This is a modest book, and it delivers modestly. Its best feature is its organization into “Top 10” lists. Yes, this becomes horrific when the topics This is a modest book, and it delivers modestly. Its best feature is its organization into “Top 10” lists. Yes, this becomes horrific when the topics turn to “worst blunders” or “deadly prison camps”—and those are, in fact, two of the Chapters. Still, the organization easily allows readers to skim or skip sections.
The worst feature is the book’s charmless writing. Oh, to be fair, the writing isn’t terrible. But it rarely conveys any awe of Southern dash or Northern industrialization, though both topics are covered. Author Thomas Flagel at one point references the “magisterial” Gettysburg battlefield, and (quite properly) condemns bush league Civil War buffs for bothering less with Western battles (Ft. Donaldson, Shiloh, New Orleans, Stones River, Chattanooga, Chickamauga, and Vicksburg). But the game-show gimmickry of list after list became boring. The italicized paragraph after each entry actually is more interesting than the entry.
Plus, his “Top 10” format forces some rather ill-fitting facts: such as the 9th most common weapon of the Civil War was “pikes and lances.” Yet, two paras later, the author concedes that (with one exception) they only were used in the first year of the war. Remind me not to take “Pikes and Lances for $1,000.”
Again, the best thing about this book is skipping ahead after, say, the fifth most common food in soldier’s fare (beans). The single most interesting fact I learned is this: of the Africans kidnapped and sold into slavery in the Americas and Europe, only 8 percent were shipped to the United States. Boomity!...more
“a privateer sailed thin to the line”—mixed metaphor plus embarrassing.
There are two authors—one wrote the North’s story; the other the South’s. The latter seemed the more jargon laden writer. Both writers, however, erroneously used the definitive article before ships’ names
In some ways, it freights an entire book on a single ninety minute battle. Some interesting facts, however: the addition of the Commander, Lt. Commander and Ensign ranks during the Civil war ended the former “First through [nth] Lieutenant” scheme inherited from the British. A gunner on USS Kearsarge may have been the first Black to win the Medal of Honor. And, amusingly, CSS Alabama lives on as USS Alabama, SSBN-731, the Ohio class submarine used as the platform for the movie Crimson Tide....more
I think the world of Guelzo’s Civil War books. He’s an antidote to liberal pieties. In writing a Lee biography, he had to skate between the “Lee as exI think the world of Guelzo’s Civil War books. He’s an antidote to liberal pieties. In writing a Lee biography, he had to skate between the “Lee as exemplary Southerner” and the “slavery was the root of all evil, a system Lee defended” positions.
The last third of the book is the author’s own (rather stern) judgments, seemingly hinged on the unhinged, small 2017 demonstration by white supremacists in Charlottesville. That was nearly 150 years after Lee’s death. I’m no “lost cause” fan, but surely Lee should be judged by then-contemporary standards.
Which Guelzo also tries. Yet those are peppered with out of place Freudianisms (“Lee lived through the women [wife, daughters, cousin] in his family”). Lee, the author says, turned to war as a means of escapism. Keep in mind that until the end of the Civil War, Lee never held a job outsides the Army Corps of Engineers. And—oh yeah—he graduated number one from West Point, and went on to have a successful tenure a that school’s leader.
Guelzo also had to write a complete book—but there are strange omissions. Did Winfield Scott really say “Lee was making the mistake of his life by turning down command of the Union’s armies?” We don’t really know, because Guelzo says Lincoln had their mutual friend Frances Blair sound Lee out. Did Lee say, “I never could take up arms against my state”? It seems so, because that formulation was preserved in ample letters. Did the war end—as legend has it—in the parlor of the man in whose fields it began, at First Bull Run? Who knows?
Lee is critical of Longstreet about Gettysburg— a critique that would grow and be absorbed by the “lost cause” doctrine, but I’ve walked that ground dozens of times, and the fault was the AWOL JEB Stewart, whose cavalry screen might have detected that Lee’s marching orders would have uncovered the flanking action to the entire Union left, hours before Longstreet would reach the Rebels’ jumping-off point.
Many of these points are covered in Guelzo’s other excellent Civil War histories. But to reach a critical judgment about Lee (lousy staff work: fair; great strategy but poor tactics: somewhat fair; over-reliance on initiative of Army and Corps Commanders: bingo) without the above seems like cheating on a closed book exam.
In the end, Guelzo concludes Robert E. Lee is the textbook example of treason. But compare Napoleon. The sole reason why the Battle Flags still adorn Napoleon’s Paris tomb, but not Lee’s, must come down to slavery itself. If so, why didn’t Guelzo associate himself with McPherson and other left-wing Civil war historians right up front?...more
No adjective or adverb was left un-written; no gerund omitted. Brooks always were “laughing brightly,” or some such. And so stuffed was the story withNo adjective or adverb was left un-written; no gerund omitted. Brooks always were “laughing brightly,” or some such. And so stuffed was the story with instantaneous imagination, one began to assume (when arriving) the next page and-half were invented from an otherwise reliable first-person young woman.
It was a sad novel, and meant to be so. Thicker than a steak, unless you excised the unnecessary froth....more
Published in 1960, Freeman Cleaves’s book is practically the sole bio of a man who, at the head of the Army of the Potomac, turned back the Army of NoPublished in 1960, Freeman Cleaves’s book is practically the sole bio of a man who, at the head of the Army of the Potomac, turned back the Army of Northern Virginia and General Robert E. Lee at the high-tide of Southern advance in the American Civil War. I live near enough to Gettysburg to make occasional pilgrimages there, and thought I was reasonably educated about Meade before reading this book. I was wrong.
Meade was the least political General the North had. Unwilling to seek out publicity, he even shunned it when directed his way. His career suffered mightily as a result: newspapers colluded not to mention him, even in battles he won. It was always “Grant’s Army of the Potomac” (after Grant was promoted Lieutenant General and, in an amicable relationship, became his boss), or “Sheridan dashing charge” (Sheridan was in the Army of the Potomac only for four months!). After hearing everyone but Meade given credit for Gettysburg, a battle he won only two days after being given charge of the Army of the Potomac, Meade said “it would soon be proved that either he was not at Gettysburg at all or that his presence there had been a positive detriment.”
The initial sting was Lincoln’s disappointment Meade supposedly did not follow Lee’s army after his victory at Gettysburg and trap Lee before he could cross back over the rising Potomac waters to the South. Contrary to popular history, Meade—from the Corps of Engineers battling another Corps of Engineers foe in Lee—tried. He was slowed by the need to refresh food and ammunition (Lee, having traversed the same ground twice before made forage impossible, and anyway, ammunition and other stores had to come from Harrisburg), by lack of cavalry, so Meade wasn’t sure what route Lee took, and when his tired army finally found Lee, they faced dug-in fortifications that would have been senseless to attack. Yes, Lee got away. But the Southern army never again threatened Washington, and never again could feed itself.
For the most part, Meade was a level-headed General, unlike McClellan, Sheridan, Hooker, and Burnside. He was most like Sherman: he didn’t complain; he did his job, however difficult. But he was contemptuous of subordinates not as competent as he; he famously criticized General Sykes, at the battle of Charlottesville, for retreating:
“Meade was more than disappointed—he was dismayed. Gazing toward the heights twice lost, he exclaimed to some officers near him, ‘My God, if we can’t hold the top of the hill, we certainly can’t hold the bottom of it!’”
Even after war’s end, Meade showed his mettle: Sent to trouble-shoot the Reconstruction South, Meade tried best to uphold the law, sometimes siding with Conservatives, other times with Radicals. Meade was a true moderate who believed in neutrality—save that he went out of his way to welcome his defeated Southern Brothers-in-Arms if they swore their loyalty to the Union. In retirement, Meade was the General pushed out of the limelight at Reunion galas—without public complaint. It took his premature death, at age 57, at his Philadelphia home for newspapers to realize “We have lost a man who did not know what it was to be false.”
Cleaves’s writing is no thriller, but no bore either. It’s just he had so little to work with. Military orders, to and from survive, but the only personal details are the letters Meade wrote to his wife during the War years. Everything else was destroyed. Cleaves had to rely on an early bio by Meade’s son and Civil War aide, Captain Meade, mostly nasty newspaper coverage, plus a handful of brief references—nearly all favorable—in diaries of men, famous and ordinary, who met him. This isn’t a book about battles; it’s an attempt to write about the man in his time.
Faced with the example of McClellan, silent George Meade disappeared from history without the credit he deserves. This 1960 work probably is the best there can be in re-installing his reputation as a Northern General who cared deeply about his men, wouldn’t risk their lives senselessly in battle, and was admired (if not loved) by all who served under him. Somehow, I never knew that. And, thanks to the egos of more political savvy Generals, the world never saw it either—unless they read Cleaves’s Meade of Gettysburg....more
Interesting, narrowly-focused history of the 1865 peace deal between Grant and Lee, how their respective regions interpreted the same text differentlyInteresting, narrowly-focused history of the 1865 peace deal between Grant and Lee, how their respective regions interpreted the same text differently, and why. Unlike many Civil War books, this is not, principally, about the battle itself (though the first section covers that); nor is it about the on-again, off-again struggle between radical reconstructionists (and freed Southern Blacks) and President Andrew Johnson allied with Southern leaders and Northern Copperheads. Indeed, except for a closing section, the analysis ends when Johnson is Impeached (but not Convicted).
It is well written, save for the middle section that feels forced. There are whole chapters of “some newspapers said this; others that.” And “Northern Pentecostal clergy preached this; yet on the same day, Baptist in the South heard that.” I recommend skimming this portion l.
But what this is about is what Lee and Grant thought the surrender meant; how their interpretation was in turn altered through the lens’ of others, and how reflections of those interpretations in turn changed how the two Lt. Generals interpreted their own text.
“[The myth of the gentleman’s agreement at the McLean house—a] sublime moment of selflessness on the part of the two great leaders, who rose up above their hatreds and resentments, and, for the good of the nation they both loved, ceased, as they agreed to the surrender terms, to be enemies. The wellspring of this myth was American exceptionalism, the idea that America had broken free of the bonds of history and was not destined to experience the interminable miseries and rivalries of the Old World.
The civil way in which Americans ended their Civil War, so this argument went, proved that Americans were distinct and superior.”
Most of the book isn’t nearly that upbeat. The service at the White House after Lincoln’s assassination:
“The gloom occasioned by his death, and the language of God’s united providences is telling us that though the friends of liberty die, liberty itself is immortal.”
Although Lee insisted for the rest of his life, and so it became part of Southern “Lost Cause” mythology, that the Army of Northern Virginia had no more than 8,000 effectives at Appomattox, “careful counting show Lee’s Army left Richmond with 60,000 men, and had 30,000 at Appomattox Court House. The Federal Armies within a 10-mile radius numbered 69,000z so, and contrary to Lee’s claim of 5:1 odds, Lee faced the same 2:1 odds he had faced all along.”...more
Alas, no one will top this as the definitive American Civil War novel. The author crashed his motorcycle soon after publication, and never wrote againAlas, no one will top this as the definitive American Civil War novel. The author crashed his motorcycle soon after publication, and never wrote again. His son wrote dozens more, without half his father’s talent.
Ted Turner bought the movie rights, renamed it “Gettysburg”. The original theatre release wasn’t bad, but unfortunately the (20 minutes longer) director’s cut is about the only thing available. General Lee is woefully miscast. In both versions, but particularly the second with the unnecessary 20 minutes, one of the best moments is watching the death of Color Sergeant Turner carrying the Stars-and-Bars up Pickett’s Charge.
Prior to this book’s release, one had to bushwhack through Gettysburg weeds and trees to find the 20th Maine Monument. Since the late 1970s, the park service paved a path to the site of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain’s heroics. And since then, I’ve never needed a tour-guide for this battlefield....more
Unexpectedly lucid and thoughtful, Grant manages to communicate the talent that made him the North's most successful general: logistics. He could viewUnexpectedly lucid and thoughtful, Grant manages to communicate the talent that made him the North's most successful general: logistics. He could view terrain, and see, instantly, not just how it should be assaulted, but how the attacking army must be supplied. (Yes, he also actually would attack, unlike McClellan.). Famously, the book was written to provide a legacy for the Grant family, and completed in two sections, the second under severe pain after jaw cancer surgery. But, unlike others, I don't find much of a difference. Yes, there's some backing-and-filling about voting Democrat, Lincoln, race relations, etc. But an easy read, and a must-read for Civil War enthusiasts....more
What Matt said. Genius, especially when paired with the more traditional (liberal) view of McPherson's great Battle Cry of Freedom.What Matt said. Genius, especially when paired with the more traditional (liberal) view of McPherson's great Battle Cry of Freedom....more
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