New Civil War blogs

There have been more than a few Civil War blogs rolled out recently, so forgive the dreaded "roundup" approach as I try to clear some backlogged info.

Nick Kurtz has launched Battlefield Wanderings, a very active two-month old blog with near daily postings. The blog started off with a strong touring focus. It's hard to characterize the newer content exactly - maybe "analytic recapitulations" will do.

Rea Andrew Redd is picking up the posting pace at a blog started in 2005 called Civil War Librarian. This is ACW books and media oriented and a little bit confusing in the voice department. Some entries are in Rea's voice, some are cut and paste press releases or reviews. The site has gone from 12 posts in 2006 to 45 so far this year.

Curtis Allen in his Johnston's Army is laying up posts like fine wines: he's got two up this year and both feature data about Albert Sydney ... pure information ... no opinions. May not satisfy the bloggy appetite without some extra flavor, I fear.

Samuel P. Wheeler is studying for his doctorate at Southern Illinois University, a stronghold of Lincoln publishing. Is he a student of Burlingame, I wonder? His blog Lincoln Studies has postings going back to February and - this is different - the blog hosts a discussion board (see here).

Another blog with a forum is Maine Militia set up by Michael P. Johnson Jr. There was one post (a news comment) in July last year. Then, on Sunday May 27, 2007 another post appeared. And now another. Three in less than one year! This could be a clearinghouse for a group of re-enactors and not intended for the ACW public.

Understanding Army of the Potomac Volume 3

An Amazon reviewer named James Durney has a very interesting take on Russel Beatie's new Army of the Potomac, Vol. III. He notes that the book covers 92 days and then does some math:

Sears in To the Gates of Richmond covers this time in about 90 pages. Burton in Extraordinary Circumstances covers this time in one general chapter on the war to date. This book averages 9.4 pages per day. From the siege of Yorktown to the battle of Williamsburg is almost 200 pages of good writing that gives a systematic account of the action. This level of detail becomes critical to our understanding of what the army is experiencing and their understanding of events as they occur.

I think that's an interesting way to convey level of detail - "9.4 pages per day." It's certainly the way we feel the bones of the story as we troll through archives, isn't it?

p.s. (or FYI) I have a blurb on the same page linked above.

p.p.s See also Drew's post on Beatie's depth and complexity and Ted Savas's comment.

Benchmarking Meade's letters to his wife

Ethan Rafuse has been doing us all a big favor by posting unexpurgated letters from Meade to his missus (see here and here).

He is able to do this because we have a turn-of-the-last-century book of correspondence edited by the general's son and can compare that published work with the handwritten original letters. In his posts, Ethan restores redactions made in the published versions and these are quite interesting.

In 1989, Stephen Sears claimed to have done the same thing in his book The Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan. Specifically, he amended some text found in McClellan's Own Story using material of unknown provenance about which he made unsubstantiatable claims. This material is what historians routinely refer to (most irritatingly) as "McClellan's letters to his wife."

Long-time readers hear the creaking of my hobby-horse and are backing slowly towards the exits. Do stay with me for a few more lines: Rafuse's efforts will help me illustrtate my point about the McClellan "letters."

Meade letters = physically exist, can be read.
McClellan "letters" = whereabouts unknown, no scholar has ever seen one (for 1861-1862).

Meade letters = edited versions were published by his son.
McClellan "letters" = edited versions of notes we think may have been taken from letters were published by his literary executor after daughter May McClellan privately amended them.

Meade letters = letters. They meet every definition of "letter."
McClellan "letters" = cryptic documents manufactured for publication under conditions unknown per agendas unknown. They meet not a single definition of "letter."

My most recent post on this McClellan "letters to his wife" swindle is here. Rafuse's work with Meade's correspondence simply cannot be performed on McClellan's so-called correspondence and I ask (beg?) that writers stop referring to these McClellan artifacts as "letters."

Just add money

The environs of Appomattox Station may become public property. A report is due this summer.

Instant battlefield parks - a good thing.

The real question

... is who reads more deeply, not who reads more titles.

Reassessing Lincoln as commander

Some interesting thoughts on Lincoln by Brooks Simpson:

Now, this is not the opening salvo in what will become a full-scale bombardment designed to bring down the Lincoln Memorial. But I think most historians have been too busily celebrating Lincoln as commander-in-chief to assess his performance dispassionately. There have been dissenting voices, but they tend to come from scholars who want to defend a particular general, and in many cases the voices have been drowned out in a chorus of mostly untempered praise. Sometimes the Lincoln myth actually does a disservice to Lincoln, as in the oft-told tale of his supposedly constant support of Ulysses S. Grant.

I would suggest what we all need is a good book about the management style and system of Abraham Lincoln. There really has never been one to my knowledge. What appears in that flavor tends to be highlight driven, focused on analyzing individual decisions and outcomes; or it tends to formulate bromides through selective presentation.

The reader needs a sense of how the man spent his days, day after day; the balance between impromptu and schedule; the choices made of people to interact with; the choices made of type of work to perform; his subordinates' comments on work habits; his method for reaching decisions; major decisions never taken; you get the idea.

I think Lincoln was a chaotic individual, difficult to be around, with a provisional approach to deciding small matters and large; in cases where his provisional choices became locked down by circumstance, we find writers celebrating these as the wise fruit of long-held beliefs and careful planning. I think working for him, you or I would find him maddeningly vague and unfocused, constantly preserving his prerogatives (wiggle room?) when decisions were needed. But I could be wrong. Write the book, somebody, and let's see.

p.s. Manny had something to say on this earlier this month. He notes Lincoln is a natural for "quipstorians." (BTW, man, I hate quipstorians.) [Hat tip to Harry Smeltzer]

Civil War Book News

I have two other ACW websites. One has not been updated in 10 years. Will get to updating in the near future.

The other is also a ten year old site, Civil War Book News, and has migrated to its third URL and ended up as a blog. The blog format offers a number of opportunities I find irresistible: auto indexing, incremental updating instead of massive updating, and relief from the page composition/ftp chores that tax an old man's brains. Civil War Book News was intended to be a complete record of all ACW titles issued per year and I will attempt to keep it so.

Civil War Book News lives on in this new format. Thanks to old readers and welcome new ones. I have relaunched with May titles and will backfill (and forward fill) as we go along.

Publishing: a forward-looking industry

You can round off your plans for the year 2023 with a good read. The 1867 Harper's Brothers trilogy History of the American Civil War will be reissued that year and Amazon is taking orders for the set now.

Directtextbook.com is also taking orders for the 2023 reissue (scroll down).

Publishing is a strange business but an optimistic one.

Bad ACW history: an explanation

The magazine Nature has gone a long way toward explaining why Civil War history (and other pop history) is so awful:

Journals with high impact factors retract more papers, and low-impact journals are more likely not to retract ... the study finds. It also suggests that high and low-impact journals differ little in detecting flawed articles before they are published. ... Cokol argues that the larger number of retractions in high impact journals reflects the fact that they receive more scrutiny.

(Emphasis added.)

In Civil War history, "low impact" translates into yet another retelling, another synthesis of secondary sources, another infotainment project that cottons to what we already know. The low number of retractions made in ths field not only suggests the prevalence of low impact publishing but an absence of high-impact books and articles: in other words, an across-the-board quality problem.

(Hat tip to Overcoming Bias.)

Two takes on tonight's Sherman show

From the Hartford Courant:

In "Sherman's Total War Tactics: A Save Our History Special" (History, 8 p.m.) Civil War Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman is actually hailed by military men as a genius for introducing terror to American warfare. Those who have had their towns burned to the ground by American troops may have a different idea about the man who led the destructive march through Georgia and the Carolinas in 1864-65.

From the History Channel website:

In this Save Our History special, we travel the entire route of the march, investigating the innovative tactics and technologies used by 60,000 Union troops on the march from Atlanta to Savannah and up into North Carolina. From building a replica portable pontoon bridge to diving for an actual section of a submerged bridge, from a shooting contest between a Union repeating rifle and Confederate musket to twisting "Sherman's Neckties" around a burning tree, we explore what remains today of Sherman's March and discover how his sometimes brutal but always innovative strategies allowed his troops to move quickly and effectively.

Thompson to play Grant

Entertainment news:

Character actor and former Sen. Fred Dalton Thompson's next role is as president -- he's playing Ulysses S. Grant in the HBO film "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee."

These two men are merely mismatched by height, girth, hairline, and accent. So much for lookalike historical casting.

Civil War Talk Radio has moved

Dr. Gerald Prokopowicz's fine Civil War Talk Radio has moved to a new location. It looks to me as if they are still building it out. Here is a press release:

Civil War Talk Radio is alive and well. Its new address is:

[HERE]

The parent organization of CWTR, World Talk Radio, was recently sold to another company which implemented massive changes, including the removal of the websites for WTR and all of its shows. The Civil War Talk Radio website, among many others, disappeared without warning to anyone (including me). All old links to CWTR throughout the web are now obsolete.

The good news is that the show is still there, and once again has its own address. Go to:

[THIS PAGE]

Whatever is currently playing on World Talk Radio will automatically start, which is annoying, but you can of course turn it off (or leave it on to learn about paragliding or trading commodity futures). While you're there, you have the option of clicking the "Download to Desktop" button which will put a shortcut to the show page on your desktop.

From the show page, you can access the archived shows, at least back to Jan 2007. I am told the rest will be back up at some point.

Thanks to all who have inquired about the show, and to all past, present, and future listeners.

Army of the Potomac, Vol. III

(This post follows yesterday's preamble.)

Early in Russel Beatie's newly released third volume of the Army of the Potomac, we find the Comte de Paris advancing, with a small party, on the evacuated Rebel lines at Centreville.

Carrying the map, he had drawn at the end of February showing the location of Confederate units and their strengths, the Comte de Paris compared his findings of ninety five to one hundred and ten thousand men with the housing capacity shown by the remains on the ground.

An accompanying Swiss army engineer, Ferdinand Lecomte, commented that the count found his map "perfectly accurate."

To the repeat reader of conventional pop histories, this may be a difficult pill to swallow. Quaker cannons. Johnston's army ravaged by disease. Miserable collection of little huts. All that folderol represents invested time to some. To the deep reader, however, this is interesting stuff, made moreso by the obscurity of the sources.

Obscurity here is relative and based on our historians' lack of familiarity with an ancient, perhaps dead language once known as "French." The count kept a diary - Mark Grimsley has taken a stab at translating it in installments - that has not previously been fully translated or published.

Beatie makes extensive use of this document in his third volume. In the passage above, he also makes use of another French tract, Ferdinand Lecomte's Campagnes en Virginie.

As to the defenses at Centreville, there are surprises. Will make mention of these in my next post on Army of the Potomac. My point is not to pile on the spoilers but to convey that for the experienced, open-minded reader this book is a very special reading experience.

(Lecomte, by the way, had published his study of Jomini in 1861 and I am not sure if Campagnes is based on this report.)

Three lessons from Edwin Fishel

As a McClellan hater, the late Edwin Fishel had few equals; nevertheless his deeply flawed history of Union intelligence - published 11 years ago - had three irreplaceable findings that have been largely ignored by Civil War authors. These are:

(1) Pinkerton achieved a very high degree of accuracy (well over 90%) in identifying Rebel units opposite McClellan and in theatre.

(2) McClellan and Pinkerton supposedly went wrong by assigning 75% fill rates to identified Rebel units to come up with overall strength figures.

(3) McClellan assigned the d'Orleans brothers (from his staff) to act as intel analysts in evaluating the raw intel Pinkerton's and McClellan's sources were producing.

By adopting a loud tone hostile to McClellan, Fishel misled his conventional readers into thinking all was well with the master narrative - and yet these three points cause chaos in the master narrative. I have seen this again and again - indoctrinated researchers fighting against the implications of their own findings.

The possibility that Pinkerton did well remains unknown to the general reader. The idea that McClellan had a check on Pinkerton and himself (the brothers) remains likewise unknown. The idea that Virginia's governor Lechter staged total mobilization of military aged men and sent them to Johnston's army - maybe exceeding that 75% fill rate?! - is likewise a complete mystery to faithful readers of ye olde doctrine who imagine the Rebel army in front of Washington might have been in the mere 30,000+ range after disease and sickness.

So, McClellan and Pinkerton did not act as their own analysts and Fishel generously credits GBM with this United States military "first." You'll need to remember this when we see the brothers in action tomorrow in a sampling of Beatie's AOP Vol. III.

(Top right, those Orleans brothers.)

The Army of the Potomac

The third volume of Russel Beatie's series, The Army of the Potomac, is shipping now and I wanted to say so many things about these books. This being a blog, constricted by format, let me say just a few brief things at a time.

The structure in which Beatie delivers his research and rethinking is that of a narrative. That is no accident, as you can see from this interview. Nevertheless, this is not you father's ACW narrative. It is leavened with analysis - sometimes to an extent that some Civil War readers would object to - and it contains all those bits left out of the traditional Centennial storyline. This makes Beatie's books the equivalent of a "director's cut" of the story of the war in the east.

"Director's cut" is a funny film industry term that means the opposite of what it signifies. It suggests a version where the director has been uncut - his vision is freed from external constraint.

Beatie's Army of the Potomac restores all the really interesting bits that pop historians removed to keep your pretty little head from worrying about confusing details. You'll recoginize the story framework (e.g. timeline and personalities) but you'll not be prepared for what you encounter on the way. The war in the east will be a new reading experience for you.

If you are a reader of the type, "wow, look at that," you're in for an excellent time. If your reaction tends to be, "this is not important or I would know it already," then forget these volumes. And please forget this blog.

In the days ahead, I'll post a few examples of this wow factor (without spoiling too much of the fun this book affords deep readers).

A sentence you won't soon see again

"His filmmaking focused on Ohio and Civil War history, including several documentaries concerning Ohio's role in the Civil War."

Compensated Emancipation

Our enjoyment of a one-day tax filing extension this year was triggered by an obscure District holiday celebrating the Compensated Emancipation Act of April 1862.

This little event is one of those speed bumps that annoy popular storytellers racing down Talespinner Lane. It generally takes the form of this thread:

* Lincoln sends message to Congress urging compensated emancipation in border states.

* DC slaves are freed with compensation; nothing else gets done.

* Lincoln moves on to begin formulating the Emancipation Proclamation.

I abstracted this from Donald's Lincoln. It sets the stage for the bigger topic, the Proclamation.

But is the Proclamation the bigger topic? Is it the end point of great thought and planning? Or did compensated emancipation far outweigh it in Lincoln's calculations?

We see in William Hesseltine's Lincoln and the War Governors the outlines of a very large topic indeed. Hesseltine characterizes compensated emancipation as Lincoln's "program" "to counter the abolitionists." Look at Hesseltine's thread:

* In March of '62, Lincoln sends a message to Congress urging appropriations be made for to purchase slaves in border states. He also proposes freedmen colonize Latin America or the U.S. Southwest.

* Again, "the only result of the proposal was the bill for compensated emancipation for the District of Columbia."

* Lincoln then renewed his appeal before Congress adjourned. He tells people "The war would now be substantially ended" if Congress had supported compensated emancipation in March.

* Lincoln then sends "a bill to compensate any state that might abolish slavery, but neither Congress nor the border states" take action, Hesseltine writes.

* In Missouri, Lincoln's ally Gov. Gamble introduces a compensated emancipation bill that is "summarily rejected."

All this adds up to significant investment on Lincoln's part, to a vision of how the war will end and how the slavery question will be settled. The war would now be substantially ended is not a trivial remark and merits deep thought.

Compensated emancipation could be the larger, more substantive topic; the Emancipation Proclamation itself … is it an afterthought? A second best choice for Lincoln?

Perhaps there are book-long Emancipation tomes addressing these matters in just proportions but I haven't seen them.

Dogs in the manger

Simon & Schuster may let your book go out of print, but they'll be keeping the rights to it anyway.

Sorry authors, new rules.

Thaddeus Lowe

... gets a website.

Warning: Intense Civil War imagery

It's a real website: The Battle of Lewisburg.

Whose idea was this?