Civil Warriors

Mark Snell and the folks at the George Tyler Moore Center for the Study of the Civil War have finished putting together the program for their annual seminar at Shepherdstown University.  It will run 21-24 June 2007, and the theme is “‘Mystic Chords of Memory’: How Americans Have Remembered and Commemorated the Civil War.”

As always, Mark has put together a first-rate line-up of speakers and activities.  The scholar-in-residence this year will be John M. Coski of the Museum of the Confederacy, the author of the much-acclaimed Confederate Battle Flag: America’s Most Embattled Emblem.  Other speakers will be award-winning author, Penn State professor, and Civil War History editor William Blair; Civil War Memory blogger and Crater student Kevin M. Levin; and G. Kurt Piehler, who directs the Center for the Study of War and Society at the University of Tennessee.  The highlight of these programs is always the various tours the GTM Center puts together, which last year went to VMI and USNA.  This year the seminar will go to Washington, D.C. to study how memory of the Civil War is reflected in the various memorials and monuments.  In addition, Tom Clemens will be leading a tour of Antietam, which in itself is worth the admission price.

Mark and his staff have been doing this seminar for several years and have refined their skills as hosts to a fine point–and you can’t ask for a better location than Shepherdstown.  More information is available here: http://www.shepherd.edu/gtmcweb/seminars.htm

George H. Thomas remains one of the most puzzling figures in the pantheon of Civil War generals. In my opinion, he was a commander of unquestioned ability, but he wasn’t always the easiest person with whom to work, and at times that contributed to the evolution of complicated command relationships. It doesn’t help that there is a shortage of personal correspondence: biographers, I’d argue, have found him a tough subject.

But there’s the historical George H. Thomas, and then there’s the debate over George H. Thomas. The two all too often get intertwined and confused. Simply put, over the years Thomas has attracted ardent admirers who are fiercely protective of their subject’s reputation and who tend to disparage Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman (and their biographers) as determined to deprive Thomas of his just due, which is quite substantial, if one believes his supporters. Although Thomas died in 1870 (while composing an ardent defense of his generalship), he had a cadre of loyal supporters in the Army of the Cumberland, and they worked hard to establish this dynamic; in turn, many Grant and Sherman biographers and other military historians, although usually not interested in disparaging Thomas’s reputation, have not always embraced the high estimate of him shared by his most ardent and uncompromising supporters. Even among those writers, there’s a high regard for Thomas, but not an uncritical one: oddly enough, the result can be a bitterness one does not see in debates over George McClellan or James Longstreet as the various contending factions debate over whether Thomas was pretty good, very good, very, very good, great, or the greatest.

Joseph Harsh once entitled an interesting and telling article on George B. McClellan “On the McClellan Go Round.” I’m not sure what would be the equivalent image for writings on Thomas, although a flawed pendulum might work. However, what I sense here is that we’re stuck in a rut shaped primarily by scholars responding to other scholars, much as I believe that a large part of Alan Nolan’s Lee Considered was really about the people who wrote about Lee and not Lee himself.

I say this because I see that we are about to embark on another round of the discussion, contained in this essay about Thomas, an interview with author Ernest B. Furgurson, and a sidebar featuring two contributors to this blog.

There is only one thing in Furgurson’s article that drew my attention (I’ve heard the rest before, and there’s nothing new in the article to anyone who’s familiar with Thomas scholarship). Of the assault on Missionary Ridge he says:

Thomas waited for Grant’s order to advance. When it came, Thomas took his time studying the crest with his binoculars, then sent his troops ahead with orders to occupy only the first line of the Confederate works. They did so in fine style—and then, seeing that they were exposed to fire from above, kept going. Thomas was surprised and Grant angry, demanding “Who ordered those men up the hill?” No one had. The troops plunged ahead, pressing on against heavy fire, struggling up the steep slope and jubilantly planting their flag on the heights for all to see.

Affixing responsibility upon Thomas for directing that the assault would stop at the base of Missionary Ridge will infuriate Thomas’s most ardent defenders. And make no mistake, they are out there. I recall a conference outside Fredericksburg where Steve Woodworth and I participated, and where the late Thomas Buell spoke on Thomas. If you’ve read Buell’s The Warrior Generals, you’ll know that Buell loves Thomas and does not think too highly of Grant. At last, in exasperation, a member of the audience raised his hand and asked Buell whether he could think of any mistakes that Thomas had ever made. After pausing, Buell replied that he could not. It was the answer he was born to make, I guess.

People have been asking whether it’s time for a new biography of Thomas. Some people have asked me to write one. I’ve declined to do so, because I would have to find a way to break out of what’s become a rather formulaic and predictable set of controversies. Having read this history before, I fear we are again doomed to repeat it.

It won’t be put better than Galloway does below.

Walter Reed Hospital Scandal is ‘The Last Straw’
By Joseph L. Galloway

(February 21, 2007) — There’s a great deal more to supporting our troops than sticking a $2 yellow ribbon magnet made in China on your SUV. There’s a great deal more to it than making “Support Our Troops” a phrase that every politician feels obliged to utter in every speech, no matter how banal the topic or craven the purpose. This week, we were treated to new revelations of just how fraudulent and shallow and meaningless “Support Our Troops” is on the lips of those in charge of spending the half a trillion dollars of taxpayer’s money that the Pentagon eats every year.

The Washington Post published a probe, complete with photographs, revealing that for every in-patient who’s getting the best medical treatment that money can buy at the main hospital at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, there are out-patients warehoused in quarters unfit for human habitation. Some of the military outpatients are stuck on the Walter Reed campus, a couple of miles from the White House and the Capitol, for as long as 12 months. They’ve been living in rat and roach-infested rooms, some of which are coated in black mold. There was outrage and disgust and raw anger at this callous, cruel treatment of those who have the greatest claim not only on our sympathies, but also on the public purse.

Who among the smiling politicians who regularly troop over to the main hospital at Walter Reed for photo-op visits with those who’ve come home grievously wounded from the wars the politicians started have bothered to go the extra quarter-mile to see the unseen majority with their rats and roaches? Not one, it would seem, since none among them have admitted to knowing that there was a problem, much less doing something about it before the reporters blew the whistle.

(Continued)

Click here for a link to the bill.

One of the things I enjoy most about my job is the opportunity to teach undergraduates about American history. I teach courses in war and American society, the American Presidency, and the Civil War and Reconstruction; at ASU I’ve also taught on the American Revolution and the Early Republic, although other colleagues have taken up those courses. I won’t even go into the broad number of courses I taught at Wofford College, except to say that I found delightful the student evaluation praising me for my expertise on the Enlightenment and that, like fellow blogger Kevin Levin, I taught women’s history.

As a teacher I believe that one of my primary responsibilities is to teach critical thinking and learning skills. Another goal is to teach my students to construct good arguments making skilled use of evidence and reason. A third goal is to show students ways in which an understanding of the past can shed light on the present by setting the present in the context of the past. These goals are of equal importance to me.

Thus I found this notion disturbing.

Let me be painfully clear in what I find troubling about the proposal. I do not believe that professors in class should explicitly support or oppose candidates or support or oppose legislation and litigation. Nor am I interested in opposing military recruiting on campus. The Pandora’s Box, however, is to be found in the fourth clause, because it is so clearly subject to abuse.

If, for example, I highlight contradictions in political arguments (say, the issue of personal military service for politicians who attack the patriotism of opponents, including those with documented records of military service), is that an observation or an act of advocacy? If I highlight the moral case against slavery, is that taking just one side (never mind that I review the proslavery argument as well). If I point out that people who claim to oppose illegal immigration because illegal immigrants take jobs away from US citizens nevertheless turn a blind eye to employing companies that employ illegal immigrants for tasks such as construction and landscaping, is that getting involved in partisan controversy? Is suggesting the inherently political nature of Supreme Court decisions somehow wrong?

It is enough to say that my students don’t know my political affiliation because they have debated it and asked me about it (in 2000 two students walked up to me after class: the Republican student asked whether I was a Democrat, while the Democratic student asked whether I was a Republican, so that should give you some idea of what goes on in my class). Students ask me all the time what I think about this or that, and I’m very careful in my answers. I’ve been the token liberal in organizations that are heavily conservative and the token conservative in organizations that are heavily liberal. But you can see how one unhappy student who feels slighted can raise quite a ruckus.

Let me put it this way: if you don’t care to be offended, never set foot on a university campus. Everyone can find something offensive, especially if they are looking for it. That’s what the free exchange of ideas is about. I don’t care for those professors who use their time in the classroom to engage in outright political advocacy for candidates, legislation, or litigation, but we might be well advised to ponder just how much we as Americans are willing to tolerate the chilling effect of such legislation at home at the same time we promote freedom of thought and expression abroad.

“With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan” – Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, 4 March 1865

If there is anyone who follows this blog that is unaware of the recent report in the Washington Post on the absolutely shameful conditions some of those who have borne the current battle have had to endure, here is the opening paragraph and a link to the full story.

Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, February 18, 2007; Page A01

Behind the door of Army Spec. Jeremy Duncan’s room, part of the wall is torn and hangs in the air, weighted down with black mold. When the wounded combat engineer stands in his shower and looks up, he can see the bathtub on the floor above through a rotted hole. The entire building, constructed between the world wars, often smells like greasy carry-out. Signs of neglect are everywhere: mouse droppings, belly-up cockroaches, stained carpets, cheap mattresses.

It would be impossible to narrate the ride without at least hinting at the answers to these questions, but the authors are so complete and even-handed in their approach that the case is never cut and dried.  They devote three whole chapters to a fascinating account of the various arguments and counterarguments used to condemn or rehabilitate Stuart before finally offering a compelling assessment of their own.  The book’s title — Plenty of Blame to Go Around — suggests the direction of their conclusions.  It also indicates that the authors have chosen what John Keegan has termed the “accusatorial” approach to military history.  Historians who employ this method, he writes, “implicitly put someone or something — a general or an army — in the dock, charge him or it with a crime — defeat if a friend, victory if an enemy — and marshal the evidence to show his or its responsibility.”

In his classic work, The Face of Battle, Keegan makes the case for a different, “inquisitorial” approach that “would allow the historian . . . to discuss battles not necessarily as conflicts for a decision, but as value-free events — for it is as events that they appear to many participants and to most non-combatant spectators — and if one began from their unpartisan stance one might well hit on a clearer view of what real significance it was that a battle held.”   It sounds quite enlightened.  Yet in much of his subsequent work, Keegan himself adheres to the “accusatorial” approach, which suggests both its value to the military historian and the difficulty of avoiding it.  In any event, controversy drenches Stuart’s ride so thoroughly that to eschew the accusatorial approach would be to miss much of the operation’s significance.

What is needed, then (to adjust Keegan’s metaphor a bit), is something akin to an investigative commission, one that seeks to apportion responsibility but which does so judiciously.  Wittenberg and Petruzzi know their subject so well, and are so sensitive to the complexities of waging a Civil War operation, that while unafraid to judge, they do so with an impressive degree of deliberation.  And their eventual apportionment of “blame” is anything but a scattershot, plague-on-all-your-houses affair.  It is measured, fair-minded, and insightful.

Plenty of Blame to Go Around is unabashedly traditional in its approach to military history.  That is no bad thing.  Certainly it is indispensable for military historians (whether professionals like myself or gifted amateurs like Wittenberg and Petruzzi) to integrate their chosen subject matter into general history, to avoid insularity, and to place themselves fully in conversation with other fields.  But this involves a broadening of military history, not a dilution of it.  We lose rather than gain if we lose sight of the field’s traditional concerns.  Victorian ideas of manliness, to take a case at random, undoubtedly played a significant role in shaping Stuart’s ride.  They enhanced or detracted from command relationships according to how well officers affirmed or impeached the masculinity of their peers.  They affected combat motivation:  soldiers fought in no small measure so as to preserve their reputation as a man among men.  But the participants in Stuart’s ride did not consciously think in these terms, and to focus on such considerations to the exclusion of what they did think about — time-space calculations, the water level at crucial fords, the availability of food and forage, the maintenance of horses, the dangers of combat, the care of the wounded, the disposal of the dead — would be to distort an event one is supposedly trying to understand.  Here, then, is Stuart’s ride as the troopers on both sides would recognize it, well researched, vividly written, and shrewdly argued. It is, in short, as good an account of the ride as we are likely to get.

Part 1 – Part 2

About a year ago, Eric Wittenberg asked me to write the foreword to his new book, co-written with David Petruzzi, entitled Plenty of Blame to Go Around: Jeb Stuart’s Controversial Ride to Gettysburg. It was sort of a rush job because the historian they’d originally approached had backed out at the last minute. I knocked it out over the course of a couple of days. I liked the result, though I confess I was surprised when the publisher, Savas Beatie, failed to place my name on the book cover. The entire point of having a foreword is to add the imprimatur of an established historian; it doesn’t do much good when the reader doesn’t know the foreword exists until he opens the book; and in this case he doesn’t know I wrote it until he finishes the foreword, since my name comes only at its end. Maybe the paperback edition will redress this. I don’t know.

The foreword itself was easy to write because the book is so good. And with permission of the publisher, I reprint it here in two parts:

On the evening of May 12, 1864, Major General James Ewell Brown Stuart succumbed to a gunshot wound received the previous day in a sharp cavalry fight at Yellow Tavern, a few miles outside the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia. Although barely thirty-one years old at the time of his death, Stuart was one of the South’s paladins, a living legend. More to the point, in a month in which Union armies seemed to pressure Virginia on every side, he was one of General Robert E. Lee’s most prized subordinates. Lee received a dispatch bearing news of Stuart’s injury while struggling to stave off a determined enemy attack at Spotsylvania Court House. A nearby captain watched as the Confederate chieftain folded the paper and said slowly, “General Stuart has been mortally wounded: a most valuable and able officer.” He paused a moment, added, “He never brought me a piece of false information” — and turned away so that those around him could not read the depth of his emotions. The captain thought no higher praise “could fall from the lips of the commanding general touching his Chief of Cavalry.”

What no one could decently say in such an hour, but which few in the Army of Northern Virginia ever forgot, was that the previous summer the “valuable and able” Stuart had left Lee bereft of any information, false or otherwise, as the army had moved toward its great collision with the Union Army of the Potomac at Gettysburg. Many blamed Stuart for the bitter defeat that ensued. Lee’s aide, Colonel Charles Marshall, went so far as to suggest that Stuart should have been court-martialed, even shot. Others, notably Major John S. Mosby, the famed partisan leader, defended Stuart with equal passion. In the decades that followed, every Confederate who lived through those days joined Stuart in death, but the argument went on. It persists to this day.

(Continued)

Why can’t folks tell the difference between casualties and dead?

 See this article on Perryville.

I think a 747 crashing every 17 minutes for five hours would result in more than (say about) 1,400 dead.  Or is it that we like our battles bloody and we like to inflate the numbers of dead? 

Thanks to Dimitri. 

This post is written in response by one of our readers to an earlier post and a query from one of my colleagues at the staff college. The latter asked me about whether I thought there was any validity to the parallels some commentators have been drawing between Grant’s assumption of command in 1864 and David Petraeus’s assumption of command in Iraq.

Because I like my job, I have to be careful here, but feel secure enough to say that of all the bad attempts to draw historical analogies inspired by the situation in Mess-o-potamia, this one can hardly be considered the worst. (My candidate for that honor would be the president’s belief that he is a latter-day Harry Truman. There are not enough megabytes in the entire blogosphere to do even begin to do justice to everything that is wrong with THAT analogy.) Still, the Grant-Petraeus analogy seems pretty weak to me.

Where to begin? First, I guess would be this thing called context regarding the time, place, and nature of the two wars, which it would take many, many postings to do justice to. Another would be the fact that Grant was made general-in-chief of all the Union armies, while Petraeus is simply becoming a theater commander. Finally, Grant took command after significant progress had been made in subduing the rebellion, while it is not unreasonable to ask whether we are anywhere near as close to achieving our war goals—whatever those may be—as the North was in 1864. If one believes the situation in Iraq is truly hopeless, a closer analogy would be with Joe Johnston’s restoration to command in the Carolinas in 1865. Alternately, one might draw a parallel between some Reconstruction commanders, such as Hancock when he was sent to Louisiana to replace Sheridan when the president believed the latter was applying too heavy a hand. Obviously, there are many more points that can be made on this point, and I hope to see some in response postings. It will make for a good discussion.

As to the objections to Petraeus in particular voiced in a response to an earlier posting; all I can say is give the guy a chance. He is clearly a very smart and accomplished officer, and in the course of my admittedly very limited interaction with the general here at Fort Leavenworth I was pretty impressed by him. Of course, I have heard the “golden boy”/Courtney Massengale/”water walker” criticisms, but suspect they provide more insight into the person voicing those criticisms than they do into Petraeus and his prospects for success. And as to J.R. Clark’s painting Petraeus as the successor to a series of “Airborne Mafia” officers who supposedly led the Army astray, of the officers he proclaims part of that mafia, my impression is that only Taylor and Westmoreland were really closely associated with airborne infantry. Starry was an armor guy (if there is a “stomp ‘em to death” mentality anywhere I would suspect it would be in that branch rather than the airborne infantry) while DePuy was an infantryman. Not sure about Schwarzkopf.

Mr. Clark’s remark that he thought we learned the lessons of counterinsurgency in Vietnam has much wisdom to it though. The Army in fact made a determined effort not to learn the lessons of counterinsurgency in the aftermath of Vietnam, other than “never again”. So the army was rebuilt to think and fight in terms of high intensity conventional warfare against the Soviets. After the Soviet Union fell and the victory in the 1991 Gulf War, instead of rethinking its outlook, the Army spent much of its time resisting and resenting the Clinton administration because it wanted the Army to undertake missions that were counter to its institutional self-image (invoking the “never again” inspired Powell Doctrine in doing so) and appointed folks like Shinseki to reform the Army in line with that vision. It has taken the situation in Iraq for the Army to really begin thinking seriously about reorienting itself into the counterinsurgency force the post-Cold War world needs, and few people have been giving this more thought than Petraeus. Give the guy a chance. One thing he has going for him is the fact that no one in the press is holding out expectations of instant success the way they did for Grant in 1864.

Officers With PhDs Advising War Effort

By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 5, 2007; A01

Gen. David H. Petraeus, the new U.S. commander in Iraq, is assembling a small band of warrior-intellectuals — including a quirky Australian anthropologist, a Princeton economist who is the son of a former U.S. attorney general and a military expert on the Vietnam War sharply critical of its top commanders — in an eleventh-hour effort to reverse the downward trend in the Iraq war.

Army officers tend to refer to the group as “Petraeus guys.” They are smart colonels who have been noticed by Petraeus, and who make up one of the most selective clubs in the world: military officers with doctorates from top-flight universities and combat experience in Iraq.

Essentially, the Army is turning the war over to its dissidents, who have criticized the way the service has operated there the past three years, and is letting them try to wage the war their way.

“Their role is crucial if we are to reverse the effects of four years of conventional mind-set fighting an unconventional war,” said a Special Forces colonel who knows some of the officers.

But there is widespread skepticism that even this unusual group, with its specialized knowledge of counterinsurgency methods, will be able to win the battle of Baghdad.

“Petraeus’s ‘brain trust’ is an impressive bunch, but I think it’s too late to salvage success in Iraq,” said a professor at a military war college, who said he thinks that the general will still not have sufficient troops to implement a genuine counterinsurgency strategy and that the United States really has no solution for the sectarian violence tearing apart Iraq.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/04/AR2007020401196.html

The 2007 SMH Awards have been announced. Winners familiar to followers of this blog include James M. McPherson who was selected for the Samuel Eliot Morison Award and Mark Grimsley who was one of the co-editors of the winner of the Distinguished Book Award in the reference category.

The announcement is below:

The Society for Military History 2007 Awards were announced on February 1. This international organization is composed of university, college, and defense academy faculty, scholars employed by government historical agencies or sections, and others among the general public interested in military studies. The Society encourages research and publication across the whole range of military history (ancient, medieval, and modern, including related popular culture studies). Its scholarly journal, The Journal of Military History, is published quarterly by the Society at the Virginia Military Institute. The 2007 awards will be presented at the Society’s annual meeting on April 20, 2007 in Frederick, Maryland.

THE 2007 SAMUEL ELIOT MORISON PRIZE recognizes not any one specific achievement, but a body of contributions in the field of military history, extending over time and reflecting a spectrum of scholarly activity contributing significantly to the field is presented to Civil War historian and Princeton University Professor of History James McPherson.

One of the more troubling aspects of Civil War history lies in going beyond the tales of battles and leaders and tightly-focused military studies to ask broader and more probing questions about issues of causes and motivations. Such queries are sensitive in part because some people see a characterization of motivation or cause as passing judgment on one’s own ancestors and perhaps on oneself. There’s something deeply personal about these queries, and simply to explore the topic is a risky proposition. Nevertheless, we make moral judgments all the time about the past, whether we admit it or not.

I find challenging the following propositions about the American Civil War:

“Both sides fought for what they believed in.”

“There was racism in the North as well as in the South.”

“Most Confederate soldiers did not own slaves.”

All three of these statements are grounded upon a factual basis. But that doesn’t mean we can’t discuss their implications (and we do). If we posed similar propositions about a more recent conflict, would we draw the same implications?

“Both American and German soldiers fought for what they believed in during World War II.”

“There was antisemitism in the United States as well as in Nazi Germany.”

“Most German soldiers did not take part in the Holocaust.”

One can raise these questions without necessarily equating the Confederacy with Nazi Germany (and I would not). Moreover, one should be able to raise these questions without being labelled a Yankee apologist who renders the Civil War in simple and stark moral contrasts of Union good, Confederate bad, Union pure, Confederate sullied. In fact, for someone to raise that objection is an intellectually feeble evasion of the import of the exercise. Simply questioning the motivation of the questioner (an all too frequent practice in such discussions, which are full of “you, too” fingerpointing) is an admission that one does not want to answer the question. I’d ask, why not?

I raise these issues to ask whether there are the meaningful differences between these two sets of propositions, what they might be, and the implications one draws from that discussion. We owe it to ourselves to engage in that sort of discussion every once in a while rather than simply rehash the same old controversies.

Just to be clear, I am not saying that “professional” historian is synonymous with “academic” or “Ph.D” possessing historian. To echo Brooks (I think), the most simple way of determining whether one is a professional historian is to ask, is it your job? Far more people answer this question in the affirmative than the Ph.D. possessors (or is it possessed?). Brooks mentions Ed Bearss, but there are also such current NPS historians as John Hennessy, Chris Calkins, Jeff Patrick, and Ted Alexander. Anyone who does not consider these folks professional historians either is ignorant of what they do or truly out to lunch. Will Greene at Pamplin Park, Richard Sommers and Art Bergeron at Carlisle, and John Coski at the Museum of the Confederacy are some other examples of professional historians who are not teaching at a college or university. So does that make Billy Bob collecting bayonets in his basement with an eye on making money off them a professional historian? If not, then, what is the separator? I believe that is the common thread to what professional historians do, and that is the public service component. (Man, now I am starting to sound like Samuel Huntington; must be the whole clash of civilizations undertone.) It is John, Ed, Chris, Jeff, etc.’s job to study the past and then take what they have gleaned from their study and make it accessible to the public audience at their institutions. This is the same basic task a college or university professor undertakes in his job, albeit in different forms. A college professor uses a lecture or seminar to educate; the folks above use an exhibit, archives, or battlefield tour. Where does writing fit into this? I’ll try to figure out my thoughts on this over the weekend.