The Mystery of Oktibbeha County

If you are joining us late, we are working on the Mystery of Oktibbeha County. It's like a Lovejoy mystery involving valuable artifacts, shady doings, an academic setting, and skullduggery behind a facade of propriety. In this whodunnit, a collection of historic papers mysteriously appears at a Mississippi college where no one can explain how it got there.

How did the Grant papers end up at Mississippi State? The collection, assembled and owned by the shadowy Ulysses S. Grant Association, was recently in the care of the deceased John Y. Simon (a bona fide Grant scholar). The Association's new director, Sherman buff and psycho-history pop author John Marszalek, moved them out of Southern Illinois University after difficulties with the current administration. So we do have motive for relocation.

Reporters, however, failed to report how MSU came to be selected as a new home. Whenever asked directly, Marszalek, as we have seen in previous posts here, diverted the question or made useless noises. As the director of the nonprofit that owns the papers, Marszalek could have said anything: "I am professor emeritus and like the place"; or, "They're giving us a nice building"; or, "The truck took a wrong turn and delivered its load here by mistake and we figured, what the hell."

One interview with local press is typical. Marszalek was asked flat out, "Why was Mississippi State's Mitchell Memorial Library chosen as the repository of President Grant's papers?" He answers with irrelevant general background data culminating in

Through the hard work of Mississippi State University Library Dean Frances Coleman, interim MSU presidents Vance Watson and Roy Ruby and the enthusiastic support of MSU President Mark Keenum, we were able to convince the [Grant] Association board of directors that the Mitchell Memorial Library at MSU was the appropriate place to house these significant materials.

In other words he answers the "why" question, "because we were able to convince our board." Was the board faced with one lousy offer?

Marszalek could say anything but he assiduously says nothing.

Hat tip to the gentleman who pointed out today's new clue. It is a university press release which hints as to the membership of the cabal behind the move.

Rhode Island Chief Justice Frank J. Williams, winner of MSU's 2006 MSU Distinguished Jurist Award, is [Grant] association president. A former commissioner of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service and a New York Metropolitan Museum of Art vice president, as well as two direct Grant descendants, are other officers."

(More on this momentarily.)

Williams, calling in to MSU for the dedication ceremony, laid more fog over the question of MSU's selection. Get this:

The transfer of Grant’s papers to MSU, Williams said, will enhance efforts to understand his legacy as president and as commanding general of the Union forces during the Civil War.

We would have had no chance of understanding Grant's legacy if these papers had gone anywhere else...

The same report covering the dedication contained an inadvertent disclosure by Marszalek:

When Chief Justice Williams, Dean Coleman and I [were] readying for the papers’ arrival, I told them that once the papers were inside the doors of the library, I was going to let out the loudest scream ever heard in Oktibbeha County.

Marszalek is alluding here to difficult negotiations, not difficult logistics. The dean would not be involved in bills of lading, delivery, and unpacking issues.

So the silence of Marszalek punctuated by screams of joy points to haggling over terms and conditions for the housing of the papers. Is the Association going to pay rent? Is it going to get grants? The deal is so secret, even the existence of a deal must be concealed.

Before we leave the dedication reporting, we should note this ominous, mystery-novel element. Marszalek appears to be the only officer present. Williams phones it in. The recalcitrant board members are not mentioned nor are any other officers. The whole point of the Grant Association is the papers and nobody shows up for the momentous event of relocating them.

Cue the dramatic music.

Now what is this Ulysses S. Grant Association? It was formed in 1962 by the Centennial's brain trust as we see in this contemporary snippet from volume 72 of Ohio History:

ONE OF THE BETTER results of the effort to recognize the centennial of the Civil War has been the establishment of a project to collect and publish the correspondence and other papers of Ulysses S. Grant, supreme commander of theUnion armies and eighteenth president of the United States. To accomplish this end the Ulysses S. Grant Association was created through the efforts of the Civil War centennial commissions of Ohio (where Grant was born and lived his early years), Illinois (which gave him his first command in the war), and New York (where he spent his last years). The association has been chartered as a non-profit corporation by the state of Illinois. Its offices are located in the Ohio State Museum, Columbus, the headquarters of the Ohio Historical Society. Officers of the association are: Ralph G. Newman, Chicago, president; Bruce Catton of the American Heritage, David C. Mearns of the Library of Congress, and T. Harry Williams of Louisiana State University, vice presidents; Erwin C. Zepp of the Ohio Historical Society, secretary; Clyde C. Walton of the Illinois State Historical Society, treasurer; and Allan Nevins of the Huntington Library, chairman of the editorial board. Dr. John Y. Simon of the department of history of Ohio State University is executive director and managing editor.

Note the Illinois charter. Info about the Association, which lacks a website or any other public-facing organ, can be found in the Illinois Secretary of State's portfolio. Its 2008 address was given as the library at SIU which housed the collection: "605 Agriculture Dr, Carbondale, IL 62901-4310." It had "Estimated annual sales" of $138,536.

Now, from our informant's link, we see what may be a board of six people. The identities "exposed" thus far:

** Marszalek, director
** Williams, president
** Grant relative #1, "officer"
** Grant relative #2, "officer"
** "A former commissioner of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service," "officer"
** "and a New York Metropolitan Museum of Art vice president," "officer."

I split the last clause into two because the story is written in AP style. AP's treatment of commas tells us this is written about two people not one ex-IRS art guy.

The Museum VP is Harold Holzer.

The former commissioner of the IRS is harder to figure but must certainly be Sheldon Cohen, "current Abraham Lincoln Association Board Member."*

So the leadership consists of Williams, who won an award from MSU and may have connections there; Marszalek, professor emeritus of MSU; Holzer; Sheldon Cohen; and two Grant relatives. Notice there are no Grant authors or scholars whatever in this organization.

If we were investigating a drug cartel, we would now begin mapping our network. Let's see what we can do on the QT:

Lincoln Bicentennial Commission: Holzer, Williams.

Lincoln Bicentennial Advisory Committee: Marszalek, Cohen.

Lincoln Forum: Holzer, Williams, John Y. Simon.

So, the Grant papers are firmly in the hands of the mobbed-up branch office of a shadowy offshore enterprise we can call "Amalgamated Lincoln Enterprises Inc."

We have our suspects and a trail of dissimulation but the mystery remains. Why MSU?

(Got clues? Send them in.)

* Despite this "credential" Cohen does not actually appear on the ALS website list as a board member. In fact, the board roster excludes all members of the rival Amalgamated Lincoln Enterprises cartel. See here.

Quite an anachronism

Montgomery Meigs quotes Brooks Simpson.

(Well, not that Meigs, but nevertheless. Scroll to end notes.)

Guelzo vs. Foner

Whatever you think of the politics on display here, I appreciate the lack of collegiality. We desperately need less collegiality in the Lincoln field.

Cutting and pasting some prize money

McPherson's laughable Tried by War has won half of the $50,000 Lincoln Prize put up by Regis and Kelly. Or Gilder and Lehrman. Or somebody with more money than sense.

At least that splitting up is in keeping with the cutting and pasting Tried by War represents.

The money men behind the award may not have noted McPherson's "borrowings" but they certainly bought into the absurd premise of the book. Behold their statement:

Lincoln was not only the first modern commander-in-chief, he moreover grasped strategy and tactics with an intuitive understanding that even his trained officers sometimes lacked.

I'm working on a book about Lincoln's overarching greatness as an intuitive rose grower, composer, brewer, doll collector, boxer, chemist, and inventor.

Whoops, inventor has already been taken. Look for it in next year's prize list.

Kindle: anti-author?

The writers' union attacks Kindle as an audiobook in disguise and therefore a threat to authors' incomes.

McPherson's "Abraham Lincoln" (part 1 of 2)

I read James McPherson's Abraham Lincoln this weekend over lunch between the first and fifth bites of a sandwich. The narrative runs 65 pages and the pages are five inches wide by eight tall (with plenty of ledding and white space to bulk it up to 6/10th-of-an-inch thickness).

Notice how few reviews this has gotten. The biggest plug so far has been a line or two in an omnibus roundup from William Safire, a Lincoln buff, in the NYT. The second biggest review - also a few lines in an omnibus - appeared in the Minneapolis Strib written in that tone we have come to expect:

McPherson, our greatest living Civil War historian, has written a clear-headed narrative ... brilliant assessments ... A superb bibliography ... lucid and balanced...

The next level down we find the Grand Forks daily paper after which the trail fades.

You could argue that reviewers have finally caught on to McPherson's instabooks issued on anniversaries (he cut and pasted his way up to Antietam, Gettysburg, and now Lincoln commemorations). This would be just but is not likely the cause of the quiet. Reviewers are too lazy to look into matters that "deeply."

At issue is that reviewers don't know what to do with a 65-page hardcover narrative printed on tiny pages. I think this is the crux together with something I noticed in the reviews for his last book, that McPherson reviewers now represent an assortment of casual labor hacks assigned by their book editors - people not informed enough to give McPherson more praise than what already appears on his press releases.

The result, this paucity of reviews, if it is caused by the brevity of Abraham Lincoln, is a missed opportunity. Not understanding exactly who he is or what he is, people mistake McPherson if they think Abraham Lincoln is a lapse of some sort.

Abraham Lincoln is intended as a powerful display of McPherson at the peak of his powers of synthesis. Whatever quick buck the author envisioned earning in the timing of this release, this is a demonstration of technique: 65 pages of Lincoln and done. I'm outta here. High five me.

The people generally impressed by McPherson ("greatest living historian," "scholar") have little idea that he is a synthesizer of other people's scholarship. To see him acting out this way - acting out his own conception of himself on a monumental (and yet micro) scale - is very confusing for people who imagine that McPherson is a hardy researcher developing original insights and putting them into clear English.

Abraham Lincoln tells us that McPherson knows who he is, what he does, and that bears no connection to his fans' conception of him.

The book also tells us just what kind of a synthesizer McPherson is, which we will develop into the next part of this series.

Photo: USA Today

Bicentennials are for stunts

How better to celebrate the Lincoln Bicentennial than with stunts performed for the Guiness Book of World Records?

And speaking of stunts, the commisars in Illinois have been revising their state history to eliminate any mention of Stalin, er, Blago:

State agencies have removed Blagojevich’s name and photograph from all state government stationery, walls, signs and any other visible reminder.

One media politruk says this does not go far enough:

Considering Illinois’ new determination to rid itself of its nationwide image for corruption in state government, it is time to ask once more: Why does George Ryan’s name remain etched into the wall of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library?

Obliterating Illinois state history could become a major economic stimulus project.

Interesting new books

WWI/WWII revisionist John Mosier has turned his hand to the Civil War and Grant but looks to be utterly conventional in his treatment. Publishers Weekly actually trashed the book ("sketchy," "unbalanced").

Meanwhile, Michael Pierson has us wondering if a CSA mutiny lost New Orleans to the federal forces.

In the "I have to laugh" department of the Bicentennial idiocies bureau, a new 240-page book offers people a "comprehensive collection of Lincoln's writings." It also patiently shows us that "Lincoln believed that he must speak plainly so that every American regardless of their level of education or literacy would understand the complicated issues affecting the country during his presidency." You see, they had not been paying attention in the run-up to the Civil War...

Lincoln was special, dammit!

Braced as I am for Lincolnian excess, I was still not prepared for a new book that argues that we as a society have to start treating Lincoln as a hero not as a run-of-the-mill politician.

A major new Lincoln scholar emerges

James "Concentration in Time" McPherson, having expropriated Clausewitz, Jones, et al to his own name, now turns his attention to recapitulating the insights of Lincoln scholars in his modestly titled new book Abraham Lincoln. I call it a book but it runs just 96 pages, including bibliographic essay.

Daniel Sauerwien says, with inadvertant humor, "The reputation of James McPherson as a scholar lends great weight to the legitimacy of this biography." Put that on the jacket! BTW, Daniel's may be the biggest review this tome has gotten, or am I looking in the wrong places? (See here and here.)

Lincoln authors, having given Goodwin a free pass, now owe us a serious critical review of McPherson's book, i.e., a bibliographic essay of their own. Of course, I'm not holding my breath.

Grant papers find new home

Moving the Grant papers to Mississippi State University attracted stories.

Was it the first offer? Best offer? Or is this the Marszalek connection, JM being retired from the school. "This spring, the board of the Ulysses S. Grant Association will hold its annual meeting at Mississippi State—its first ever south of the Mason-Dixon Line." Hmmm. Sounds like a one-man band at work. "Marszalek, who will assemble a new support staff..."

In an interview on NPR, Marszalek artfully dodges the direct questions of why and how this particular school now houses the collection. The same element is missing from the AP and other print stories.

Let's see: a Sherman specialist steps in with a strong hand to complete the publication of the Grant papers and to organize a new staff and archives in a new center where he (only he) has connections and leverage.

Obviously this will work as long as he is competent and active in his retirement, but after that? Does it not disempower the association and any rivals for leadership?

Is this a bad thing?

The future of the ALPLM

I've been waiting for the announcement of an Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum (ALPLM) leadership search, one that was lined up to start in mid-February, but in re-reading last month's press have concluded that the target time for starting the search was casual, perhaps spurious. There will be no search starting anytime soon. State historian Thomas Schwartz played coy in the waning days of Hot Rod and I think took himself out of the running thereby.

The larger question is what does the state expect of the ALPLM director? (The position is separated from any fund raising duty, so that's not a consideration.)

With infotainment celeb Richard Norton Smith I think the selectors expected publicity, that his usual public appearance rounds would result in museum plugs.

With mysterion Rick Beard, an unpublished and unknown Atlanta museum honcho, I think they looked at his record there and expected community programs and similar outreach.

Schwartz may already be cutting ribbons at Bicentennial events. He's probably standing in for Beard in the anemic Bicentennial schedule arranged before Beard's departure. This may be all the state wants or needs just now.

The Schwartz leadership trial balloons floated by Harold Holzer and search committee chief (and Blago confidante) Judy Cellini indicate a desire to resume "business as ususal" - to continue under the radar with the extremely low expectations set by Rick Beard continuing in force. The messages coming out of Gov. Pat Quinn's office point to economies; Schwartz continuing to fill-in is an economy measure.

Prediction: there will be no repositioning of the ALPLM, no rededication, no star power, no rethinking of the top role. There will be muddling along with acting and interim leadership.

Heritage tourism delerium is recession-proof

The seamy Civil War "heritage tourism" dynamic generated among chambers of commerce, local government, and "public historians" recently surfaced again in this story in Helena's (AR) Daily World newspaper.

A couple, making their living as public history consultants in Arkansas, met with the Helena Rotarians to pitch tourism attraction ideas. It immediately generated the hysterical newspaper headline, "Helena’s Civil War story could mean some major tourist dollars."

Sick stuff. If you have any doubt whether this is P.T. Barnum country, read on.

Brent said that people, who aren’t from the Delta, would find the story of Phillips County “fascinating.” Brent showed a brief taste of the design for Helena, which includes 27 locations for waysides, Kiosks, enhanced walkways, camps, buildings, audio displays, public art and murals. The green space on Biscoe that used to house dilapidated homes and was torn down through the efforts of the Delta Bridge Project and the city of Helena-West Helena, will be Freedom Park and detail the African American troops that fought during the Civil War. Estevan Hall, which has been bought by Southern Bancorp and the American Trust, will house a welcome center, if all goes according to the plans. Brent said that 900,000 people visit Vicksburg and the Civil War sites there. “You’re well situated to attract the tourists and you have the story. The story is compelling and they’ll (tourists) go tell their friends.”

The Brents are selling what desperate governments are buying: hope in a magical economic solution. What the accumulated disappointments will do to history, public and otherwise, is not good.

Naive then and naive now

The Fourth International is fed up with Lincoln/Obama comparisons in the mass media:

Attempts to portray Obama as the heir of Lincoln's legacy involve a grotesque historical and political falsification. Lincoln will forever be associated with one of the great progressive causes in history—the emancipation of the slaves and the destruction of the Southern slave-owning oligarchy in the American Civil War (1861-1865). Obama, on the other hand, bears only a negative and reactionary relationship to the great political questions of his day.

Regardless of how one evaluates Obama, the interesting thing about the communist position, historiographically, is that it here marries in one evaluation package magnitude and specificity in outcomes. We can differ over what to measure, but these Trotskyites are measuring.

When you look at the new C-Span survey of celebrity infotainers, you see what might be a rational metric operating only at the very tip top and rock bottom of the list (Lincoln/Buchanan); everywhere else, personal affinity seems to drive selections. This subjectivity is what you would now expect, for as Civil War historian James Robertson, Jr., tells his students, history is all about emotions.

In trying to transcend the miasma of C-Span and Robertson, the Fourth International remains true to Marx's Civil War standard of "scientific socialism" which he and Engels developed in opposition to what they called the "naive socialism" of Union Generals Willich, Siegel, Schurz and so many others. (Naive socialism remains as intensely personal, idiosyncratic, and emotional now as then. When Newsweek therefore proposes in its recent cover "We're all socialists now," it does not suggest we're all Marxists now, but rather "We're all naive socialists now" -- we've become politically contemporary with Schurz, Willich, Siegel and the other 48ers.)

This is not to suggest C-Span's prizewinning infotainers are all naive socialists but that they appear naive whatever. The constant resort to baby talk in public and on the written page reinforces the the appearance of naivete and incapacity. The participation in list-making and rankings is also infantile.

At this point in the ongoing orgy of "public history" I'm desperate for some intellectual standard in historical evaluation. I'll even take it from the communists.

Lincoln's Bicentennial birthday

They made pretty good historiographers out of us kids.

In the classrooms where portraits of Washington and Lincoln were hung we knew one big thing about Lincoln by the time we reached sixth grade: Lincoln freed the slaves.

"They" understood that to be all you needed to know about Lincoln, the sign and seal of his greatness, his place.

He didn't need to be a bigtime boxer, an excellent general, a managerial genius, a champion rose grower, or a political philosopher for the ages. Lincoln freed the slaves.

The genius in this is that it doesn't compel you to vilify his political enemies, to slander his generals, to spin out rationalizations to cover his monumental errors and bad judgement. No, because you're done. You laid down ace of trump in the statesman game. You can go home now.

For the pygmies tormenting us with endless sixth grade civics lessons this year, learn something about Lincoln: he freed the slaves.

The digital literacy of MSNBC

MSNBC is out with a big story on a new Civil War records trove available on Ancestry.com without giving the archival link or indicating if registration is required:

World's largest Civil War collection now online

I went to Ancestry.com and found nothing.

Uses of history

Andrew Ferguson explained how easy it is to become a "recognized Lincoln expert." We are now, in this Bicentennial, reaping one whirlwind sown by the painfully low standards of Lincoln discourse.

Additionally, due to the pervasiveness of the Obama-as-Lincoln media meme, advanced Lincoln readers face an irruption into their realm of political junkies with primitive analytic capabilities and little historic sensibility.

In other words, the onslought of naive readers threatens to set back Lincoln publishing as decisively as Civil War publishing was retarded by the the perfect storm of Killer Angels, Ken Burns, and James McPherson. Indifferent readers flood the market buying craptastic books for all the wrong reasons thus completely reprogramming the minds of acquisition editors and their publishers - for a generation.

There comes a point in historical generalizing when you start aggregating generalizations (Burns, McPherson) beyond any point of sense or even approximate truth; to the careful reader you come across as stark raving mad. Mix in a strong dose of political lesson-mongering and your material will look amazing to anyone remotely familiar with your topic.

Case in point.

Can we get the Bicentennial on a solid footing? I think it is too late.

(Hat tip to Russell Bonds for the link.)

Paid holidays and Confederates

Bill would require paid Confederate holiday in SC.

Confederate Memorial Day cannot be a state holiday in any state where there is no legal or historical continuity with the Confederate state governments. I don't know of any state with legal or historical continuity of that sort. It can be a holiday for the memory of war dead by families affected - in other words a private holiday - but not a state holiday.

Can a state have a memorial day paid holiday for local Loyalists killed in the Revolution? Can it furlough the civil service to celebrate the national holidays of France, Spain, Russia, Mexico (in Louisiana, Florida, Alaska, the Southwest)? Can New York, Philadelphia and Boston celebrate the British occupation of those cities?

We live in a "whatever" culture where distinctions are all blah blah blah.

(Which by the way is why ACW nonfiction is so bad.)

Heritage tourism: travel up, spending down

A new tourism study focused on the Rt. 15 "Hallowed Ground" area has revealed some optimistic information. (The Hallowed Ground website does not seem to link to the study and I am depending on just one news story for summary information.)

The nub:

A new Michigan State study shows people seeking out the past spent more than $247 million at 10 national parks within the Journey Through Hallowed Ground National Heritage Area, a 175-mile stretch from Gettysburg to Charlottsville.

The conclusion you are invited to draw:

It's estimated that every tax dollar spent on those parks generates $4 in visitor spending within a 50-mile radius of the community.

The heritage tourism folks are apparently still applying old metrics to new data. Beware such modeling, my friends.

In summer, we noticed a funny thing happening at Gettysburg: attendance was up and private spending was down. In other words, people travelled to the park, rented their hotel, and spent parkside not townside. The underlying story is still online. Consider,

So far in 2008 [end of July], hotel occupancy rates are up 13 percent in Gettysburg over 2007 figures, according to the Gettysburg Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Officials also estimate more than a half million people have visited the new Gettysburg National Military Park Museum and Visitor Center since its opening April 14. Summer events have attracted an additional 86,000 visitors to the area this year.

Nevertheless,

"Everybody I talk to, they say their business is down," said Crist, president of the Steinwehr Avenue Business Alliance.

(BTW, this reminds of the day I revisited Harper's Ferry and discovered the National Park Service had set up a new bookstore in town to compete with the existing private bookstore. The business of government rolls on.)

Obviously, the tourism industry needs to recalibrate its rules of thumb. More interesting is the issue, what happens to the preservation movement once the Chamber of Commerce loses interest?

Historian: Obama is reshaping Lincoln memories

A professor specializing in Civil War memory studies says that "... many may not realize that today’s president is shaping the way we remember the 16th president. Memory is always crafted by its contemporary context."

Many of us are old enough to remember how FDR's supporters appropriated Lincoln inadvertently launching a Lincoln publishing surge that eventually led to the still-running ACW boom. Both bonanzas had dire historiographic side effects, however...

The horse as Civil War hero

Many times wounded, Old Sam retuned to Chicago after the war and was later buried in a (human) cemetery.

"Resurrection" issues

"Resurrection" is an industrial term used in Hollywood that has implications for historical novelists. Francis Hamit this weekend posted some thoughts on the ACW literary side of the subject at Amazon:

From a legal standpoint, the dead have no privacy and cannot sue, nor can their relatives sue on their behalf. It's simply not going to happen.

From the standpoint of storytelling, I'm working in a particularly tough area, the American Civil War, which has a huge audience for non-fiction that despises most of the fiction created about the era. And justifiably so, because a lot of those authors are lazy about their research. My novel, The Shenandoah Spy is researched to the level of a non fiction book, but written as a novel. I made some creative choices that displeased a lot of people, including some fairly hot sex scenes with my protagonist, Belle Boyd.

This was not gratuitous but driven by character and the storyline. Belle seduced, or was seduced by a Union Army captain, Daniel Keily, who gave her the opportunity to listen in on the staff meeting where plans to capture and destroy Stonewall Jackson's army were discussed. Belle, by her own account, rode 15 miles in the middle of the night to find and give this intelligence to Turner Ashby.

Belle was accused not only of spying, but of being "an accomplished prostitute" by William Clark, a reporter for the New York Herald. Now Clark was an odious creep and propagandist for the Union cause, but he was not a bad reporter. He didn't make things up. He had to get that someplace. (You can read his reporting online). Belle was, at the very least, an outrageous flirt. These are all established facts. Well documented. Belle's passion for for the South was a reflection of her passionate nature, and it is easy to see how she might have gotten caught up in the moment and given up her virtue to Keily. She later gave Keily medical treatment when he was wounded (she was one of the first women in the South to take up nursing, which also damaged her reputation --it was the Victorian era and mores.) So, I stand by these creative choices. They are generated by the story line, not any cheap thrill and if you read the book, you will see that it works. Sex and spying do go together as the two oldest professions.

I find that the Civil War community has an excessive reverence for historical figures. These people were not plaster saints. They had flaws and made mistakes and even fooled around. Jill Lapore, a history professor at Harvard who writes in the New Yorker, had an essay about historical fiction (March 24, 2008)which said that it often gets closer to the truth of an era than a recitation of known facts. To this I add my own observation on those "factual" sources. Much of what survives is heavily slanted.

When I was a speaker at the West Coast Civil War Round Table conference in Clover, California last November, there was another speaker who cast doubt on the Southern Historical Society papers, which were controlled and edited by a former Confederate General intent on rewriting history and creating the myth of "The Lost Cause". It was very interesting because I've found a lot of signs of disinformation in my own research (I wrote the short article on that topic for the Encylopaedia Britannica). Let me put in another way; autobiographies, especially those written decades after events, seldom do harm to their subjects. Letters are written with a filter. The journalism of the period always had a political slant. And some of those sources are obvious fiction.

Another instance is the episode at the Battle of Front Royal, where Bell ran across the battlefield under fire to give a situation report to Jackson. This was dismissed by many as fanciful and a complete invention on her part because it seems so unlikely (and unladylike) but there are two independent eyewitness accounts in the literature and a historical marker on the spot where she gave her report. A good researcher puts aside preconceptions and digs for evidence.

Belle Boyd seems to have been generally truthful. Don C. Wood, Executive Director of Belle Boyd House in Martinsburg, WV, told me as much. Sometimes known facts are overlooked and ignored. An example is Sam Hardinge, Belle's first husband, who is usually described as having died in London in 1865. Except that Belle was planning to divorce him then, and there is a article in the New York Times from 1865 to that effect. And she did. Don C. Wood told me that he has a copy of the divorce papers. She had cause. The part of her book where their relationship is so romantically described, was, of course, propaganda. Ghost-written by George Augusta Sala, a English Confederate sympathizer and published with the help of Henry Hotze, the Confederate "Commercial Agent" in London (Secret Service Chief, actually). Don said that Hardinge had taken up with an English actress while Belle was pregnant with his child, and if that were not cause enough for a divorce, the Daily of Benjamin Moran, the Union consular clerk, reveals that in November 1864, just months after their marriage, he came to the American embassy and offered to spy for them -- and was refused! Why have these facts been overlooked by Civil War academics? It may have something to do with the fact that Don Wood doesn't have a Ph.D (At least he doesn't advertise one). He's one of those troublesome people who has spent a lifetime researching this area, but that's not as important to most as having been to the right schools.

When you are working with such compromised sources, you really have to pick and choose carefully. (All of the above will be in a later novel in the series.). How does the myth of Hardinge's death persist? Out of laziness, because professional historians find it easier to quote other historians than do the hard work of examining primary sources and analyzing them. I am sure there is a fair amount of academic politics and not a little prejudice against Belle, because she was so shocking for her time. When it comes to Civil War sources, my own view is that it is all fiction to a degree.

Civil War Pipe Tobaccos

It may be too much to look for historical meaning in pipe blends, but here goes anyway. These are modern blends not pretending to be historical. Courtesy of the Old Virginia Tobacco Company:

Antietam Pipe Tobaccos
Description: American Civil War
Blend of flue cured Virginia & Kentucky Burley seasoned w/ribbon cut black Cavendish. The enticing aroma is from apricot brandy. Slightly sweet & rich, yet mellow. A general's favorite.

Gettysburg Pipe Tobaccos
Description: A soldier's favorite from the American Civil War. Virginia tobaccos and smooth black Cavendish are set with Colombian coffee beans and dark chocolate. The real thing for genuine coffee lovers.

I see wisps of meaning here. The Gettysburg blend alludes to "bummers" off in the weeds brewing coffee when they should be in the firing line. (Civil War soldiers probably drank Mexican, Brazilian, or Javanese coffee so the Columbian reference may be anachronistic.) Col. Wainwright in his diary noted thousands of these slackers in and around Gettysburg while his artillery was en route to battle. Case closed.

Antietam is more difficult. Who is this mysterious general? McClellan smoked cigars. Did Lee smoke? I think not. The Antietam blend must be about Burnisde. Wainwright comments on how maginificently Burnside's HQ was stocked with every kind of alcohol: lager, porter, port wine, madeira, the works. A pleasure to visit the hospitable Burnside, Wainwright said. That was in 1864 but a tiger doesn't change his stripes. Apricot brandy - expect to find it at Burn's place. Kentucky burley - a reference to Burnside's nearby Cincinnati stay? Sweet and mellow. That's how Wainwright characterized his dealings with Burnside. I think we've solved another one.

Got a better reads? Send 'em in.

West Point: "contemptible"

We're all familiar with the diatribes against West Point made during the Civil War. Here's a particularly choice specimen from Henry C. Whitney's Life on the Circuit with Lincoln (1892). It comes in the midst of a chapter attacking McClellan:

Those who are familiar with West Point and its workings are also aware that it engenders the most contemptible aristocracy in this country. The profession of arms is alluring to youth and callow manhood; the forced gentility and mechanical manners taught, tend to the fostering of a dull mediocrity - a repression of individuality - an undue sentiment of reverence for those officially superior, and a feeling of contempt for all below. The very attire engenders illegitimate pride and ever-preening vanity; and a spirit of caste is infused, as trenchant and deeply ingrained as that of the Brahmins. It is not forgotten that in the British army the officers are spawned from the titled aristocracy. Manhood is estimated in the order of rank, and groupings take place accordingly. A conventional General is at the zenith of the social fabric, and a private soldier at the foundation, although the latter may have brains, and the former none. And it was this very infusion of artificial manners, and social mechanisms and evisceration of manhood, that replaced national patriotism with esprit de corps; and that caused the recusancy of Stone at Ball's Bluff - of Buell in Kentucky, and of Porter at the second Bull Run.

"Intelligent" people who don't know better

How can well-regarded prizewinners, credentialled to the nth degree, write one piece of nonfiction trash after another? How can their fans lap it up?

As has often been noted here, it has to do with evidence handling. I used to think that evidence management was an ethical issue. Now, I wonder if evidence handling is a "medical" issue, a go/no go proposition that can be tested as easily and simply as color blindness.

If you don't have it, maybe you're not going to be able to fake it or develop any. By the same token, your devoted readers, those that are similarly "blind," will not care about evidence handling.

I'm on this because a psych professor suggests that we make "the proper calibration of evidence" (his term) part of IQ measurement. I say make it a whole test of its own and let it be the first step before enrolling someone in any history or journalism program.

Diversity was a killer

The more diverse a unit's enlistees were, the higher the casualty rate, the higher the desertion rate, the more likely the unit was to fail in battle.

That's the quick and dirty summary by a journalist encountering Heroes and Cowards: The Social Face of War, a new book that applies social science methodology to 41,000 Union ACW records.

"Union soldiers, whether in prison camps or in the field, were the most loyal to men who looked like themselves — of the same ethnicity and occupation, from the same state or hometown, or of the same age or related by blood," said Dora Costa, a UCLA economics professor and co-author of the book Heroes and Cowards: The Social Face of War.

I am reading this volume and will report back soon. Meanwhile, the publisher's pitch says:

When are people willing to sacrifice for the common good? What are the benefits of friendship? How do communities deal with betrayal? And what are the costs and benefits of being in a diverse community? Using the life histories of more than forty thousand Civil War soldiers, Dora Costa and Matthew Kahn answer these questions and uncover the vivid stories, social influences, and crucial networks that influenced soldiers' lives both during and after the war.

You can read a sample chapter at the link.

The other Sesquicentennial

The John Brown's Raid Sesquicentennial has a website and is generating some press.

Cump and the Pasha

Hmmm: Stone Pasha's pallbearer was Sherman. Story here. Background here.

A non-update for Lincoln, the movie

Screenwriter Tony Kushner says his script for Spielberg's "Lincoln" is "deep in revisions" and declines to project a next milestone.

Star Liam Neeson has been left hanging:

"I don't know (anything) other than what you know," he admitted. "He asked me four years ago would I play this part and I most certainly said I would. He'll do it whenever he's ready to do it, but it's in the works."

No sign of Doris Kearns Goodwin either whose rights to Team of Rivals were sold to Spielberg.

Meanwhile, a film buff puts things into the broader view:

I'm going to take this opportunity to mention how depressing it is that Spielberg's two upcoming projects are films that I don't really care about.

"I'd like to buy a book"

We've all stood in the information line of a bookstore while the shopper at the head of the line struggles to remember anything at all (author, title, genre) about the book sought.

In the same vein, people go to Amazon and enter the search word "book". Alone. By itself. Proof here that it is a popular search term.

Today's re-enactment

There will be more than one re-enactor at the inaguration today, despite what i reported earlier.

BTW, if you look at the picture, you'll see the 54th Mass now has black officers and white privates. Simulation or simulacrum?

Hero and villain

Confederate militia captain by day, Union guerilla captain by night: the strange military career of Martin D. Hart. (More here and here.)

The Battle of Shepherdstown (cont.)

A WVU professor will harness students to collaborate on the production of a book on the Battle of Shepherdstown, presumably in an effort to clarify where the affected ground lies.

Sesquicentennial in MS

Mississippi is considering whether to create a Sesquicentennial Commission. The state's Development Authority would have oversight of its activities.

Lincoln themes - how much is enough?

It will be "a Lincoln-themed inauguration from top to bottom," reports the New York Post with overflowing detail.

Meanwhile, the planned inauguration parade of Mobile's Azalea Trail Maids is said by the local NAACP to hearken to "a shameful past."

Bones (cont.)

Mannie has weighed in on the Antietam bones with a hearty bit of head scratching.

A themed inauguration

The Inauguration Committee has some idea that it is recreating the last stage of Lincoln's journey to Washington. Absurd, says Larry Tagg.

Why we don't read more navy stuff

The difficulty with ACW (and other) navy lit (click to enlarge: via Tony Millionaire).

Bones and "armies of people"

I should wait for Mannie's report on this but the press is already going wild with 255 stories linked on Google News. This is the basic story from the local newspaper. This is the wire story that's repeating worldwide.

Antietam Superintendent John Howard baffles me. The local report tells us a visitor noticed bones near animal diggings and loaded them into his backpack for transport to the visitor center (he then left the park without telling or showing exactly where the bones were found).

"He did everything right," Superintendent John Howard said. "He drove right to the Visitor Center with the bones."

What if I told you he did everything wrong?

In the AP report, Howard explains why bones would be found on a battlefield:

"These armies were made up of people, of men who fought here," Howard said.

He forgot to add, "People contain bones."

A friendly reminder

December 8 is Pretend to be a Time Traveler Day. You know what to do. (If not, here are some ideas.)

"Say there, can you tell me where can I obtain some cotton trading permits?"

McClellan at Gettysburg (cont.)

Author Greg Acken was good enough to send more McClellan-at-Gettysburg incidents. I may compile all our sources and map them in a future post. Anyway, here's Greg:

Regarding the McClellan at Gettysburg theme, I edited a grouping of a Union captain's letters that was published in 1998 called Inside the Army of the Potomac. In the letters, my subject, Captain Francis Adams Donaldson of the 118th Pennsylvania, noted that on the night of July 1-2, while the 5th Corps was en route to Gettysburg via Hanover, that an officer with a lantern standing by the roadside (this was at 3:30 AM) read an "order" claiming McClellan had again been placed in command.

"The men became perfectly wild with joy, and the scene was very exciting where we halted. Here were divisions of infantry intermingled with artillery and cavalry cheering each other as they passed, while the name McClellan rang thro' the ranks. Everyone seemed filled with enthusiasm, and each battalion as it moved past stepped to the encoraging shouts of thousands of voices in one grand chorus for Little Mac"

I found similar mentions in History of the Twenty Third Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry, Birney's Zouaves, pg. 93: (6th Corps regiment-8 PM July 1)

"A rumour being circulated just at this time, that General Hooker had been relieved and he was to be succeeded by General McClellan, the men exhibited their joy while on the march by singing and in other ways manifesting pleaasures, but we soon found the report was without foundation, and that the new commander of the Army of the Potomac was a Pennsylvanian-- General George G. Meade-- who remained in that position until the close of the war."

Additionally, the Regimental Historians of the 155th Pennsylvania (also 5th Corps) note on pg. 154: (They had just united on the march to Gettysburg with other Pennsylvanians of SBW Crawford's command)

"With the arrival of these troops also came the report, which was circulated all along the line, that General McClellan had been restored to the command of the Army of the Potomac and was on his way to join the army. General McClellan's name and popularity on this report were also enthusiastically received, but alas! it was doomed to contradiction as a mere camp rumour, as developments soon demonstrated."

It is also worth noting that in the same brigade (and thus, the same line of march) as Donaldson's 118th Pennsylvania was the veteran 22nd Massachusetts. Their reaction differed greatly from that which Donaldson recorded in the Corn Exchange Regiment when they heard of the re-appointment: (22nd Massaachusetts, p. 244-245)

"(McClellan's) name had lost its magical impact, for beyond a few feeble cheers from some of the commands, the column stalked on in moody silence"

Finally, Henry Hunt, writing about the second day at Gettysburg in Battles and Leaders (Vol. III, pg. 301), also makes note of this phenomena.

Excellent! Keep them coming, please.

(This thread, as always, is about the sanitizing of history by storytellers. Of course McClellan was not at Gettysburg, so such incidents as these are "meaningless" and can be excised from the "true" record of events.)

Publishing cuts back

Hat tip to Richard Miller for the link to the story "Puttin’ Off the Ritz: The New Austerity in Publishing."

Interesting to me is the last paragraph which describes Michael Korda as former Simon & Schuster editor-in-chief. Didn't know he left. Korda was personally interested in the ACW, put out a lot of ACW "product" including his own work, and was, I think, perennially seeking the vast ocean of general readers the Centennialists sailed on. Historiographically, he was a disaster - Jean Smith's Grant, for example, was a disgrace - and financially he did his firm no favors if the low sales I used to track through Ingram's were any indication. Nonetheless, he was the highest profile advocate of ACW publishing in the biz.

The story also contains an odd snippet from a retailer who looks forward to fewer titles being published; in other words, who thinks the cut back will benefit book sales. This makes sense only if book stores don't have buyers anymore and must take every title put out...

The brief return of Dr. Strange

Lo, he has been unchained, his tongue freed to chant spells against his Illini masters.

Any pretense that you’re hiring the best person necessarily [for the ALPLM], that you’re conducting a search or that you’re really trying to hire quality and that’s all that matters is absolute nonsense.

But the evil Illini invoke protective spells of process:

Mr. [Rick] Beard is no longer an employee of the state, and we are not going to address his allegations.

And thus, with this brief but powerful recitation, all power of allegation is rendered harmless! Checkmate, Dr. Strange!

Banished again to the oblivion dimension by his sinister overlords, Dr. Strange will spend eternity imploring the unhearing powers that be, "Ask Mrs. Cellini."

The news

Break's over: news is backlogged.

ALPLM attendance is down again. The hundreds of thousands have declined year-on-year from 5 to 4 to 3. If you discount the busloads of school kids, then what?

If I understand this article correctly, the Inauguration Committee is going to allow a grand total of one ACW re-enactor into the festivities.

The Wilderness Wal-Mart struggle continues with a piece that tries to explain the significance and status of the commercially zoned parcel.

Ever happen to you? You get a call from a dealer interested in selling you ACW stuff you already own - or you thought you owned. Whoops.

A certain county, custodian for an ACW battlefield, hopes you and your historical society will come and build monuments all over that battlefield. Great idea, huh?

Professor E. Ayers and the University of Richmond plan to kick off the Civil War Sesquicentennial with what is billed as its first official event in April. As this year marks the sesquicentennial of 1859, we stroke our beards perplexed before concluding that sesquicentennialism might best be left to the mathematics department.

History for cocktail parties

Tracking the first to volunteer: what a waste of effort.

McPherson on Lincoln and Obama

Someone was kind enough to send in this link. James "Concentration-in-Time" McPherson was asked to name similarities between Lincoln and the president elect. He names just one: cool disposition.

I don't understand how someone can see Lincoln this way. His verbal jabs come in an unending stream indicating a continuously poor temper. Centennialists try to make this a McClellan thing, but Lincoln snapped at everyone. When he fully unloads on somebody - say a Carl Schurz - the result is frightening and yet it brings him no lasting peace (he's soon jabbing again). He is often bored and expresses boredom in bad jokes and inappropriate behavior. In between his restlessness from boredom and his uncontrollable flashes of anger are troughs of depression marked by listlessness, inattention, and not-too-masterful inactivity.

At times, he publicly loses control of his impulses. He invites the officer in charge of his security detail to sleep in his bed. He has his cabinet sign a bizarre document signifying nothing but the imminent election of McClellan. He stages an amphibious assault consisting of himself and a few aides against Norfolk. He signs cotton trading permits like there's no tomorrow. He solicits Ben Butler to be his running mate in '64. He gazes over the parapet to watch early assault his position.

The list goes on: cool is Lincoln's missing ingredient.

Look who's been reading pop history

Seen on today's Daily Reckoning:

Historians will try to make sense of it. But all historians lie. Not intentionally. It's a professional requirement. They look back and think they see a plot. From then on, every circumstance is bent, greased and wedged into the story line. The basic facts are the same any way you look at it; the dramatis personae don't change. But the historian can make readers laugh or cry. He can turn it into morality play or an amoral farce.

Don't let them spoil your appreciation of history

The Good Fight that Didn't End is a new book collecting the journal entries, letters and newspaper articles of Henry Goddard, a Connecticut cavalry officer. He has a journal entry dated November 10th of a type seen often:

Maj. Gen. G.B. McClellan, having been relieved of the command of the Army of the Potomac, we had a grand review from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m., the general riding past us and bowing to the cheering, he was accompanied by his successor, Maj. Gen. Burnside. It was a splendid sight, but a sad day for the Army. Curse the politicians who drove the general from his place just as his plans were developing.

At this point, the editor normally inserts an explanation on why the soldier holds foolish opinions not approved by best selling Civil War authors. This editor signally failed to do so.

The next part of the journal entry will look like indecipherable gibberish to the responsible editor and historian alike:

I never was a McClellanite till this last campaign, which has been managed splendidly. We have seized and held every gap in the Blue Ridge before him and got in the rebels rear here at Warrenton, and now he to whom we owe all this is removed.

The journal writer seems to be talking about some imaginary campaign that never happened. If the editor had replaced the passage entirely with elipses [...] he would have saved readers a lot of needless confusion.

Speaking of "gibberish" in another new book, One Continuous Fight, the authors write of Pennsylvania's Gen. Gregg capturing 2,000 Confederate stragglers and 3,000 Confederate wounded in a single incident after Gettysburg. I'm not sure how this could have happened in a pursuit not authorized by Civil War historians, but in round numbers, this looks like 7% of the total force brought by the South onto the battlefield taken in just one incident of the retreat.

If these numbers look "wild," Continuous Fight offers another tidbit a few pages later. Again, the speaker sets out to purposefully confuse the reader. Here is the colonel commanding the 4th Pennsylvania Volunteer Cavalry:

I count up out of five hundred men of my regiment with whom I left Potomac creek, twenty-five with me mounted. The rest are, heaven only knows where, dismounted, killed, wounded, scattered, and not at hand.

His command has become entirely notional - to him. But to us, Civil War historians and readers, there are no notional Union commands, only excuse making and balking. I would have footnoted this passage with a comment about battle fatigue, things we say when stressed, etc.

Before you start wondering about all of this kind of crazy talk, be assured that the quotes listed here will only slip through those works not edited by knowledgeable and vigilant authorities. Stick with brand name authors and especially avoid diaries and letters if you want to maintain that clear-headed, hard-earned understanding you have held for so many years and worked so hard to attain.

Don't let improperly presented source material spoil your appreciation of history.

p.s. These are excellent books, all irony aside, and the point here is that if your author is not "spoiling your appreciation" of previous readings, shame on him.

Tagg: Where's the team?

Larry Tagg has launched a blog and his first post attacks the Goodwin meme of Lincoln leading a team of rivals working in harness for cause and country. It's really all you could want or expect on the subject from a single blog entry. He sums it up:

"Lincoln’s 'team of rivals' was hardly a success—rather than act as a template for modern administrations, it should be a cautionary tale."

Again, one must ask where are the Lincoln scholars? What island are they vacationing on? Tagg is indeed the author of Lincoln: the Story of the Most Reviled President (as well as his better known Generals of Gettysburg) but his public persona is more that of singer-songwriter.

The heavy lifting is being left to others. Good heavens, I mean they're sending in graduate students to do the talking instead of the professors. Disgraceful.

Exception: Allan Guelzo weighs in with a a firm veto. "Nor did Lincoln encourage rivalry," he notes. Amen. James Oakes, a scholar who is just beginning to turn his attention to Lincoln, is also displeased. He notes, "there was nothing new in what Lincoln did," and "not much of what made him great can be discerned in his appointment of a contentious, envious and often dysfunctional collection of prima donnas to his cabinet."

Got another exception to the rule of AWOL Lincoln experts? Send it in.

Meanwhile, nearly all of the flak fired at Goodwin's Zeppelin is coming from mere political bloggers, left and right, who due to their interest in politics have bothered to look at the validity of the meme.

Below the Beltway: Not much of a team, but definitely rivals; Team of Rivals? More like a Dysfunctional Team of Enemies

Demockracy: Team of Dysfunctional Rivals

Open Left: bad analogies can be destructive

Truthdig (Joe Conason): Not a team of rivals at all. Get this:

When the journalistic pack bites into a tasty cliché, they often refuse to let go, lazily chewing and regurgitating a phrase like “team of rivals” long after the flavor is gone.

Hah. Finally, let me quote myself quoting Thomas and Hyman two years ago:

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

Lincoln scholars, your break's over. Get to work.

Hat tip on LT's new blog to Ted Savas.

p.s. An alert correspondent sent in this link about the time this was posted. Foner is quoted but not contra Goodwin; he makes a generic remark about hubris instead.

About all those critical thinkers

I think we all (advanced ACW readers) ask ourselves as we read, "Where did this come from?" and "Why do I believe it?" or "Why does the author believe it?"

We are by nature close readers which makes for critical thinking. At the same time we are confronted by an endless stream of naive, careless work from historians coming out of or going into academia. How can this be?

There is an interesting passage that helps explain the situation in a Defense Intelligence College publication, "Critical Thinking and Intelligence Analysis." It stunned me:

Despite its importance, critical thinking is not widely taught in schools and universities. A mid-1990s California study on the role of critical thinking in the curricula of 38 public and 28 private universities ... concluded that university faculty members 'feel obliged to both claim familiarity with it and commitment to it in their teaching, despie the fact that ... most have only a vague understanding of what it is and what is involved in brininging it successfully into instruction.' Indeed, the authors of the study found that while 89% of the faculty they interviewed 'claimed critical thinking was the primary objective of their instruction,' only 19% could define the term and only 9% were evidently using it on a daily basis in their instruction.

Emphasis added. You can look more deeply into the study and its sponsors here.

The famous paper that told us how incompetents imagine themselves to be competent ("Unskilled and Unaware of It") seems apt. It appears in the same way that uncritical thinkers imagine themselves to be paragons of critical thought, indeed teachers of critical thought.

And so this river of naive, polemical, nonfiction sludge pours forth. There is no reducing it, much less stopping the flow.

(Image from despair.com)

Team of Rivals: publishing datapoints

Surprise: No one in the UK has bothered to put out Team of Rivals.

However next year, Viking will release it in UK on the slender hope of a presidential connection and a wash of Bicentennial publicity. (Any movie tie-in will not activate until 2010 at the earliest.)

The story reporting these things also says that "the book has sold more than 1.5 million copies" in the USA. (That would be 273,000 copies per year for the five-and-a-half years it's been out.) This bit is interesting as well:

The deal was done through Karolina Sutton at Curtis Brown for a "modest" sum.

A new book from Ethan Rafuse

A Maryland campaign guidebook is out - one that probably lacks the requisite errors, invective, and ridicule. Nevertheless... see top of list.

A Wal-Mart for the Wilderness

"Historians fight proposed Wilderness Wal-Mart."

More detail is available from the local paper.

Funny, I had never before heard of the "National Coalition for History:"

NCH is a consortium of over 60 organizations that advocates on federal legislative and regulatory issues affecting historians, archivists, teachers, researchers, and other stakeholders.

Glenn LaFantasie: McPherson critic

Civil War and diplomatic historian Glenn LaFantasie has been running quite a good ACW blog and recently posted a most thorough review of McPherson's Tried By War.

Glenn's review represents a superset of the Tried by War criticisms voiced on this blog. He is irked by McPherson's "relaxed and slatternly approach" in data handling and considers that this effort "seriously calls his exalted position into question."

He notes not only McPherson's borrowings from other writers but his underhanded way of repackaging those takings in a way that gives him credit for what he has appropriated.

I can write multiple posts just on this one review (maybe I will) but read it yourself. It represents the complete indictment of an utterly dishonest and slovenly effort.

Great stuff, don't miss it.

(Update, 12/11/08: Glenn informed me that he uses posting dates to order the content on the site and that the March 2007 date on the post is not the publishing date - the posting went up this month. My own post, above, has been modified to reflect that.)

More Gomorrah than the law allows

You've seen it on Drudge and elsewhere: the governor of Illinois has been arrested at long last.

The sudden resignation of Richard Norton Smith as head of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum (ALPLM) some two years ago now looks slightly less mysterious. Blagojevich, flaboyantly and openly pay-to-play, must have scared Smith.

This has ramifications for the past and present staffing of the ALPLM. Even Newsweek understood this three weeks ago, with the arrest of the ALPLM's political rainmaker.

I say "even Newsweek" because the community of Lincoln authors and scholars has maintained an ironclad silence, refusing to issue any comment about the ALPLM, its fallen director, its compromised board, and the context of corruption in which it operated. Future directions, suggestions for new directors? Nothing.

This tells us that Lincoln writers and researchers view the ALPLM as something owned and operated by Illinois (or "others") rather than something of their own. It suggests that this tourism mecca was "disowned" without fanfare early on and intellectual interest in it remains as low as it has ever been. That's the charitable explanation.

There is a second possibility. Here in the realm of Civil War history, we have all types of historians: researchers, storytellers, analysts, genealogists, collectors, art experts, antiquers, etc. On the other hand, I notice that the Lincoln crowd is all too much of one thing only: public historians.

As previously noted here, public historians have a Gomorrah ethos. As Lot argued with God that He should spare the cities on the plain if one righteous resident could be found, the public historian argues that no expense is wasted, no narrative is too twisted, no presentation is too perverse if even one little child can eventually be brought to the altar of history thereby.

This Gomorrah ethos explains how the Lincoln crowd can be indifferent to a Goodwin book, an ALPLM crisis, the Bicentennial minstrel show, endless knick knackery, and various publicly staged imbecilities. As long as the "greatness" message comes though, a child may feel the magic, and then someday...

What? Design fantasy exhibits for a patronage sink?

Draw

Speaking of Civil War poker, Harry Smeltzer reminds us that Union BG Robert Schenck actually "wrote the book on poker" - as seen above. (Note how he has morphed from "general" to "the honorable.")

Logrolling in our time (cont.)

Russell Bonds writes:

Have you seen the NY Times top 10 books for 2008? Two things of note:

1. Faust makes the list with Republic of Suffering - a "powerful book"

2. 9 of the 10 books were published by Random House (7 of those under Knopf). Wow. Small and university presses need not apply?

At 15.9% of the market share, 90% of the list being Random House stuff is a red flag.

The byline on this piece belongs to the "editors of the Book Review" of the New York Times. Editors are those people who are supposed to notice things going wrong and right them. But if you work in a place where the editors write and no one edits, you might be working in a failing business dragged low by a collapsing ethos. Your tragic workplace then becomes a much bigger talking point around the water cooler than any lopsided book choices.

Let's look at the first book review in the omnibus.* Note that this first book is by one Millhauser who is also a reviewer for the NY Times. His book is a collection of short stories. A collection of short stories topped the list of great books in 2008. Remember all of those short story collections you read this year? This one was the best. And it just happened to be by a NYT contributor. Go team!

The third ranked book in the list is also by a NYT contributor, a fellow named O'Neill. It's a novel about New York written by a New York Times contributor. Yeah team! We're hittin' it out of the park here at the Times.

Let's see. Twenty percent rolling our own logs, 70% rolling logs for the editors at Knopf, with a 20% log rolling effort reserved for other pals at Random House. Let the other 84% of the market take care of itself.

* If, BTW, these editors think that Nabokov was a "fabulist" who "invents spookily plausible parallel universes" their employer will need to take out a second mortgage.

Publisher rankings from here.

"Logrolling in Our Time" was a feature that tracked publishing corruption in in the defunct Spy magazine.

Here and there

Civil War invention: five card stud poker and the straight hand. (This drives up the number of active re-enactors by a lot.)

Judah Benjamin has a new website. The site makes him a cofounder of the Illinois Central, a nugget missing from Wiki. McClellan and Banks gain a connection if true.

Newest Lincoln re-enactor: Conan O'Brien March 2 at Ford's. Andy Richter as Mary Lincoln?

Bantam and Doubleday may fold

Gawker is predicting the imminent demise of the Bantam and Doubleday divisions of Random House.

Civil War publishing will not be affected.

Bantam has been weak in ACW publishing although it used to publish military titles generally; Doubleday lacks an ACW publishing as well, although that marque has been running a book club with some ACW offerings.

Another McClellan-at-Gettysburg report

The excellent new Gettysburg Union pursuit study, One Continuous Fight, contains one new (to this blog) McClellan report from a Sergeant Charles T. Bowen of the 12th U.S. Infantry. Bowen hears that McClellan is advancing at the head of 40,000 Pennsylvania militia: "If this is true, I rather think the rebs will find a warm spot somewhere around here," he notes.

Bowen's writing, Dear Friends at Home, was published by Butternut & Blue seven years ago and adds to our GBM-at-Gettysburg stockpile (see here, here, here, and here).

The point of the blogging thread, McClellan-at-Gettysburg, was to emphasize the difference between history as received and history as experienced. For many veterans, McClellan was part of their Gettysburg experience. The "fact" of his presence being "false" makes their experience worthless to many historians who produce an account of the battle outside of the experience of its participants.

And we reward them for this.

One Continuous Fight by Wittenberg, Petruzzi, and Nugent, is very much about the same problem. It sets history experienced by the AoP after Gettysburg against the reader's naive beliefs about the battle's aftermath. The reader's views, based as they are on sanitized historical "truths" tend to show up as "false" in matters of experience, memory, and activity.

It must be embarassing to the many dead on both sides to have been killed in the midst of a pursuit that never took place.

More on Continuous in a future post. Meanwhile, keep searching for anomalies.

Debunking "Team of Rivals"

Matthew Pinsker, someone I would characterize more as a political historian of the Civil War than a Lincoln historian, has stepped up to the plate to knock down Goodwin's meme of there being a "team" of rivals in Lincoln's cabinet.

Not to diminish Pinsker's editorial, but anyone who has access to cabinet diaries can do the same.

The special value added here is his pointing out the considerable political cost Lincoln paid by putting defeated competitors in his government - a cost that hurt Lincoln's effectiveness and thus - inevitably, one may conclude - the war effort.

The behavior of Lincoln scholars in this matter has continued to be utterly contemptible.