The Wadsworths persist

Catching up on back issues of In and Around Horse Country, I noticed that Marion Thorne is "huntsman" for the Genessee Valley Hunt. A huntsman acts as c-in-c of the dogs, around whom the hunt is organized, and Ms. Thorne is the stepdaughter of the grandson of Major W. Austin Wadsworth, founder of the Genessee Valley Hunt and a very big name in the history of American foxhunting.

I am unclear on the relation of W. Austin and our good friend MG James Wadsworth, the great patroon and leader of the NY Republicans in opposition to Seward-Weed (one supposes WA's majority originated in the ACW). This 1943 article makes clear that there are just too many Wadsworths to keep track of, even for local historians, and it suggests the immense properties of the W. Austins (over 60,000 acres) are separate from the endless estates of the James Wadsworths. The same article is more than a little defensive about the status of the serfs who (as late as 1943) worked the lands of their Genessee patroons.

So, the Wadsworths are still with us as surely as the ACW is still with us.

p.s., W. Austin, center above, is depicted sometime after 1878, I think, because that is the point at which he tried to establish his own pack. Of course, he could be posing with borrowed hounds at an earlier date.The eclectic hunting dress is charming. Perhaps it is ratcatcher. By 1912, he had succumbed to conformity.

Note the stovepipe hat

In 3-D for you, the consumer. You take your kicks where you find them.

Today's war news is not bloody enough; history is not gory enough; and the life of AL is not dramatic enough.

Ghoulish you.

On the other hand, if this movie brings just a single child to the study of history, it will have been well worth it.

The publishing dog chases its tail

A reader writes:

I was thinking about Grant the other day – and noting the slew of forthcoming Grant biographies by big names. Have you noticed? Three major biographers have Grant bios in the works: H.W. Brands (Oct. 2012), Ron Chernow (not sure when), and Ronald C. White, Jr. (2014).

[...]

Here’s a test--how many Grant bios can you name off the top of your head in the past 15 years? Simpson, Perret, Smith, Waugh, Longacre, Korda… I think G is challenging Lincoln as the most popular biographical subject. Not to mention the “dual” biographies: Grant and Twain, Grant and Sherman, Grant and Lincoln.

And … oh good, another new biography of Thomas. Am I the only one that is heartily tired of hearing about GHT and how unappreciated he is? Three biographies since 2009 – all of them insisting he is unappreciated.

All right, all right, enough already, we appreciate him!

Master of War: The Life of General George H. Thomas – 2009 – Thomas “has never captured the public imagination”

George Thomas: Virginian for the Union – 2010 – “one of the North’s greatest generals… yet he has been eclipsed.”

George Henry Thomas: As True As Steel – 2012 – “George Henry Thomas still has not received his due.” Really? He still hasn’t?

Publishers showed us two things during the sludgefest that followed Ken Burns's "Civil War." (1) Whatever works, keep doing it. (2) The simpler the meme, the greater the sales.

Now I have a question for all of you. Earl Hess has been on a publishing roll. What is the Earl Hess value proposition? He writes outside of my expertise and I do not understand what exactly he is all about. Storyteller? Fresh new research? Powerful affirmations of what we already know? Bold revisionist? What is Earl Hess doing?

Theories welcome, esp. from Hess fans.

The timing of a diplomatic lament

In the Third Session of the First CSA Congress (1/63-5/63), on January 14, a letter on foreign affairs from Jefferson Davis was delivered and entered into the record. The argument and the timing of what Davis lays out I have not previously read in diplomatic histories by Howard Jones, et al. They strike me as very important. Here is the gist of his report:

The complaint is that the [European] neutrality has been rather nominal than real, and that recognized {European] neutral rights have been alternatively asserted and waived in such manner as to bear with great severity on us and to confer signal advantages on our enemy.

This is very condensed compared to the long message it summarizes. Davis is saying (and he illustrates this), that the neutrals have been openly and clearly playing against the Confederacy from the start of the war. Up to this point, Jefferson has mentioned neutrals' surrender of their treaty rights to ship non-contraband goods to and from belligerent ports; the neutral's failure to condemn an illegal (paper) blockade; the neutrals' refusal to allow their ports to admit privateering prizes for dsiposal; France's failure to recoginize the sovereignty of states with which it had previously signed separate treaties apart from the U.S.; and most importantly, the French and British position communicated to Confederate commissioners from the outset, "a refusal to treat us as an independent government." The message does not mention frustration with any failure to mount a peace initiative. It acknowledges flatly Louis Napoleon's recent efforts to poll European powers for their attitude on a potential future peace initiative, but Davis seems to dismiss this development. The Davis letter is all past tense, barn-door-closed in tone. At one point Davis says,

I have hitherto refrained from calling your attention to this condition of our relations with foreign powers for various reasons.

And

It is therefore because our just grounds of complaint can no longer be misinterpreted that I lay them clearly before you.

To repeat, there is no hint of a reasonable chance of neutral intervention ever having been a calculation of the Davis government. The story is one of neutrals playing their neutrality against the CSA in favor of the USA from day one.

The defenders of the conventional wisdom might say that this message was Davis blowing off steam at the failure of intervention. If so, the failure is from the first, a failure to even enter grounds of discussion where this could be feasible.

(Note also, prior to Davis's message, a representative entered a motion - referred to committee - to recall all Confederate commissioners from abroad.)

What we are seeing here is not exasperation that a single military roll of the dice went against one side. In his January 1863 message, Davis was washing his hands of the Europeans (and his Congress is favorable to that) after a string of offenses. He has observed the effects of their policies from the beginning and judged them passively hostile. He is fed up with what has been going on for a long time.

The French initiative then, in the general context, appears as a fluke and Davis seems to give it no consideration for success.

Readers should walk the timeline.

Davis's message was surely in preparation during December of 1862, at the latest. So too, the congressional measure that would have recalled commissioners.

The idea that Davis or his Congress entertained hopes of European intervention in the second half of '62 appears to be unworkable.

Whatever fears the Union had for a peace initiative, it should not be read into the Confederate side.

Intervention looks to be a plot device concocted by talespinners to juice a story, especially that of the Maryland campaign.

p.s. Our friend Tim Reese in his last book did a fine job in tracking (unit by unit) the British Army force buildup in Canada during the ACW, esp. in the run-up to the Maryland campaign. Although the buildup can be roughly correlated to Seward-induced British tensions with the Union, they do not correlate to peace initiatives or discussions in Britain. The diplomatic histories make much of a high point for intervention in the fall of 1862. Its cresting wave was a proposed British cabinet meeting to discuss the matter. The sponsors of this discussion lost their nerve beforehand and it never even got that far. Attempts are made to connect Antietam with the decision to drop the cabinet approach but the whole issue is moot. Had the topic been broached in cabinet, it would have needed a consensus to move forward. Moving forward means deciding on the form of the peace initiative, and whether it would be backed by diplomatic threats to recognize the CSA or military force of some sort to start negotiations. Once those matters were decided, a proposal would have to be sold to Parliament and the French. I have felt that the time element and the moving political parts always made European intervention a false problem for ACW historians. The Davis letter to the CSA lower house moves us even farther away from the possibility of such a development.

The NYT notices a McPherson misdeed

The New York Times managed to sound like Civil War Bookshelf earlier this month:

The Fox-Livermore numbers continued to be cited well into the 21st century ... Among many others, James M. McPherson used them without citing the source in “Battle Cry of Freedom,” his Pulitzer-winning 1988 history of the war.

Surprise, surprise. How shocking is that? Or not.

A Dr. Hacker estimates higher ACW deaths than the Fox-Livermore tallies. We'll look at his work in a future post.

Palmer and Patton (cont.)

Here is the gist of Patton’s analysis from the 1932 memo. He says that there have been two armies recurring in history:

(a) A Mass Army composed of hastily raised and incompletely trained individuals who, in the main, looked on the business of war as a secondary avocation. The dominant characteristic of such a force is QUANTITY rather than QUALITY. (b) A Professional Army, highly trained, and composed of individuals who looked on the business of war as their vocation. The dominant characteristic of such a force is QUALITY rather than QUANTITY.

The present trend of military thought: Since 1919 numerous military authorities have voiced the belief that for the immediate future the solution to the problem of obtaining short, decisive wars was to be found in the employment of smaller, more mobile and better trained armies. That is, by the use of armies organized along professional lines. […]

Notice the problem Patton is trying to solve with his reorganization proposal: “the problem of obtaining short, decisive wars.”

Scott’s devotion to a 75,000-man force of regulars sprang from similar concerns (and earned Scott the younger General Palmer’s condemnation).

Could the ACW have been “solved” Patton's way?

Here is where Scott and Patton’s views agree. The bulk of Scott’s 75,000 would have formed a column descending the Mississippi with enhanced mobility. Scott, in his letters to McClellan, conceived of this as an unstoppable military force, foreshadowing Patton’s argument of Quality devouring Quantity; 50,000 or so professionals would overmatch the numerous Southern forces sent to oppose them.

And here is where Scott and Patton diverge. The mission of Scott’s riverine regulars was to clear the Mississippi and seize New Orleans at its mouth. This would create the political effect of a bargaining incentive, the war being settled through negotiation. Scott was NOT going to occupy the enemy’s capital or smash his military forces.

McClellan’s views of August, 1861, provide an interesting alternative. McClellan proposed following rail, river and coast lines to junction points where large forces (Quantities) would be deposited in fortified positions where they could easily hold off those CSA (Quantities) sent to dislodge them. McClellan named his targets and timelines; the effect would have created the “Anaconda” people talk about with respect to Scott’s ideas. With the passage of time, McClellan's mass army (Quantity) would be dispensed in ever more rock-hard packets. No short war, but likely a shorter war.

There is an interesting light, however, thrown on Patton’s ideas in recent works. Martin van Creveld in his book Fighting Power: German and US Army Performance, 1939-1945 makes the point that the Germans decided against a robust replacement policy for the army in order to preserve the fighting power of veteran units, preferring instead to combine fragments into ad hoc formations over time. Replacements were segregated into all new units. This is very much like the accidental ACW replacement “system” where ever-shrinking veteran regiments could be counted on to deliver more shock than fully staffed new regiments, or regiments diluted with too many green troops.

John Mosier, in his new-ish Death Ride fastens onto another Patton-related point. He focuses on the qualitative difference in the firepower and maneuver of German units on the eastern front in an extended quality vs. quantity meme. Unlike van Creveld and his intangibles, Mosier posits that certain German divisions were “super units” functioning equal to or above corps level in striking power due to being infused with equipment allocations at multiples of the TOE norms and with that equipment being the newest and best technology available. Mosier pegs the Stalin/Hitler outcome on Hitler moving Quality to other fronts.

It is hard to imagine Civil War super units. Maybe regulars carrying repeating rifles and “coffee grinders” on armored trains? That would raise the problem of ammunition supply, however, and on the logistical and transportation matters, Patton has very interesting things to say – things with a lot of Civil War resonance.

--

BTW, the original letters of Col. George S. Patton, CSA, can be purchased here.

Palmer and Patton

This was Col. John M. Palmer’s main point about the Civil War (in U.S. Grant’s words): the South leavened the whole loaf by distributing its professionals among the volunteer (amateur) formations. The North failed to reap the same benefit because of Winfield Scott’s commitment to concentrating experience in regular formations as part of a Regular Army buildout.

In Palmer’s view, this produced a qualitative disparity that enabled a long Confederate resistance against an inferior Union establishment.

In 1932, Maj. George S. Patton submitted an extensive memo to the War College on “The Probable Characteristics of the Next War and the Organization, Tactics, and Equipment Necessary to Meet them.”

In his memo, Patton attributed the duration of the Civil War to likeness: the two sides contended with similar organizations, tactics, weapons, and technology. Patton did not consider Palmer’s point that the Union reduced quality by creating a concentration of military talent in its regular establishment. The two sides were just too similar for one or the other to achieve striking results.

This was not the only point on which Patton disagreed with Palmer. He was, at the time, living in Palmer’s world, under the National Defense Act of 1920, crafted by Palmer and Wadsworth. The Act does not come into view in Patton’s ruminations.

As we noted earlier in this thread, that Act lost its Palmerite essence because the reserve components were not funded until WWII started abroad. In considering the Army as it was in 1932, Patton disregarded the unfunded reserves and wrote of the active component as if they were the “complete” army.

Before considering Patton’s suggested military reform, let’s lay out “Palmerism” and its alternatives.

(1) The most “Palmerite” structure was that proposed by Washington and Knox: small standing army, very large trained reserves, proportional to the male population.

(2) This would fix the anti-Palmerite situation of a small standing army supplemented with a large but useless militia. This was the traditional American setup, through the Civil War.

(3) Another non-Palmerite solution was Peyton March’s huge standing army with a large reserve stocked with the usual (poorly trained) suspects.

(4) Yet another is what we have now: a large standing army with a smaller standing reserve.*

(5) Another non-Palmer solution: Emory Upton’s proposed larger standing army with a small trained reserve.

Patton’s contribution to this is to suggest a sixth anti-Palmer organization:

(6) Small army, no reserves. What might look like an oversight – consideration of the reserves – is intentional. Patton’s 1932 paper is concerned with deflecting the U.S. Government’s planning for and reliance on a mass army of conscripts. He makes a number of good arguments against mass armies, many of which apply to Civil War armies and which we will take up in a separate post.

To summarize his views a bit summarily, Patton viewed a small professional army as better able to manage newer military technology; as being better trained over time; as being less susceptible to wounds, sickness, straggling; as being more maneuverable and able to strike much harder blows.

Patton, in Civil War terms, is aligned with Palmer’s bugbear, Winfield Scott. He wants a small, skilled force to win a shorter war. Like many an ACW reader, Patton believes in battles as decisive in war. Without battles, his view makes no sense.

He makes the Lincoln-Grant-Unionist error of thinking that if X army is destroyed/hurt/crippled the war cannot continue.

Wasn’t it Robert E. Lee, tears streaking down his face, voice quavering pitifully in that famous Richmond conference during McClellan’s advance, who said We cannot win a war of posts [positions]? Wasn’t it McClellan who laid out a national strategy to Lincoln in which his mass army would occupy successive posts (positions) at railway junctions and in cities, fortifying points as he went in an multi-phased internal strangulation of the CSA?

How soon we forget, if we ever even knew.

A war of positions is quite suitable for a mass army. Patton’s (or Scott’s) professionals, facing a positional mass army, would have to strike and dislodge a large number of fortified levies without running down their own strength beyond the point of extinction or dilution.

If facing Palmer’s mass army of highly trained reservists, Patton’s (or Scott’s) force would be quickly snuffed out.

Or so it seems to me. More on this shortly.

*In absolute numbers our NG and Reserves are large but they are not proportionate to the total population of the US as Washington, Knox, and Palmer intended. Additionally, they are comparable in size to the standing army whereas they should utterly dwarf the standing army.

An open letter to Gary Gallagher

Dear Dr. Gallagher:

It has been seven years since we noted here the forthcoming book on ACW navies by James M. McPherson. This book now has a release date, if Amazon is to be believed.

You are far and above the usual cut of book editors and I want to appeal to your professionalism and integrity as you review McPherson's manuscript. Please be especially mindful of the following.

(1) Dr. McPherson in recent works has tended to cite primary sources only, skipping any references to the analysis that preceded him while at the same time borrowing liberally from that analysis. As well read as you are, Dr. Gallagher, we (the reading public) rely on you to recognize borrowings McPherson may make from the rich field of Naval history and we rely on you to compel him to acknowledge his influences in writing.

(2) It is important that McPherson supply a bibliographic essay reviewing the pertinent literature. In the past few books he has avoided this. Please provide every facility to him in supplying such an essay.

(3) Please be very alert to memes, turns of phrase, key concepts, and other intellectual property that may belong to naval historians and compel Dr. McPherson to attribute them wherever he uses them. This has been his weakest point in books past.

(4) Please formulate a compelling reason to read Dr, McPherson's book for those of us who have already read the naval histories on which his work is based. The Amazon description promises excitement and entertainment. The advanced reader is looking for more.

As conversant as you are in ACW history, we are counting on you to ensure no injury is done by McPherson to ACW naval historians and we rely on you to guide him toward some standard of originality, the same standard your UNC books posess.

Submitted in all humility,
Dimitri Rotov
Blogger

McPherson's navies: my personal guarantee to you, the reader

I had sworn off commenting on James McPherson's books in the last half-year. Hat tip to Drew for alerting me to this forthcoming navies volume on which I had speculated previously in this space. To close the loop, a letter to McPherson's publisher is in order, and I have written that and posted it here.

Gallagher is a great enough acquisitions editor to understand the danger that a McPherson book on Civil War navies represents.

At worst, it presents an attempt to usurp the insights and analysis of those who have preceded him. At best (the best we can hope for from this author) it will be a fully credited "retelling" of ACW naval history with entertaining anecdotes.

As hostile as I am to McPherson's deplorable corpus, I don't begrudge him a mindless, pointless, entertaing retelling of naval history. Nor do I begrudge him future multiple prizes for his "brilliant" work as the new "pre-eminent" naval historian. Many will worship at his new, nautical altar. I truly believe - truly - McPherson is uniquely qualified to write an authoritatively useless synthesis of Civil War naval history that no one needs and that everyone will praise.

My special concern regards McPherson's editor, Gary Gallagher. We need him to stop McPherson from ripping off the writers who preceded him.

In this, I am personally willing to help. I promise to review McPherson's printed word in order to track every lifted meme, every stolen phrase, every unattributed quote, every purloined insight, every piece of chicanery that gets by Dr. Gary Gallagher. I will invite readers to report on the same topic. We will have a McPherson expose extravaganza.

This sounds like a threat but it shouldn't. I do trust Editor Gary Gallagher as much as I distrust Author Gary Gallagher. I think the author (weak stuff) got finagled into a book deal that the editor (stern stuff) dislikes.

Giving McPherson a swing at naval history makes no sense except potentially in sales. Unless you are networking with him or looking for a book prize...

My secret hope is that in the seven years since this project was announced, Editor Gary Gallagher has been struggling to bring integrity and decency to an author who is used to having his own way in all things and at all times. This is an author (McPherson) who defended the indefensible DK Goodwin in the midst of her plagiarism scandal. He recently wrote a tiny book on Lincoln, acknowledged not a single Lincoln scholar, and got away with it, even winning prizes for it. Lincoln scholars rolled over and nobody scratched their stomachs.

We deep Civil War readers are made of sterner stuff than Lincoln scholars (any day), we are brighter stuff than the Ken Burns fans who haunt our bookshelves, and we are more demanding stuff than the generic nonfiction bookbuyer who is intended to cop McPherson's latest.

My hope is that it has been seven years of Gallagher the editor fighting McPherson the author. That is my hope. I am willing to bet on Editor Gallagher's integrity based on the quality of books UNC has released under his purview. I am fearful but confident. UNC has published good stuff under Gallagher's editorship. Getting McPherson into the "good" column is a task of more years than seven.

Let us see what we will see. My money is on Gallagher.

A million spammers on a million keyboards ...

... will eventually, inevitably come up with a Good Friday message.

"Lost Cause" posts compiled

Persistent interest in just two Lost Cause historiography posts suggests I add a few links to older posts.

This series is the best summary of my objection to Gary Gallagher & Co. attacking the straw man they call "Lost Cause history." Part 1 casts Gallagher & Co. as naively and sloppily attempting to do what the communist historian Hobsbawm has done much better. Part 2 identifies them, via Popper's insights, as consipracy theorists. Part 3 touches on the Voegelinian analysis of human experiences of order that invalidates their entire effort.
Popper, Hobsbawm and the Lost Cause - 1
Popper, Hobsbawm and the Lost Cause - 2
Popper, Hobsbawm and the Lost Cause - 3

A response to Kevin Levin who responded to the above:
Notes on the "Lost Cause"

An analysis of why the SCV cannot engage in a debate with "Lost Cause" critics due to the structure of the conversation:
The SCV's anti-debunking efforts (a lost cause)

Enjoy...

Seward's foreigners (fin)

When we last left Seward, he was recruiting foreign officers for a "people's war" and our good friend George B. McClellan received word by letter that he was to vacate his general-in-chiefdom to make way for György Klapka (a future major general in the Prussian Army).

Klapka, for those too lazy to click the links I painstakingly provided yesterday, was a close, later associate of Louis (Lajos) Kossuth, the leader of the Hungarian Revolution, 1848-1849, and recipient of what would later be called a tickertape parade in New York in 1851.

Philip Figyelmessy (pictured), an ADC to Kossuth in '59 (during Garibaldi's Sicilian campaign), "came to America in 1861 to offer his sword to the Union. He was well supplied with letters of introduction, among which was one from Kossuth to Secretary Seward." So we read in Hungarians in the American Civil War.

The same source gives us this peek at a Seward-Kossuth interaction:

It is known that Secretary of State Seward conceived the idea of sending to Europe, in an unofficial capacity, three representative and influential men to meet the impending danger of foreign intervention. He chose for this mission Archbishop Hughes, Bishop McIlvaine and Mr. Thurlow Weed. It is less well known that he also sought to enlist the aid of Louis Kossuth.

This was a very natural idea, for, while he could not know then the inner history of Kossuth's relations to Napoleon and Cavour, he [Seward] did know that, in 1859, Kossuth had prevented the intervention of Great Britain in the Austro-Italian conflict through his speeches at public meetings in England and Scotland and his influence with the British Liberals, which caused the downfall of Lord Derby's cabinet.

Emphasis added!

Seward was recruiting veterans of the revolutions in Europe to gain political leverage with political celebrities who influence liberal opinion. The offers he made were to people close to opinion shapers.

Now let's do some speculation applying spotty memories. This is a blog, after all.

You recall I proposed that foreign conservatives were given to McClellan as staff and that revolutionaries went to Fremont. From what we remember about such assignments, a pattern seems to emerge.

The conservative foreign adventurers seem to represent kingdoms outside the nexus of intervention (Britain, France) and in fact number among those states generally opposed to France and Britain geopolitically. Consider Rosencrantz of Sweden, various Prussians, the French princes (pretenders to the throne of Napoleon III), the Russians and their fleets, which visited the North in displays of solidarity.

Seward was playing both internal politics and geopolitics against the potential interventionists. He strove for a grip on the liberal opposition within France and Britain while at the same time building influence with the conservative states that might work in combination with him against Franco-British designs.

Interesting, surely.

You shouldn't have to read material like this in a blog, for heaven's sake, but that's where we are in Civil War history.

(Part 1, Part 2)

Seward's foreigners (cont.)

So what was Seward up to?

Before getting one answer from Hungarians in the Civil War, let's drop in on McClellan's Own Story, a compilation of writings by GBM's literary executor.

Mr. Seward's policy of making ours a "people's war," as he expressd it, by drumming up officers from all parts of the world, sometimes produced strange results and brought us rare specimens of the class vulgarly known as "hard cases." Most of the officers thus obtained had left their own armies for the armies' good, although there were honorable and admirable exceptions such as Stah[e]l, Willich, Rosencranz, Cesnola, and some others. Few were of the slightest use to us, and I think the reason why the German regiments so seldom turned out well was that their officers were so often men without character.

Soon after Gen. Scott retired, I received a letter from the Hungarian Klapka informing me that he had been approached by some of Mr. Seward's agents to get him into our army, and saying that he thought it best to come to a direct understanding with with myself as to terms, etc. He said that he would require a bonus of $100,000 in cash and a salary of $25,000 per annum; that on his first arrival he would consent to serve as my chief of staff for a short time until he acquired the language, and that he would then take my place of general commanding-in-chief. He failed to state what provision he would make for me, that probably to depend upon the impression I made upon him.

I immediately took the letter to Mr. Lincoln, who was made very angry by it, and taking possession of the letter, said that he would see that I should not be troubled in that way again.

But they kept coming.

Cluseret - afterward Minister of War under the Commune - brought me a letter of introduction from Garibaldi, recommending him in the highest terms as a soldier, man of honor, etc. I did not like his appearance and declined his services; but without my knowledge or consent Stanton appointed him a colonel on my staff. I still declined to have anything to do with him, and he was sent to the Mountain Department, as chief of staff I think.

McClellan goes on to mention two German ADCs he liked, taken on at the request of a Prussian minister, and his high opinion of the famous French princes and their uncle (as you would expect).

But what does all this mean? Seward's game here is not too obscure, as we shall see.

(Photo of by Alexander Gardner of what appears to be part of Hooker's staff, L-R: Maj. D.S. "Peter" Ludlow, Ulric Dahlgren (standing); LTC Joseph Dickinson, AAG (recumbent); Graf Zeppelin of the Prussian Army, and McClellan's Swedish ADC, Lieutenant Frederick Rosencrantz. This site says FR "successively served Burnside, Hooker and Meade in the same capacity. His brave and genial disposition made him a universal favorite."

Seward's foreigners

One of the lamest digs against McClellan and Fremont is that they had large "glittering" staffs of foreigners, implying that this was ego gratification and an early warning sign of mental debility.

The better-read have some inkling that these foreign volunteers were foisted on Fremont and McClellan by the Lincoln Administration. Since governors appointed regimental commanders and would not surrender this patronage to strangers, and since foreign high-profile military volunteers were often the business of Mr. William Seward, Seward imposed upon McClellan and Fremont to accept otherwise unplaceable foreigners with military experience.

Why Fremont and McClellan? Without getting into some very interesting but detailed chronology, the short answer is that Fremont was Seward's client from his early appointment. Fremont's intake of foreign officers was immediate upon his arrival in St. Louis; McClellan's only began with GBM's federalization and transfer to Washington (after which Seward claimed him as a client). Seward had a third client, of course, the irascible Winfield Scott, but Scott was an outspoken opponent of enlarged staffs and would not be moved on what he considered points of principle.

The Seward-McClellan relationship is complex and worth a few posts in the future but the Fremont and Scott connections to Seward are easy to explain. The Seward-Weed team funded national Whig projects out of their rich New York political machine. They backed Winfield Scott's presidential run on the last Whig ticket. Scott was a creature of the old Whig political establishment - recall, he attended McClellan's wedding and I would say not based on interest in GBM, for it was Dr. McClellan (GBM's father) who was a linchpin in the Philadelphia and national Whig establishments and a major supporter of Scott's presidential run. (Thank you, Ethan Rafuse.) Recall, too, that in feuding with the Democratic Secretary of War, a certain Jefferson Davis, General-in-Chief Scott moved Army Headquarters from Washington to New York City, where it subsisted under the angel's wings of his Whig sponsors.

Weed and Seward also funded the national Republican Party in its early years and backed Fremont's presidential campaign against Buchanan and Fillmore - a reasonably close race run by a new party. The Fremont/Dayton ticket was impossible without Weed and Seward and this is likely the source of Seward's leverage.

The astute reader is lodging a protest at this point. "Every schoolchild in America knows that Fremont was the Blairs' candidate to replace General Harney." Of course they do, as do I. But I have a few untested ideas here: Fremont was the Blair's candidate by the contrivance of Seward who put Fremont's name forward. (Admission: I need to do more work on this.) Further, Seward let Fremont (and later McClellan) understand that the appointments were due to him. There are hints of how Seward worked these angles in Welles' diary: he took credit where credit was not due. He reaped where he did not sow. More grist for a future mill.

In sum, we see foreign officers assigned to the most prestigious staffs of those generals where Seward has leverage. The sheer volume of officers initially falls most heavily on Fremont, where the bloat is ridiculed by critics, and then later the deluge hits McClellan, with the attendant scoffing.

I would add another personal observation needing more research. It seems to me that Fremont gets the European revolutionaries and McClellan the European conservatives. If true, this again suggests a higher, guiding intelligence.

The question remains, what was Seward's motivation in these foreign appointments?

A lot of bits and pieces came together for me recently while reading Hungarians in the American Civil War, a forgotten and out-of-print book from the turn of the last century. Before going to the revelations in its footnotes, we'll look at McClellan's comic anecdotes about these interventions by Seward.

Booth bobbleheads

They were a "top seller." They were the John Wilkes Booth bobbleheads sold by the Abraham Lincoln Museum and Presidential Library.

They've been pulled because a blogger squawked. A blogger. No more, no less.

Word to the wise: never locate a museum in Chicago.

Gallagher's "Lost Cause"

There is the "Lost Cause" per what I would consider failed historiography and then there is the "Lost Cause" as a punching bag for historiographic dunces.

A propos of Gallagher's "Lost Cause," readers remind me of this post.

Transvestite chic

This was an ACW museum display - before sensitivities were bruised.
(Via the Washington Times)

Publishing - some simple observations

Was looking for a book in B&N at the Reston "Town Center" last week and noticed the Civil War shelves had reduced from three to one.

This is good news and bad news, I suppose. The bad news is less choice but the good news is that quality has been way up ever since the Michael Shaara-Ken Burns fans began drifting away. Whatever their merits, Burns and Shaara were a disaster for Civil War publishing, flooding the market with the lowest quality readership imaginable.

Now, it's as if two thirds of the rot has been cleared away to leave some air and light for the better publishing. "Better publishing" means books for deep readers instead of what dominated - entertainment for transients.

Quality in Civil War publishing now is so encouraging compared to when this blog started that I am afraid of drifting into embarassing superlatives.

We still have a residue of book buyers who gravitate to the themes and messages of sixty years ago and they remain a problem for us in that publishers will still seek out this market and consume scarcer shelf space with books that regurgitate the nonsense of long-dead authors locked into a dying dogma.

Even here, however, there are rays of sunshine breaking through the gloom.

For instance, I recently received a deeply offensive newsletter from Gateway Press. It contained an article that lacked notes, bibliography, or in-line references. It made no textual reference to sources (primary or secondary) and it read as if it had been cribbed from a 1959 issue of American Heritage.

I thought no one in 2012 can be this ignorant, or blind, or innocent of the scholarship of the last decades. So I read the offensive piece again slowly and noticed two points buried in the piece that would gag a Centennialist.

It occurred to me then that this article was not written for me or for any modern Civil War reader. This was an author trying to "move the ball forward" five yards against a powerful, entrenched defense that does not read or understand modern Civil War histories.

I had another taste of this in reading Chester Hearn's Lincoln, the Cabinet, and the Generals. Considering the scope of the work, the gaps, the enormous analytical shortcomings, the extensive and irrelevant recounting of the war in narrative form as if for a first-time ACW book-buyer and the meager sum of insights, I was not surprised to find a bibliography replete with secondary sources from the 1950s and 1960s.

My better self eventually suggested that this book was not written for me, my friends, the readers of this blog, nor for anyone we know or will ever know. It was written for an audience of limited understanding trapped in time, locked into a narrative superstructure. The book served the very admirable purpose of (again) moving that ball a possible five yards towards the goalposts against the home team in Centennial stadium.

In that B&N store, BTW, I picked up an ACW railroad/strategy history (quite the thing just now) and noticed the author making inventive points based on new research. He hurt himself badly, however, by borrowing framework elements from the King James Authorized narrative as approved by the Centennial's leading ecclesiastics. For example, the succession of prophets was as depicted by Fathers Williams & Williams, Fuller, Catton, et al. McClellan, a false prophet, arose in the land; Sherman succeeded him as one greater; and Grant followed as the culmination of all prophesy. In railroad terms, this became McClellan as he-with-the-rough-idea-of-utility; Sherman as a more advanced McClellan; Grant as the super-McClellan. In the great Rowena Reed's calculation, the order is inverted but Reed did not make it into this fellow's bibliography.

And again, through my irritation, it occurred to me that this book is not for me. This book is intended for them.

And who are they? They are the remnant searching for the lost shelves of Barnes & Noble.

We'll look at some books in detail soon, with fewer mixed metaphors in play.

How it was done (cont.)

To the continuous outrage of the nation's financial sector, Salmon Chase, Lincoln's Secretary of the Treasury, granted to Jay Cooke & Co. the exclusive right to sell all Treasury paper during Chase's tenure. Cooke was given "points" (a percentage) of every sale made.

From the book Jay Cooke: Financier of the Civil War Volume I by Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer:

Banking services. P. 210: On 2/7/62, Chase asks Cooke for a personal loan of $2,000 for "a store I am rebuilding" in Cincinnati.

Wealth management. Throughout 1862, Jay Cooke was investing Chase's personal funds for him and advising him on finances. In a couple of letters (at least), Chase admonishes him for mixing personal business into official communications, since his official correspondence had to be archived. They met privately on a continuous basis about Chase's finances.

Free stock and a plush job. P. 188: Chase "again had a vision of resigning from the Treasury Department to take [the] presidency" of the Washington and Georgetown Street Railroad Company, a Cooke & Co. concern, in which Chase was given free stock. On 5/31/62, he dropped the hint in a letter ("I was strongly inclined..."). He was needed where he was, however, and Cooke did not act on Chase's employment hints.

We should be mindful that the Gilded Age started with Lincoln.

The OR as a template

In the library at the Army and Navy Club a week ago, I was surprised to encounter two series of volumes organized very much like our beloved Official Records but postdating them by many decades. Both were prepared by the US Navy.

The first was

Naval Documents Related to the Quasi-War between the United States and France: Naval Operations from February 1797 to December 1801. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1935-38. 7 vols.

These were seven very thick volumes, by the way. The second surprise was

Naval Documents Related to the United States Wars with the Barbary Powers, Washington, U.S. Govt. Printing Office, 1939-44

Here again, a thick set of seven volumes spanning 1785 to 1807.

If you could find sets to buy, you could lose yourself in the history of these wars for a long time. Whatever feeling immersion in the OR delivers, here is more.

Brian Lamb, slightly off topic

As Drew notes, Brian Lamb is a major media figure and I want to follow Drew in congratulating him on his retirement, albeit for different reasons.

Drew and others appreciate the book segments on C-Span. I found them to be the weakest link, driven by narrative-based pop history and queries from that same pop-history standpoint. The recurring problem with C-Span interviews of authors is that each author was enshrined as an expert. This is opposite to Feynman's formula that the esence of science is to treat expertise as ignorance.

In one of his Jazz Casual TV shows, ETV's Ralph Gleason queried Count Basie on the lines of, Do you think jazz will ever lose its blues basis? The possibility worried Gleason to death and is indicative of that cultural ultraconservatism that attracts people to ETV (in that day), PBS (nowadays), and NPR. It's the same cultural rigidity that reduces classical radio stations to what Zappa called "top 40 hits" and other safe bets.

The common theme here is deference to authority. The good part of C-Span showed us the face of authority as it is. The worst part of it deferred to this or that jackass author-authority. Brian Lamb had this blind spot.

In the end though, the best part of one C-Span channel was worth more than all the ETVs, PBSs, and NPRs put together over the last 50 years. In that I thank Drew for reminding me to tip my hat to Brian Lamb.

Simpson has a blog

It was a pleasant slumber, and upon waking I found Brooks Simpson blogging on his own site.

Better than a pleasant dream!

In my "special" view of ACW historiography, Brooks was a beacon of sanity in the sewage tsunami that represented ACW publishing in the 1990s. You could count on one hand the original writers willing to put everything on the table (subject to sources, rigor, and insight).

He remains interesting, independent, and important, not on the basis of his connections but on the basis of his methods and conclusions.

Your encouragement is deserved and even required. The best readers deserve the best authors and the best authors need to know how much we appreciate them. This is a contender for the heavyweight championship. Don't waste time on palookas.

Gallagher and ACW history

An author friend tipped me that Gary "Stop the Madness" Gallagher has published thoughts on blogging in one of the glossies.

In the true spirit of blogging, I thought it best to immediately launch harsh ad hominem attacks without even reading the underlying piece.

Just kidding. Up to a point, anyway.

Kevin Levin has written nicely about GG's position and Harry Smeltzer has a very good comments section on it. Makes me reconsider opening up comments.

Just kidding again.

Seriously, though, I had been thinking about Gallagher lately because UNC Press keeps sending me review copies of very interesting books. This has been going on for years (and if GG reads this blog, this is his chance to tell marketing to cut me off.)

I would say Ted Savas and Gary Gallgher are the very best acquistion editors in Civil War history publishing today. UNC simply could not do better than Gallagher (since Savas is unavailable), and that's worth a few postings. I owe the Press a few lines anyway based on this backlog of titles weighing down my shelves.

I hold GG in low esteem as an historian, as you know. He reminds me of certain political commentators who strain for some sparkling but non-controversial insight while burrowing through piles of common knowledge and acceptable truths. I also find his writing as wickedly polemical as any blogger's.

Note to self: A blogger complains about polemics. Oh, the irony.

When the history of Civil War history is written, Gallagher will be that bright young hope of the dying vestiges of Centennial dogma, the man who carries the shopworn and dusty insights of an ancient era into the harsh light of the 21st Century. I speak of him this way in his form as an author and anthologist.

As an author, he's a lost battalion, trapped behind the lines of historiography, out of touch with his headquarters (destroyed by the creeping barrage of time), searching for a way to rejoin the fight against revisionists, struggling for relevancy on a battlefield for which he has no maps. He's low on ammunition (fresh insights). He's also low on water, in terms of a stream of supporting research and ideas.

And yet, Gallagher does not use his editorial position at UNC Press to pound us with tome after tome reiterating the golden verities of 60 years ago. Lost behind the lines as author Gallagher is, editor Gallagher sends these daring little patrols in different directions to find some way out of no-man's-land. This is what makes his editorship so different from Ted Savas's and so interesting in a completely different way. Being utterly lost, Gallagher is forced to experiment in ways Savas, knowing the terrain, is not.

Ted has a firm grip on Civil War historiography as it is developing now and as it has been evolving for the last decade, partly because he is a committed neutral with a taste for good research and writing. Gallagher, however, is a committed partisan who cannot, therefore, admit of new work that contradicts "the canon" and therefore he cannot discern the shapes emerging from the smoke of battle. It would have required shell shock for him to have published Rowland, Reese, Harsh, Beatie, Rafuse or others as an editor at UNC Press. And yet, in his own reconnaisance of the battlefield, editor Gallagher's thoughtful desperation yields novelty again and again. Now, that novelty is generally within the framework of the canon and it never explicitly contradicts "the masters" on any point of importance, but it is interesting nonetheless.

Editor Gallagher's new works are not concerned with the central truths that have been handed to us by the Centennial generation. It may be that Gallagher's misplaced conceit spares us endless recastings of Catton, Williams, et al. He seems to believe that the literary nonfiction of the 1950s and 1960s era delivered us "settled science" in Civil War history and therefore does not need repeating. Who but a blogger would contend with these greats?

Author Gallagher's flirtation with topics like the "Lost Cause" and "black Confederates" show a man bereft of basic historiographic instincts and insights. In a way, this is the last man you want in charge of selecting new ACW titles. Gallagher's new writing shows a man fighting for the orthodoxies of the past. And yet, editor Gallagher's commissioning of new books, shows all the verve, spunk, intelligence, and insight we have come to expect from ... bloggers.

Think of editor Gallagher as a blogger and new UNC books as his (extended) posts. If you do, you'll find him really interesting.

---

Again in the true spirit of blogging, here are some of the more hurtful things I have written about author Gallagher in the past. I hope you find them interesting.

Stop the Madness -- Wittenberg, Petruzzi and I pile on while Kevin Levin plays defense for GG.

When You Can tell a Book by Its Title - Beating an historiographical blunder by GG into the ground.

Foner Criticizes Gallagher - nuff said.

McClellan Bad, Very Bad Man - A sampler of stale Centennial punditry from a Gallagher book. If you don't laugh out loud (i.e., LOL!) at some of his quotes, you're not paying attention.

Let that be enough. Even blog readers have limits.

Browse UNC Press here.

Update, 3/24: the ever-estimable Manny has read GG's article and is okay with it.

How it was done

In case the name does not ring a bell, Justus McKinstry took care of John Fremont's supplies. His private papers contain this letter:

Washington, September 10, 1861

J. McKINSTRY, Brigadier General and Quartermaster, St. Louis:

Permit me to introduce James L. Lamb, Esq.[headed large firm for merchandising and pork-packing] of Springfield Illinois. I have known Mr. Lamb for a great many years. His reputation for integrity and ability to carry out his engagements are both unquestioned, and I shall be pleased, if consistent with the public good, that you will make purchases of him of any army supplies needed in your Department.

Your obedient servant,
A. LINCOLN

You look at Lincoln's involvement with cotton trading permits and wonder how many more "pork" and privilege letters are in private collections.

A trope becomes common knowledge

Last week (behind this paywall), the following Lincoln reference appeared among the op-eds of the Wall Street Journal. I give the Lincoln extract complete, with no cutting:

Abraham Lincoln is considered to be one of our most effective presidents. He managed to win the Civil War and keep a divided country together, no small feat. He was able to do this in part because he had an amazing team, one of the strongest cabinets in history. Ironically, most of the people on his team didn't really like each other—or him. In fact, when he formed his cabinet, he surprised many people, appointing his four fiercest rivals for the presidency. These were people who not only didn't like Lincoln, they basically thought he was an idiot, that he was seriously under-qualified for the job. But in appointing them to the highest positions in his cabinet, he was able to bring together the men who represented the different factions that threatened to further divide the United States, and unite all of them around one vision: "a new birth of freedom." He ensured that everyone on his team followed his rules — most importantly, to rise above petty rivalries and disagreements — and in the end, they achieved the "impossible" and won the war.

Isn't that amazing?

This trope is specific to Doris Goodwin; it "brands" her view of the AL presidency. To roll it out in an essay on management (or whatnot) without crediting her suggests her "team" thoughts have become common knowledge. Everybody "knows" that Lincoln forged a brilliant team! By now, perhaps every schoolchild in America learns it. When the Lincoln movie comes out, we may get more of the same.

The behavior of Lincoln scholars on the release of Team of Rivals was utterly disgraceful. They silently rolled over and now we have this nonsense handed to us in the popular culture.

Matthew Pinsker summed things up when he wrote:

Lincoln's Cabinet was no team. His rivals proved to be uneven as subordinates. Some were capable despite their personal disloyalty, yet others were simply disastrous.

Here are some posts you may enjoy reading: Bates / Chase / Welles / Stanton.

U.S. Grant - a super Palmerite before his time

The title here is misleading. George Washington was the super-palmerite of all time in the sense that BG John McAuley Palmer derived his theory of military organization from President Washington.

Nevertheless, he quotes U.S. Grant in what are breathtakingly Palmerite sentiments. Grant:

This state of affairs gave me an idea which I expressed while in Cairo [1861]: that the government ought to disband the regular army, with the exception of the Staff Corps, and notify the disbanded officers that they would receive no compensation while the war lasted except as volunteers. The Register should be kept up, but the names of all officers who were not in the volunteer service at the close [of the war] should be stricken from it.

Palmer and Grant seem to see eye-to-eye on the central problem of the early war. Palmer:

The new citizen army of the Confederacy was trained and led by the Southern graduates of West Point and other officers of the old army who went South when their states seceded. As Grant said, "they leavened the whole loaf." But there was little such yeast for the Northern volunteers. Between January 1 and September 1 1861, 301 officers resigned from the regular army and almost all of these found important places in the Southern Army. By September 1 only 26 Northern officers held volunteer commissions. This was because all available Northern officers were needed for the formation of new regular regiments--too few and too weak in numerical strength to have any decisive effect upon the great issues of the war.

The Northern war governors applied repeatedly for trained officers for their new volunteer regiments. But General Scott disapproved their requests because to grant them would injure his new regular regiments.

When you increase the regular army at the outbreak of a war you impair, if you do not destroy, its capacity to diffuse military knowledge and experience in the national citizen army. Until the close of the Civil War many educated Northern officers were kept as company officers in regular regiments while their Southern brethren held important command and staff positions. It was Grant's opinion that the marked Southern superiority in the early campaigns of the war was due to the fact that the North did have and the South did not have a standing army.

The pursuit of a false military policy is sufficient to account for the Federal defeat at Bull Run. While Jackson was hardening his citizen soldiers into an effective "Stonewall Brigade," his Northern brethren were busy increasing the regular army. In the words of the [Episcopal] Prayer Book, they had "left undone those things which" they "ought to have done" and had "done those things which" they "ought not to have done" and there was "no health in them."

P.S. On this Ash Wednesday, February 22, we have Washington and theology in one post. Here, we attempt to meet all your blog-reading needs.

Glimpses of MG John McAuley Palmer, USV

In his capstone work, America in Arms, BG John McAuley Palmer, USA, reflects on his Civil War namesake, the MG, USV (pictured).

He uses the subterfuge of anonymous references to "my friend." I chose the passage below as both poignant and concise in its case for the "political general." It represents a psychological "arc" in the development of the political general that we need to reflect on as readers of ACW history. You'll notice this remembrance is wrapped in a critique of Winfield Scott and the Northern war policy that we will take up later. (Footnote in the original.)

PRESIDENT LINCOLN has been criticized because he appointed so many "politician generals.* He did commission many inexperienced popular leaders as general officers, not because he was a politician but because he had no alternative under the policy imposed upon him by his official military advisers.

In my early youth it was my good fortune to know one of these so-called "politician generals." After the fall of Sumter he raised a regiment of infantry in his Congressional district and, as a leading citizen, he became its colonel. He felt his lack of experience keenly and expressed the hope that he and his regiment would soon have a West Point graduate or other trained officer from the old army as their brigade commander. But the War Department, under General Scott, could not spare any officers to serve as brigadier generals of volunteers because they were needed as lieutenants and captains in the new regular regiments.

When it became apparent that the brigade commanders must be selected from among the new colonels, my old friend decided that, ignorant as he was, he was as fit as any of the others, and so he accepted a commission as brigadier general. Without the immediate leadership of a trained senior and without the assistance of trained subordinates, he soon found himself in command of a division. With this division he entered the Battle of Stone River, and there by the test of successful leadership in battle he won his second star as a major general.

A little later he commanded one of the four divisions that held their ground under Thomas at Chickamauga. When Thomas became commander of the Army of the Cumberland he selected this "politician general" to lead his old command, the Fourteenth Army Corps.

By the time he became a major general and had won his position by hard knocks and without the guidance he had sought in the beginning, the War Department loosened up and began to send more of its trained officers to the volunteers. One of these became a brigade commander under my old friend and did not disguise his superior pretensions as an educated officer. These would have been conceded frankly a short time before. But even a tyro who had finally won his two stars on the battlefield might feel disposed to assert their validity.

Situations such as this produced friction and misunderstanding throughout the Union Army. Many of the regulars decried the citizen army leaders as mere politicians and many of the latter had good reason to believe that the professionals were intriguing to displace them.

---

*Under an act passed March 6, 1861, the Confederate Congress authorized the formation of a regular army. But it was intended primarily to establish a national status for the general officers, the staff departments and certain special auxiliary services. The combatant troops were not included in this establishment. The soldiers of Lee and Stonewall Jackson, like Washington's Continentals, were citizen soldiers.

Puzzle comments

The U.S. First and Second Cavalry are special units. When you get down into the rosters of serving captains (exception = McClellan), the names are a blur but at the field grade level, this is a picked crew.

Consider what you knew about these units and then the implications for Civil War historiography.

Take a look at this passage I wrote just now. Imagine this is a biography:

So-and-so then began what would be a nearly five-year stint in the X Cavalry. Some of the officers in this unit that would later become generals included A, B, and C. Years of tedious garrison duty eventually included some personal milestone (insert marriage, birth, death). With the drawing near of war, the routines of the drill square and the short days would soon pass and X would have to decide on sides in a great struggle as well as find a new role for himself.

I think that sums up what's out there in the relevant biographies and why we are so surprised by Puzzle 1 and Puzzle 2.

We have explored (lightly) the Sumner-Johnston-McClellan struggle over cavalry doctrine in the First Cavalry (by way of Matthew Moten's book on the Delafield Commission), but beyond Moten I can't recall a historian digging into these relationships and interactions, 1855-1860.

I could be mistaken but the gaps in ACW history are enormous and they remain year after year. They seem a matter of complete indifference.

Those years McClellan spent as Lincoln's boss on Illinois Central RR legal work - when are we going to read about that? About their many trips to county courthouses on railroad cases? Seems there might be an audience for such writing.

And does anyone care to write that first-ever McDowell biography? It's only been 150+ years, hasn't it?

The idea that Civil War history is actually history often seems questionable.

Answers to puzzles

Puzzle 1: Col. Edwin V. Sumner commands LTC Joe Johnston, majors John Sedgwick and Wm. H. Emory, and a Captain McClellan. This is the First Regiment of Cavalry. Excluding McClellan's time, this lineup served together from early 1855 to the end of 1860. McClellan resigned in 1857.

Puzzle 2: Col. A.S. Johnston commands LTC Robert E. Lee and majors Wm. Hardee and George Thomas. This team served together from March 1855 to March 1861 in the Second Regiment of Cavalry. Hardee left in mid-1860 after being seconded to the USMA for much of his cavalry assignment.

Commentary will follow.

Puzzle 2

Same deal as Puzzle 1: This is the hierarchy of a single army unit in a specific moment in time. It is arranged in rank order, top to bottom. The images are catch-as-catch-can, not indictative of the historical period. Everyone here eventually commanded above corps level.

Without googling, can you (a) identify every person shown? (b) identify this unit?

Puzzle 1 can be solved by any regular reader of this blog. Puzzle 2 is harder - this unit has had only the briefest mention here previously. Fun fact: these were not transitional organizations. The teams you see here worked together for many years in the hierarchies displayed.

Answers to both puzzles (with commentary) tomorrow.

Puzzle 1

This is the hierarchy of a single army unit in a specific moment in time. It is arranged in rank order, top to bottom. The images are catch-as-catch-can, not indictative of the historical period. Everyone here later commanded at corps level or above.

Without googling, can you (a) identify every person shown? (b) identify this unit?

We remember the Sesquicentennial, 2011-2015

As we advance deeper into Sesquicentennial events and commemorations, it's important to remember the one man who made it all happen.

It seems like just yesterday, but it was 2008, when it all started to come together.

Meanwhile, anyone notice that without our hero, the ALPLM has strictly banned any sesquicentennial events or even a mention thereof?

You would think that the ACW is not a subject fit to be mentioned in the polite company of Lincoln buffs.

I remember the ALPLM

It was a grand old place: a green pasture for Chicago politicos whose mojo was running low, an entertainment center for bored schoolkids, a picture postcard destination for tourists. I remember the good-old Disney-intensive ALPLM.

But now it has a rival: Ford's Theatre.

The Ford's Theatre Center for Education and Leadership opens to the public Sunday, the 203rd anniversary of Lincoln's birth. The new center built in a 10-story former office building is part of a $60 million project to create a four-part campus for visitors to learn about the 16th president in the nation's capital.

And who has been building this Lincoln museum in our nation's capital? None other than "Richard Norton Smith, who helped plan the new center."

If you are a reader from the earliest days of this blog you will know how much we appreciate having Richard Norton Smith back in Civil War news. He was the ALPLM's first honcho.

I remember, too, his immortal words: "It's not just our history, it's your history."

Yeah, he's talking to you. Over there in the corner. You know who you are.

Notes from the Great Outside (cont.)

Quips from N. Nicholas Taleb's Bed of Procrustes selected for relevance to ACW literature:

What I learned on my own, I still remember.

Regular minds find similarities in stories (and situations); finer minds detect differences.

Many are so unoriginal they study history to find mistakes to repeat.

Corollary to Moore's Law: every ten years, collective wisdom degrades by half.

... knowledge is reached (mostly) by removing junk from people's heads.

Avoid calling heroes those who had no other choice.

The ancients knew very well that the only way to understand events was to cause them.

(Photo from the Guardian.)

Palmer and Krueger

Hat tip to Joseph Fouche for the nice summary of Palmer posts here and for presenting some original Palmer writings.

Walter Kruerger was certainly our most obscure four-star combatant commander in WWII and I occasionally, in my readings, wondered how he had reached that pinnacle.

A new book - perhaps his only biography - explores Krueger's career and it seems he made his stars as America's leading interwar military theorist. He was the successor to Upton and Palmer.

His theories make thin reading today, but he is interesting on the subject of military organization.

From the new bio:

Krueger was thus an Uptonian in regard to the crucial issue of military preparedness. In several important ways, Krueger was even more Uptonian than other, more notable army leaders. Whereas some envisioned importnat contributions the citizen soldier could make, Krueger, in contrast, saw none.

Actually, Krueger saw citizen soldiers contributing through universal military training followed by assignment to a two-tiered reserve system. This is in advance of the 1920 Act that attempted to implement Palmer's thinking about a two-tiered reserve system. Krueger:

Germany's strength does not rest upon the organization of its Army ... but upon its military system, universal service ... the Germans are, indeed, a "Nation in arms," and it is safe to say that, should war come, as it surely will, Germany will give a good account of herself.

That was written before WWI and Krueger seems more Palmerite than Uptonian:

Krueger advocated a national conscription of 125,000 men per year, with each new conscript serving for two years, giving the army a strength of 250,000 men. After serving two years ... each young man would "pass to the 1st reserve, in which he would remain three years, then to the 2nd Reserve, where he would remain for two years...

The 2nd Reserve would have carried a 15 days per year annual training requirement.

Before and after WWI, Krueger held a number of positions as a Regular assigned to different National Guard liaison or advisor duties. Kevin Holzimmer, author of the Krueger bio, notes that "by at least 1936," Krueger surrendered the core Uptonian principle of a defense based mainly on the Regular Army and he was saying:

[It was] not until 1920 that we finally adopted a military policy that gave us a good army, the Army of the United States, with its three components, the Regular Army, the National Guard, and the Organized Reserves.

This is Wadsworth-Palmerism, it is in line with what the military believes and practices even today, and so it may be that Krueger, as an influential interwar theorist, played a serious role in delivering the ultimate victory of General Palmer's views over General Upton's.

Notes from the Great Outside (cont.)

In the 1950s, there was this great upwelling of criticism of what was called (by Dwight McDonald) "midcult" and "masscult."

Civil War history as we know it today continues in the midcult/masscult of that era. It's helpful therefore to know and apply midcult criticism to this little corner of the nonfiction world.

Dwight McDonald wrote of masscult and "its impersonality and its lack of standards" and its "total subjection to the spectator," or in our case, the reader. Let me elaborate on this: ACW history too often spares the reader messy explanations, confusing background information, time-wasting digressions, proofs of claims, and deviations from the master narrative.

Kitsch sits at the center of masscult. Whitney Rugg (Chicago School of Media Theory) said something about kitsch that should resonate with every long-suffering reader of ACW history: "Kitsch does not analyze culture but repackages and stylizes it." Let's retell the story better. Let's offer the definitive narrative pop history. Let's write a history that does better at highlighting the dramatic elements.

The culture critic Gillo Dorfles edited a very interesting book called Kitsch in the 1960s. I loaned my now-valuable copy to a pretty artist, never got it back, but remember this definition offered by Dorfles: Kitsch reviews itself. In other words, Kitsch explicitly solicits the response it wants from the viewer or reader. If you have trouble matching this to ACW history, pick up a book and read the adjectives. The ham-fisted authors will "spill their guts" about the events unfolding on their pages, ladeling out scorn, anger, joy, approval, etc. The more restrained authors are also manipulating the reader's opinion through subtler means.

Dorfles viewed kitsch as a cultural problem brought on by the "industrialization of culture" which produced "falsification." I would add that institutionalized falsification is our biggest problem in Civil War literature. It is driven my mass-market history requirements. These requirements are about efficient storytelling, effective memes, symbols, and archtypes, and about satisfying a mass audience emotionally.

Clement Greenberg (photo, top) wrote a famous article, "Avant Garde and Kitsch," which makes this point:

Kitsch, using for raw material the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture, welcomes and cultivates ... insensibility. It is the source of its profits. Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money -- not even their time.

"The debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture" pretty well sums up so many professors writing Civil War history, does it not? Consider also all the time-saving authors of ACW history who will spare you lots of troublesome detail! Greenberg:

The precondition for kitsch, a condition without which kitsch would be impossible, is the availability close at hand of a fully matured cultural tradition, whose discoveries, acquisitions, and perfected self-consciousness kitsch can take advantage of for its own ends. It borrows from it devices, tricks, stratagems, rules of thumb, themes, converts them into a system, and discards the rest. It draws its life blood, so to speak, from this reservoir of accumulated experience. This is what is really meant when it is said that the popular art and literature of today were once the daring, esoteric art and literature of yesterday. Of course, no such thing is true. What is meant is that when enough time has elapsed the new is looted for new "twists," which are then watered down and served up as kitsch. Self-evidently, all kitsch is academic; and conversely, all that's academic is kitsch. For what is called the academic as such no longer has an independent existence, but has become the stuffed-shirt "front" for kitsch.

Can we name a stuffed shirt front (or two) for authorized Civil War history, BTW? I think we can.

When I see "devices, tricks, stratagems, rules of thumb, themes" I see ACW history writ large.

Food for thought.

Notes from the Great Outside - Feynman

Richard P. Feynman needs no introduction and I'd like share a few of his quotes that should be of interest to ACW readers. I'm putting my own headings (in bold) on his quotes.

On pop history and the McPhersons of the world:
If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize.

On the value of personal research in primary sources:
I never pay attention to anything by "experts". I calculate everything myself

On Civil War "experts" -
We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and no learning. There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt. People search for certainty. But there is no certainty.

More on experts:
Learn from science that you must doubt the experts. As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts

How to write Civil War history with integrity:
Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can — if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong — to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it.

The problem with authoritative histories of the war:
I have the advantage of having found out how hard it is to get to really know something, how careful you have to be about checking the experiment, how easy it is to make mistakes and fool yourself. I know what it means to know something, and therefore I see how they get their information and I can’t believe they know it, they haven’t done the work necessary, haven’t done the checks necessary, haven’t done the care necessary. I have a great suspicion that they don’t know, that this stuff is [wrong], and they’re intimidating people.

Your humble blogger would add that getting stuff wrong and intimidating people is American Civil War history in a nutshell.

Palmer et al on the Second Militia Act of 1792

If you follow pop culture, today's hot topic in the conservative mass media has been the Second Militia Act of 1792. This act is said to form the basis of a precedent for the compulsory purchase of health insurance by virtue of having compelled all males of a certain age to purchase firearms for their involuntary militia duty. This has something to do with what is derided as "Romneycare."

We'll stay out of those political weeds except to quote Maj. James Groark's Politics and the Evolution of the Army Reserve. He notes that

The Militia Act required all able-bodied men ages 18-45 to serve in the state militia. Each man enrolling in the state militia had the responsibility maintain his own weapon and equipment. Congress authorized no federal dollars for this purpose. The Militia Act did not include how states were going to enforce the enrollment. Thus, many states failed to ensure these “able-bodied men” met their service obligation. In addition, “the Militia Act offered no means of assuring that citizens would comply with the requirement that they furnish their own arms and accoutrements at personal expense."

Groark is quoting (at the end) Russell Weigley's Towards an American Army.

This is a snapshot of the act and we turn now to matters military.

What is interesting is that it was sponsored by Col. Jeremiah Wadsworth of Connecticut, ancestor to Civil War General James Wadsworth and to 20th Century military reformer Senator James Wolcott Wadsworth, who used some of the principles in the Second Militia Act to craft the National Defense Act of 1920. His collaborator in this was Col. John McAuley Palmer, organizational theorist extraordinaire, and grandson of the Civil War's Gen. John McAuley Palmer.

And so we come to Palmer-the-younger's writing on the Second Militia Act in his book America in Arms.

For the sake of the reader, let me compress Palmer's views up to this point. Pardon my violence done to details.

1) Washington had distinct views on national defense and despite the view that he despised the militia, as president he placed the militia at the very center of his national system. Washington wanted to reform the milita as it was.

2) Washington's constructive views on the militia were embodied in legislation sponsored by Henry Knox. The public in Palemer's time and today do not understand Washington's views. Knox's bill was rejected by Congress at the end of Washington's second term.

3) Col. Wadsworth's militia bill attempted to revive the best parts of the Knox-Washington vision. Congress adjourned before his bill reached the floor.

4) In March, 1792, the bill was reintroduced and acted upon by the House and (per Palmer) "every constructive feature was amended out of it." "As amended, the bill no longer contained even the slightest germ of Washington's well-organized militia." Palmer is blunt: "Its passage actually made our military system worse than it was before the bill was introduced. The old militia organization, with its phony regiments and divisions now had Federal sanction and was made uniformly bad throughout the nation."

5) Jefferson and his supporters were unwilling to have a federally controlled militia, a more effective militia, in the hands of a Hamiltonian administration.

Palmer's views on the militia, the ACW, and military reform, will be reviewed in a future post. Meanwhile, perhaps we can agree on the shock value of encountering the Second Militia Act in a modern news cycle. And yet the Revolutionary War, and its aftermath, will persist just as the Civil War persists.