book is so well done, it takes away all the easy criticisms a typical narrative reading offers and puts me up against the bedrock, generic issues of narrative structure per se. That has nothing to do with Russll Bonds, however, and can be saved for a future meditation.

Meanwhile I continue to read, enjoy, and highly recommend this book.

"Let us have our Walmart and let us stop the battle"

There will be a lot of blogging on the Wilderness Walmart vote, so let me get out of the way as fast as I can.

The title quote, complete from the linked story, is "I know we've been referred to as ignorant shoppers. I feel bad about that but I'll live with it. Let us have our Walmart and let us stop the battle." Let us have peace, as Grant said.

The reporting explains why preservationists lost: "Many residents cited three reasons for supporting the Walmart proposal: jobs, tax revenue and a cheap shopping option..."

The 4-1 vote routed preservationists; humiliated them; cut down their orchards, salted their fields, carried their women and children into slavery. But the preservationists will not learn.

They fail to see similar motives in their allies the heritage tourism boosters; or in the various greens who team up to save ducks and battlefields or open space and battlefields or farmland and battlefields. These multi-purpose alliances can deliver success but confess great weakness.

Heritage tourism, for instance, is a dark alliance that is all about jobs, tax revenue, and cheap shopping. The expedient alliances pursued nationally to save battlefields will turn against preservationists as surely as the council that voted in Walmart and voted out history. If there is no organic preservation scene with political roots and deep local cultural affinity, all is in peril.

The "outsiders" who swooped in here deserve some credit but we need to look at the resources wasted in this battle; the opportunity cost of wasted time, energy and treasure; the polarization of preservation around the Wilderness into us versus them; major message failure; and the fundamental truth that advocates of "jobs, tax revenue and a cheap shopping" are not natural allies of the Civil War preservationist when parading as "heritage tourism" advocates.

We had a Bull Run in the Wilderness. Will we regroup and reorganize on sounder lines? Will certain generals be relieved? Can we retrain before the next battle?

Fake Grant, Lincoln imagery

The New York Times depicts a couple of amusing historical fakes: composite images of Lincoln (his head superimposed on Calhoun's body) and Grant (his head superimposed on McCook's body). This being typical Times reporting, however, we are not told who made the fakes, why they were made, when they were made, what purpose they served, who discovered them, or when they were discovered.

"Why senior military leaders fail"

The Armed Forces Journal has an article that will resonate deeply with Civil War readers, "Why senior military leaders fail." You may want to read it to inform your own views before going further.

***

The first thing that strikes me about the essay is that - without mentioning the ACW - it models all of the Lincoln-and-his-generals conventions . These are taught to generations of cadets. I hear a playback loop from the authors.

Consider the title and theme of the piece - failure is considered military relief by civilian authority. The general may betray his duty to subordinates, he may lose battles, he may botch strategies, he may neglect equipment and supplies, but he fails if and only if the civilians don't like him.

We define “failed” by their outright firing, or the more euphemistic “asked to resign.”

Meanwhile, a new biography, LeMay, shows us a chief of staff of the Air Force constantly, openly fighting with his presidents (Kennedy and Johnson) and they constantly reappointing him. So as to then versus now: if you have never served, it will be hard to understand how completely the U.S. military have internalized the civilian control ethos and how twisted their form of subordination has become.

Over a decade after Lemay/Johnson, in the summer of 1977, one of my Korean DMZ ambush patrols encountered infiltrators in the kill zone; my patrol leader reported in by radio and within minutes White House civilians took over his unit by telephone. This was a great relief to my battalion commander, his brigade commander, the Second Division commander, the Eighth Army commander, and so on up the Army line. Delegating command to an anonymous poli sci grad student, somebody's ardent campaign assistant, to run combat patrols over phone lines and radio relays half a world away remains a brilliant example of when senior military leaders succeed.

Major General Barry Goldwater, USAF, did a curious thing to help adjust military-civilian relations almost a decade after that patrol. As senator, he and Congressman Bill Nichols sponsored a bill, one provision of which required that the Joint Chiefs of Staff always have direct access to the president. You wouldn't think it was needed. Halleck could again talk to Lincoln.

What General Goldwater did not seem to realize, per my Korean example and the AFJ article linked here, is that the Chiefs do not need access to the president to "succeed," and in fact, are eager to bargain away such access in exchange for real "success." Thus, early in the reprise of SecDef Donald Rumsfeld, his inner Stanton counseled him to have the chiefs sign a memo foreswearing their legal access to the president. They signed gladly and were all the more "successful" for it with only a couple being retired prematurely under Rumsfeld redux. That arrangement continues to this day with less "success" for the generals, Rumsfeld's replacement, Gates, having fired a gaggle of generals and service secretaries (an act we ACW readers associate exclusively with presidential prerogatives). Perhaps the generals need new statutes they can bargain away in exchange for "success."

Here is a test you can apply yourselves any Sunday. To see how the relationship with civilian leaders has evolved, look at the military men on the Sunday civics shows answering policy questions as if they make and own policy. These are implementers of policy whose natural sphere is to tell how they are implementing what they have been given; it is their duty to reject every policy question as out of their field. Nowadays, however, looking out for the boss means internalizing and anticipating his policies, then advocating them as if they were your own.

The linked AFJ piece gives the counter-example of Admiral Fallon travelling the world making statements to pre-empt his civilian masters from adopting policies that Fallon did not want. (Rorschach test for you: is he more like Wadsworth or McClellan?) To me, this is the next natural step after demanding implementers internalize policy. Fallon's pre-emptive diktats are exactly of a piece with generals becoming spokesmen for the policies they are instructed to follow and just as pernicious. Fallon's path at least has the advantage of intellectual honesty but its poisons flow from the same source as the cheerleaders': demanding of subordinates their policy buy-in, as if they were apparatchiks, or clappers at a party congress where the first to stop applauding calls attention to himself.

We don't ask the policeman to be an advocate for every law enforced but rather to be an effective implementer of the law. We don't sit the policeman on the talk show panel and ask what the policy should be.

An important book, one that ended the career of BG J.F.C. Fuller, was Generalship: Its Diseases and Their Cure. Fuller was less concerned with the specifics of general-civilian interaction than with the superset of phenomena associated with the "chateau general". He noted that the American Civil War was the last period of the fighting commander and that the chateau general is all anybody has nowadays. Perhaps, if the commanders are now going to act like apparatchiks, the term should be dacha generals.

***

The second thing you notice about the AFJ article is that it's written by men who are not "senior military leaders" themselves and worse, do not draw on any personal experience as aides to such to develop their piece. Their article is based on newspaper clippings such as you or I might gather. This is very much chateau (or dacha) staffwork. No reconnaissance of the line, no mucky interviews, no gory research, and no analysis outside of the crazy framework that equates failure to please the president's aides with military failure.

***

Misinterpreting relations between Lincoln and his generals, codifying those "lessons learned" in all the wrong ways, then inculcating those errors into the officer corps for generations has led to a morally confused military leadership that does not know how to relate to civilian authority.

It cannot even follow the law in such matters.

There is a very real price we pay for bad Civil War history.

Another setback for Lincoln, the film

The news of massive Indian funding for Spielberg's movie company has cast indirect light on the Lincoln film project that started with his buying in advance the rights to the then unwritten Team of Rivals; and then, more recently in partnership with screenwriter Tony Kushner, Spielberg's seeming to drop Doris Kearns Goodwin's property for a new storyline.

This nugget of intelligence comes from Playbill, earlier in the month:

Spielberg's DreamWorks film about Abraham Lincoln (with Tony Kushner attached as screenwriter) was not yet ready to shoot, according to the trade paper, so Harvey [a newer project] has been fast-tracked.

Recent stories featuring Kushner have not mentioned him finishing the script - in fact, they have not mentioned Lincoln at all. Is it too much to infer that Spielberg is having story/scenario problems with the material? First with Goodwin's book as delivered, then with Kushner's new material?

Larry Tagg noticed news that Robert Redford will beat Spielberg to market with a Lincoln film, albeit an assasination story ("The Conspirator"). This could actually help a future biopic by creating interest via the drama of death and chase.

What bothers me about the Redford stories - and we're entering codger territory here - is that only some of them mention that this is for HBO. To me HBO = TV and an HBO movie = Made-for-TV-Movie. Has the stigma disappeared? If it is not shown in theatres, is it a movie? When HBO started, I cancelled it the first time they broadcast a made-for-HBO-movie and have never looked back.

What Larry likes is the angle the scriptwriters are taking: "I'm especially excited about this because the movie centers on Mary Surratt, and I was just asked to speak at a conference organized by the Surratt Society--www.surratt.org--in March."

A Surratt society! Well, the astonishing level of interest in Dr. Samuel Mudd must be an indicator of something. Redford here may have a better nose for commercial potential, even if he is wasting a film on cable TV.

Vietnam War re-enactors

What do they think they are doing?

The author answers his critics (cont.)

Regarding authors answering critics, Russell Bonds writes:

Another place to watch answering-the-critics car wrecks - on Amazon.com Customer Reviews. Some authors use the "Comments" function to answer/blast readers who give them a bad review. (The State of Jones folks are doing this to debate some of their one-stars.)

He adds, "It is tough to watch people trash your 'baby,' but arguing with them is a bad idea."

A good indicator of which authors might be prone to do this is to note which ones go into a state of rage when publishers turn down their manuscripts (see doozy here).

Francis Hamit adds:

That e-mail I sent you about bad book reviews was not a "press release". You were the only recipient. I don't mind having a dialog on this topic, but since I have over a dozen favorable reviews for "The Shenandoah Spy" a badly done one simply makes its author look bad and, frankly, I expect better from academics than a "once over lightly" approach which would earn any of their students a "C". As I said, I used to be a book reviewer for the Los Angeles Daily News. There are standards for reviews and rule number one is that you are supposed to read the entire book. Anything less is cheating. People rely upon book reviews for insights into the quality of the text and insights into what the book is about. My concern here is not whether or not the review might be negative or prejudicial, but whether or not it is accurate and fair. How can it be fair if the reviewer hasn't bothered to read the entire text and grasp the author's intention?

The author answers his critics

Way back, Ted Savas of Savas-Beatie, mentioned to me that Russel Beatie (right) was using his website to answer critics. I didn't think it was a good idea, so I am pleased to find no retorts on his site now.

My feelings are/were somewhat Beatie-specific. His more ardent critics almost drove me to write an extended series of essays on substantive criticism vs. frippery.

Major criticisms deserves a response but the author is too often tempted into overkill, chasing the critic's own smaller mistakes or errors in interpretation. Do you ever read magazines with letters colums where the author responds? Voila.

All this is to introduce a very interesting press release from Francis Hamit (right) in which he addresses critics of his novel Shenandoah Spy. I place the whole release below to provide context for the response to reviewers. Is Hamit in the zone where response is needed? Or is he in a lose/lose bargain?

Because of the economy, we continue to push "The Shenandoah Spy" and have put off the second book in the series, "Nest of Spies". That means we are still sending out review copies and doing book signings and interviews. Generally, the reviews have been excellent and the only ones that fail to be excellent are one where the reviewer has quite obviously not read the book fully and completely. When the review focuses on a very minor character and misses the main events of the narrative that define the characters, it's sort of a dead giveaway. This only seems to happen when reviewer is a historian rather than a novelist. Given how touchy these folks are about accuracy, it seems odd that they are so careless and quick to judge a historical novel based on a few selective readings of bits and pieces and not the whole. True, many historical novels are sloppy in their own research and many professional historians rightly scorn them for this Hollywood approach to the facts, but prejudging a book by its category and reading it incompletely is the kind of carelessness that professional book reviewers (if there are any left) get fired for. I used to be one.

There is not much an author can do about a badly done review, except take the hit and hope that the mass of favorable opinion will overcome it, but I do think that professional historians should recuse themselves from reviewing historical fiction if they cannot be bothered to read the complete work and understand, going in, that is is indeed fictional and creative choices related to the needs of an entertaining and enjoyable narrative for average readers, sans footnotes and other artifacts of the tradtional history are what will drive the storyline. These are not teaching tools, nor are they intended for immature or sensitive readers.

The essence of drama and fiction can be expressed in the question "What would happen if...." and fill in the blank. This takes a novelist places that a historian would never think to go. Currently I am looking once more in the exisitng primary sources for what the intelligence trade calls "indicators". Last night I discovered that the British were very worried at the end of the Civil War that America might use it's massive and experienced army to invade Canada and that British support of the Confederate Navy (almost entirely crewed by British sailors) would be the cause. The American merchantile fleet had been destroyed by the Confederate cruisers, either directly or ,more significantly by the 715 vessles that had changed their registration from American to British. The Confederate Navy was a secret service operation from beginning to end. I will be going to the Public Records Office at Kew in the future to see just whose secret service. And to Liverpool. Seems to me that there more than one PhD dissertation to be gotten here, but that's not my game, so regular historians should feel free to jump on this, if they like.

My book is available for review, but you have to read the whole thing. The attached file is the current book cover. By the way, the Amazon Shorts version is not the same. I did more research before the final publication. Mostly on Major Wheat, a very minor character, but every character in a novel is important.

Google: annoyance or menace?

One should not speak ill of a business partner but it used to be that when you Googled "Russel Beatie" (watch the spelling) his website appeared near the top of the results. Now you get a fairly random grab bag of mixed relevance with his site outta site (but his political contributions in the top four results!). You'll see this very blog in the top five, so it's not all bad news. On the other hand, I'm worried that this post will eventually index higher than the author's own web pages or any other contextually relevant site.

Which reminds me, any of you codgers notice a serious deterioration in the Amazon search output over the last decade? I have relied on it for 13 years of ACW book hunts but am getting better relevance from B&N over the last three years. It must be the expanded inventory that is degrading Amazon search quality. I'm seeing a major irrelevancy generator in the (Amazonian) textual analysis of various books' insides. (If a UFO book mentions Lincoln or Civil War, it's on your list.)

Where are all those fierce algo jockeys when you need them?

(Image result topside from Googling "fierce algo jockeys." They seem to be fiddling with some sort of iTunes interface device.)

Heard at a meeting this morning...

"That department is in the first 10 minutes of Pickett's charge..." I guess those were the better minutes.

Testing search engines

When I hear about new search engines, the first test I'll run is "Civil War."

Here are the results from Microsoft's new "decision engine" Bing. The good news for Eric Wittenberg is that his blog landed fourth on the list (but not the blog in general, one post in particular).

The rest of the showing is marred by duplicate entries (Encarta, Wiki, Civilwar.com) and scattershot relevancy. See for yourself.

Buchanan and the inevitability doctrine

This blog carried a post on how Buchanan's reputation reaps little gain from the Centennial doctrine that the war was inevitable. Mitch Hagmaier writes

I had a kid submit an inevitability & Buchanan paper for this year's History Day state semi-finals. He did, in fact, argue that Buchanan was blameless due to the whole Centennial "irrepressible conflict" line of argument, and generally blaming every negative event of Buchanan's term on somebody other than Buchanan. Shame he was more interested in the Sumner-Brooks beating & taking his analysis from contemporary political cartoons than in discussing decisions which Buchanan had actually made, but at least he took a slightly different tack than the usual line.

He's picking something up from pop political culture, I think: any accusation made against your guy can now be refuted by means of rationalization (or charge of hypocrisy). Could be the wave of the future in history...

I'm with Bynum

When I saw what they had done to her book, I felt the same sentiments author Victoria Bynum expresses here:

“I am appalled at the manner in which these authors have written what is touted as a scholarly work. I am also deeply hurt by the manner in which they have appropriated, then denigrated, my work.”

I had asked earlier how a the head of a Harvard department could do scholarship such a wrong. Sally Jenkins now stands a good chance of being profiled by the Cambridge police.

This blog got ahead of the New York Times, but the Times has caught up (and passed me) in grand style. Click the first link.

The genesis for a book

This is one of the oddest origins-of-a-book story ever.

A director is shooting a film.

He creates a team of two authors to write a book about the film's subject.

The authors enter a specific, deeply plowed ACW history field to compile a rockem-sockem narrative on the QT with almost no research: "we spent a number of weeks in Mississippi together, filling in holes in the research [!] and borrowing groundbreaking material from Jim Kelly, who is writing his dissertation on the subject."

Weeks of plugging and borrowing. You see, the research has been done to death, including in a trade hardback I reviewed 10 years ago which they disparagingly call an "academic monograph". The holes are to be plugged in other people's work and augmented with a new dissertation by a student.

OPM = Other People's Money. OPR = Other People's Research.

The authors include a sportswriter and the chair of a Harvard department.

In addition to cranking out hit history titles, sounds like these two could run a pretty good whorehouse.

Bloggers with books out

A surprising number of ACW bloggers had books out this summer.

Eric Wittenberg's Like a Meteor Burning Brightly: The Short but Controversial Life of Colonel Ulric Dahlgren was scheduled for release June 11 (by Amazon's reckoning) but was still in production as recently as July 10. I'm really looking forward to the accounts of political intrigue in this one.

I missed the release of Scott Mingus's book in March, Flames Beyond Gettysburg: The Gordon Expedition, June 1863. Hmm: Confederate general training militia on the march during and for an invasion of the North. Narrative history doesn't get much better than that. (Hat tip to Eric W for mentioning this.)

Brooks Simpson has put out his Civil War in the East 1861-1865: A Strategic Assessment. The publisher says, "At a time when the telling and retelling of the military narrative approaches Norse saga, Brooks avers that it is essential to question conventional wisdom, especially when it is questionable wisdom, without giving way to pure contrarianism."

J. David Petruzzi and mapmaker Steven Stanley saw their Complete Gettysburg Guide released by Savas-Beatie last month. This is a full-color production on slick paper with maps of the same quality as CWPT distributes in its mailings.

Back in April, Steven Woodworth issued a collection, The Shiloh Campaign, which included a piece by his co-blogger Brooks Simpson as well as Savas-Beatie author Timothy Smith.

Larry Tagg's Unpopular Mr. Lincoln was reviewed here Friday - please read that post.

Apologies to fellow bloggers for mere mentions. Will delve into content in future posts.

Lincoln's odium

The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln is a bold and difficult idea for a book.

In our circles (dear reader), everyone knows Lincoln was unpopular but his unpopularity is one of many bromides ("McClellan was a great organizer," "the ACW was the first modern war") on which no one wastes curiosity.

In fact, these bromides are designed as prophylaxis against subject development. "We all agree, let's move on." Put another way, lazy writers use these thought tokens so often as EZPass badges that readers are taught to accept them as the legal tender of scholarship.

Over the years, in my mind, I have thoroughly organized my own version of an Unpopular Mr. Lincoln. It is a book that would turn the firehose of contemporary Lincoln criticism into the face of thoughtless Lincoln-loving. Its vast number of chapters would be organized topically - by category of criticism, very heavy on quotes, progressing from the most substantive and credible complaints to the grumbles of partisans. The back of the book would be an examination of the best, sharpest criticism. An extended appendix would ask to what extent Civil War history has been organized to defend Lincoln's decisions, all of which we are currently told, were correct or the best under the circumstances; a second appendix would trace the phrases, ideas and memes of current historians back to their origins in the Republican newspaper editorials of the period. This imaginary book of mine would be the cure for "everyone knows Lincoln was unpopular but..."

Hearing of The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln, I oddly assumed Larry Tagg had written a book plotted out in my own mind.

Actually, The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln starts from an opposite premise: it seeks to correct the idea of Lincoln being popular, "the idol of the common people," presumably the view held beyond our ACW readership. Its organization has to be different because if someone's stock of Lincolniana is so miserably low that he thinks Lincoln was popular, then the author is going to have to take that reader by the hand and lead him along a timeline landscaped with deep context and summary information.

The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln, then, takes the form of a book of essays, each devoted to a phase of the Lincoln presidency and the controversies and criticism in that phase.

This approach is not to my taste; I expected to be bored and disappointed. Actually the essays are so well done, afer the first three I became so excited, I had to get up and walk around to calm down. The summaries of the presidency and the party system pre-Lincoln were superb - and I say this even in full rejection of Tagg's interpretation of Whiggery and the birth of the two-party system.

This brilliance may defeat the marketing ends intended. These are more like treats for advanced ACW readers than digestible foods for general nonfiction readers - unless I'm underrating the latter. I mean, think of the Larry Tagg "brand." What was Generals of Gettysburg? It had the outward form of a reference book but its content was that of delightfully pungent commentary by an entertaining and informed author for a knowing reader. Welcome dummies, welcome cognescenti! Myself straddling the dummy/cognescenti divide (at least re: Gettysburg) I read that non-narrative cover to cover, entry by entry when it came out and enjoyed it immensely.

Tagg here takes the insight and writing skill shown in his tiny biographical gems (in Gettysburg) and dispenses more, better in a much larger medium demanding of him much wider reading and much deeper thought. This is a tour de force demonstration of writing, reading, and thinking.

If old hands have a problem with this book it will be in Tagg's matter-of-fact treatment of Lincoln's mistakes; not that he dwells on them, rather the opposite. He relates an action or decision then goes to the public reaction without the usual elaborate rationalizations and justifications. (I sometimes think authors are terrified to leave the reader unchaperoned in a room with Lincoln.)

Personally, I think this book wasted on general nonfiction readers. We, however, are free to enjoy it and should do so in the knowledge that a work of this quality can rarely come out of an authorial pool as small as that of the ACW and Lincolnology. Bravo.

(Topside: Lincoln's Comedy of Death, a privately circulated cartoon scanned from the book; it's typical of the author's original research and good eye.)

Inspiring

Ted Savas knows what to do with interns - make 'em blog! And boy, does Parul Guliani blog. Let's see if I can get my summer-soaked attitude adjusted and inspired...

Back to blogging

After a lazy hiatus, this blog will be looking like Drew's for awhile as I plunge into the pile of books accumulated in the last weeks.

Kenneth Stampp has died

It's amazing to hear of people with big mid-century reputations dying now. Think of Stampp's peer group among Civil War historians...

Celebrating Lincoln, 7/4/09

Perhaps they were waiting for better weather, but a surprising number of venues postponed their Bicentennial observances from February to July 4. The weather was fine in some places, worse in others:

Rain didn’t prevent Abraham Lincoln from making a Fourth of July visit to downtown Springfield. Lincoln impersonator Michael Krebs was one of a large group of entertainers who performed Saturday as part of the Capital City Bicentennial Celebration ... Because of the wet weather, many entertainers had their performances moved ...

Notice how the writer conflates the performance of a vaudeville bit with an actual visit by the historic Abraham Lincoln. I guess history is the big winner when (similarly) an eight-year-old in Philly mistakes a re-enactor for an historical person:

"Awesome," Joey said, nodding. "I thought that Abe Lincoln was just a spirit, but he's right here."

There was not enough bad vaudeville availble to Sparta, Indiana, so Kiwanis there decided that "Children who dress-up like Abe or his wife, Mary Todd will be admitted to the park for free." This will help them get past the image of the man to penetrate his historical meaning, perhaps.

In Philadelphia, the art club Dumpster Divers strewed trash across damaged plywood on Independence Mall to "honor Abraham Lincoln's 200th birthday." Sensing the kitsch imperative behind every Lincoln project, a spokesman said "Originally I wanted to make it look like Abe Lincoln's hat" but gave up for technical reasons. He was careful to use the word "whimsical" instead of "kitschy" but of course the "trash" content of the exhibit is immutable.

Another artist, Wisconsin cheese artist Troy Landwehr (top photo), sculpted a Lincoln form out of a 1,000-lb block of cheddar with the full weight of the task in mind: "I think it's a big honor to carve Lincoln." He did not take this honor lightly: "It's a lot of research."

When the figure was moved to Washington, hot weather and jostling caused the cheese head to roll off:

Landwehr couldn't salvage the stovepipe hat. "But we saved his face," the sculptor said. "He's OK. He's back to standing tall."

He, not "it." For you see, Joey, Lincoln has become a spirit that inhabits trash, kitsch, bad lectures, and vaudeville schtick.

"Comfort reads"

As someone who reads books only once (very, very slowly) I had never heard of "comfort reads" before this. I suspected there were people who read a book twice due to memory failure but this is wild stuff...

Sesquicentennial kick off

Virginia could not wait another moment and kicked off its Sesquicentennial program in Winchester this weekend with some 1859 re-enactors (!) in attendance (shown right).

I don't want to be too hard on "Bud" Robertson because I am relying on a third party - a reporter - to translate what he said into one and two syllable words for a mass audience. If, however, you read the linked story carefully you'll get a full measure of the kind of damage public history can do to the public and history.

This is the subject for a symposium, not a truism to be handed out to newspaper readers:

...the Shenandoah Valley proved to be crucial in the outcome of the war...

It gets worse:

Winchester alone changed hands between the Union and Confederacy more than 70 times, making it focal point of the war, he said.

We should rename it "The Winchester War" I suppose. Look at the phrasing in this whopper:

“The Shenandoah Valley was important because of location. It was the western flank of all military operations.”

All military operations. And does he know what a flank is?

Is it Robertson's own interest - as a specialist - in the Valley that skews his thinking this badly? Or is there more to it, something out of the public historian's public usefulness (emphasis added):

Robertson said the celebration of the war should be a time for enjoying history, building on visits by citizens to boost the economy of various towns and counties throughout Virginia.

Eventually every town in Virginia will be declared "crucial to the outcome of the war/tourist industry." Meanwhile, enjoy your celebration of war.

"For diligence in genealogical research..."

West Virginia has 4,000 unclaimed ACW medals awaiting an owner.

They found an angle

The New York Times ran a re-enactment story, believe it or not. Seems to have a Mason vs. Mason angle...

John Brown's Raid

John Brown will have died in vain if his end cannot be made to serve heritage tourism:

Harpers Ferry officials claim they have serious standing in the national celebration because the Civil War actually began when Brown and his men raided the arsenal that saw the first shot fired in the “War Between the States.”

They maintain Brown’s raid is the real jumping-off point for the 150th anniversary of the Civil War and not the shot that was fired by the infant Confederacy on Fort Sumter in Charleston, S.C., in April 1861.

Freshman dorm arguments apparently make good history (for some).

Speaking of which, this freshman dorm argument was inevitable:

"John Brown was, in effect, a terrorist. Whether you agree that what he was doing was right or not," says Gerry Gaumer, spokesman for the Park Service in Washington, D.C. "There are people in the Taliban who believe what they're doing is right. Can you separate John Brown from what's going on in Iraq or Iran or Pakistan or Afghanistan? "They fervently believe what they're doing is right," he says. "But is there a better way?"

Can we get some historians into the National Park Service and over to Harpers Ferry? The freshmen are running the seminar.

Professor demands Republicans apologize for slavery

Your children are in good hands at Vanderbilt:

Carol M. Swain, a professor of political science and law at Vanderbilt University who had pushed for the Bush administration to issue an apology [for slavery], called the Democratic-controlled Senate's resolution "meaningless" since the party and federal government are led by a black president and black voters are closely aligned with the Democratic party.

"The Republican Party needed to do it," Swain said. "It would have shed that racist scab on the party."

Republicans = slavery?

Also interesting how some modern administrations are more responsible for events 150 years ago than others.

Intriguing, too, this legal scholar's idea that a (legal) party without (legal) standing can "shed" crimes committed by other (legal) parties through the simple issue of a legislative resolution by this or that political party.

Dr. Swain is a breakthrough thinker who offers us a whole bag full of historiographic bones to chew on.

Touring Wheatland

You would think that the "inevitability of war" doctrine would work in favor of Buchanan's reputation:

I asked Patrick Clarke, director of James Buchanan's Wheatland, what he thought of Buchanan's being on the worst-president list. Clarke said that nobody elected in 1856 could have averted the war.

Despite the iron grip of the inevitables on Civil War historiography, Buchanan reaps no gain.

U.S. Senate considers slavery apology

At last, I can be reconciled to my fellow man, thanks to a Senate resolution:

... a formal apology to African-Americans will help bind the wounds of the Nation that are rooted in slavery and can speed racial healing and reconciliation...

ACW publishing: trending up

After an astonishingly weak first quarter, the number of Civil War titles released in April-May-June has exploded.

Prize heaven

The list of recent Savas Beatie prizes.

You've just been insulted

From Publishers Weekly:

...one wishes for more rigorous, subtle analysis ... Still, McGinty's engaging account ... will delight history buffs.

Battle Hymns

A new choral/dance work, "Battle Hymns," will use Civil War texts and premier in a working armory. Pulitzer-winning composer David Lang says,

"The Civil War was different from the Revolutionary War, which was so clearly 'us versus them.' There's something inherently introspective about the Civil War, because it's about us."

Ayers kicks off Sesquicentennial in Virginia

Interesting account of the Sesquicentennial kickoff in the Chronicle of Higher Education by a slavery historian from Yale.

For a motif in his article, David Blight (right), despite his pedigree, sophomorically grabs onto so-called "Lost Cause history" and tells how he would like to stamp out this imaginary school of thought and re-educate its purported proponents. Deleriously waving this red herring, handed to him by respected Centennialists, he completely misses the up-to-date, historiographic struggle occurring under his very nose in realtime.

Agitating against "Lost Cause" historiography invites one into a fantasy struggle against a pretend school of thought invented out of scraps of writing and speech and then built into a menace. Centennialism dresses up as Don Quixote to tilt against this windmill while its real foes line up for hard jousting.

Edward Ayers' symposium, "America on the Eve of the Civil War," did something dramatic to grab the attention of the Centennialist's inevitability-of-war advocates.

Ayers immersed attendees in his system of "deep contingency" analysis, then he enforced that system throughout the event (apparently with rigor). The "inevitables" - if any attended - had to evaluate and discuss events as contingent in origin with multiple possible outcomes. Can you imagine the discomfort of the "inevitables" at this event?

Inevitablility vs. Contingency. How do you split that difference? How do you pretend the difference does not exist?

Blight's solution was to paper over the stark differences "deep contingency" bares: let's all unite to attack the French in Mexico - er, "Lost Cause History."

Nothing to see here folks. Keep moving.

The cost of war in Missouri

To right the wrongs, 11,200 lawsuits were needed.

Prizeworthy

The prizes are accumulating at Savas-Beatie, starting with Darrell Collins' Rodes bio.

Prepare to overreach

Prepare to exhibit!

Pretentious pseudo-biblical title ready?

Check, "Illinois Stories: 'How Vast and Varied a Field' ... The Agricultural Vision of Abraham Lincoln."

Tangential and irrelevant artifacts ready?

Check, ox yoke and John Deere tractor prepared for show.

Rationale ready to explain how a farmer who abandons the land remains an agronomist?

Check, all Whigs are actually agronomists:

He recognized how technological and industrial advancements could improve agricultural productivity; how improved roads and canals and new rail lines could tie outlying markets to burgeoning cities; how national banks and a new currency system could help both farmers and businessmen.

Civil War coiffure (cont.)

Lane - again with the hair.

CWPT redesign

Civil War Preservation Trust has redesigned its website. Maps steal the show.