Informed minds want to know

Has anyone ever heard of a museum display exploding? Anywhere? Anybody ever heard of routine police checks made on weapons displayed in a museum? This Chicago is a remarkable place. Some say "shakedowns" are conducted there.

At least the cops know shot from bomb although they call bombs "grenades" for some reason.

Maryland's Sesquicentennial

Maryland is considering whether to think about a Sesquicentennial commission maybe sometime uh in the future perhaps.

Just in time for the Sesquicentennial

Philadelphia's mothballed ACW museum loses funding for relocation.

Baltimore's President Street Station ACW museum was abandoned in 2007 and now the building itself (not an historical structure!) needs saving.

Meanwhile, get ready for another Lincoln museum.

The fuse went out

I searched for "bicentennial" news today and received one hit for a Lincoln's birthday event on the first page. That item was outnumbered three-to-one by 1812 bicentennial preparation stories.

Fizzle.

We hold these truths to be entertaining

Nothing speaks to the significance of Abraham Lincoln more than a dozen stovepipe hats: "cartoonish," "whimsically decorated," "fun," "really fun," "really colorful and fun," and did we mention "fun"?

Nothing speaks to the significance of Abraham Lincoln more than fun.

Or to take a meme from Kevin Levin, Nothing speaks to the significance of Abraham Lincoln more than entertainment.

Plus a dozen 300-pound blocks of concrete.

Tennessee's slavery apology

No state re-integrated into the Union on the basis of Reconstruction needs to own any pre-war history. There is no political continuity - the link is broken.

To see states like Tennessee prepare apologies for slavery is to see a modern polity voluntarily associate itself with an historical curiosity - as if Sarkozy were to apologize for the actions of Petain.

Further, it puts the government in the position of making a claim against the lives of Tennessee residents, the majority of whom are transients or descendants of non-Tennessee ancestors. It takes the fallacious idea of universal blood guilt and twists the principle around to produce an even more absurd "geographic guilt".

If some legislators seek to own the actions of a discredited and violently deposed slave government, surely there must be some punishment we can mete out to them without embroiling the entire population in political fantasy.

Meanwhile, as the apology law moves through state deliberations, the Republicans are opposing it on the basis that it might cost money down the road. Incredible.

Testing Lincoln's "Shroud of Turin"

The museum holding the pillowcase with Lincoln's blood and brains on it faces a request for DNA material.

Was the 16th president dying of cancer at the time of the assassination?

John Sotos, a cardiologist, an author, and a consultant for the television series House, wants to test the artifact to confirm what eyewitness accounts and 130 period images already tell him: Lincoln had a rare genetic cancer syndrome called multiple endocrine neoplasia type 2B (MEN2B).

Apparently cancer detection by photograph has not of itself progressed enough.

No more Battle of Selma?

Just in time for the Sesquicentennial: re-enactment cancellations.

More Confederate money than...

South Carolina is auctioning off "40 cubic feet of banknotes issued by the Bank of South Carolina during the Civil War ... on eBay." They should auction it off in bales not in onesies and twosies.

Kindling my interest (cont.)

Harry Smeltzer had been mulling over Kindle issues in late February, it turns out, and he pointed out to me that Renee's Civil War blog went into Kindle deeply the same week. Harry comments on my post: "I think the real attraction of the device to CW bibliophiles is for the downloading of free, public domain pdf books." Renee is also enchanted by free ACW books.

But here are my reservations as a potential buyer.

(1) In the file types supported that Renee lists, pdf is not there.

(2) There does not seem to be a print-out capability.

(3) I would need inherent Zotero capability in a device and high levels of interoperability with Wintel computers for the cutting and pasting of passages I need in my writing.

(4) I read in the bathtub where electronics dare not go.

(5) I read on the patio where computer screens are unreadable.

(6) I read at lunch every day in restaurants where I may leave the table for the buffet or restroom.

I think one of Ted's examples paints a picture of perfect use: a frequent traveler reads her favorite periodicals indoors in waiting rooms and on planes. I think Renee and Harry have hit on another strength - reading for pleasure.

Consider me "still thinking."

Kindling my interest

Publisher Theodore Savas and his son Demetrius were in Arlington yesterday and we met for dinner, some trade talk and a few laughs. Ted is as wise as he is genial and I would urge authors to jump on the chance of working with him.

He caught me offguard with his interest in the Kindle reading machine promoted by Amazon. When you say "Kindle" I picture a curly wire sticking out of a taped-together shipping box stuck at the bottom of a closet - a closet filled with early adopter toys that never worked out.

I had seen the competitors' stuff and was not impressed. In fact earlier in the day, I had looked at an 8" USB-enabled $49 digital picture frame that could serve as a computer monitor in a pinch. I thought, "If the book pages were image files, this could also be a reading device." Then I thought, "This is stupid, I'm re-inventing the tablet computer."

Ted has seen people with Kindles in public places. He has talked to them about the thing and is impressed by its potential and the way people use it. He met a woman who gets her newspapers and magazines delivered to the system; he has seen travelers in airports and trains reading it; he remarked on its lightness and legibility.

He also mentioned an Amazon feature I had not noticed in my browsing. While looking at book information, Amazon enables the sending of a pestering email to the publisher asking for a Kindle edition of the work. What startled me is that as a publisher Ted gets such emails.

It seems Kindle has an active fan base. I am wiping off my Kindle spectacles for a fresh look.

Monocacy battlefield - your input needed

The NPS is seeking your input on the future of Monocacy National Battlefield. Story here, government website here.

Bull Run in the repertoire

Opera's sweetheart Renee Fleming has been scoring her biggest emotional gains in programs featuring John Kander's "A Letter from Sullivan Ballou," a Union officer killed at Bull Run.

There is a fine YouTube presentation of same by Fleming available here (marred by some slapstick coughing). The letter itself is transcribed incompletely in some places on the web, however this version seems full.

(Note: Although Kander is a Broadway composer, the music will strike listeners ill disposed to opera as uncomfortably operatic. But if you like what you hear, listen to Paul Hindemith's and Walt Whitman's When Lilacs last in the Dooryard Bloom'd, music that should actually be the theme for the Bicentennial.)

Shot, shell, whatever

There is work called "journalism" which was a trade when I learned it but which has become a "profession." The journalist now "professes" his desire to improve the world; this places reporting tradecraft at the bottom of a long list of more urgent priorities.

For us, this means reading endless stories that refer to Civil War shells or bombs as "cannonballs" and vice versa. Here, have another: "Civil War-era cannonball safely detonated." Note that "It turns out the cannonball was filled with gunpowder." Full of tricks, those cannonballs.

In a different kind of balls, Private Eye collects this kind of nonsense in a weekly column called "Colemanballs," named after an incompetent sports broadcaster. We need columns like that in this country, if shaming can still do any good.

Publishing: the digital editions pricing scandal

Authors are upset with publishers who are pricing digitial (e.g. Kindle) editions of their work near hardcopy levels.

It gets worse: Amazon users, availing themselves of that website's "tagging" feature tag overpriced digital editions with the word "BOYCOTT."

And so, some blameless authors (using Amazon's tag search feature) find their work at the top of Amazon's boycott list.

Have a look at this post, including the comments.

Hoofbeats in the distance

J.D. Petruzzi has moved his url to Blogger and posts a debut piece featuring meet-ups with Ted Savas and Duane Siskey, among others.

Bob Dylan: "Elvis must have felt it too"

From the Times:

Q: When you think back to the Civil War, one thing you forget is that no battles, except Gettysburg, were fought in the North.

Bob Dylan: Yeah. That’s what probably makes the Southern part of the country so different.

Q: There is a certain sensibility, but I’m not sure how that connects?

BD: It must be the Southern air. It’s filled with rambling ghosts and disturbed spirits. They’re all screaming and forlorning. It’s like they are caught in some weird web - some purgatory between heaven and hell and they can’t rest. They can’t live, and they can’t die. It’s like they were cut off in their prime, wanting to tell somebody something. It’s all over the place. There are war fields everywhere … a lot of times even in people’s backyards.

Q: Have you felt them?

BD: Oh sure. You’d be surprised. I was in Elvis’s hometown – Tupelo. And I was trying to feel what Elvis would have felt back when he was growing up.

Q: Did you feel all the music Elvis must have heard?

BD: No, but I’ll tell you what I did feel. I felt the ghosts from the bloody battle that Sherman fought against Forrest and drove him out. There’s an eeriness to the town. A sadness that lingers. Elvis must have felt it too.

A Bicentennial essay worth reading

It takes an Air Force captain to look at the Lincoln loving and ask What exactly is going on here?

...the inevitable corollary to this Lincoln love-fest in the capital is a good bit of self-aggrandizement served up by those who see themselves as the rightful political heirs to his legacy. Praising oneself while appearing to praise someone else, especially someone beloved and dead, is an invaluable political skill...

...a slew of recent Lincoln “scholarship” seems less concerned with historical study than with self-justification. A clinically depressed biographer concluded that Lincoln was clinically depressed; a gay rights proponent discovered that Lincoln was gay; former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo ... assert[ed] that Lincoln was at heart a Northeastern Democrat in the late 20th/early 21st century mold. In 1992, former President Ronald Reagan misquoted Lincoln to show that he was a staunch fiscal conservative. In 2007, former Vice President Al Gore misquoted Lincoln to show that he was a staunch fiscal progressive.

... Given Lincoln’s postmortem celebrity, understanding the extent of his unpopularity while governing and breathing is all the more important, and can’t help in the end but deepen our appreciation for him.

... Memorializing Lincoln, and especially rededicating a monument that has served as a backdrop for so many different political movements, requires us to walk a fine line. We pay tribute to him by distilling the lessons of his life, but risk being manipulative if we claim his legacy for ourselves.

Take care that your Lincoln love does not become a public display of self love.

New books

Some notes.

Jomini
While batting around emails with Drew Wagenhoffer on Jomini editions, I happened to notice the same translation is being endlessly repackaged with a floor price of about $15 and up.
Then, looking up Halleck's Art of War (based on Jomini), I see pricing of reprints starts at $76, steps up to $103 and rises from there. What recession?

Meanwhile, Halleck's translation of Jomini's Napoleon remains out of print and deserves a reprise (priced right).

Publishing
The big news however, seems to me to be something like a collapse in Civil War publishing. In 12 years of compiling Civil War Book News, I have never seen a weaker month of releases than February 2009
- and that includes the bump provided by Lincoln Bicentennial releases. March has been better but so far publishers seem to have decided to downplay the ACW list.

Clash of Extremes
There is a new, scholarly study (Clash of Extremes) about what might be called the economic origins of the ACW from Marc Egnal. It seems, from reading the release information, that the author develops a picture of a changing national economy that lowers the cost of political extremism.

Drawing on a wealth of primary and secondary sources, Egnal shows that between 1820 and 1850, patterns of trade and production drew the North and South together and allowed sectional leaders to broker a series of compromises. After midcentury, however, all that changed as the rise of the Great Lakes economy reoriented Northern trade along east-west lines.

Meanwhile, in the South, soil exhaustion, concerns about the country’s westward expansion, and growing ties between the Upper South and the free states led many cotton planters to contemplate secession.

Note that it seems some of these themes might play on either side of the historiographic fence, blundering generation or inevitability-of-war. Will have to read to find out.

Jack Hinson
On a visceral level, another new book of interest is Jack Hinson's One-Man War. Hinson was a prosperous Kentucky planter who became a bushwacker after finding his sons heads placed on stakes by Union forces.

The author makes Hinson a former friend of Grant who ambushes and kills over 100 men; he credits Hinson also with the destruction of an entire Union supply train as well. Reading the description, one gets the psycho-killer vibe that pervades ACW non-fiction treatments of irregular warfare.

The number of titles issued may be down but material of interest is still coming out.

Jomini's objectives

Speaking of Jomini, here is a passage from the US 1862 edition of his Art of War. I cite this in the hope we can be rid of the procrustean nostrum Make the enemy your objective:

There are two classes of objective points,—objective points of maneuver, and geographical objective points. A geographical objective point may be an important fortress, the line of a river, a front of operations which affords good lines of defense or good points of support for ulterior enterprises. Objective points of maneuver, in contradistinction to geographical objectives, derive their importance from, and their positions depend upon, the situation of the hostile masses.

In strategy, the object of the campaign determines the objective point. If this aim be offensive, the point will be the possession of the hostile capital, or that of a province whose loss would compel the enemy to make peace. In a war of invasion the capital is, ordinarily, the objective point.

More, with reference to risk:

As to the choice of objective points, every thing will generally depend upon the aim of the war and the character which political or other circumstances may give it, and, finally, upon the military facilities of the two parties.

In cases where there are powerful reasons for avoiding all risk, it may be prudent to aim only at the acquisition of partial advantages,—such as the capture of a few towns or the possession of adjacent territory. In other cases, where a party has the means of achieving a great success by incurring great dangers, he may attempt the destruction of the hostile army, as did Napoleon.

Did the Union ever have the political capacity to incur "great dangers"? Demanding great results without incurring great danger is exactly what we would expect of politicians.

There is another class of decisive points to be mentioned, which are determined more from political than from strategic considerations: they play a great part in most coalitions, and influence the operations and plans of cabinets. They may be called political objective points. [...] This subject is so extensive and so complicated that it would be absurd to attempt to reduce it to a few rules. The only one which can be given has just been alluded to, and is, that either the political objective points should be selected according to the principles of strategy, or their consideration should be postponed till after the decisive events of the campaign.

Emphasis added. Have a look.

Jomini 2009

A new article from the Small Wars Journal applies Jominian analysis to a critique of modern US counterinsurgency doctrine. The brief review of Jomini, by way of Maguire, will evoke many Civil War campaigns in the mind of the reader.

Interesting general note on theory vs practice from the piece:

What the US Army and Marine Corps seem to have done in their counterinsurgent doctrine is to turn despair of finding enemy’s lines of communication into a doctrinal escape from the [Jominian] principles that focus on those lines. The new doctrine displays a sort of psychological displacement behavior in the face of failure. For instance, because the lines are hard to find, descriptions of the type of combat begin to include the expression ‘non-linear.’ Once accepted that a war is non-linear by nature, any need to look for the lines collapses, and any principles constructed on the basis of their existence are rendered inapplicable.

By the way, the DEA (unlike the Army) views clandestine networks differently and attacks them through their lines of communication and support (as this article shows, starting on page 21).

Jomini and the Civil War remain with us.

Maryland's Sesquicentennial

Maryland takes its first step towards a Sesquicentennial program. I'm expecting a pure tourism play.

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

Totaling 65 tiny leaves of narrative, each larded generously with white space, we can easily see how reviewers might be stumped by McPherson's new book Abraham Lincoln. Was this a stillborn embryo of a biography? An example of failing faculties? Reviewers stayed away in droves.

In my view, Abraham Lincoln is intended as a powerful display of the author at the peak of his powers.

The whole issue comes down to, what are those powers. As I have said for more than a decade, McPherson is patently a synthesizer of secondary sources while his admirers imagine that he is an original researcher/scholar whose popular writings offer glimpses of original insights.

If you believe the latter, the book Abraham Lincoln can make no sense, for there is no McPherson reader so new to this corner of nonfiction that most of the content of Abraham Lincoln will not be familiar, warmed over, even tired. Put another way, no one's stock of Lincolniana is so low and so poor that McPherson's biography is going to surprise and delight them with fresh facts and observations. In that way his ardent admirers at last arrive at the place where the deep readers of Civil War source material have been all along – face to face with pedestrian recapitulations of well known secondary material.

For the purveyors of the myth "Greatest Living Civil War Historian," the game is up. In fact, McPherson has given them up himself. He never bought into the image that was foisted on him. Abraham Lincoln would not be possible if he had.

As much misguided praise as McPherson drinks up, he still knows much better than his adoring public who he really is and what he really does. And so the author (I contend) intended here a virtuoso performance of summation – a real knuckle buster (to borrow pianist slang) – within his beloved "public history" sphere.

To make this very public demonstration, the artist has to make choices on the lines of What is virtuosity in synthesis?

Go back to Battle Cry of Freedom where we have a comparatively long book. Take a complex issue, such as the commander's intent in Lee's Maryland Campaign; McPherson's treatment of it is to select one single secondary source that he regards as the best for this issue (D.S. Freeman) – without making a case for its excellence, BTW - then to summarize a substantive evaluation made by Freeman in a single paragraph.

So, we can derive a value system at work here. Go through Battle Cry and you'll see it continuously. McPherson's art in those early days was to choose (to his own personal satisfaction) the best secondary explanation of means, motive, and action on a single matter and then "boil it down" to essentials that could be expressed in a few sentences or less. His attributions were reasonably transparent as he saw no shame then in crediting the sources of his recapped insights.

If you view the Civil War as a series of decisions and incidents, each one of which has some controversy attached to it, each analysis of which requires a discussion of evidence, McPherson was never for you. He did not even recap his secondary sources' own travels through primary sources. For instance, Freeman might have quite a substantial review of the sources to justify his views, but these would not make it to Battle Cry's front- or back-matter. Only Freeman's conclusions would survive in truncated form.

But we don't want to get too deep in the technique here, just far enough to identify the secret sauce this artist is serving. It is the most concise single account of what McPherson deems the best thinking on an issue. He connects the issues by stringing the accounts together in a narrative. One issue or incident demands just one interpretation, one explanation. The weakness in historical method and technique are offset by a confidence in tone and faster narrative pacing.

If we compare Battle Cry with Lincoln, we are first struck by scaling issues. Battle Cry, so much bigger, can be viewed in terms of the art of compression not being perfected, as being clumsier.
The individual summaries within Lincoln are briefer than in Battle Cry. In Lincoln, paragraphs have given way to sentences.

This is not the only change in technique. Like Goodwin in Team of Rivals, McPherson wipes the slate clean of secondary sources in his new writing. He seems embarrassed to have ever been associated with secondary sources.

He has 67 footnotes for his 65 pages, only three of which contain secondary sources cited for their own value (a few more are cited specifically to extract a particular Lincoln quote only). McPherson now uses citations exclusively to document quotes. He has jettisoned the Battle Cry system of making his influences transparent, no doubt deciding that this is a luxury his readers don't need. In the case of his fanbase, I would say it is a luxury they never made use of anyway.
Needless to say, this shortens the book considerably.

Finally, McPherson includes a bibliography in which he delivers one-liners (more compression!) about this or that source or secondary study. He never divulges which author influenced him or which set the course of a particular school of thought. Imagine just four tiny pages of annotated bibliography of all the Lincoln literature, manuscript and published. This is not happenstance, this is showing off.

The question is, do we get it? Some of us have gotten it from Battle Cry onward.

Now it's time for the rest of his readership. Let them pick Abraham Lincoln up and read it in the way he intended them to. Take McPherson at his own measure for once.

He's been putting on a show - and you've completely missed the show with your scholar nonsense - now go and enjoy the show.

The Sesquicentennial in New England

This fellow says won't be any. I agree.

Tea for Varina Davis

By the time she gets her tea party for the Sesquicentennial there will have been time enough to learn how to spell her name.

Sometimes I think the persons, places, and things of history are mere placeholders for the heritage tourism industry.

CWPT Battlefield Report

The Civil War Preservation Trust has released its annual endangered battlefield report. Press release here and report here.

When activists take an interest in history

Got to shed light on slaveholder insurance policies. The need is urgent. Must compile report and send to governor immediately. I repeat, the need is urgent. Pass a law to force disclosures. Hurry. This is a priority. What are we waiting for? Pass the law now.

The hearty handshake school of heritage tourism

Brunswick, MD, wants to leverage its Civil War history (it was "Berlin" then) to qualify for inclusion in the Preserve America program. The program, if you haven't heard of it, is comical in a W.C. Fields sort of way:

"The benefits are not monetary," Jones said. But participating communities get a certificate of recognition, a Preserve America welcome sign, and inclusion in press releases about the historical value of the region.

"Allow me to give you another hearty handshake" says the bank president after the bank dick foils a robbery.

An affront to Old Baldy

Philadelphia is down to its last Civil War museum (due to budget issues) and would you believe they are not displaying Meade's horse's head!

Mr. Waskie would like to see the head of Old Baldy taken out of storage and reunited with the reins on Gen. Meade’s horse, currently on display.

“The head of Old Baldy was obtained by two members of the Grand Army. They had it preserved and then put the skin over a plaster mold and framed on a wooden fence,” Mr. Waskie said.

Let their labors not be in vain.

Why they fought the Civil War: for peace

The Union fought for peace. Peace was Lincoln's objective. To be specific: "a just and lasting peace." The kind that takes four years and a mountain of dead to achieve. That kind of peace.

Peace is good and Lincoln is good. Connect the dots.

The Mystery of Oktibbeha County (cont.)

How did the Grant Society's Grant Papers end up at Mississippi State? We have a new clue: Mrs. Marszalek is a political powerhouse in the state. If her husband, an emeritus, wanted the archive nearer home, she had tremendous wherewithal to prepare a warm reception for them:

She has played a major role in Mississippi politics. She began her career as secretary of the Oktibbeha County Democratic Executive Committee from 1989-1992, also becoming a member of the Mississippi State Democratic Executive Committee (1989-2000). She was the founder and first president of the Oktibbeha County Federation of Democratic Women (1990-1992) and has held a variety of offices in the Mississippi State Federation of Democratic Women (1990- ). In 1992 and 1996, she was elected a delegate to the Democratic National Conventions and subsequently played leadership roles in the two local Bill Clinton presidential campaigns. From 1994 to 2002, she wrote a regular column in the quarterly newsletter, the Oktibbeha Democrat. From 1993-1996, she was co-chair of the Starkville Race Relations Team. She was awarded the Unity in the Community Award from the Oktibbeha County NAACP (1996) and the Democrat of the Year Award from the Oktibbeha County Democratic Executive Committee (1998). In 2003, the Mississippi State University College Democrats named her "Honorary Life Member."

Mrs. Marszalek rates her own page on the MSU website without having been employed by the school or published by its press. Her relationship with MSU is strictly that of patron:

She and her husband have established endowed library funds at Mississippi State University and Canisius College. Her papers, gathered in the course of her political career, are deposited in the Mitchell Memorial Library, Mississippi State University.

Her own papers! So students can study her life and career!

Sorry, I'm getting distracted. The bullseye is that "She and her husband have established endowed library funds" at MSU.

The closely guarded secrets surrounding this transfer are starting to come unraveled. We'll get to the bottom of this. Keep watching and if you have a clue, send it in.

p.s. I have stopped referring to this archive in shorthand as THE Grant papers in deference to the important point made by Brooks Simpson that they are not THE Grant papers, but rather the papers of the Grant Society. "... just as so much of this story has been confusing." Amen

Grant Papers: SIU feels the sting

SIU has weighed in on the Grant Papers removal with a resounding "no comment."

This story, however, puts the Simon controversy in a larger context, a year in which "a couple of administrators have left under bizarre or suspicious circumstances." It reports also that one administrator was busted for false military service claims. The funniest SIU scandal of 2008 had to have been when the college's new plagiarism policy was discovered to have been plagiarized.

Current administrators have assured the reporter it's all no big deal.

(Hey, good college press, though.)

Lincoln's watch

You leave it for repair and they're messing with your watch. Is this like cooks spitting in your soup?

BTW, why would the Smithsonian only occasionally put this item in their Lincoln display if it is the one item he carried with him night and day? Now that its secret is exposed will it get more exhibition time?

(Thanks to Ted Savas for the pointer.)

New Lincoln pic

Can we call it marginally interesting at best?

The ALPLM in the Bicentennial

I think that I shall never see...

It's been over 20 days since the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum appeared in any news item in this Bicentennial year.

We go to the ALPLM website and click on EVENTS for a surprise. The big February to May event is an art show featuring Don Pollack (whose painting is featured topside). Don's exhibition is offering "a conversation with painting, photography, history, and art history and includes painted landscapes, portraits, maps, and documents." Not very Lincoln-sounding.

Concurrently, a master of sticky pads will work his magic putting the Emancipator at the center of his efforts: "Using thousands of colored Post it notes, Mr. Killham will work with local volunteers to build larger than life portraits of Mr. Lincoln: one in each side of windows on the bridge that spans Jefferson Street."

Am I sensing trivialization here? Or just disorder, exhaustion, and ingnorance?

The ALPLM calendar then descends from these two artistic high points into a sparse listing of laughable trivia (tea ladies?).

For relief, you could try looking at Bicentennial Commission events. These include events such as performances of Shakespeare's Macbeth.

If these folks are not going to celebrate Lincoln, we can all safely take a pass.

Lincoln authors and scholars: you missed a great opportunity. The Bicentennial is over. Kudos, though, on maintaining excellent collegiality throughout.

Using the ACW to corrupt Boy Scouts

These Boy Scouts have a pretty neat agenda for their "Boy Scout Day At Mayfield Earthwork Fort." This is all stuff I would want to do if I were a child: "Participants will learn to drill and fire wooden muskets, fire artillery and learn how to send messages using signal flags."

The part that made me laugh was "Scouts will also learn how to prepare camp food and formulate military strategy." You see, boys, military strategy is a lot like beans and franks...

Actually this is like an old comedy bit mocking children's shows: "And tune in next week when we'll show you how to cure diseases and end world hunger!"

After their half-hour strategy session, these kids will be fully equipped to denigrate any Civil War general they may read about.

Confederate money

No longer worthless.

Is this the stupidest Bicentennial event?

How childish would you have to be to ask serious questions of a Lincoln actor and a Darwin actor? What sense of history imagines them sharing tea on the same stage and chatting about this and that? And how low will we have to go before the year ends to find the stupidest-ever Bicentennial event?

"Our ancestors, the Gauls"

A bill supporting Sesquicentennial activity in Kentucky has made it out of committee and now lumbers on to the next milestone.

These sorts of stories are interesting places to gather clues about who is driving these bills and why. As a general (maybe shaky) observation, it seems to me that Civil War readers are absent and that in our circles there has been no discussion about what a Sesquicentennial is for and what it should do.

A state senator promoting the Sesquicentennial had this to say:

It is important that we educate those who do not realize our state’s significance in this historic era and recognize our ancestors for their roles in the war and its aftermath.

The question, "Why is it important" is left on the table.

His remark seems to divide Kentucky into two classes of inhabitant: "our ancestors" and "those who do not realize," i.e. the transients who make up the majority of the population of any state nowadays. The motivation, then, seems to be one of integration.

I don't think it will work. That part of the transient national labor pool that finds itself in Kentucky is amply served by all sorts of non-local culture. It also imagines itself "national" in character - witness the abysmal turnouts in local elections.

If the sesquicentennial is a cultural rearguard action designed to drag "those who do not realize" along the path of state history I think it will fail.

In fact a specific image of futility comes to mind: those thousands of colonial African schoolrooms where the children began their very first French lesson with the words, "Our ancestors, the Gauls..."

The Mystery of Oktibbeha County (cont.)

Russell Bonds writes to say, if you want to understand why the Grant papers were moved to Mississippi State University, look to the bulldog motif:

My 2¢: Could it be the mascot?

Compare:

and (Currier & Ives):

See also Lincoln to Grant, Aug. 17, 1864 ("Hold on with a bulldog grip, and chew and choke as much as possible"), OR Vol. 42 pt. 2 p. 243; F.B. Carpenter, Six Months at the White House with Abraham Lincoln (New York: Hurd & Houghton, 1867), p. 283 ("I asked the President, during the progress of the battles of the Wilderness, how General Grant personally impressed him as compared with other officers of the army, and especially those who had been in command. . . 'The great thing about Grant,' said he, 'I take it, is his perfect coolness and persistency of purpose. I judge he is not easily excited, — which is a great element in an officer, — and he has the grit of a bull-dog! Once let him get his 'teeth' in, and nothing can shake him off.'").

And (bonus!!) see also Harold Holzer, "The Return of the Peacemakers," American Heritage (Feb./March 1996) (describing "Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, famed for bulldog ruthlessness in battle...").

Behold the power of Internet Archive and Google Book Search. : )

Got a theory? Pass it along.

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.