Civil Warriors

A guest post by Zachary Fry, a graduate student in the Ohio State University history department.

“Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?” -Alfred, Lord Tennyson

The Gettysburg Semester was the time of my life.  As a student of the Civil War, how could it not have been?  I might easily say that the allure of the place was enough to make it so – living a block or so from where Coster’s Eleventh Corps brigade tried to stem the tide of triumphant Rebels on the battle’s first day, walking the autumn fields of Plum Run on the weekends, or even studying the war’s Eastern Theater while sitting just an hour away from Antietam and Harpers Ferry.  But the Gettysburg Semester was much more than just four months living on a beautiful campus in the cockpit of Civil War history.  I learned more than I ever expected and forged unique friendships that have added immeasurably to my life for several years now.

I had just finished my third year at Kent State when I received a scholarship to attend the Semester, and I entered the program with seven other stalwarts from Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, California, and Oregon.              Together, we lived in an 1870s house on campus solely devoted to Gettysburg students receiving their degrees in Civil War Era Studies, fine friends all.  My academic life consisted of a crash course in Civil War historiography (where I first read my future graduate adviser’s work), a course in Civil War tactics supplemented with a battlefield trip every Friday, and a readings course on John Brown and the abolitionists of the late 1850s.  For the first two courses I enjoyed the powerful lectures of Dr. Allen Guelzo, eloquent director of the Semester and the foremost academic historian of Abraham Lincoln.

In addition to my regular coursework, I procured an internship at the Adams County Historical Society, housed in historic Schmucker Hall on the Lutheran Theological Seminary campus.  My bosses at ACHS were Wayne Motts, an OSU alumnus who has since gone on to even greater glory at the National Civil War Museum, and Ben Neeley, a passionate public historian who drove to work every day from distant Lancaster.  During the internship, I processed hundreds of newspaper articles detailing individual experiences at the Battle of Gettysburg, the most difficult part of which was training myself not to read each one so that I could finish the day’s work efficiently.   Thursday nights at ACHS were traditionally attended by members of Gettysburg’s subculture of lifestyle researchers.  I was certainly among that group by the time I left in December.

The most rewarding part of the Gettysburg Semester was not the history, such as the fact that I worked at ACHS next to the door where soldiers of the 151st Pennsylvania dragged their wounded colonel to safety during the chaotic retreat on July 1, 1863.  Nor was it the resources available, such as the numerous side-trips to the National Archives to conduct research for my ongoing senior thesis project on the 59th New York Infantry.  It wasn’t even the unique culture of Gettysburg itself and the Remembrance Day ceremonies, which I enjoyed with a very close friend from Washington. The Gettysburg Semester was special because of the people who made it happen – Dr. Guelzo, Dr. Matthew Norman, Cathy Bain, and, most of all, the seven accomplished Semester alumni whom I am fortunate to call my friends.  Nowhere else, not even in graduate school, could a student have enjoyed the companionship of so many others who live, eat, and breathe the Civil War.  The coursework, the research, the culture, and the friendships, all provided me a formative experience, academically and personally.  The Gettysburg Semester was, in short, a dream come true.

Here is something to do, if you find yourself in Culpeper County in a few months:

THE BATTLE OF BRANDY STATION
June 9, 1863
150TH ANNIVERSARY TOUR
SATURDAY, JUNE 8, 2013
Time: 8:30 am – 5:00 pm
SPECIAL GUEST HISTORIAN GUIDE – CLARK “BUD” HALL

Bud Hall, the nation’s leading expert on the Battle of Brandy Station, will be conducting a uniquely rare walking tour of remote battlefield sites that have never before been visited by any tour group. Priceless anti-bellum homes and bucolic river fords are just a few of the historically significant and scenic sites that will be visited on this special tour. This is an exceptional Sesquicentennial event that you will not want to miss! All tour materials including maps and handouts will be provided. A bag lunch, hat, sunscreen, bug spray and walking shoes are suggested for this tour which will take place rain or shine. Come join us as we commemorate the 150th Anniversary of the Battle of Brandy Station!

To sign up for this special FREE tour of the largest cavalry engagement of the Civil War, accompanied by the leading authority on Brandy Station, click here and follow the registration instructions shown thereon.

For further details contact: Loudoun County Civil War Round Table.

Call for Papers

Transnationalism and Minority Cultures: The Mid-America Conference at the University of Oklahoma

Submissions for papers in the humanities, arts, and social sciences are invited for the 35th annual meeting of the Mid-America conference, dedicated to the interdisciplinary topic of “Transnationalism and Minority Cultures,” to be held at the University of Oklahoma, September 26th-28th, 2013.

Transnationalism transcends national boundaries and highlights the interconnectedness of people and places, of local communities and the global processes that link them. We welcome paper and panel submissions that respond to the conference theme, such as in the following approaches:

• Exile, Migration, and Diaspora Studies: transnational migration history; (trans)migrant and refugee experiences; histories of border-crossings; comparative diaspora studies

• Transnational Cultures: transnational print and digital production; world literature; Native American intercultural transfer; transnationalism in music, sound, and dance cultures; film; visual culture in transnational settings

• Theory; New Praxis: the transnational public sphere; transnational genocide/memory studies; transnationalism in educational studies; transnational geography

• Transnational Citizenship: transnationalism’s impact on indigenous and minority cultures; creative agency; subaltern cosmopolitanism; citizenship debates

• Critiques of Transnationalism: access to the cosmopolitan class; transnational history “versus” comparative history

• Transnational Communities: multinational / multiracial border communities; micro-histories of urban borderlands; “translocal” urban spaces; walls, borders, and boundaries

• Transnational Activism: Native American studies and social justice; transnationalism; sexuality; globalized queer activism; transnational social movements and religion; feminism & human rights discourses.

Faculty and graduate student abstracts on the conference theme are welcomed. Abstracts for individual papers should be 250 words. Panel proposals should contain a 250-word session description as well as three paper proposals and a moderator/commentator. All submissions should include a 1-page c.v. and audio-visual needs.

Deadline for submissions: April 30, 2013, via email to the conference organizer: Janet Ward, Professor of History, University of Oklahoma: janet.ward@ou.edu. Further information on the conference can be found on the conference website.

For those who have 55 minutes and 22 seconds to kill, here is my lecture last June at the Kansas City Public Library on Thomas J. Jackson.

Enjoy.

81st Annual Meeting of the Society for Military History
“Transformational Conflicts: War and its Legacy through History”
April 3-7, 2014
Kansas City, Missouri

The Society for Military History is pleased to call for papers for its 81st Annual Meeting, hosted by the Command and General Staff College Foundation, Inc., Liberty Memorial – National World War I Museum, Harry S Truman Presidential Museum and Library, and the Department of History, University of Kansas.

The year 2014 marks the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War. It is also the 150th anniversary of the third year of the American Civil War, 200th anniversary of seminal events in the Napoleonic Wars and War of 1812, and 300th anniversary of the end of the War of the Spanish Succession. The Society for Military History invites papers that examine these and other pivotal conflicts in terms of how they were conducted, their effects on the evolution of war, culture, and society and how historians and societies at large have remembered them. The program committee will consider paper and panel proposals on all aspects of military history, while especially encouraging submissions that reflect on this important theme.

Panel proposals must include a panel title, a one-page abstract summarizing the theme of the panel , one-page abstracts for each paper proposed, and one-page curricula vitae for each panelist (including the chair and commentator, with email addresses provided for all participants), as well as panelist contact information. Submissions of pre-organized panels are strongly encouraged and will be given preference in the selection process. Individual paper proposals are also welcome and must include a one-page abstract of the paper, one-page vita, and contact information, including email. If accepted, individual papers will be assigned by the program committee to an appropriate panel with a chair and a commentator.

Participants may present one paper, serve on a roundtable, chair a panel, or provide panel comments. They may not fill more than one of these roles during the conference, nor should they propose to do so to the Program Committee. Members who act as panel chairs only for a session may deliver a paper, serve on a roundtable, or offer comments in a different session. Members who serve as chair and commentator of a session may not present in another session.

All proposals must be submitted electronically to the program committee by October 1, 2013. The address is: smh2014kansascity@gmail.com. All presenters, chairs, and commentators must be members of the Society for Military History by December 31, 2013.

The meeting will be held at the Westin Crown Center Hotel in Kansas City. It is located right next to the Liberty Memorial-National World War I Museum and accessible to the many sites in the greater Kansas City area that are of importance to the military history of the United States. Participants can reach the meeting site via hotel shuttle and cab from the Kansas City International Airport (MCI).

On 14-15 March, I will be in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, participating in a three-day conference on “The Future of Civil War History: Looking Beyond the 150th”. (The program can be found here.) My former comrade in Chancellorsville staff riding Christian Keller and I will be leading a few dozen participants around the Gettysburg Battlefield for about two-and-a-half hours in what is billed as “Rethinking the Staff Ride Model” before I high-tail it down to DC to catch a flight to New Orleans so I can participate in the Annual Meeting of the Society for Military History.

A look through the program for the Gettysburg conference, though, has raised a couple of questions in my mind. The session of the program on the evening of 14 March is billed as “Popular Misconceptions about Civil War Military History”. Other sessions are dedicated to such questions/issues as How Can Civil War Sites Offer a Usable Past during a Time of War? Strategies in Educational Programming, Exploring Violence in the Classroom and in a Museum Setting, and Building a Dialogue among Museum Professionals, Academics, and Civil War Re-enactors. These matters and others addressed at the conference are naturally of interest to those of us who work in the professional military education system, teaching today’s makers of military history–who also happen to be perhaps the Civil War’s most committed audiences of scholars and students. Thus, one would think that our perspectives would as a matter of course be considered of value and interest to anyone else wrestling with these issues.

And yet, of all the participants in the program, only Chris (who teaches at the Army War College in Carlisle) and myself, are members of the professional military education system, which invariably raises the following questions:

1. What place do those of us who work in professional military education, our perspectives, and our real and potential contributions as educators and scholars have in the “future of Civil War history”?

2. Why, if this program is any indication of where the thinking of those who presume to be determining the “future of Civil War history” rests, does the answer to the first question appear to be “rather marginal”?

The floor is open. If you do not have answers to these questions now, perhaps someone at the opening session on Thursday afternoon (which I expect to attend) will.

If the reviews here are any indication, my talk to the Puget Sound Civil War Round Table a few weeks ago seems to have gone over well with the audience.  (I certainly had a good time with its members.)  Evidently, though, my unwillingness to play the game of ranking the Army of Northeastern Virginia–Army of the Potomac-Army of Virginia commanders did not go gone over well with one member.

I, of course, understand this.  Both because I want to make my audience happy by answering their questions and because such exercises can be a lot of fun. Still, this is the sort of question that I am reticent to answer due to a reluctance to engage in exercises that can lead (especially given the time constraints one faces during the Q & A session that follows a lecture) to oversimplified analysis when the true reason we should study history is to understand historic actors and appreciate the complexity of events. Indeed, if there is one thing I have strove to push back against in my scholarship and teaching it is against oversimplified judgments about individuals and events–in other words, what Mark has labeled the “what fools they were” school of military history.  (And, yes, I am aware of the irony of this coming from a guy who recently published an article on “Civil War Generals We Love to Hate”.  I have pointed out that the purpose of my piece was to explain why the particular generals in question are hated, not say it was justified, though I can see how I might not have been as clear on that as I could and should have been.)

To illustrate the complexity of “grading” generals, take for instance what appears on the surface to be a simple question:  Was Grant a better general than McClellan?  The first response, naturally, is to say . . . absolutely!   Look who Lee surrendered to!   But, of course, there is the immensely inconvenient fact that, to get to the same place McClellan had in 1862, east of Richmond on the James River, fighting an Army of Northern Virginia that did not have James Longstreet or JEB Stuart for most of the campaign (and no Stonewall Jackson at all), which was symptomatic of the fact that two years of hard fighting had significantly dulled the strength and vigor of Lee’s army by May 1864, Grant pretty much wrecked the Army of the Potomac.   And, of course, one searches in vain for a Cold Harbor or Crater on McClellan’s military resume.

So move Grant down in the rankings and McClellan up, right?   Well . . .  wait a minute, there are certainly extenuating circumstances in Grant’s case (which Grant fanboys, of course, label “excuses” when presented on behalf of anyone else)–not the least being that one can easily imagine ways that having Longstreet, Stuart, and/or Jackson on hand in 1864 might have actually worked to Grant’s benefit!  After all, anyone familiar with Longstreet’s performance at Seven Pines and Jackson’s conduct during the Seven Days Battles, can certainly make a case that their presence was to McClellan’s benefit in those instances.   They certainly did not prevent Lee from getting his army blasted to pieces at Malvern Hill.

Then, there is the question of how much weight should be given to the degree to which a general contributed to the cancerous command climate in the Eastern armies (caveating, of course, that the real villains in the story resided in Washington).  How much does malignant conduct in this regard, in the case of Hooker, balance against the very real ability he demonstrated as an operational commander?   And what makes for a good tactical commander in the Civil War besides the good fortune to fight on the defensive? (Of course, good fortune being something any successful general has–not exactly something that goes down well in a society that possesses an active management guru industry. Indeed, Napoleon is supposed to have asked only one thing of a general–that he be lucky.)  Should we view Pope as a victim of the Eastern command climate, or a villain in the story of its poisoning?   Burnside, of course, very clearly was a victim of the poisonous command climate.  In this light, and given the extremely problematic operational problem he faced in December 1862, can we really consider his time in command a fair test of his–or anybody’s–ability?   And was Fredericksburg really a defeat for the Union?  By what measure?  If a Union defeat, why did Lee declare himself “depressed” afterward?

In the end, though, I am willing to play the game on one point.  There really is no question who the best commander of the Union armies in the East, and indeed the entire Civil War, was (although a continuous stream of books and his fans insist on insisting there is) . . . Grant.  (What, you thought I was going to say Ben Butler?)   Lee was a great commander, but what sets Grant apart is the fact that he demonstrated the ability to successfully negotiate the Washington game and conduct joint operations–two things Lee never had to do.

Few things cooler in this world than being, like Hooker’s men at Chattanooga, above the clouds, watching the sunset to the west. Check out this view looking west from near the top of the Skyline Chair at Stevens Pass Ski Area shortly after a cloud descended on the lower 900 or so vertical feet of the mountain but left the top 300 or so feet crystal clear in a way that my camera does not do justice to.  

BTW, Stevens Pass is not, as some people believe, named for first Washington territorial governor and Civil War general Isaac Ingalls Stevens, but John F. Stevens, a late nineteenth/early twentieth-century railroad engineer, who also served awhile as chief engineer on the Panama Canal. Here is a view of the pass, where US 2 passes through the mountains, from the Seventh Heaven lift at Stevens Pass Ski Area:

I also had a great time with the good folks who belong to the Puget Sound Civil War Round Table–with a caveat, which I will address in a future post.

You think John Bell Hood was bad at Franklin?

Inside the Battle of Hoth
By Spencer Ackerman

How did the Galactic Empire ever cement its hold on the Star Wars Universe? The war machine built by Emperor Palpatine and run by Darth Vader is a spectacularly bad fighting force, as evidenced by all of the pieces of Death Star littering space. But of all the Empire’s failures, none is a more spectacular military fiasco than the Battle of Hoth at the beginning of The Empire Strikes Back.

From a military perspective, Hoth should have been a total debacle for the Rebel Alliance. Overconfident that they can evade Imperial surveillance, they hole up on unforgiving frigid terrain at the far end of the cosmos. Huddled into the lone Echo Base are all their major players: politically crucial Princess Leia; ace pilot Han Solo; and their game-changer, Luke Skywalker, who isn’t even a Jedi yet.

The defenses the Alliance constructed on Hoth could not be more favorable to Vader if the villain constructed them himself. The single Rebel base (!) is defended by a few artillery pieces on its north slope, protecting its main power generator. An ion cannon is its main anti-aircraft/spacecraft defense. Its outermost perimeter defense is an energy shield that can deflect Imperial laser bombardment. But the shield has two huge flaws: It can’t stop an Imperial landing force from entering the atmosphere, and it can only open in a discrete place for a limited time so the Rebels’ Ion Cannon can protect an evacuation. In essence, the Rebels built a shield that can’t keep an invader out and complicates their own escape.

The entire story can be found here.

The program for the 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for Military History, which is being held on 14-16 March 2013, in New Orleans, LA, and sponsored by the Center for the Study of War and Society at The University of Southern Mississippi, with the National World War II Museum and Southeastern Louisiana University, has recently been posted.

Not much this year, unfortunately, to interest the Civil War enthusiast. I saw only one session dedicated to the subject, which is definitely odd considering this is the 150th anniversary of not a few events of note in the military history of the Civil War. No doubt this is in large part due to a program on the 150th at Gettysburg College that is running the same weekend. Still, there will once again be a decent contingent of Civil War historians in attendance, including George Rable, Susannah Ural, and Carol Reardon. As for me, I will be chairing a panel on “Alcohol and Drugs in Three Wars: The Great War, Korea , and Vietnam”.

Further information about the meeting, including the program and logistics, can be found here.

This, of course, is the 150th anniversary of a truly tumultous week in the history of the Army of the Potomac; one that generated the following documents:

GENERAL ORDERS, HDQRS. ARMY OF THE POTOMAC
January 23, 1863.

I. General Joseph Hooker, major-general of volunteers and brigadier-general U. S. Army, having been guilty of unjust and unnecessary criticisms of the actions of his superior officers, and of the authorities, and having, by the general tone of his conversation, endeavored to create distrust in the minds of officers who have associated with him, and having, by omissions and otherwise, made reports and statements which were calculated to create incorrect impressions, and for habitually speaking in disparaging terms of other officers, is hereby dismissed from the service of the United States as a man unfit to hold an important commission during a crisis like the present, when so much patience, charity, confidence, consideration, and patriotism are due from every soldier, in the field. This order is issued subject to the approval of the President of the United States.

II. Brigadier General W. T. H. Brooks, commanding First Division, Sixth Army Corps, for complaining of the policy of the Government, and for using language tending to demoralize his command, is, subject to the approval of the President, dismissed from the military service of the United States.

III. Brigadier General John Newton, commanding Third Division, Sixth Army Corps, and Brigadier General John Cochrane, commanding First Brigade, Third Division, Sixth Army Corps, for going to the President of the United States with criticisms upon the plans of their commanding officer, are, subject to the approval of the President, dismissed from the military service of the United States.

IV. It being evident that the following named officers can be of no further service to this army, they are hereby relieved from duty, and will report, in person, without delay, to the Adjutant-General, U. S. Army: Major General W. B. Franklin, commanding left grand division; Major General W. F. Smith, commanding Sixth Corps; Brigadier General Samuel D. Sturgis, commanding Second Division, Ninth Corps; Brigadier General Edward Ferrero, commanding Second Brigade, Second Division, Ninth Army Corps; Brigadier General John Cochrane, commanding First Brigade, Third Division, Sixth Corps; Lieutenant Colonel J. H. Taylor, assistant adjutant-general, right grand division

By command of Major General A. E. Burnside:

LEWIS RICHMOND,
Assistant Adjutant-General.

U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 70 vols. in 128 parts (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1880-1901), series 1, vol. 21, part 1: 998-99.

Though William Franklin’s and Baldy Smith’s service in the Army of the Potomac would soon come to an end, President Abraham Lincoln did not approve these orders. Nor did he punish “Fighting Joe” for his efforts to undermine his senior officers–which had in fact begun during George McClellan’s tenure in command. Rather, Lincoln did just the opposite, giving Hooker command of the Army of the Potomac. That was followed by this famous letter:

Executive Mansion,
Washington, January 26, 1863.

Major General Hooker:

I have placed you at the head of the Army of the Potomac. Of course I have done this upon what appear to me to be sufficient reasons. And yet I think it best for you to know that there are some things in regard to which, I am not quite satisfied with you. I believe you to be a brave and a skilful soldier, which, of course, I like. I also believe you do not mix politics with your profession, in which you are right. You have confidence in yourself, which is a valuable, if not an indispensable quality. You are ambitious, which, within reasonable bounds, does good rather than harm. But I think that during Gen. Burnside’s command of the Army, you have taken counsel of your ambition, and thwarted him as much as you could, in which you did a great wrong to the country, and to a most meritorious and honorable brother officer. I have heard, in such way as to believe it, of your recently saying that both the Army and the Government needed a Dictator. Of course it was not for this, but in spite of it, that I have given you the command. Only those generals who gain successes, can set up dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship. The government will support you to the utmost of it’s ability, which is neither more nor less than it has done and will do for all commanders. I much fear that the spirit which you have aided to infuse into the Army, of criticising their Commander, and withholding confidence from him, will now turn upon you. I shall assist you as far as I can, to put it down. Neither you, nor Napoleon, if he were alive again, could get any good out of an army, while such a spirit prevails in it.

And now, beware of rashness. Beware of rashness, but with energy, and sleepless vigilance, go forward, and give us victories.

Yours very truly,
A. LINCOLN

Roy P. Basler, ed. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953-55), vol. 6: 78-79.

In light of the circumstances, it is suprising that there is nowhere in the historical record anyone writing a letter to Lincoln at the time to this effect:

Dear Mr. President:

In light of your record of supporting officers who have worked to undermine their superiors over the past year and a half–from George McClellan in his dealings with Winfield Scott the previous fall to the circumstances under which the corps were created and their commanders appointed in the Army of the Potomac last March to the ongoing machinations of John McClernand, who the heck are you to bemoan the existence of and place responsibility elsewhere for the fact that such a “spirit” prevails in your army “of criticising their Commander, and withholding confidence from him”?

Perhaps, in surveying the history of the Army of the Potomac and its notoriously bad command climate, there is far more cause to be “not quite satisfied with you”?

Your obedient servant . . .

This event is co-sponsored by the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College Foundation. The other talks in the Kansas City Public Library’s Sesquicentennial Series this year will be:

GRANT’S MASTERPIECE: THE CAMPAIGN FOR VICKSBURG
Presented by Dr. Gregory Hospodor
Thursday, April 18

AFRICAN-AMERICAN TROOPS IN THE CIVIL WAR
Presented by Dr. Terry L. Beckenbaugh
Thursday, July 18

THE SACK OF LAWRENCE AND THE GUERILLA WAR
Presented by Dr. Randy Mullis
Wednesday, August 21

GETTYSBURG: THE MOST IMPORTANT EVENT OF 1863?
Featuring a roundtable of historians
Tuesday, November 19

And, hey, if you live on the West Coast and just can’t make it to Kansas City next week, I will be in Seattle next month speaking to the Puget Sound Civil War Round Table.

And maybe not . . . But it was pretty cool to see this the other day at the Naval War College:

Next week, I will be briefly leaving the nice little Army schoolhouse William T. Sherman established here on the banks of the Missouri River and traveling to Newport, Rhode Island, to get immersed in what Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson once referred to as “a dim religious world in which Neptune was God, Mahan his prophet, and the United States Navy the only true Church.” There I will be teaching a two-hour seminar that is part of a course a former West Point colleague, Jon Scott Logel, who is now now on the staff of the Naval War College, is in charge of. The subject of the seminar is “Grant in Command”, which is described thusly:

After Vicksburg and Chattanooga, Grant took command of the entire Union Army. Lincoln depended on Grant to develop and execute a strategy that could defeat the Confederacy in 1864. This lesson examines how Grant fought his strategy in Virginia and leveraged Sherman’s forces to end the rebellion in the spring of 1865. Students will assess the merits of Grant as strategist and as a leader of the U.S. Army in war.

The assigned reading consists of about 160 pages from Grant’s memoirs that cover the last two years of the war. Since this will naturally involve covering Grant’s strategy for 1864, I have asked that the students also read the following January 1864 letter Grant wrote to Halleck.

Hdqrs. Military Division of the Mississippi
Nashville, Tenn., January 19, 1864.

Major General H. W. HALLECK,
General-in-Chief of the Army, Washington, D. C.:

GENERAL: I would respectfully suggest whether an abandonment of all previously attempted lines to Richmond is not advisable, and in lieu of these one be taken farther south. I would suggest Raleigh, N. C., as the objective point and Suffolk as the starting point. Raleigh once secured, I would make New Berne the base of supplies until Wilmington is secured.

A moving force of 60,000 men would probably be required to start on such an expedition. This force would not have to be increased unless Lee should withdraw from his present position. In that case the necessity for so large a force on the Potomac would not exist. A force moving from Suffolk would destroy first all the roads about Weldon, or even as far north as Hicksford. From Weldon to Raleigh they would scarcely meet with serious opposition. Once there, the most interior line of railway still left to the enemy, in fact the only one they would then have, would be so threatened as to force him to use a large portion of his army in guarding it. This would virtually force an evacuation of Virginia and indirectly of East Tennessee. It would throw our armies into new fields, where they could partially live upon the country and would reduce the stores of the enemy. It would cause thousands of the North Carolina troops to desert and return to their homes. It would give us possession of many negroes who are now indirectly aiding the rebellion. It would draw the enemy from campaigns of their own choosing, and for which they are prepared, to new lines of operations never expected to become necessary. It would effectually blockade Wilmington, the port now of more value to the enemy than all the balance of their sea-coast. It would enable operations to commence at once by removing the war to a more southern climate, instead of months of inactivity in winter quarters.

Other advantages might be cited which would be likely to grow out of this plan, but these are enough. From your better opportunities of studying the country and the armies that would be involved in this plan, you will be better able to judge of the practicability of it than I possibly can. I have written this in accordance with what I understand to be an invitation from you to express my views about military operations, and not to insist that any plan of mine should be carried out. Whatever course is agreed upon, I shall always believe is at least intended for the best, and until fully tested will hope to have it prove so.

I am, general, very respectfully, your obedient servant,

U. S. GRANT,
Major-General

U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. 70 volumes in 128 parts. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1880-1901), series 1, vol.33: 394-95.

This document—as is the letter from Halleck laying out the Lincoln administration’s objections to the ideas contained in it—must figure prominently in any effort to understand or explain Grant’s thinking as he ascended to the office of general-in-chief and assumed responsibility for formulating Union strategy. Indeed, to revisit an argument I made over five years ago in an essay on Grant scholarship, it is astounding to me that so many works published since 1983 on Grant and his generalship neglect the subject. “Undoubtedly,” I argued, “the main explanation for the neglect of this document is the fact that Grant did not mention it in his memoirs. . . . Still, this is no excuse for ignoring a document that is readily accessible in both the Papers of Ulysses S. Grant and Official Records.”

Why 1983? Aside from the dismissive treatment of it in works by Bruce Catton and T. Harry Williams, it was not really until the appearance of Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones’s How the North Won that Grant’s letter seems to have received the attention and degree of sophisticated analysis it deserved. Since then, Brooks Simpson has followed in Hattaway and Jones’s footsteps to make serious consideration of this document a critical part of his analysis of Grant’s generalship. Yet, it seems that even though nearly thirty years have passed since the publication of How the North Won, Simpson remains rare in this respect among students of Grant’s generalship—though I like to think I have also given the letter appropriate attention in my own work on Grant and his relationship with Meade.

Of course, this is just further evidence of How the North Won’s status as one of the great books in the field people say they recognize, but have not taken the time to read with the care it requires and deserves.

Washington Times, 31 December 2012