In response to yesterday’s post, reader Dave Kelly wrote, in part, “You’ve been off for 5 days. Figured Savas had you electricity cut off and your house surrounded so he could go to press without another stop.” While Dave was obviously jesting when he wrote that, the point actually was well-taken, and I thought I would offer an explanation for the uncharacteristically long spell of silence.

Last week, I posted about the horrific nightmare that we faced in trying to fix bollixed-up notes for one of the chapters that happened when our researcher waited until the last possible second to get us new material, and we had to plug it into our manuscript when it was already in the page galley stage. Quite a bit of the especially useful new material went into the third chapter, which deals with Corbit’s Charge in Westminster, MD. It really fleshed out the chapter. Ted did his best to shoehorn the stuff in, but his efforts to do so meant that the notes to that chapter–85 of them–were completely and totally FUBAR’ed (for those not familiar with the acronym FUBAR, I suggest you look here for the definition). I had to spend the major part of day re-working those, and JD took another seven hours fixing this stuff, too.

In short, I spent most of those five days getting the bugs ironed out of the Stuart’s Ride manuscript, and also with work-related stuff. As a result of the intense frustration toward our researcher for putting us into that situation, being tired from concentrating, and the normal things of every day life that interfere with my hobbies, I simply didn’t have the motivation, time, or wherewithal to blog.

Thanks to Susan, I got to sleep in yesterday for the first time since the puppy came home, and I finally started feeling less sleep deprived and more alert yesterday for the first time in ages. We’ll see how long that lasts.

In the meantime, the Stuart’s Ride manuscript is now complete, and Ted’s proofreader is finishing up his work on it. Then, it goes to the History Book Club for consideration for a selection of the month. More on that as the process goes along.

Finally, Ted told me today that the copies of my Monroe’s Crossroads book had hit the warehouse, so it will be available for purchase in a day or two. Yahoo!!!!

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I would be remiss if I failed to mention the 141st anniversary of an event as important as the surrender of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Court House. 141 years ago today, Lee surrendered his army to Ulysses S. Grant in Wilmer McLean’s parlor. The surrender was the culmination of a relentless pursuit of Lee’s retreating army by the Federals in what was clearly Phil Sheridan’s finest hour.

Lee’s surrender began the process of healing the national wounds rent before and during the Civil War. In large part, this was due to Grant’s realization that he had to offer his adversary generous terms of surrender so that the Confederates could give up their cause with dignity. Grant permitted officers to keep their side arms and the men were permitted to keep their own horses and personal baggage. These simple gestures–intended to permit the enemy to keep their dignity–began the process of healing the nation’s deep wounds.

Likewise, Robert E. Lee deserves a vast amount of credit for realizing that continuing the war effort would bring about a useless effusion of blood. Lee easily could have taken the low road. Instead of surrendering, he could have ordered his command to take to the hills and conduct a guerrilla war that might still be raging today. The men of his army might would have done pretty much anything he ordered, so it is no inconceivable that they might have headed for the hills and a lifetime of bushwhacking.

Jay Winik has written a much-acclaimed but, in my humble opinion, vastly overrated book called April 1865: The Month that Saved America. Winik’s thesis–overstated, in my opinion–is that the generous surrender terms granted to first Lee by Grant, and later to Johnston by Sherman, were critical to bringing about an actual end of the war, and not drag it on as an endless guerrilla conflict. While I think Winik wrote a good book, I don’t believe it is the masterpiece that many–including the present President of the United States–have declared it to be.

Abraham Lincoln had intended to let the South up easy, and had Lincoln not been assassinated, the face of Reconstruction would have been very different indeed. The fact that Lincoln was assassinated by a Confederate sympathizer gave the Radical Republicans an excuse to impose harsh terms upon the South instead of following Lincoln’s plan.

It is, therefore, not beyond the realm of reason to argue that with his assassin’s bullets, John Wilkes Booth nearly undid all of the good done by Robert E. Lee when Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox on the generous terms offered by the Union commander. Fortunately, calmer heads prevailed when Gen. Joseph E. Johnston realized that there was no reason to continue the war in North Carolina once Lee surrendered. Johnston had a nearly insurmountable lead on Sherman’s pursuing army, and Johnston might have continued running indefinitely. Instead, Johnston, a wise man, recognized that, in light of Lee’s surrender, the time had come to end the conflict. When Johnston learned that Lincoln had been assassinated, he was–and for very good reason, I might add–very concerned that Sherman might turn on him and take out the country’s anger and frustration on him and his men, but Sherman was a greater man than that. Sherman, in fact, wanted peace, and not just the surrender of Johnston’s army. Sherman gave Johnston peace terms, not just surrender terms, but an angry and bitter Washington ordered Sherman to revoke those terms and to offer the same terms that Grant had given Lee. Wisely, Johnston accepted those terms, and with that, the war east of the Mississippi River ended.

Again, while I firmly believe that Winik’s book greatly overstates its case, Winik’s point is nevertheless well-taken. The surrender of Lee’s army on the generous terms offered by Grant began a healing process that ultimately led to this country being the great power that it is today.

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Dimitri Rotov had a very interesting post/rant on his blog today. He mentioned that I, along with several others, have been encouraging him to write a book about McClellan for some time now. I really think that Dimitri is the logical choice to write the definitive study of Mac’s life, and I can only reiterate the hope that he will do so.

Dimitri wrote:

I may write a book. I’m thinking about it. But I don’t feel obliged to do so.

Can that be my credo?

I thought I would kick in my two cents’ worth on this interesting issue. Let me begin by stating that I have a very real and very powerful bias/preference for real, honest-to-goodness books. I like the feel, sight, and smell of a book. I love the look of a full bookcase, brimming with volumes. Having said that, I am also a bit of a techno-nerd, and am married to a propeller head. So, I get the idea of making information generally available on the Internet.

Here’s my problem with Dimitri’s concept. I am, and remain, very concerned with protecting the integrity of copyright. The Internet makes it ridiculously easy to steal copyrighted material (it is, of course simple enough to xerox or scan a book, but you can’t copy/paste a book). My thoughts on this topic have been explored in depth on this blog with respect to Google’s massive copyright infringement scheme, and I won’t beat that poor dead horse here again. Having said that, the concern is legitimate and valid. How would you at least make an effort to protect the integrity of your intellectual property, Dimitri?

The other issue that I wanted to address is the question of how does one make any money from something that is entirely published on a blog? Let’s be clear about this: I am a realist. I don’t expect to get rich writing books on the Civil War. It’s not going to happen, and I understand that. At the same time, I spend a lot of money doing the research for my books, between buying books, paying researchers, traveling to battlefields, and paying cartographers. While I don’t expect to get rich, I would at least like to break even on these projects. Getting paid at least provides the basic funding for the next book project, so that I’m not having to dig deeply out of pocket each time that I commence another project (and I usually have several different research projects going on at any given time, all in different stages of the process). In other words, the royalties for the prior books provide the funding for future books. It is, frankly, about the only way that I can justify the expenditures to Susan. If she had her way, we’d be making John Grisham money from my writing, unrealistic as that might be. Heck, I’d settle for David McCullough or Doris Kearns Goodwin money.

From my perspective, the only way that I could get behind the idea of “publishing” a book on a blog would be if there was some way to guarantee a flow of revenue coming from it. Writing a couple of hundred years ago, Dr. Ben Johnson wrote, and quite correctly: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote but for money.” I wholeheartedly agree with Dr. Johnson’s observation, and I may be a lof of things, but I am not a blockhead, if this is the operative definition of blockhead.

Perhaps the ITunes model of paying for individual songs before downloading them might be a solution to this problem, but it would require some fairly sophisticated e-commerce capability on the web site. I won’t speak for Dimitri, but I can unquestionably say that I don’t have the technical skills to do so, meaning that Susan would have to do it. There’s also the question of how you would price the downloads, etc. I’m really not sure how Dimitri intends to address this issue, if at all, but for me, this one would be a real deal-breaker.

So, the upshot of it is that while I think that Dimitri’s got an extremely interesting idea here, I think that it requires some serious thought and serious planning in order for it to work. I wish him well with it, and I will be watching carefully to see how he tackles these issues.

And to reiterate what I’ve said before: write the damned book, Dimitri. Mac deserves as much.

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Dimitri, I tried to e-mail you earlier today, but your server bounced it with a message that you had exceeded your disk storage quota for e-mails. You might consider doing a little housecleaning. Sorry for posting this this way, but I have no other way to reach you if your e-mail is bouncing.

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Today, J. D. got another package of newspaper articles from our Washington researcher, this time from the New York Herald. Once again, our researcher was well aware that we have been working on this Stuart’s Ride project for the better part of two years, and only just now got around to providing us with these articles at the very last possible moment. Of course, we’re even closer to the drop dead date for adding material now than we were last week when we got the articles from the Baltimore American that I posted about last week.

There was even better stuff this time around. For instance, if you read Jeb Stuart’s report of his activities during the Gettysburg Campaign, when you get to the section about the Battle of Hanover, he mentions that, at the beginning of the battle, as things begin to get intense, there was no word from Fitz Lee, who was supposed to be covering his left and rear. An article in the Herald indicates that Fitz sent a note to Stuart via courier, and that the courier was captured. The dispatch itself is quoted verbatim–it specifically indicates that Kilpatrick was moving on Stuart’s left. Had that message been delivered, it might have made a real difference in Stuart’s dispositions, that’s for certain. So far as I know, no account of the Battle of Hanover has EVER used this particular item previously. So, we’re going to be changing the interpretation of this battle by virtue of adding it into the manuscript.

There are apparently several other useful articles that deal with other aspects of Stuart’s ride that also haven’t been used previously. The problem, of course, is that our backs are up against the wall. We are quite literally out of time if we’re to get the book out by June. Plus, we drove poor Ted Savas nuts last week with the stuff from the American, and he’s not willing to re-do the entire book (I certainly can’t blame him for that–I wouldn’t, either). So, the compromise was that we got to add a paragraph and a single note to chapter four, including quoting the captured dispatch from Fitz Lee to Stuart. We’re pleased with that, although we’re also greedy and would love to plug ALL of it in.

Fortunately, we have enough time to plug additional material from these two newspapers into our manuscript on the retreat from Gettysburg. Those will also be excellent additions, so please don’t get me wrong. But, we’ve been working on that project even longer than we have on the Stuart’s Ride project, so the same lingering questions about timeliness apply there, also. It’s damned frustrating.

The issue here, of course, is the same as the one we had last week. Our researcher has known about this project for more than eighteen months, and why he waited until this last possible second to produce this material to us remains a complete and total mystery, and one we’re not particularly happy about. This problem was created completely by him, and it leaves me wondering if there is something else equally as significant still hanging out there that he was supposed to get for us but failed to obtain.

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Today, it finally hit me that spring has finally sprung. In no particular order, I’ve noticed the following things today:

1. The daffodils are out everywhere. They’re my favorite flower, because they mean it’s spring time.

2. Tomorrow is opening day for major league baseball. If you need proof that it’s spring, I can’t possibly think of better proof than that.

3. We’ve slept with the windows open for the last couple of nights.

4. I have a sinus infection. That’s always a sure sign that it’s spring.

5. One of my neighbors had a new roof put on this week. Nobody does that sort of work in the winter time unless it’s absolutely necessary.

6. The NHL regular season is nearly over. Our Blue Jackets have only eight games left to play. They’ve won five in a row. It’s a crying shame they waited until the tail end of the season to decide to start winning.

7. Susan had the top down on her convertible the other day for the first time this year.

8. Everywhere we looked today, we saw people riding motorcycles. That prompted us to get our bikes out today.

I’m a novice biker. My bike has about 40 miles on it, and my total riding experience equals about 75 miles. We took the Motorcycle Safety Foundation new rider course last fall, and it was deifnitely a worthwhile experience. I’ve already used some of what I learned in the class, including a quick stop today, the first I’ve had to do on the street. My learning curve is still so steep that it’s almost vertical, and I’m still scared to death every time that I get on the bike. I hope to get up the courage to take the thing out on the freeway soon; so far, I have not done so–too scared, not enough experience, and not enough confidence in my abilities on the thing yet. But, it’s a definite sign of spring.

Let’s hope that the weather holds and that there’s no more snow. I love spring, and I hate winter.

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Earlier this week, my co-author for the Stuart’s Ride book, J. D. Petruzzi, unexpectedly received a large pile of copies of articles from the Baltimore American newspaper from June and July 1863 from the researcher that we use to find things for us at the Library of Congress. Never mind that our researcher has been aware of this project for more than a year–he just now got around to sending us this stuff, right at very last possible moment.

To our surprise, J. D. found a number of really useful articles for the project in this pile. In particular, we were able to flesh out our discussion of Corbit’s Charge at Westminster, MD a great deal thanks to some of this newspaper coverage. The problem is that we are in the final page galley stage; the book is nearly finished being laid out. Adding this material was much more difficult that turning on the “track changes” feature of Word and then typing it out. Instead, we had to carefully prepare the inserts, show Ted Savas, our editor/publisher, where they were to go, and then hope that Ted got it right. It was a big deal for Ted to do this and to get it right.

Ted tried, but the endnotes for one of the chapters got all bollixed up. It’s NOT Ted’s fault–it was actually a pretty major job, and it’s not a huge surprise that things got bollixed up. I just spent an hour going through the galley of the second chapter and then going through the endnotes in order to make sure that everything matched up the way it was supposed to. Since I was the primary author of that chapter, I was the logical choice to do this, and not J. D.

Let me tell you, I now have a world-class headache from it. It was a major chore doing that, and it was also essential that it be done correctly. The very last thing that we want is for the notes to be all wrong, and for some reviewer to catch the fact that all of the notes are wrong, and give us a bad review as a consequence. So, I had to be very, very careful, and I think that they’re all correct now. Poor Ted. He must have been about ready to pull his hair out by the end of it, and I know that he threw his hands up about the endnotes, which is why he threw it back in our lap in order to make sure that we’d gotten it right.

J. D. and I have both said this before: we’re lucky to have Ted as the publisher on this book, as I doubt that anyone else would have permitted us to make such substantial additions at the very last minute, as we just did. Thanks, Ted. We really appreciate your dedication to publishing the very best book possible.

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In February, James L. Swanson published his book Manhunt, which is a narrative of the pursuit and ultimate killing of John Wilkes Booth by Federal forces. The book covers a period of twelve days, and is the most detailed narrative of these events yet written.

This book has lots of problems. First, and foremost, the author states specifically that he takes liberties with sourcing. He adopts the old “I don’t want to bog down the reader with frivolities like notes” trick, which many do when they’re trying to cover up the lack of depth of their research. This book fails to meet my tests for academic standards, which makes it difficult for me to endorse it.

At the same time, it’s a fabulous read. Swanson’s style is easy and fast-moving, and it really reads more like a novel than it does history. The best way to describe it is to call it pop history. From my perspective as a serious researcher, I always have trouble endorsing that sort of a work. At the same time, well-written pop history will probably help to bring new readers to the Civil War, just as the Ken Burns film generated new interest in the war when it debuted.

I think that the thing that bothers me the most about this book is that it was obviously written as a means of boosting interest in the forthcoming film that is going to be made. It’s almost like this book was written to drive movie ticket sales, and not the other way around, as most books that are turned into films usually work. I have already addressed the most interesting aspect of this forthcoming film: how 64 year old Harrison Ford is going to pull of playing 31 year old Lt. Col. Everton Conger, the secret agent who commanded the force sent to hunt down booth.

The way I see it, this book is, at best, a very mixed bag. I can only hope that it won’t generate an whole new generation of poorly researched pop history.

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Loyal reader Russ Bonds passed this tidbit along. Thanks to Russ for bringing it to my attention.

I found this to be one of the most appalling, inconceivable things I’ve seen in a long time.

Present is worst of times for historical markers
By DAVID PENDERED
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 03/27/06
All that’s left of the historic marker at the site where Atlanta surrendered to Union Gen. William T. Sherman’s army is a broken post that bows toward the ground.

“If the state needs $300 to put it back up, I’ll pay,” Bruns said.

The fall of Atlanta is often considered to be THE decisive moment that guaranteed the re-election of Abraham Lincoln in the fall of 1864. Obviously, the site where that occurred is a critical spot, obviously well worthy of interpretation and being marked. The marker itself obviously already exists. So, we’re talking about a lousy $300 to replace the pole.

Is the State of Georgia REALLY that poor?

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Yesterday, Kevin Levin wrote:

While I understand Eric’s point I would like to hear more about the virtues of obscurity. What exactly is important about an obscure military event in the Civil War like the Wilson-Kautz Raid? I know people here in Charlottesville who can tell me close to every single detail about the small engagement at Rio Hill which led to the capture of Charlottesville and the University of Virginia. When I hear the name Rio Hill I immediately think of the IHOP and an order of pancakes. Yes, I learn about new people, but it seems to me what I learn fails to reveal anything new about the soldiers – same stories and experiences in a different time and place. I sometimes want to ask why it is necessary to know this much detail. How does knowing more detail help me understand better? There is of course the element of local interest and a desire to know the history of one’s backyard, but that only sheds light on a small group. Is there a hope among people who write detailed battle studies of such events that the obscure will eventually become more familiar, and if so is this a worthwhile endeavor? Is this ultimately the same obsession that drives Gettysburg historians, but applied on virgin ground?

I will attempt to answer Kevin’s question. However, as an opening note, it should be pointed out that Kevin and I have fundamentally different interests in the war. From what I’ve divined, Kevin’s primary interest is with the social issues, with a special and definite focus on the issues of race relations. I, on the other hand, am interested in the tactics and strategy, and in dissecting those tactics and strategic decisions to see how they worked out in the field. The social issues don’t interest me much, and I leave those to others. So, with that analytic framework in mind, let’s proceed.

In this context, I think I may have unduly limited myself by using the word “obscure” to describe my interests, although I have an undying fascination with and love of those obscure places. I genuinely enjoy visiting obscure Civil War sites and figuring them out, perhaps more than anything else. Instead, I think that a better way to describe my interests and to describe what I find interesting is that which others have not written about in any detail. There are a variety of reasons for this. First, I’ve already stated my thoughts about things like “who really needs another book about Pickett’s Charge?” Instead, I prefer to look at things that others haven’t, as doing the research and figuring them out for myself is not only extremely challenging, it’s also extremely gratifying.

The reason why I like to pursue these actions is because there are lessons to be learned from the tactical and strategic analysis, even for those events that are obscure or smaller in scale. We at Ironclad recently published a book on the Battle of Averasboro. Averasboro fascinates me, even though the Confederate side numbered less than 10,000 men, because it was a textbook example of an almost perfectly designed and almost perfectly executed defense in depth. To me, that makes it fascinating and makes it worthy of study, even if it was a smaller battle that nobody would ever call a decisive battle.

As someone who is primarily interested in tactical study, the Wilson-Kautz Raid offers me a lot of interesting lessons. It demonstrates, for example, the consequences of trying to pursue a strategic vision that is too aggressive. By trying to do too much, it meant that Wilson’s and Kautz’s commands got chopped to bits, losing fully one-third of their men (mostly captured), all of their artillery, and all of their wagons. It also offers very interesting lessons in the dynamics of the consequences of what happens when one event is tied to another, and the underlying event does not work out the way it was hoped or planned (in this case, the event that did not work out the way it was planned was Sheridan’s utter failure to achieve his objectives for the Trevilian Raid, thereby freeing Wade Hampton to pounce on Wilson and Kautz with three full divisions and two independent brigades. That any of Wilson’s or Kautz’s units made it out intact at all is really remarkable). Those are the things that interest me, and those are the things that make this worthy of study in my mind.

While the Battle of Rio Hill suggests IHOP and pancakes to Kevin, to me, it serves as a prime example of a situation where a commander did a poor job of picketing his camp, got caught by surprise, and still managed to turn that situation around and make the best of a bad situation. Again, there are lessons to be learned from that, and those lessons are interesting to me, and which make that action worthy of study.

Obviously, these things are not of the scale of the Battle of Gettysburg. That much is clear, and I doubt even Kevin would dispute that. Just because they’re smaller or lesser known events doesn’t mean that there are not lessons to be learned from the study of them, and that, in turn, makes them worthy subjects for scholarly study.

Bottom line, Kevin: I think that our disconnect here arises as a result of the fundamentally different approach that we take to Civil War history.

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