In praise of slow marching

Our love of false data in Civil War history becomes fatal when we make that non-data the centerpiece of our understanding.

How many narratives use comparative strength data as proxy for adversity, for pluck, for character? Look closely and (I promise) you find the data is garbage which then turns the narrative into garbage. The better authors handle the data gingerly, with care, who know not to place loads where they can't be borne. The better authors are scarce.

On the other side, we get authors who are crazed by the imagined disparities they see in comparing sets of false data and who work to share their rage with the reader. This can spread from one (false) view of a battle into a generally false picture of the war and the men who fought it.

"How many" as an ironclad criterion is accompanied by "how fast" as another. Here's a typical complaint: "X's force covered only Y miles that day."

When I see that, I tend to run through potential research our author failed to perform:

"General John Q. Public's three divisions managed only 12 miles over sandy, one-lane roads that day."

Or

"The general's divisions covered an average of 12 miles in three columns while under orders not to lose touch with each other while advancing on three separate axes."

Or

"The general's troops covered 12 miles while his trains managed to close from a two-day gap to within a day's march of the lead elements."

Or

"General Public's troops covered only 12 miles following General Doe's columns which led the advance."

Or

"General Doe reached his commander's designated stopping point just 12 miles out from the previous night's camp."

Or

"General Doe, having lost contact with the elements on his right and having received no new orders, halted his advance after 12 miles."

And here's a dig I should see but never do:

"General Doe covered X miles on the same route in one day where General Public had covered Y miles on the same road on his way to Shambala on a previous day."

And so on. If you write Civil War books, the insufficiency of the record is no reason not to try and burn witches.

Another aspect of the historian's desire for fast marching at all times is the straggling factor. We moderns don't understand it, can't picture it, and can't figure it into our calculations.

A fast marcher, say Thomas Jackson, makes a tradeoff that the ACW reader is hardly even aware of. The forced marcher opts to inflict casualties on his own units in order to arrive somewhere faster. This is a hard decision to make and cannot be foisted on all generals everywhere as a standard. Loss of men by the roadside reflects attrition in delivering fighting power to the point of arrival. Some stragglers desert; some catch up; some become medical casualties. The numbers are never trivial and grow larger over distances.

And BTW, wasn't Jackson fragged by the brothers of a straggler he shot? Does anyone else remember that meme? Does anyone else remember the shoot-to-kill-all-stragglers orders issued by Jackson? Memory fails but hard marching is not easy, to coin a cliche.

The slow marcher is bringing as much of his command to bear against the enemy as possible; he is preserving cohesion and fighting power; he will increase shock in the attack or more stoutly defend a position assumed on arrival. His troops will be fed, his ammo will be supplied, his ambulances will be within reach. The hard marcher gives this up and disorganizes his own units for some gain or other. He has to know what that benefit is and he has to be right or he is bordering on relief and/or court martial.

The ACW writer's love of hard marching is a love of drama and storytelling. Miles of marching are spit out as hard data; the associated harsh judgements and snide asides tell us we are reading polemics, not history. We may as well be reading a blog.

--

(Thanks to Manny for finding merit in this post.)

Varney casts no shadow

Since his mention here five years ago, Francis Phillip Varney has disappeared from the Internet.

He left trace of a 906-page book, The Men Grant Didn't Trust: Memoir, Memory, and the American Civil War. Amazon has no record of him or the book.

Cornell doesn't know him from Nosferatu.

Have we been hoaxed?

UPDATE (5/16/12): VARNEY FOUND.

How dearly we love the fake data of the ACW

One of the remarkable features of today's culture is the desire to model truth and in fact to substitute models for truth. (The postmodern thinker who explored this strange development was Jean Baudrillard.)

In the run up to the last census, there was a drumbeat sounded for abandoning the count in favor of modeling. This would substitute assumptions, projections, extrapolations, and inferences for their "equivalent," hard data. It would have asked an agency that has great trouble forecasting population trends to estimate these post facto.

The climategate emails, by the way, are well worth reading to witness "data equivalents" becoming data in the new sense of non-data data.

No matter how many economies are destroyed by financial modeling, no matter how discredited climatology becomes through publicizing its modeling, no matter how many armies are defeated by their own flawed threat modeling, our lust for and belief in models proceeds and even takes on strange new shapes.

People used to believe in counting (as well as touching, hearing, seeing, and tasting). This is how the census came about - out of just such a cultural bias. I was young and in the Army at the tail end of this preference. We had to have body counts. They were important. We measured unit readiness by counting operative vs. inoperative systems, by counting men present for duty. And given how corrupt my generation was and is, we faked the numbers we needed: the body counts, the readiness data, and more, down until the present day.

The ethics of counting became an exercise in fudging and faking. With this widely known, the new attitude developed "why bother." Enter the estimates and models. We have a Defense Department that has not been audited in living memory - what would be the point? We have Civil War authors who make love to zeros, tacking on a minimum of five to any number they need, and rounding counts off to make them "easier" for the reader to absorb.

There was a splash in Civil War news recently when Professor J. David Hacker (shown above) proposed to revise the number of war dead upward from 618,222 to 750,000-850,000.

Look at the form of these numbers and you see my point. There is a painstaking precision in 612,222 which many today would be content to exchange for a range of goose eggs which in their minds would be more "accurate." That is a remarkable thing, think of it, for an educated person with a basketful of eight goose eggs to imagine himself closer to the truth than when he had 618,222 in hand. Astonishing, really.

In approaching the truth, from the inside out, we have:
counting > estimating > modeling.

In Civil War analysis this would equate to
Fox > Livermore > Hacker.

Hacker's model does not seem complete, at least as presented here, witness the zeroes and the use of a big range. The centerpiece of his analysis is the disparity between the 1860 census and 1870 census. Is death in war the only possible reason for the gap? No, and this may be why Hacker uses a range of numbers.

Hacker also mentions that one can find errors in the 1860 data through careful review at the micro level but this discovery has apparently not led him to project an adjusted, modeled total number in lieu of a range. This is why his model seems incomplete.

When Fox tabulated his losses, he counted and his counts included adjustments. An adjustment might involve enhancing a number with additional data from a second source or reconciling two sources, say a muster roll and a hospital discharge list.

Livermore took Fox's sources (and more) and made estimates. He might take the hard data of Confederate soldiers killed and apply to it the Union's proven 1.5 casualty ratio, dead to wounded, to arrive at a CSA wounded total. Here we are getting on thin ice and we must remain conscious that we are handling estimates and we must understand how the estimates are derived. Time and again, authors (like James McPherson) will use Livermore's numbers not knowing (or caring?) that they are handling estimates.

Hacker represents the modern way. Subtract one census result from the other, add assumptions, publish range of estimated figures. Voila, data point!

I'm exaggerating to make an effect. Hacker speaks of Fox and Livermore with a precision I have not seen in Civil War literature. He knows what they were doing and how they were doing it. What seems so astonishing to me is the cultural component, that he could look at their work and substitute an incomplete model for their approaches to the truth.

The way to have handled Hacker's discovery would be to say that there is X difference in the cohort count, this may have a lot to do with uncounted ACW mortality, although we don't know. An author would then revisit the sources to understand how an error of great magnitude could have occurred unnoticed. This research would either open up or close off the line of inquiry, "Proposed: the 1870 census discloses a higher Civil War death toll."

The historical problem is a cohort discrepancy; that is the problem. The problem then went forth to search for a solution and came up with some satisfycing, ACW casualty totals.

Feynman has the last word here:

I have the advantage of having found out how hard it is to get to really know something, how careful you have to be about checking the experiment, how easy it is to make mistakes and fool yourself. I know what it means to know something, and therefore I see how they get their information and I can’t believe they know it, they haven’t done the work necessary, haven’t done the checks necessary, haven’t done the care necessary.

(Take a look at Fox's work here, Livermore's here, and Hacker's here.)

Spielberg's Lincoln movie - done

The media frenzy over gay "evolution" seems to have peaked today and it brought forth Tony Kushner, Broadway's gay superscrivner, who happens to be Spielberg's scriptwriter on the Lincoln movie.

Playing on the evolution theme of the day, Kushner said his own political views had evolved over the last 20 years to the point that he now believed social justice in the U.S. could possibly be achieved peacefully through democratic means.

This led to a discussion of his work on the Lincoln film where he let loose a few newsy tidbits:

* The film wrapped in December and will be released this November.

* Kushner spent six years writing it, he says, and does not regret a minute of it.

* He was script doctoring one version while watching the election returns in 2008.

* The most interesting element to him historically was Lincoln's relationships with the Radical Republicans.

* He thinks Lincoln on the level of "genius" with Mozart and Shakespeare and suggests this is a higher level than President's Obama's level.

These notes are cribbed from listening to Democracy Now on the radio this morning; they have audio and video and have isolated the Lincoln bits here.

I would add this observation: if the film's emphasis is on the "evolution" of Lincoln-Radical relations, then the "Team of Rivals" focus is lost and D.K. Goodwin's association with this project has been marginalized. This is underscored by Kushner's previous comments about the amount of research he had to do himself to write this script.

Mahan and Reardon

Oddly enough, Carol Reardon all but ignores D. H. Mahan in her new book With a Sword in One Hand and Jomini in the Other. We'll get into that and more shortly.

Mahan writes a letter to the editor

August 27, 1864
The Army and Navy Journal

Sir: - The JOURNAL, I am glad to see by the number of August 16, is ventilating the foreign nuisances of our Army, in calling attention to that not insignificant class, in numbers, the restless, obtrusive adventurers from all lands, who are the pests of the military bureaus everywhere, in pushing their pretensions to military capacity in every quarter. This kind of thing commenced with our Revolutionary War, and has continued up to the present moment. Able American citizens have given in to it; and Mr. Jefferson, in organizing his grand scheme for the University of Virginia, laid it down, as a sine qua non, that foreigners alone should fill the principal chairs in it. The experiment was a signal failure, and it hardly rose above tho condition of a grammar school, until native-horn and educated persons were placed in charge of it. In my youth [...], James Monroe being President, a man was hardly thought eligible to the engineer corps unless he was a Frenchman, or had, at least, a French name. If you doubt it, look over our old Army lists of some forty years back. What did we do in the case of General Bernard, a man of no striking mark, inferior in talent and acquirement to McCree, Totten and Thayer? We passed a special act making him virtually a brigadier-general. What did we gain by it ? A loss, not only in national prestige, but in adopting plans of fortifications far from the best, because, forsooth, proposed by a man wholly unacquainted with our institutions and wants.

I have had some opportunity of looking into this matter, in two visits to Europe; in one of which I spent nearly eighteen mouths as a student in the first military school in Europe, that of Metz in France. I was then, in 1826, only two years out of our own school. Well, I found nothing they had to teach there, the elements of which, much to the surprise of both professors and pupils, I had not well acquired at, home, and learned with ease. As to the schools of other Powers, the programmes of their courses of study contain more matter, but nothing in substance differing materially from our own. It is no disparagement to French engineering skill and quite the reverse to that of the English to say, that both in our defensive works and in our siege operations they have nothing superior to them to show.

Upon the men of all nationalities, who have made themselves part and parcel of ourselves, and are perilling life and limb for the safety of their adopted country, be all honor conferred, in every form. I do not class them with the Gurowski and Cluseret genus, who are my admiration for the ineffable impudence with which they have constituted themselves our political and military Mentors and for the rollicking air with which they revel in their peculiar billingsgate diction; happily, having no longer before their eyes the slavish fears of Siberia and tho Knout, or a term of service in the penal colony of French Guiana, which, in Russia or France would have been their meed, had they dared to have let their tongues wag with a moiety of the impertinence they are now in the daily habit of indulging in towards persons in the highest civil and military positions. From such base comradeship I trust our brave soldiers, native and adopted, may for the future be rid.

Very truly yours,
D.H. Mahan
Newport,
August 18, 1864.

Reporter says Cinco de Mayo is an ACW holiday

Read this closely and see if you agree...

Savas Beatie forums

Savas Beatie has set up author forums. I think that's a book publishing innovation. (Game publishers have done this for a long time...)

Jomini and Reardon

Drew precedes me in reviewing Carol Rearden's new book.

It's a good book, one well worth reading, and kudos to Gallagher acquiring it for UNC Press. Drew likes it rather much which frees me to balance the ledger with my many criticisms.

Balance! That's what the blogosphere is all about.

Blogroll has been updated

... it has more than doubled in size.

Counting the Civil War dead

There should be a rip-roaring controversy about J. David Hacker's recount of the ACW dead but Civil War historians are so innumerate and so phobic about numbers in general that they are willing to keep quiet or go along with any plausible claims.

We'll get to Hacker's claims soon. In the meantime, this page is a great source for links to his works on the subject.

Red River follies

Some re-enactors were having at it in Alexandria, LA, the other day (photo). My advice: stage your stuff away from the parking lot or it spoils the effect.

Also, when advocating the virtues of history, don't say things like "This battle defined who we are as American citizens," or call it one of the "most important battles in history." Not if you're talking about the battle of Forts Randolph and Buhlow.

Note also to caption writers: "a galvanized Southern regiment" is not the same thing as an energized or inspired Southern regiment.

The offensive spirit in a picture (OT)

Ah, the spirit of the attack. The old infantry mission "to close with and destroy the enemy." We hear a lot about it in our military readings.

I think this wartime Japanese painting puts over an artist's conception of the offensive spirit very well.

As a former member of and exponent for the "stupid infantry," this is my cup of tea.

(Shown: Japanese bayonet attack on a Soviet BT-7 tank at Nomonhan, 1939. By T Fujita, 1941, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.)

Emily Dickinson and the ignorance of curators

It is a mark of the Civil War and various antebellum passions that the daily newspaper read by the overwhelmingly Democrat population of Amherst, MA, is called The Republican. This newspaper title is actually rather common throughout New England and it must baffle the locals completely, given the scarcity of Republicans in those parts.

The Republican is running a sad little piece coming out of the Emily Dickinson Museum: Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst to host Civil War encampment group. Someone at the museum had an NRA moment and invited a bunch of armed white males onto the premises, though that's not the sad part.

What is sad is the ignorance displayed by a curator there on the subject of Dickinson's connections to the ACW. Jane Wald, director of the museum, said the following:

(1) "She wrote more poems during the Civil War years than any other time."

That shouldn't be your strongest point.

(2) Reporter paraphrase: "She was deeply affected by the death of Frazar Stearns, son of Amherst College president William Augustus Stearns, who died in the battle of New Bern, North Carolina in March, 1862."

Actually, she knew many of the young Harvard men killed at Ball's Bluff, as well.

(3) Director Wald: "The idea is to help convey a sense of Dickinson’s awareness of and involvement in the life of her community apart from her poetry."

Why not show pictures and bios of her dead male friends and acquaintances, delineating the social connections?

(4) Director Wald: "She was becoming more a bit more reclusive at this time (but) it didn’t mean she wasn’t aware of what was going on."

She was continuously informed of the deaths of young men she knew and discussed the war with her visitors, including her literary mentor Higginson.

(5) "The encampment 'is one way to highlight the range of her experiences and observations that informed her creative mind.'"

She also knew Col. Robert Shaw and was affected by his death. Maybe the museum could show the film Glory so some of that Hollywood charisma might rub off on Emily.

Could we please fire Director Wald? If not, could we put this highly credentialed professional under the close supervision of a few knowledgeable amateurs and hobbyists?

On August 10, 2000, a couple of knowledgeable people rebuked Joyce Carol Oates for saying Dickinson did not write about the ACW. I don't expect Dickinson Museum employees to read this blog, but the rebuke appeared in the New York Review of Books, a publication so assiduously mainstream that James McPherson is its house critic for all new Civil War books.

Some of Dickinson's most powerful lines are in her war verses. We expect Dickinson curators to know that.

Are we that wait—sufficient worth—
That such Enormous Pearl
As life—dissolved be—for Us—
In Battle’s—horrid Bowl?

It may be—a Renown to live—
I think the Men who die—
Those unsustained—Saviors—
Present Divinity—

And this, I have quoted before, and connected it to the deaths in the Harvard Regiment at Ball's Bluff:

My Portion is Defeat--today--
A paler luck than Victory--
Less Paeans-fewer Bells--
The Drums don't follow Me--
with tunes--
Defeat--a somewhat slower--
means--
More arduous than Balls--

'Tis populous with Bone and
stain--
And Men too straight to stoop
again,
And piles of solid Moan--
And Chips of Blank--in Boyish
Eyes--
And scraps of Prayer--
And Death's surprise,
Stamped visible--in Stone--

There's somewhat prouder,
over there--
The Trumpets tell it to the Air--
How different Victory
To Him who has it--and the One
Who to have had it, would
have been
Contenteder--to die--

Yes indeed, my friends, Men too straight to stoop again and Oates' too crooked to accept correction. Her rebuttal to this criticism is absurd - read it yourselves in the link above.

But we were talking about the ignorance of Director Wald, not Oates. Let her find Oates totally convincing. Let her believe that nonsense that Dickinson wrote no Civil War verse. In that case, let her at least present the Civil War letters of Emily Dickinson, rich in war content.

But perhaps she is unfamiliar with such letters.Being a director means you are trained in the business of museums, not poetry or Dickinson.

Why not have zookeepers direct poet's museums? Where would the downside be?

Sesquicentennial bits

The National Park Service this month decided to launch an ACW Sesquicentennial site. Better late than never?

Would it be too cruel to characterize this as government-approved history?

I have a Sesquicentennial project of my own in mind. We all rent a bus, drive it to the Genessee Valley in New York, and free any remaining serfs working General James Wadsworth's estates.

People could relate to that better that re-enactments or authorial lectures.

Forbidden philately

Two of McClellan's many triumphs are being celebrated by the USPS, which is exceedingly careful not to mention his name. They have studied their pop history well.

p.s. I should publish Adm. Porter's personal letter to McClellan (see the McClellan Papers originals) asking McClellan to credit him with the idea for the New Orleans expedition. The record on this is most interesting and absent from Civil War histories.

Administrivia

The blogroll has been updated. Broken links have been fixed.

Key to parenthetical comments:

Inactive: Old stuff visible.
Terminated: Nothing visible.
ex-ACW: Location same, content changed
ex-Blog: Location same, not a blog now

These are new listings, found by myself:
Duane Tate
John F. Cummings III
Michael Lynch

This is one that should have been listed ages ago but for some reason wasn't:
Andy Etman

These are ripped off from Eric Wittenberg's roll, taking advantage of his good nature:
Charlie Knight
Craig Swain
Corey Meyer
Damien Shiels
Dave Powell
Jim Rosebrock
Kraig McNutt
Johns Hennessy et al
Richard J. Bell
Richard McCormick
Sean Heuvel

I was surprised to find a group blog called "Emerging Civil War Historians."

The mission of the blog you are now reading has been to submerge Civil War authors, as many as deserve it. I hope not to rain too hard on the parade of the emerging authors. Steven Wright used to joke that he put his dehumidifier in a room with his humidifier to watch them fight it out. A scene set for tragedy.

A little history: My first post here appears to date from August, 2003. The only ACW blog that existed up until that time was a travelogue in which a guy (Frederic A. Moritz) reported his paddlings around North Carolina following the trail of the Burnside Expedition. It was not an open-ended affair, time wise, and when he reached his last destination, his blog folded. The content tended to be naturalistic travel narrative. The blog is still up here and from the dates, you can see he began and ended posting the month before CWBN was launched.

So I continue to claim that this was the first Civil War blog and it remains the longest-lived one at that. I think that's worth saying once every nine or ten years. Sort of shocking not to receive a continuous string of complements on that, actually.

The Wadsworths persist

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

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

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

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

Note the stovepipe hat

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

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

Ghoulish you.

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

The publishing dog chases its tail

A reader writes:

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

[...]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Theories welcome, esp. from Hess fans.

The timing of a diplomatic lament

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

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

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

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

And

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

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

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

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

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

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

Readers should walk the timeline.

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

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

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

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

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

The NYT notices a McPherson misdeed

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

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

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

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

Palmer and Patton (cont.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--

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

Palmer and Patton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How soon we forget, if we ever even knew.

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

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

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

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

An open letter to Gary Gallagher

Dear Dr. Gallagher:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Submitted in all humility,
Dimitri Rotov
Blogger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A million spammers on a million keyboards ...

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

"Lost Cause" posts compiled

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

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

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

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

Enjoy...

Seward's foreigners (fin)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emphasis added!

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

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

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

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

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

Interesting, surely.

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

(Part 1, Part 2)

Seward's foreigners (cont.)

So what was Seward up to?

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

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

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

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

But they kept coming.

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

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

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

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

Seward's foreigners

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Booth bobbleheads

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

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

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

Gallagher's "Lost Cause"

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

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

Transvestite chic

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

Publishing - some simple observations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How it was done (cont.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

The OR as a template

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

The first was

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Lamb, slightly off topic

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

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

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

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

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

Simpson has a blog

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

Better than a pleasant dream!

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

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

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

Gallagher and ACW history

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

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

Just kidding. Up to a point, anyway.

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

Just kidding again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Foner Criticizes Gallagher - nuff said.

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

Let that be enough. Even blog readers have limits.

Browse UNC Press here.

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

How it was done

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

Washington, September 10, 1861

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

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

Your obedient servant,
A. LINCOLN

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

A trope becomes common knowledge

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

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

Isn't that amazing?

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

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

Matthew Pinsker summed things up when he wrote:

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

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