Last night me and Kenyatta went out for dinner with some of our closest friends. At the end I realized something--it was the first time, in two weeks, that I'd gone more than a couple waking hours without making some note about the Civil War.
I've been listening to these David W. Blight lectures, courtesy of Yale, like nonstop. Kenyatta says that every time she comes in the room all she hears is "Blahblahblah KANSAS blahblahblah JOHN BROWN blahblahblah KNOW-NOTHINGS blahblahblah WILMOT PROVISO." Hilarious. I'm in one of those moments--totally overcome by this period of history.
And now for today's random Civil War/Reconstruction observation: U.S. Grant was kind of a bad-ass. Yesterday I was reading McPherson's appraisal of the dude and he talked about how Grant, having failed so much in his earlier life, was a fearless, offensive general. McClellan, on the other hand, who'd experienced so much success, lived in permanent fear of another Bull Run. So much of that resonated with me.
He quotes Grant, in his first major command, leading the 21st Illinois to attack a rebel camp in Missouri. Grant talks about how scared he was. But when he arrived at the battle-field the enemy had fled, and he realized that the opposing general held just as much fear in his heart as Grant.
There's something almost bluesy, and anti-heroic about his whole style, something deep, very human, and of course, ultimately tragic. But it's beautiful. Especially given that generals charged in with the troops and tended to die at astonishing rates.
This whole business is in my skin. I think about it all the time.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
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You gonna be reenacting any time soon?
Tony Horowitz wrote a book about guys like you. Actually, not really like you at all. "Confederates in the Attic." A fun read about Civil War reenactors in the South.
That's a fabulous book. I think it's been recced in comments before.
Do it, TNC! Rumor has it it's a good time. And a dude who lives near me actually got shot with a musket ball at a civil war reenactment. He came out of it alright, and therefore it's hilarious. How awesome would it be to tell your friends your old war wound is from the battle of Gettysburg?
You know what really gets me about this period. Its the overwhelming sense of how differently American history could have turned out just from shear chance. Here's my favorite example. Lee's battle plans are lost by the courier and found rolled up in a cigar by a union soldier. What are the odds? Those were the battle plans for Antietam. So the Union wins the battle, at a Huge cost, but wins. That win allows Lincoln the room to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. What are the odds? That's some guy finding a cigar and unrolling the thing and changing American history. Wow, just effing Wow.
I think the tragedy of Antietam was that McClellan had an accurate map of Confederate troop locations, twice the forces with Lee’s army backed against a river, and he let Lee get away.
Well if that is Kenyatta's take on your recent trips to the mid-19th century, I feel real sorry for my girlfriend, too. If one should never marry a writer, then one should DEFINITELY never marry a Ph.D. (who writes). I mean sometimes I actually ask her to "edit" or see if something makes sense. And she will return it to me with that annoyed smile and say "well, yeah I think it is fine; but maybe their are problems here, I don't know. I mean I guess you are right when you say modernity--particularly after the French Revolution--caused a breach from which escaped cognitive and hermeneutical apparatuses that made particular modes of action possible in theretofore unfathomable ways, particularly with democratic and national appeals to the what Homi Bhabha calls the 'pedagogical object.'" I feel bad for this sister and I feel bad for Kenyatta, too. Tell her to STAY STRONG! (LOL at blhahah Kansas blahblalahaha Wilmost Proviso. Although the Wilmot Proviso is really a fascinating topic, as are the under-discussed Know Nothings.) But I think they prefer these minor headaches to some other possible headaches, particularly those that many of my boys back in B-more are inflicting on their lady-friends.
Ouch. Editing that sort of stuff is hard work.
Grant would have made a great deputy ops in The Wire.
Grant would've stopped Arthas as soon as he had the idea to level Stratholme.
You've gone way over the line if you've started talking to your woman about the Wilmot Proviso. This is dangerous territory. Get professional help. See a florist.
We went out last night! We had sangria! The red!!
Did the sangria remind you of the dark red blood of a young farm boy staining the dry Kansas soil?
I wish I'd come back with that...
If your place has it, try a cava-based Sangria. Rosa Mexicana has a nice one, they call it Sangria Brilliante, I think.
It's all about being able to spot the geek-out glaze.
I was in a conversation once with another lawyer in which he compared his legal strategy in an appeal to that of General Lee at Chancellorsville sending Jackson on a long swing out to attack Hooker's flank by surprise. I thought to myself, I know exactly what he means! My long years as a child pouring over Civil War maps was not a complete waste! Unfortunately, unlike Lee, his strategy failed completely.
I still think it beats comparing everything to the Godfather.
Hey, TNC. Based on your recommendation of the McPherson book, I bought it yesterday and read the first 50 pages last night. Great so far, and I can't wait to read more. Thanks!
But you guys aren't married, so it should be all good right?
If you haven't already read Grant's memoirs, drop everything and do it, right now. Sherman's memoirs are great too.
Those are the memoirs that Twain helped him write, correct?
No, Twain was the publisher. But they were written by Grant.
Twain published them, but all the evidence indicates that Grant wrote them himself. Mark Perry wrote a good book about the relationship between the two men called Grant and Twain: The Story of an American Friendship that I remember reviewing when it came out.
Grant was a surprisingly good general, then a surprisingly bad president, and then finally a surprisingly good writer. Read the autobiography; you will not only learn a lot, but likely enjoy the writing, too.
It's interesting to me that the examples Kenyatta mentions, Bleeding Kansas, the Wilmot Proviso, Know Nothings, are all from the decade before the war while you follow it up with an wartime observation about Grant.
I've never really shared the fascination some people have with the Civil War itself. But I can get completely obsessed with the years that preceded it. Somehow we went from a nation where virtually every President had owned slaves to a nation where the (nominally) anti-slavery candidate could win the Presidency, and we did it in just a few years time. The jump from the Liberty Party to the Free Soilers to the Republicans to the Presidency in just a few years never ceases to amaze me.
To me, it's one of the most fascinating, confusing and inspiring periods in American history, but histories tend to skip right over it to get to the more interesting war stuff.
Exactly. I usually skip these posts because I read everything I could get my hands on about the Civil War for 15 years and finally had to stop. I don't want to be dragged back in lest my spouse starts lecturing me too. But I agree that the period leading up to the war is more interesting than the war itself and often gets short shrift. And no one I have ever met received correct information about Reconstruction in school. We should work on changing that since it is difficult to understand the America we live in today without a good understanding of the causes and immediate results of the Civil War.
Well, I'm further ahead on McPherson than I am on the lecture series--chronologically. So I'm reading about Grant in Tennessee right now. But in the lecture series we've just gotten to secession.
I'd never thought of Grant this way, but he is very distinct from the other generals of that war, and most wars, in that he seems to have had no connection at all to the glory. Most of his contemporaries wanted to believe; "It is well that war is so terrible, we should grow too fond of it." Sherman did not believe, but still recognized the power of that narrative. Grant... didn't care. War was a chore of sorts, to be started and then finished, like chopping wood. Thus the private's uniform, the muddy boots, the whittling, the silent manner.
Bluesy is a good word for him.
"War was a chore of sorts, to be started and then finished, like chopping wood."
Ulysses S Grant: "Doin' Work."
I read the McPherson about a year ago. Great stuff. One question I have about this whole period - what did the Union rank and file really think? What really motivated them? It's never been clear to me. I'm sure, after a while, it was anger and revenge for the last battle. But what made them go in the first place? I can't imagine it was slavery, for more than a minority. Was the "union" idea so strong? Did they want to relieve the Revolution? Did they just have no real grasp what they were getting into - all the boys are going, so here we go? This is an outstanding question of mine from the era.
Of course, we know some didn't want to go at all. But it's the ones who went willingly that I have the curiousity about.
What the Union rank and file thought probably largely depends on when you ask the question. In the prewar period alot of the Anti Slavery sentiment wasn't moral or at least in the lion's share of cases was it antiracist. It seems that it was more of a free labor thing. If you were a working man in the north, white, and wanted to earn the largest wage you could you didn't want to compete against a part of the country where they didn't pay or compensate their workers. Of course there were individuals who did take a moral stance but I bet for most it was self interest. They didn't want land in the west to be plantation agriculture, they wanted to homestead.
But I think those are stances that would make you vote Republican, not go to war to keep the Union together. In fact, secession would have strengethed the free-labor position since the danger of slavery going North would have been eliminated (which people did worry about after Dred Scott).
I agree that most Northerners didn't go to war to fight against slavery. In fact, I suspect most of them went for pretty much the same reasons anyone goes to war... Why did anyone go fight the Mexican-American war, or Korea or Iraq for that matter? And after a while, as abccommentator mentioned, the war becomes its own justification.
I don't want to understate whatever amount of moral reasoning was there, but I do think that everyone known in 1861 what the next 5 years would bring, very few people would have shown up for the first muster of the Union Army.
Re: your last point
I think the same could be said of WWI. In both cases most of those involved thought that they would be short, glorious wars with decisive victors. If I remember correctly with WWI, many people thought it would be over by Christmas, so a lot of people joined up in an effort to not miss out.
For most of the common soldiers on both sides, it was inconceivable that they would not participate in this, the greatest adventure of their lifetimes. Political concerns weren't motivating them, but rather social expectations and the boredom of rural life in mid 19th century America.
Some Northern troops were politically motivated, and the common theme there seems to have been fear of the "slave power" - the way that Southern aristocracy imitated the European aristocracy that these men, or their ancestors, had left Europe to escape in the first place. Southern secession was felt to be an attack against the ideal of equal opportunity, the chance to rise and fall on your own merit. This did not generally imply any feeling that blacks deserved equal rights, but rather that black slavery was enabling Southern whites to enjoy greater rights than Northern whites.
One of the best stories about Grant is how after losing all his money in a sham business venture, then being diagnosed with terminal throat cancer, he sat down and banged out his memoirs to leave something that would generate income for his family. He died, and it worked, the book made a fortune.
I wish Generals still led the charge from up front. I'm certain that war would be a tad bit different.
MacArthur may have been one crazy SOB (nuclear weapons in Korea probably wouldn't have been the best idea), but he sure wasn't short on the courage necessary to lead from the front and get shot at along with the rest of his men.
Generals, like all officers, lead from where they can best control their troops. We were told back in ROTC, that if an officer has a choice of two spots from where he can have equal control, he ought to take the one with the greater risk.
Bear in mind, too, that generals come up from the officer ranks, and many of them experienced combat as more junior officers.
I have seen all of the David Blight lecture series. His best lectures are on Reconstruction. I have two criticisms of his actual Civil War lectures:
1) Blight seems to give Charles Francis Adams (Lincoln's Minister to the UK) most of the credit for keeping Great Britain from intervening in the US Civil War on behalf of the Confederacy. I admire Adams as much as the next guy, but the political actions of a large part of the British working class had alot to do with preventing her majesty's government from recognizing the Confederacy. Even in Liverpool, the economy of which was highly dependent upon cotton from the American South, thousands of unemployed workers (including dock - and textile workers)rallied to support the Union and oppose slavery.
At one point, Lincoln sent a ship loaded with flour to Liverpool to be distributed for free to those unemployed workers (many of whom were starving). It is an inspiring story that a leftist like Blight should know.
2) In passing, Blight mentions that the British Navy was engaged in a shadow war supporting the Confederacy, without explaining what he means.
That said, I should mention that my former professor at Columbia, Eric Foner thinks very highly of Blight.
"Oh, I am heartily tired of hearing about what Lee is going to do. Some of you always seem to think he is suddenly going to turn a double somersault, and land in our rear and on both of our flanks at the same time. Go back to your command, and try to think what are we going to do ourselves, instead of what Lee is going to do." -- U.S. Grant
I'd love to get behind your sentiments for Grant, but in my opinion the only thing that he was good at was feeding the meat grinder.
Grants strategies and methods can be summed up regardless of the battle: send in more men. Sure the North could afford it, but a tactician Grant was not.
Even Grant's shining moment as a general officer was a siege. Vicksburg was pretty much a no-brainer.
Oh, yes. Because Grant outmaneuvered Pemberton's troops and cut them off from retreat or reinforcement by magic! There was no practice of maneuver warfare that put Grant and Sherman astride confederate supply lines to put them in a position to compel the surrender of more than 30,000 Confederate troops at the loss of a small fraction of that number.
What a loser.
Dude. The seige of Vicksburg didn't happen out of thin air. There was a whole campaign that preceded Vicksburg which left the Confederates in a hopeless position - precisely BECAUSE Grant was a skilled and tenacious practitioner of maneuver warfare.
And then there's Chattanooga.
Grant had some serious tactical and operational chops when he needed them. I don't think you understand the operations he was in.
The meat grinder was not a machine Grant could control, only direct. There is an entire, far bloodier, substance to the Civil War that gets forgotten in all the romance. See The Destructive War by Royster for provocation...
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2005/is_n4_v26/ai_14125309/
My beloved's life is a never-ending round of scholarship, with special attention to the creation of new reading lists for every class he teaches every year. I do see why he wants and needs to talk over the choices, but I just can't do it any more. So instead, he hires research assistants. Bright young things, paid to perform services I am no longer willing to offer. In short, concubines for a different task than the standard arrangement. In your forties, you may need a similar outlet.
I once read that US Grant smoked like 12 cigars each day, but that he smoked them dry. Unlit.
Also, Grant has the coolest nickname ever. Not the United States Grant, or the Uncle Sam Grant, but the one I think Lincoln gave him, which was Unconditional Surrender Grant, because he would accept nothing less.
Talk about bad ass.
And TNC - if you're gonna read so much Civil War stuff, I have to recommend to you what is certainly the best historical fiction I've ever read, and might be the very best book I've ever read. By one of our greatest and most erudite writers.
Gore Vidal's LINCOLN.
Can't recommend that book highly enough.
Once you finish the first chapter, you won't be able to put it down. Reads like a thriller. Except it's all true.
BTW, re Grant: he is said to have been an excellent writer as well.
Your observation about Grant being "antiheroic" tracks the military historian John Keegan's essay on Grant in "The Mask of Command" -- highly recommended if you want more on Grant (comparing his leadership style to the styles of Alexander the Great, the Duke of Wellington and Hitler. One correction, though. Although Grant was almost impossibly unflappable under fire, he did not seek it out, and did not lead from the front --very few Civil War generals did exceptions including Confederates at Pickett's Charge, and crazy Custer), and virtually no high-ranking ones did.
TNC I still think the two best insights were about the war from Lincoln's pspective.Doris Kearns Goodwin's book on Lincoln and the classic Carl Sandburg Lincoln bio have tremendous insight into the human perspective on the war. Sandburg tells the now classic story of a woman kneeling before Lincoln, and he growing angry with her, chastising her for kneeling before a mortal human and not God. She only wanted to beg for her son's life spared as a POW and he promised her that. Goodwin portrays Grant as a bit of a snarling alcoholic. I also really loved the film "Glory."
Boy, do I know what you mean about obssessive-subject writing. I am writing while working full time, and I have to compartmentalize my day so that I can function with my peers and my family. I missed a party with some Pac-10 folks because I had to finish the final scenes. Crazy, just crazy.
I am able to sneak in a bit of writing during the day, but most takes place at night. I have finally finished my screenplay and am editing, but as it was about a singer (S.C.--I've posted it here before), I listened to his music day and night, all genres, and researched him contantly, even though I am adapting it from a book. I feel as though he will always be a part of me.I also undersstand why he chose the materialhe did at various parts of his life and I know without a doubt that he did not die as most folks think.
So tell K to hang in there.My family is used to my being there / not being there simultaneously!
One of the best pieces of public art in DC is one everybody ignores: The U.S. Grant memorial. It's at the foot of the Capital steps, on the mall side. It's a really impressive piece of work--Grant sits on a horse in the center, flanked by two deep relief sculptures of men struggling to move their gear through really deep nasty mud. The mud is full of dropped equipment. It's obviously raining and miserable. Grant sits on the horse with his hat pulled low, looking like a man facing up to grim necessity. It doesn't get enough appreciation--it's really a fine piece of figurative art
kind of a bad-ass? i'll say!
my favorite quote about him:
"Grant is a man of a good deal of rough dignity; rather taciturn; quick and decided in speech. He habitually wears an expression as if he had determined to drive his head through a brick wall, and was about to do it. I have much confidence in him."
got that? this son of a bitch is about to drive his head through a brick wall, and it's written on his face. he knows it is going to hurt. he knows it is going to cost him.
and a lot of people would say, "but it's a brick wall! you can't win! you can't punch your head through a brick wall!"
and grant is saying, "i don't want to do it. but i must. now stand back, and watch me do it."
totally bad-ass. but people tell me his memoirs are uncommonly well-written. garry wills says that his ability to write clearly was part of what made him such an efficient battle-field commander. i have not read them yet.
oh, my bad--forgot to put in the citation.
that brick wall quote is from theodore lyman, a union colonel. you can find it here:
http://faculty.css.edu/mkelsey/usgrant/quotes.html
TNC, there are a couple of things I'll add to your observation, and if I recall the McPherson book correctly, they're both in there. First, about Sherman. He gets a rap for brutality and for instituting the concept of "total war," but really I think that's crap. By comparison to what war was like in prior centuries (read any book on European history and the virtually continuous war between the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 and the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815, and you'll see disease, starvation, civilian suffering, etc. on a truly massive scale, all in the service of some of the most pointless causes imaginable), Sherman was positively benign. He destroyed a lot of property and provisioned his troops from local occupied land, yes, and I'm sure it was quite unpleasant for the southerners in central Georgia and South Carolina. But there was no mass rape, little physical mistreatment of the locals and, most tellingly (and in contrast to, say, Napoleon's Grande Armee), Sherman was very very solicitous of the well-being of his men.
The other thing about Grant that always stays with me is the visual image of what the Appomattox (sp?) surrender must have looked like. Lee, the military genius, descendant of Virginia aristocracy, dressed in his formal uniform, standing over 6' tall with patrician bearing, silver hair and beard, ramrod straight, handing his sword in surrender to Grant, standing 5'8", shoulders slightly rounded,wearing muddy boots with his trousers tucked into them. Quite the image.
It makes one wonder whether the main public actors today will be as vivid to history readers 50 or 100 years from now as Sherman, Lee, Grant, Jackson and the others seem to us now.
and no picture of appomattox is complete without joshua chamberlain, hero of little round top and professor of rhetoric and literature, being selected by grant to accept the surrender of southern arms.
april of 1865.
and all of these actors, moved by the spirit lincoln had breathed forth on march 4, little more than a month previous:
"with malice towards none; with charity for all."
dammit, tnc: when are we going to go visit these places? i want to go there with you; i want to see the tears start in your eyes. and when we get to the crater, and stand there and read the accounts by survivors, we're all going to be balling our eyes out.
tell you what--you should announce that you're going to do a blog meet-up at a civil war site. the entire ta-nehisi coates readership is invited to the courthouse at appomattox on day such and such for a picnic, and reading of relevant documents. also loud rap music, about ten years out of date.
then you do it a few months later at a different battlefield.
Shelby Foote said that the Civil War is the crossroads of American history, and it's so well documented--everyone, at all levels of rank, writing letters home!
The Civil War book I enjoyed most recently isn't new, but it's full of terrific stuff: With My Face to the Enemy, an anthology of essays that first appeared in Military History Quarterly.
Recently became obsessed with the Civil War myself after watching the Burns documentary...and yes, I'm planning to visit a few battle sites within driving distance from Baltimore this summer to lay some flowers. The weird thing for me is that my father's ancestors fought for the Confederacy (Army of Northern VA). I detest the cause for which they fought and I won't be laying any wreaths for slavery, for Jeff Davis or for Lee either, who chose his state over his country. My father's ancestors were poor whites, and it seems to me that they, like so many folks like them today, supported a cause which would in no way benefit them. Some things never change.
but people tell me his memoirs are uncommonly well-written. garry wills says that his ability to write clearly was part of what made him such an efficient battle-field commander. i have not read them yet.
Again, I can't recommend them enough. The picture you get of Grant from them (probably on some level self-serving, but it's a memoir) is just that he was an awful lot smarter than the people he was dealing with. Not in a flashes-of-brilliance kind of way, but that he had an incredible capacity for not losing track of the fundamentals of any situation. War's not about glory or honor, it's about getting your armies to the places you need them, and making sure they have food while they're getting there.
Grant on inefficient subordinates is very funny: there are three or four passages where he talks about how one of his generals failed to carry out an order, or accomplish something that he had instructed them to accomplish. And Grant will go on for a while about how the order was incredibly difficult to accomplish, and failure was perfectly reasonable, and the general was a terribly brave and competent person. And then the last sentence will be something like "I never relied on him again." And the contrast with Grant talking about Sherman is glaring -- no particular gushing, but a palpable miasma of relief that he finally had someone who would get things done.
The memoirs make him an incredibly appealing character -- I'm not a real Civil War buff, but I'm very fond of Grant.
My great great great grandfather was a soldier in the Confederate army. At Appamatox he lost his horse. Grant gave him (and other soldiers) a horse to go home on. He was so grateful he named his son after Grant. My great great grandfather grew up in the south with the name Ulysses S. Grant Turner.