Civil Warriors

I have been waiting for Mark to post his impressions of the recent meeting of the Society for Military History in Frederick so I could then respond to them, but I guess it will work the other way around this time.

As always, I had a fun and productive time at the SMH. It is hard to think of a better location for the conference (OK, maybe Hawaii with a Pearl Harbor staff ride . . . ) than western Maryland, at least for us Civil War folks. The meeting kicked off with a panel in which Mark participated on teaching military history. All of the participants in the panel offered interesting talks, but I had a bit of a problem with just how much the experiences of the panelists were of relevance to the audience. The idea was for there to be perspectives offered by individuals who have taught military history at a high school, an undergraduate institution, a graduate school, and a professional military school.

A good concept, but I quibble with the selection of “representatives” from those institutions. The high school at which Lee Eysturlid, the high school teacher, works in Illinois has dorms for its students and an average SAT of 1400. A far different experience from what I and most people have in high school. The perspective on undergraduate military history was provided by Kip Muir, who teaches at the Virginia Military Institute. In ways that are too obvious to need description here, VMI is hardly a typical undergraduate teaching environment. (Kip did, however, teach for many years at a civilian university and offered some observations based on that experience.) Mark spoke on graduate education at Ohio State University—excuse me, The Ohio State University—which has five members of the faculty who specialize in military history. Again, this is hardly typical. The last participant was my boss, James Willbanks, whose presentation on teaching military history at CGSC was, of course, beyond criticism on every level known and unknown to man. Anyway, although all of the participants gave excellent presentations, it seems that if we really wanted insights of relevance to the instructor at the equivalents of P.S. 51, Faber College, or Ithaca University, a different set of panelists would have been more appropriate.

As for myself, I presented a paper on the Union high command during the Maryland Campaign, chaired a panel on 19^th-century military education, and basked in the glory of being a member of the SMH Awards Committee during the awards luncheon. The best part of the last event was getting to sit next to Brig. Gen. Robert Doughty, my former boss at West Point, who received the award for best book in non-American military history for his Pyrrhic Victory: French Strategy and Operations in the Great War. Also at my table was James McPherson, who received the Samuel Eliot Morison Award for his contributions to the field of military history. I resisted the temptation, though, to lean over to him and say: “I am Dimitri Rotov”. (Just for the record, I am not. If I were, I suspect the citation the chair of the awards committee read to the audience upon giving the award to Professor McPherson might have been a bit different.)

A recurring theme in this blog has been the persistence of time-honored Civil War tropes notwithstanding new research.  See, e.g., this post and this one.  It’ll be interesting to see if Christopher Einolf’s forthcoming biography of George H. Thomas will succeed in its avowed mission of moving that particular dialogue beyond, well …

I completely forgot that the History Channel broadcast Sherman’s March this past Sunday evening (April 22). My students have since reminded me: a number of them stumbled into the broadcast and noted my talking head bits (along with those of John F. Marszalek, Steve Woodworth, and several others). So have a few email correspondents, including this gem from Tallapoosa, Georgia:

I caught your “act” on the History Channel last night reference your “Uncle Billy”. Very amusing. It would have been something to see your process of rationalization on display at Nuremberg. I suppose that the opinions of those four “Professors” from Southern Universities were intended to add some kind of legitimacy to the premise of the show for Southern viewers. You “Lincoln Empire” apologists are so predictable and trite.

For those in need of trite predictability, I offer the following times when the show is scheduled to be rerun:

Saturday, April 28 08:00 PM

Sunday, April 29 12:00 AM

Saturday, May 05 05:00 PM

Or if you need trite predictability on call at any time, just buy the DVD. (It makes a great mother’s day gift!)

UPDATE, April 27, 6:45 p.m. – As usual, I’m behind in my reading of Other People’s Blogs.  In this instance, I missed two good posts regarding Sherman’s March.  Both appear on Kevin Levin’s Civil War Memory.

The first is a guest post by Bill Oberst, Jr., a South Carolinian (!) who played Sherman; the other is Kevin’s favorable but characteristically thoughtful and nuanced review of the film.

A guest post by Christopher J. Einolf, University of Virginia. Einholf’s new biography of Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas will be published this fall by University of Oklahoma Press.

In his post entitled “Here We Go Again…” Brooks Simpson described the scholarship on George H. Thomas as a “rut” or a “flawed pendulum,” in which scholars engaged in a recurring debate on whether Thomas was a better general than Grant and Sherman. I agree with Simpson that biographers of Thomas have been overly biased in favor of their subject, and that their discussion of Thomas focuses too narrowly on a direct comparison of Thomas with Grant and Sherman. In writing my own biography of Thomas , I tried to avoid letting the “formulaic and predictable set of controversies” that Simpson identifies limit the book.

In writing the book, I had access to a number of sources not available to Thomas’ earlier biographers, Francis McKinney and Freeman Cleaves, including some personal letters to family members, friends, and military colleagues. McKinney wrote in 1961 and Cleaves in 1948, so I also benefited from the tremendous increase in quantity and quality of scholarship about the Civil War and Reconstruction over the last 50 years, and this alone, as Ethan Rafuse wrote, would be enough to justify a new biography. Here are the themes of the book:

(Continued)

In case you missed the heads up on David Woodbury’s blog, Of Battlefields and Bibliophiles, The Onion has a mock round table discussion of a mock proposal by President Bush to reinforce an overextended US force in Iraq by calling up . . . Civil War reenactors. The pundits’ exchange concerning the pro’s and con’s of sending reenactors into harm’s way is an absolute scream — and in some cases, right on the money. Have a look.

Last September I was a talking head for a documentary, then in production, about Sherman’s March.  (So, for that matter, were quite a number of other Civil War historians.)  I just learned that Sherman’s March is scheduled for broadcast on the History Channel at 9 PM EDT/PDT and 11 PM EDT/PDT on Sunday, April 22.  The History Channel web site currently has a promo about the documentary and an interactive map of Sherman’s March that is either kind of neat or kind of cheesy, depending on one’s taste.  (I myself lean toward kind of neat.)

An Institute for Teachers
(March 24-25, 2007)

A couple of weeks ago I was one of several military historians who gave presentations at a weekend symposium intended to help teachers — mainly high school teachers — learn how to better integrate military history into their American history curricula. Other presenters included Paul A. Rahe (University of Tulsa); Pete Maslowski (University of Nebraska); Paul Herbert (Executive Director, Cantigny First Division Foundation); Brian M. Linn (Texas A&M University); and Walter A. McDougall (University of Pennsylvania).

Each of these presentations — and several others by such luminaries and David Eisenhower and Rick Atkinson — were recorded for webcast. The webcasts and additional information about the symposium are now available online. From what I’ve seen, the quality of the webcasts is good and well worth a look.

My assigned lecture was on “The Social Dimensions of the Civil War,” which given the military history focus, I discussed mostly through the lens of Civil War soldiers.

Spent a few days in Virginia last week leading a staff ride of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania Campaign for a class attending the CGSC satellite campus at Fort Lee. As always, I had a great time; would have had a better one had my daughter not given me a stomach virus as a going away present. And yet somehow she ends up with a ladybug t-shirt from the Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens.

Anyway, the decision to do these particular operations for the staff ride was made by Chris Stowe, who in addition to being the historian on the Fort Lee teaching team is working on a full biography/exculpation of General Meade, and teaching team leader Bob Kennedy, who also happens to have taught history at CGSC. (Since they had four groups, Curt King of the Combat Studies Institute and I were sent out from Leavenworth to assist.) The challenge, of course, was to do justice to both operations in a single day, which I am not sure we met successfully. The day started out well at the Lacy House, which we were able to do thanks to the willingness of a park volunteer and former president of its friends group, Dwight Mottet, who was good enough to meet us at 0800 to open the gate. He also gave my group a great brief on the Lacy House and the famous limb buried in its cemetery. (Thanks, Dwight.)

The Wilderness ride, of course, has a fairly logical sequence, which we followed, with stands at Saunders Field, Widow Tapp Farm, and Brock-Plank intersection after Ellwood. We then did stops at Todd’s Tavern, Laurel Hill, and Doles’ Salient before doing a walk that took us from the East Angle to Landrum Ridge and back to the Bloody Angle. By this point, we only had time left for a final stand at the McCoull House site, where the rest of the campaign at Spotsylvania got a big wave of the hand before we did a very brief integration phase.

When we discussed the ride on the way back to Leavenworth, Curt and I debated whether a ride that just looked at Spotsylvania might be a better course of action in the future. Dropping the Wilderness would enable us to do Spotsylvania with a bit more depth and sophistication—and do justice to the 13-21 May operations. On the other hand, there is the possibility that without a good understanding of the Wilderness, students might not be able to fully understand the larger operational context of Spotsylvania and that a ride just on Spotsylvania might end up focusing too much on tactics. Since the purpose of the CGSC course is to help students make the transition from thinking tactically to thinking operationally, this is something we want to avoid. I suspect that better discipline in terms of managing individual stands from a time standpoint may be part of the solution to the problem. At the Tapp Farm, for instance, I went well over the allotted time without even getting to the “Lee to the Rear” episode. Not surprisingly, Chris went over at some spots as well, but that was on account of his needing to find excuses for the goggle-eyed snapping turtle . . . something that requires no little amount of time and energy.

Nonetheless, I do think the ride was successful in terms of helping students understand and be comfortable thinking in operational terms and applying the principles of operational planning they are introduced to in the CGSC course. For example, the Wilderness offers terrific illustrations of the concept of culmination points and why they have to be taken into account in planning operations. In the Wilderness attacks were continually conceived and launched with no thought given before hand as to how quickly they would run out of steam and with no effort to accommodate this into planning. I also think most of the students came away with an appreciation of the fact that, whatever his merits as a strategist and operational thinker, U.S. Grant could be a real clod tactically.