General musings

Some guy I’ve never heard of previously named James R. Leighton left a review on Amazon of my 2001 book, Glory Enough for All: Sheridan’s Second Raid and the Battle of Trevilian Station. I read it and was floored. I actually was left speechless by it and had to share my exchange here.

The title of the review is “Another biased Civil War book.” This is what the review says:

Like so many books and articles as well as art I found this book heavily in favor of the South. The North is often made to seem lacking in good Generals or often even in good horses. It is always something!! I really only liked this book because it was about a train station and I am a train collector. Actually I have read many books about the civil war since I was 16 years old and have visited many of the important battle sites. I even collect toy soldiers and here I am 68 years old!

What are the good points about this book? One is that it is easily readable and the story flows evenly with good maps which is rare in civil war books. It also does a good job of describing the content of the battle, going into the purpose of the raid, as well as the many difficulties of being in a troop of some 9000 men trying to engage an elusive enemy. I also found that Sheridan’s tactics in trying to lead the Southern cavalry away from Grant’s movements to Petersberg were justified. Also remember it was under Grant’s approval that this raid was conducted. Since that goal was accomplished I would say that the raid was successful and disagree with the authors opinion that it was a failure.

What is not so good about this book? I would say that it could have used a few more maps in some strategic places, that the battle of Samaria seemed more like an after thought and was not very well described. Most of all, the books inherent Southern bias made me wonder how accurately the battle is described in spite of the rather large amount of documentation included at the end of each chapter. But since the documentation included many references to the First Maine Cavalry in which some of my relatives served at least now I have to find another book to read which is often the outcome of reading one book on the very Lost Cause.

Wow. I’ve been called a lot of things in my day, but a Lost Causer? Inherent Southern bias? Say what? Those of you who read this blog regularly know that nobody has EVER accused me of having inherent Southern bias or of being a Lost Causer before. I was blown away and had to respond. Here’s my response:

Wow. I’m blown away by this. I’ve been accused of a lot of things, but one thing I have NEVER been called is a Southern partisan. If anything, I’m known for my work on the UNION cavalry. The Union cavalry has always been the primary focus on my work. I am most assuredly NOT a Lost Causer. NOBODY has ever accused me of that before. Wow.

So, he responded. Get a load of this:

Whether or not you write about the Union cavalry is is not the issue. The issue is the fact that you are and other writers are critical of the Union side of the war until the last year of the war. You depict Sheridan as basically incompetent just like other writers about Sherman and Grant. Why is this? The Battle of Travilian Station was another victory of the Union not a loss as you depict it. Sherman gave the South exactly what it deserved with a constitution that approved of slavery and so did Sheridan. Even Mort Kuntsler depicts the South in a positive light. I cant find one artist or writer including you that depicts the South as basically a criminal society. Such is revisionist history!!

Let me see if I’ve got this right: anyone who doesn’t portray the South as a criminal society is a revisionist Lost Causer with an inherent Southern bias. Anyone who criticizes the Union high command–even when it’s appropriate and deserved–is a Lost Causer. Hmmmmm….that’s a new one on me, and I thought I’d heard pretty much everything in my years of working with the Civil War.

My reply:

That’s a very strange definition you use, Mr. Leighton.

You seem to think that I should have preconceived notions rather than go where the evidence leads me. If it takes being what you criticize to satisfy you as to my work, I’ll take a pass, thanks.

By every definition–tactical and strategic–Sheridan failed miserably. You and he are the only ones who call it a victory. How is being driven from the battlefield after failing to achieve your objective a victory? That’s one strange definition you have, sir.

Good luck to you.

Normally, I would be terribly amused by this sort of thing, but I’m actually troubled by it. The only thing that will satisfy this bozo is something that condemns the South as a criminal society and compares Jefferson Davis to Adolf Hitler. It really concerns me that this guy takes such a viewpoint seriously. He can say what he wants about me–I don’t care what he thinks about me. I am, however, worried now about how many others are out there who share this absurd viewpoint.

It seems that I have found the mirror image of the Lost Causers and neo-Confederates that I so despise. I guess I now have a new category of moron to contend with, and that concerns me. What do we even call this viewpoint?

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And just for fun, I give you the Ulric Dahlgren bobblehead. I gotta git me one of these….

Here is the official press release issued by the Washington County Convention and Visitors Bureau (with the blurb from article on Dahlgren in the Gettysburg Campaign excised):

Media Release

Contact: Hagerstown-Washington County CVB, 301-791-3246

Hagerstown Suns, 301-791-6266

For Immediate Release:

Hagerstown-Washington County CVB and Hagerstown Suns Unveil “Captain Ulric Dahlgren” Bobblehead; Hero of Battle of Hagerstown to be Given Away at July 9th Home Game

HAGERSTOWN, MD — The Hagerstown-Washington County Convention and Visitors Bureau will present Captain Ulric Dahlgren bobbleheads to the first 1,000 fans arriving at the Hagerstown Suns’ 7:05 p.m. game against the West Virginia Power on Saturday, July 9.

Gates will open at Municipal Stadium at 6:05 p.m., and the Suns advise fans to arrive early, as the supply of bobbleheads is not expected to last long.

The bobblehead commemorates the famous Civil War officer known as “The Hero of Hagerstown.” Captain Ulric Dahlgren was the son of the well-known Union Rear-Admiral John Adolf Dahlgren. On July 6th, 1863, then-Captain Dahlgren led a charge of Union Cavalry against numerically superior Confederate forces in the streets of Hagerstown. The hand-to-hand and fierce fighting exemplified the bravery and gallantry of Ulric Dahlgren.

The new bobblehead was unveiled at a press conference at the Hagerstown-Washington County Convention and Visitors Bureau’s Visitor Welcome Center.

“The Convention and Visitors Bureau is very proud to be the financial sponsor of this bobblehead giveaway,” Bureau President and CEO Tom Riford said. “With the 150th Anniversary of the Civil War upon us, we felt that this particular bobblehead would be unique, and a reminder of the struggles endured in Hagerstown during July 1863.”

Riford announced that a direct descendent of Ulric Dahlgren will be throwing out the first ceremonial pitch at the July 9th baseball game at Municipal Stadium, “Ulric Dahlgren, IV and Ulric Dahlgren, V have agreed to represent their famous ancestor’s legacy, and throw out the first pitch at the opening ceremony.”

Captain Ulric Dahlgren is the sixth figure to be honored by the Convention and Visitors Bureau (CVB) with a bobblehead giveaway at Municipal Stadium, joining General George Washington, author Nora Roberts, MSO music director Elizabeth Schulze, General Abner Doubleday, and Hagerstown’s symbol Little Heiskell.

“It is appropriate that our sixth annual CVB-sponsored bobblehead be of such an important and historic figure from our city’s past,” Riford said. “Just as Hagerstown fielded the first minor league baseball team in Maryland, the CVB is proud to make the Hagerstown Suns the first professional baseball team ever to give away a Captain Ulric Dahlgren bobblehead.” The figure is historically accurate, and is dressed in the uniform of a Union Captain from 1863, complete with sword.

“This project has been more than eight months in the making,” according to Hagerstown Suns General Manager Bill Farley. “We’ve been working very hard with the CVB to make this bobblehead ready for the July 9th home game.”

“The Suns are proud to partner with the Convention and Visitors Bureau on the 2011 Ulric Dahlgren Bobblehead giveaway. We hope our fans enjoy adding another historical piece of Suns memorabilia to their collections.”

The game is expected to be a sell out. The Hagerstown Suns management urges people to purchase tickets as soon as possible.

The Hagerstown Suns play at Municipal Stadium in Hagerstown, MD and are a Class “A” affiliate of the Washington Nationals. Visit the Suns on the web at www.hagerstownsuns.com.

The Hagerstown Suns baseball team is a member of the Hagerstown-Washington County Convention and Visitors Bureau. For more information, see; www.marylandmemories.com. Washington County is part of the Heart of the Civil War Heritage Area, and the Journey Through Hallowed Ground National Heritage Area. For more information see: www.heartofthecivilwar.org and also www.hallowedground.org.

Don’t forget: July 6th Premiere of “Valor in the Streets: The Battle of Hagerstown.” See: http://tinyurl.com/6b46kuk.

Don’t forget: Bobblehead Give-Away Night: July 9th at Municipal Stadium.

About Ulric Dahlgren (compiled by historian Steve Bockmiller, from multiple sources):

US Army Colonel Ulric Dahlgren was the second son of Rear-Admiral John Adolf and Mary Dahlgren, and was born April 3, 1842, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

Completing his school-days in 1858, it was decided that his vocation was civil engineering, and, as he had received much practical instruction from his father, he was in 1859 employed to survey some tracts of wild land in Mississippi. In September, 1860, in obedience to his father’s wishes, he entered a Philadelphia law-office, but amid the rush of events which followed the inauguration of President Lincoln he desired to serve his country, and July 24, 1861, he was attached to a naval expedition from the Washington Yard to assist in the defense of Alexandria, Virginia. Ulric then reluctantly resumed his law studies, with the promise that he would be recalled when the hour of action should come.

During the winter of 1861-62 he was one of an association of young men who formed a light artillery company in Philadelphia, at the same time pursuing his studies.”

On the 26th of May, 1862, young Dahlgren, who was then just twenty years old, was sent to Harper’s Ferry, in charge of a battery of navy howitzers, and on the 29th was sent back to Washington to obtain needed supplies of ammunition. Appointed a captain in the army, he returned to Harper’s Ferry the next morning in time to take part in the final repulse of the rebels.

Captain Dahlgren was attached to the staff of General Sigel, and later the staff of Army of the Potomac commander Major General Joseph Hooker.

General Sigel desired to make Captain Dahlgren chief of artillery of his corps, and in a note addressed to the governor of Pennsylvania, endorsed by President Lincoln and Admirals Smith and Foote, spoke of his aide as a “young officer of merit and usefulness, who has already distinguished himself and reflected much credit on the service.”

Captain Dahlgren’s led sixty men on a raid into Fredericksburg, Virginia to disrupt Confederate operations there and held the town for three hours against a force of Confederates that outnumbered his 5 or 10 to 1, and then withdrew with thirty-one prisoners and their horses and accoutrements.

During the Gettysburg campaign he entered Greencastle and captured several very important dispatches, and then rode at break-neck speed through thirty miles of enemy-held territory to Gettysburg. Some historians have argued one of the letters revealed that General Robert E. Lee did not have the large force at Gettysburg that Union intelligence officers had estimated, and that General Meade then decided to stay and fight a third day. The third day of the Battle of Gettysburg resulted in a Union victory.

He was given one hundred men to operate with, and July 4, 1863, he attacked a brigade of Confederate cavalry and captured Greencastle. On his way back dashed into a rebel train, destroyed one hundred and seventy-six wagons, captured two hundred prisoners, three hundred horses, and one piece of artillery.

Confederates held Hagerstown, and were ransacking the town, and terrorizing the residents. In the July 6, 1863 Battle of Hagerstown, Captain Dahlgren, on horseback and in plain site to every enemy soldier, led a charge of 20 dismounted cavalrymen up Potomac Street toward Confederates emplaced at the present-day Zion Reformed Church. When he reached Franklin Street (at City Hall) his right foot and ankle was blasted by a shot from hiding Confederate soldiers. He was wounded in the foot by gunfire from the area of today’s Pioneer Hook and Ladder Company on West Franklin Street. It was said that his charge up Potomac Street was of such a heroic nature that Confederates ran from his fury, and he fought on even after being horrifically wounded. He avenged a dear friend’s life, and afterwards “no man could withstand him.”

Sent to his father’s home in Washington, gangrene set in and his foot had to be amputated. On July 24th he received his commission as colonel, directly from President Abraham Lincoln.

Returning to the field on February 18, 1864, he was given a command of five hundred picked men to join an expedition to release the Union prisoners at Richmond, Virginia. Colonel Dahlgren drove the enemy’s pickets into their works around Richmond, but the country being aroused he could not make the junction with Kilpatrick, and in endeavoring to return to the Union lines he was ambushed, and killed. Orders were allegedly found on his body to burn Richmond and capture and kill President Davis and his cabinet. This became an international incident. It may have inspired John Wilkes Booth to begin his plot against Abraham Lincoln, and Admiral Dahlgren spent the rest of his life trying to clear his son’s name.

Colonel Dahlgren’s remains were secured at the close of the war, and, after lying in state in the City Hall of Washington and Independence Hall of Philadelphia, were buried with distinguished honors at Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia. After the war, his step-mother, Madeline Vinton Dahlgren purchased the stone house on the National Road at the top of South Mountain and maintained it as a summer home for many years. That stone home is now the Historic Old South Mountain Inn restaurant. Mrs. Dahlgren constructed the Dahlgren Chapel across the street from the restaurant, which stands to this day. It honors both the Admiral, and the heroic son, Colonel Ulric Dahlgren.

Sadly, I will miss the game–we should be somewhere in southern Virginia about the time the first pitch is thrown by either Ric Dahlgren or his son Ulric V, but I’ve got a line on one of these little beauties, which will have a place of honor in my library at home.

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Every now and again, I wander off the reservation and post about something that has nothing to do with my historical work. Today is going to be one of those occasional wanderings off topic, as I would be remiss if I didn’t at least touch on the death of Clarence Clemons, The Big Man, yesterday. I hope you will forgive me for doing so.

Music has long played a very important role in my life. I have no musical talent whatsoever, but I have always loved music, and it has long been the soundtrack of my life. A big part of the soundtrack of my life has been the music of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. For reasons that I’ve never quite understood, Bruce’s blue-collar paeans to life have always deeply resonated with me. I first discovered the Boss at 14 in 1975, when his epic Born to Run was released. Playing a major role in the stories that fill “Born to Run” was the honking saxophone of the great Clarence Clemons.

As an example of how large a role the Boss and his music have played in my life, I spent the night before my first day of law school–in August 1984–attending a Springsteen concert in Washington, DC with my good friend Stuart Jones, and then drove all night to get back to Pittsburgh in time to get a couple of hours of fitful sleep before getting up to go to my first day of law school. I never got caught up on my rest again until after I took the bar exam three years later. I’ve had the good fortune of seeing the E Street Band perform live eight times in my life, and I now worry that there with Clarence’s passing, there will be no more such opportunities.

Bruce knew how much Clarence meant to the band and to the fans. He always introduced the Big Man last, and he acknowledged his importance in the song “Tenth Avenue Freezeout”, from Born to Run:

When the change was made uptown
And the big man joined the band
From the coastline to the city
All the little pretties raise their hands
I’m gonna sit back right easy and laugh
When scooter and the big man bust this city in half

In the fall of 1982, my senior year in college, I got to see Clarence’s own band, Clarence Clemons and the Red Bank Rockers, in a concert at Gettysburg College. The band featured Clarence, obviously, Max Weinberg, and most of the horn section of the Asbury Jukes, and it was a fun, rollicking night. After the show, I got to chat with Max and Clarence for a while, which was a great thrill. They were willing to talk to a couple of college kids, and we had a few laughs together. I will never forget their kindness to a couple of middle-class college students.

Clarence was not the greatest technical sax player, but he was larger than life, a huge star in his own right–as Bruce so often put it, he was the king of the universe. He was a gentle bear of a man at 6’4″, 270 pounds, with a large personality and an even larger stage presence. The eye naturally gravitated toward him, as he loved the limelight. Before long, it was obvious that, other than Bruce himself, Clarence was the one member of the E Street Band who was irreplaceable. Indeed, I cannot even begin to imagine hearing something like “Jungleland”–Clarence’s most famous and most epic solo, one that still gives me chills when I hear it today–without Clarence’s horn.

I can’t help but wonder whether Clarence’s untimely passing yesterday at the too-young age of 69 won’t mean the end of the E Street Band–I hope not, but as I said, I cannot imagine it without the Big Man’s outsized persona and his even bigger horn. For now, rest in peace, Clarence. Thank you for the memories, and thank you for filling such a large place in the soundtrack of my life. You will be missed.

It’s a sad day on E Street today…..

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I suffered through 45 minutes of Gettysburg on the History Channel last night. With brothers Ridley and Tony Scott as directors and producers, I had high hopes for this production. The Scotts are two of my very favorite directors, and they are known for the quality of their productions.

What a staggering disappointment this thing was. I turned it off after 45 minutes because I couldn’t take another moment of it. This thing was shockingly bad. Events were presented horribly out of context, with absolutely no stage setting. The movie begins with the Iron Brigade’s advance to the unfinished railroad cut and without any context for the viewer to understand how they got there or why they were there. It would have confused anyone without a decent working knowledge of the battle.

I counted ten major factual inaccuracies in the first ten minutes of the thing. And it got worse from there. Just a few of the things wrong with this production–and this is FAR from a comprehensive list:

1. The terrain was completely wrong. Since when were segments of the Gettysburg battlefield covered with thick forests of pine trees?

2. The sets were awful–fence lines were wrong, the buildings were wrong, and the depiction of the town itself was completely wrong. The unfinished railroad cut on McPherson’s Ridge was portrayed as being only three or four feet deep when it’s really as deep as thirty feet at its deepest.

3. They had the Iron Brigade digging deep trenches atop Culp’s Hill on the night of July 1–not crude breastworks like those actually built on the night of July 2, but rather the sort of deep, semi-permanent trenches with head logs that one expects to see on the Petersburg battlefield. And they were using brand-new, shiny shovels and pick axes that looked like they still had the Lowe’s or Home Depot price stickers on them, not period tools. They never did mention Greene’s brigade either….

4. The uniforms and many of the weapons were wrong, and few, if any, of the actors looked like the people they were portraying. I just loved the yellow cavalry stripes on the infantrymen. That was my favorite.

5. The history was largely wrong. As just one example, none of John Buford, John Reynolds, Henry Heth, or A. P. Hill were even mentioned at all during the discussion of the first day. Instead, the first day focused on Rufus Dawes–you would think that the 6th Wisconsin alone captured the Confederates in the railroad cut and that no other units were involved.

6. I turned it off just as the second day’s portrayal began. I’m told that the focus was on William Barksdale and that there was no mention of Little Round Top or of Joshua Chamberlain or the 20th Maine’s defense.

I feel badly for Garry Adelman and Prof. Peter Carmichael, who were interspersed as talking heads. They presented the history accurately and correctly, and lent some credibility to this thing, but yikes–now they will be associated with this piece of crap. Pete and Garry are both good guys and very capable and accomplished historians, and I sincerely hope that their association with this terrible program doesn’t sully their reputations.

There’s plenty more, but that will give you a taste. I’m so disappointed in this that it’s shocking. What’s even more concerning to me is that novices will think that this piece of dreck is an accurate depiction of the battle and that they will find out just how terribly wrong it was and lose interest because of it. On the other hand, if it spurs interest, then I guess it’s a good thing, but it nevertheless shows how far the History Channel has fallen.

Awful. Just appallingly, horrifyingly awful. Do yourselves a favor–don’t waste a minute of your time or a brain cell on this piece of crap. It’s not worth either.

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With thanks to Bud Hall–a Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War himself–for passing this along to me, I give you the words of the great American poet, Archibald MacLeish, who offered this elegy:

Who in the still houses has not heard them? The soldiers say: “Our deaths are not ours; they are yours. They will mean what you make them mean.”

They say: “Whether our lives and our deaths were for peace and a new hope or for nothing, we cannot say. It is you who must say this.”

They say: “We leave you our deaths. Give them their meaning. We were young, we had died, remember us.”

Thank you to all of the veterans who gave the last full measure of their devotion to help give us the freedoms that we take for granted. And to all of my friends who have served, thank you for your service and for the sacrifices that you have made so that the rest of us can enjoy our freedom. As you celebrate this Memorial Day, please remember to thank a veteran for his or her service.

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This photo, taken last Sunday on the steps of the Ohio State House at the Ohio Civil War 150 kick-off event, which featured a speech by Wes Cowan of The Antiques Roadshow, pretty much leaves me speechless. Apparently, there was another event going on downtown at the same time….

UPDATE, APRIL 18, 2011: I’ve gotten a piece of hate mail from a fellow member of the Sesquicentennial Commission, slamming me big time for posting this photo. He says it makes the re-enactors look bad and that it also makes the Commission look bad. While I am not a re-enactor and personally don’t get it, I have plenty of friends who are re-enactors who take it very seriously by trying to get it right, and it was never my intention to offend any of them. My intention was to take a photo that HAD ALREADY SPREAD ACROSS THE INTERNET by the time I saw it, and have a little bit of fun with it. As I told him, if he takes himself so seriously as a re-enactor that he can’t have a laugh at a silly, funny picture, then that’s a real shame

As for the Commission: My membership on the Governor’s Advisory Commission on the Civil War is a matter of great pride for me. It’s important to me to have been asked to serve on the Commission, as I think that I have something to offer. I take that responsibility VERY seriously, although I try never to take myself too seriously (although I admittedly don’t always succeed).

Unfortunately, I could not attend the event, as I had already committed to do the event in Greencastle, PA months before the idea for this event was even cooked up. I felt it would be disingenuous to brag about an event I could not and did not attend, and at the same time, I wanted to let it be known that we can all have a little fun with this stuff, that there’s no reason to be as serious as a heart attack about it all the time. It certainly was not intended to belittle the effort that went into planning and executing the event–which was substantial–or to disrespect anyone who participated in it. If any other of my fellow Commission members–other than the member who sent me the hate mail–were offended by my having a little fun with this, then I apologize for offending you. However, I do not, and will not, apologize for thinking that it’s okay not to take ourselves–and the commemoration of the Sesquicentennial–too seriously.

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I’ve been fairly cutting edge with the Civil War on the Internet. I was one of the earliest participants in on-line discussions, I had a website as early as 1997, I started blogging in 2005, and I’ve been using Facebook to promote and sell my stuff. There is, however, one thing that I absolutely and categorically refuse to do: join Twitter. While some argue that no social media strategy is complete without tweeting, I can’t get beyond the thought that Twitter is the ultimate exercise in narcissism. It never ceases to amaze me that with all of his loony, demented ravings, nobody has ever gotten a larger following on Twitter faster than Charlie Sheen, who admittedly doesn’t even write his own posts.

The bottom line is that I already spend too much time on this stuff as it is, and the last thing I’m about to do is to add another layer to my daily Internet usage, and I just won’t do so. That doesn’t mean that others shouldn’t make good use of Twitter as a means of marketing and selling books, I just won’t be one of them.

However, I have to tip my cap to a historian at the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources who is using Twitter to spread the word of the Civil War sesquicentennial. Here’s the article about it, from Yahoo News:

Historian tweets about Civil War to bring back era
By TOM BREEN, Associated Press – Tue Mar 22, 5:02 pm ET

RALEIGH, N.C. – Two months before the start of the Civil War, a North Carolina belle named Catherine Ann Devereux Edmondston tapped out a frustrated message about her secession-opposing sibling in a tweet to her followers: “Sister Frances is a terrible Unionist!”

She might have tweeted, that is, if Twitter had existed in 1861. Instead, Edmondston and other long-dead North Carolinians from a bygone era are having their social networking done for them posthumously. A Raleigh-based historian is using the popular service to bring the home front of a war to modern day audiences nearly a century and a half later.

“We’re not imposing any of our words. This is purely from men, women, and even teenagers who stayed at home and fought the war in their own ways,” said LeRae Umfleet, the historian who manages the collections at the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources.

Since last week, Umfleet has been tweeting from the account (at)CivilianWartime with the words of an escaped slave, a woman whose husband owned a plantation and others. The tweets are moving roughly in chronological order along with the war, meaning that so far the messages mostly express the foreboding and uncertainty of people in North Carolina as they watched war clouds build.

“I have just seen the President’s message,” Umfleet tweeted in the March 11, 1861 words of Mary Bethell. “Mr. Lincoln, I think he intends to coerce those seceding States.”

The Twitter account is part of the ongoing effort of the cultural resources department’s ongoing effort to mark the 150th anniversary of the bloodiest conflict in American history. It seeks to highlight the experiences of those who remained at home while others went off to war — a conflict ever more dire as the battles drag on.

“By the end of the war, we will have seen conflict on North Carolina soil, and we’ll have heard from people with firsthand knowledge of that,” Umfleet said.

The tweets aren’t just short excerpts from a time when letter writing was far more common than today, though. Each tweet links to a blog that contains the full passage being cited as well as information on where to find the original documents.

And all of the tweets are taken verbatim from letters, diaries, autobiographies and other records of what people thought of the conflict as it unfolded.

These tweets of war are an attempt to reach those now accustomed to getting their information from tiny portable screens rather than thick and musty volumes. Siince Monday, the Twitter page has gone from fewer than two dozen followers to more than 240.

“How cool is this!” one Twitter user tweeted Tuesday, linking to the site.

Umstead has been tweeting several times a day so far. She plans to follow the war’s progress by recording thoughts of North Carolinians roughly in step with the chronology of the war, from the first stirrings of secession to the final surrender in 1865.

One of those following the tweets is Wilson Hines, a history major at Wayne Community College in Goldsboro. Hines, 37, says that some history buffs may turn up their noses at services like Twitter, but it’s increasingly important to use tools familiar to younger people to teach them about such a big part of American history.

“All these kids do is spend time on the Internet,” he said. “It’s on their phones, it’s on their laptops … Twitter is a fantastic way to get the word spread about historical events.”

Hines has even seen specific interest in the Civil War growing on Twitter, where the (hash)CivilWar hashtag — a way to search for tweets referring to a particular topic — has grown significantly in the last few months.

“Almost every minute someone’s saying something new about the Civil War, where not long ago there might be one post a day,” he said.

The conflict that millions of Americans followed at the time through newspapers, letters and the telegraph has become something of an Internet-era sensation, with efforts that also include blogs and web sites featuring accounts and images from the war. There are also numerous Facebook pages, and even Twitter accounts set up on behalf of long-dead figures from the war era, including Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant.

Umfleet, who is new to Twitter herself, said she’s taken to tweeting with enthusiasm, although there are hurdles to negotiate when bringing 19th century ways of speaking into the digital age.

“Sometimes their prose is a little difficult to follow, and unfortunately they don’t end their sentences with LOL,” she said.

I’m still not going to run out and sign up for Twitter, but I have to tip my cap to Ms. Umfleet for coming up with a really novel idea, and if it helps get one person in the Civil War, then it’s a good thing.

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Sometimes, I get to see and touch some really cool stuff. One of my favorite photographs of me shows me holding John Buford’s Henry rifle. I look terrified but thrilled, probably for the reason that I was terrified and thrilled at the same time.

Today was another one of those days when I got to see and hold something incredibly neat that very few people ever get to see, let alone to touch.

The Ohio Historical Society owns a 4.5 acre parcel in the middle of the Buffington Island battlefield. Funds were set aside to construct an interpretive kiosk on that parcel, which, in addition to a number of other new interpretive markers from the Morgan’s Trail group, will enable visitors to understand what happened there without needing a battlefield guide for the first time. Because I am the chairman of the history committee of the Buffington Island Battlefield Preservation Foundation, the folks at OHS who have been working on this project have been kind enough to include me in the process. Edd Sharp, the president of the Foundation, has also been involved in this process. Today, we had a meeting at OHS to discuss the illustrations that will be included in the interpretive kiosk.

The meeting was productive and successful, and at the end of the meeting, Edd and I got a treat. John Hunt Morgan and all of his officers were imprisoned in the Ohio Penitentiary here in Columbus. Morgan and a few of his officers eventually escaped, and the rest were exchanged. In September 1863, one of the prison guards brought a small notebook into the prison and got every one of Morgan’s officers to autograph it for him, including Morgan himself, two of his brothers, and his brother-in-law and second-in-command, Basil W. Duke. Each officer signed his name, wrote his rank, his unit, and his home town. Some dated the page. It’s really a remarkable artifact, and it’s not the least bit surprising to hear that OHS keeps it in its vault, under lock and key, and with extremely limited access.

Today, for the second time in two weeks, I not only got to look at the entire notebook, but I also got to hold it too. I don’t believe it’s ever been out on display, and I’m quite certain that only a very, very small handful of people have ever seen it since it went into the OHS collection. The staff got it out and allowed me to look at it at the last meeting two weeks ago, but Edd missed the meeting due to illness. He was there today, so today was his turn, and we both got to hold it and look at it in detail.

I wanted to take a photo of Morgan’s signature and post it here, but the staff would not allow me to do so, which I do understand. The signature says, “Jno. H. Morgan, Brig. Gen. C.S.A. Lexington, Ky.” Morgan had neat, tight handwriting. One of the things that I have always enjoyed about handling Civil War documents is to appreciate the beautiful penmanship that even men had in those days, and the signatures in the notebook are no exception.

Scans of Morgan’s, Duke’s, and a few of his other officers will be included on one of the interpretive panels in the new kiosk on the battlefield, so if you ever visit the Buffington Island battlefield and see the likenesses of those signatures, you will know where they came from.

OHS also has the key to Morgan’s prison cell, as well as the Henry rifle of Major Daniel McCook, the patriarch of the Fighting McCooks, who was killed by the first volley at Buffington Island. The photo of Major McCook that will appear in the kiosk shows him holding the so-called “McCook Rifle”, and that same weapon can be seen in the museum at OHS.

One of the fringe benefits of the work I do is getting to see stuff like what I saw today, and I never take that for granted. I’m just sorry that I can’t put up a photo of the notebook or of Morgan’s signature here.

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In honor of President’s Day, Prof. Glenn LaFantasie of Western Kentucky University has written a very interesting piece on why the 15th President, James Buchanan, is the worst president in American history. It’s also sure to push the buttons of some modern-day Republicans:

Who’s the worst president of them all?
When it comes to who least deserves to be honored today, it’s a close call between the 43rd and 15th presidents
By Glenn W. LaFantasie

In 2006, while the Bush administration smashed its way through two wars, countless constitutional constraints, and a fragile economy constructed on the slippery slope of tax cuts for the wealthy, Sean Wilentz, a Princeton historian, pondered in Rolling Stone whether W. would be regarded as America’s worst president. Rather coyly, Wilentz never came right out and said that Bush 43 was the worst, but his essay gathered together all the evidence that pointed toward only one verdict: guilty as charged.

In making his case, Wilentz mentioned a 2004 poll of historians, who predicted that Bush would surely end up among the worst five presidents. While presidents have a way of rewriting their own history — witness Bush’s recent book tour — he doesn’t seem to be on a path to any near-term redemption. For example, a poll conducted in July 2010 by the Siena Research Institute revealed that 238 “presidential scholars” had ranked Bush among the five worst presidents (39 out of 43), with Andrew Johnson solidly occupying the very bottom of the list. Johnson is a particular favorite for the bottom of the pile because of his impeachment (although he was acquitted in the Senate by one vote in May 1868), his complete mishandling of Reconstruction policy, his inept dealings with his Cabinet and Congress, his drinking problem (he was probably inebriated at his inauguration), his bristling personality, and his enormous sense of self-importance. He once suggested that God saw fit to have Lincoln assassinated so that he could become president. A Northern senator averred that “Andrew Johnson was the queerest character that ever occupied the White House.”

Queerest? Perhaps. But worst? Johnson actually has some stiff competition for the bottom rung of the presidential rankings, not only from W, but also from one of his own contemporaries, James Buchanan, the fifteenth president.

Interestingly enough, Johnson and Buchanan, two of the worst presidents, stand as bookends for arguably the best: Abraham Lincoln. But Lincoln’s greatness might never have manifested itself if it weren’t for Buchanan’s utter and complete incompetency, and for that reason I cast my ballot in favor of the fifteenth president as our absolutely worst chief executive ever.

While I acknowledge that Bush 43 was certainly the worst president I’ve seen in my lifetime (12 presidents have occupied the White House since my birth), he runs neck and neck with Buchanan’s inadequacies as chief executive. Both of them pursued their own agendas: Buchanan hoped to placate the South as the sectional controversy grew worse (and became increasingly more violent) in the late 1850s, while Bush worked assiduously to dismantle the federal government while trying to fit his presidency into his vacation schedule. Buchanan failed to reach his goal; Bush succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Both presidents handed a broken country on to their successors. But Bush broke the nation’s back on purpose, so he wins points for what we might call a competent incompetency.

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By any measure, Buchanan was an odd duck. As the last president to be born in the 18th century (1791), he began life as the son of a storekeeper in Pennsylvania, attended Dickinson College (from which he was briefly expelled for rowdiness), and became an able attorney. Apart from eyelashes and eyebrows, Buchanan lacked any facial hair; he never shaved throughout his adulthood. His eyes were slightly crossed; to compensate for the defect, he often kept one eye shut and cocked his head to the side. Actually Buchanan was nearsighted in one eye and farsighted in the other.

Yet Buchanan built up a prosperous law practice, and savvy investments — particularly in real estate — made him a wealthy man. In 1819, he was engaged to Ann Caroline Coleman, the daughter of a prosperous manufacturer, but he devoted most of his time to his work as an attorney and to politics. For whatever reason, Ann Coleman broke off the engagement and died shortly afterward, perhaps from an accidental or self-induced overdose of laudanum. Her death left Buchanan distraught with grief. “I feel that happiness has fled from me forever,” he told his father. The Coleman family prevented him from attending the funeral. He would mourn Ann’s death for the rest of his life. From time to time friends urged him to marry, but Buchanan vowed never to take a wife. “My affections,” he said, “were buried in the grave.”

The mysteries surrounding his relationship with Ann Coleman resemble the bleak and brooding elements of an Edgar Allen Poe story, with Buchanan cast in the role of a bereft and inconsolable inamorato. He remained a committed bachelor until his death. Some historians have speculated that Buchanan was actually a homosexual, but these claims are based solely on the fact that he roomed for several years with a close friend, William Rufus King, an Alabamian who served in the U.S. Senate and as vice president under Franklin Pierce. Andrew Jackson once called Buchanan “an Aunt Nancy.” A Tennessee governor referred to him and his roommate as “Buchanan & his wife.” But such 19th century political slurs should not be interpreted in a 21st century context. Like most of us, Buchanan kept his sexual preferences — whatever they were — to himself.

During the War of 1812, Buchanan turned to politics, joined the Federalist Party, and served in the Pennsylvania Legislature from 1814 to 1816; he later won election to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he served from 1821 to 1831. In Washington, he turned his back on the Federalists and ardently — although somewhat incongruously, given his wealth and high status — supported Andrew Jackson and the rising populism of the Democratic Party. Jackson appointed him minister to Russia, a diplomatic post that placed Buchanan as far away from Washington as the spoils system could manage. When he returned to the States, he was elected to the U.S. Senate, where he displayed all the traits of a Democratic Party stalwart, a strict constitutional constructionist (in the Jeffersonian mode), and — again, incongruously — a Northerner who strongly, even sometimes impulsively, supported Southern interests, including any measure that would protect or extend the institution of slavery.

In the 1840s, he hoped to receive the Democratic Party nomination for president, but he did not attract much attention in Congress or as a diplomat, and he occupied a middling rank in his own party. When James K. Polk won the presidency in 1844, he named Buchanan secretary of state — a plum appointment — but the new president grew frustrated with the Pennsylvanian, calling him indecisive and thinking him ineffective. “Mr. Buchanan is an able man,” Polk wrote in his diary, “but in small matters without judgment and sometimes acts like an old maid.” As secretary of state, Buchanan’s biggest idea was to propose the annexation of Cuba while the United States went about adding great expanses of territory in the Southwest and along the Pacific Coast after defeating Mexico in the U.S.-Mexican War of 1846-1847. The dream of acquiring Cuba danced in Buchanan’s head for the rest of his life, obviously to no avail, even though plenty of Southerners would have loved taking over an island in the Caribbean where slavery already existed, just 90 miles or so off the U.S. mainland. Americans, he believed, should go wherever they wanted to go, although he said so in a potentially tongue-tying sentence: “Let us go on whithersoever our destiny may lead us.”

Echoes of Buchanan’s belief in Manifest Destiny can still be heard in our own time. In his 2004 State of the Union address, George W. Bush recast (but only slightly) Buchanan’s belief in manifest destiny by trumpeting: “America is a Nation with a mission — and that mission comes from our most basic beliefs. We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire. Our aim is a democratic peace — a peace founded upon the dignity and rights of every man and woman.” That was one of his explanations for why the United States had invaded Iraq without provocation. Buchanan’s “whithersoever” had landed us in the Middle East — without an exit strategy. For Bush and Buchanan, there was simply no way to avoid destiny and providence. If God wanted the U.S. to possess California and Oregon, so let it be done. Ditto Iraq and Afghanistan.

Buchanan thought he could grasp the presidency by wooing support from Southern Democrats, so he remained steadfast in his defense of states’ rights, slavery and its extension into western territories, and aggressive expansionism. Yet his bid for the Democratic nomination failed in 1848, when Lewis Cass of Michigan ran and lost to Zachary Taylor, the Whig candidate, and again in 1852, when Franklin Pierce won the Democratic nomination and the election. Buchanan hoped that Pierce would name him secretary of state, but the new president instead appointed him minister to Great Britain. Once again Buchanan’s ostensible political friends had succeeded in getting him out of the country and, one assumes, out of their hair. In London, he could not stop thinking about Cuba. He traveled to Ostend, Belgium, in October 1854, where, with two other American ministers, he drew up a “manifesto” that called for the use of force by the U.S. to take possession of the island. Inevitably, the Ostend Manifesto was leaked to the press, giving rise to a storm of protest at home and abroad. Congress investigated the diplomatic correspondence surrounding the document’s creation, and Northern antislavery forces denounced it as nothing more than a Southern attempt to expand slavery into the Caribbean. The Pierce administration gave up its designs on Cuba, but Buchanan kept longing for the island, hoping that someday the United States (and he) would hold it in a loving embrace.

From across the Atlantic, Buchanan also kept his eye firmly focused on presidential politics. He resigned as minister to England and returned to the U.S. in time to throw his hat into the ring for the Democratic nomination in 1856. His timing was perfect, since the Democratic Party had been thrown into disarray by the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act two years earlier. The act, which was the brainchild of Sen. Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, voided the earlier Missouri Compromise by allowing the voters of Kansas and Nebraska to decide by means of what was called “popular sovereignty” whether their territories should allow slavery inside their borders. Conflict between pro-slavery “border ruffians” and “free-soilers” resulted in violence between the two sides. President Pierce supported the pro-slavery element in Kansas, despite the fact that free-soilers actually constituted a major of the population. As a result, both Pierce and Douglas, who also had presidential aspirations, lost support in the Democratic Party — a political development that worked to Buchanan’s great advantage.

Regarded as a safe candidate, since he had been overseas during the upheavals over Kansas, the Democrats nominated him at their convention in Cincinnati. In the general election, Buchanan faced off against two other candidates: John C. Frémont of the Republican Party and Millard Fillmore, the former president, of the American (or “Know-Nothing”) Party. Buchanan won, but only by a plurality, not a majority. Nevertheless, he saw his victory as a mandate, namely that Americans had voted for Union over disunion.

From the start of his presidency — indeed, from the very moment of his inaugural address — Buchanan revealed that he was going to do everything he could to sustain slavery and Southern interests, no matter how much his policies would give Northern Republicans proof that the new president was part of what they called a “Slave Power Conspiracy.” Sixty-five years old, with snow white hair, Buchanan took the oath of office and delivered his inaugural address. He made plain his own and his party’s belief that Congress had no authority to interfere with the institution of slavery.

What really mattered to him, however, was the prospect of finding a judicial, rather than a congressional or a presidential, solution to the sectional issue of slavery. Going beyond accepted political bounds, and ignoring the principle of separation of powers, Buchanan had used his influence to sway a Northern Supreme Court justice to side with the Southern majority in a pending case, Dred Scott v. Sandford. When he delivered his inaugural, Buchanan already knew the outcome of that case, although in his address he deceitfully alluded to the forthcoming decision by saying of the Court: “To their decision, in common with all good citizens, I shall cheerfully submit, whatever this may be.” Two days later, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney issued the most infamous decision in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court — an opinion holding that Dred Scott, a slave who sued for his freedom because he had lived with his master for a time in a free state, was not free; that no slave or black person could be a citizen of the U.S.; that Congress had no power to exclude slavery from a territory; and that the slavery exclusion clause of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 was unconstitutional. The opinion did not resolve the sectional controversy as Buchanan and the Taney court had hoped. Instead, it produced thunderous outrage throughout the North. In the South, of course, the decision was cheered. But Northerners saw the court’s action as a partisan ploy.

Ignoring the clamor of criticism from the North, Buchanan nestled into the White House by surrounding himself with advisors who told him what he wanted to hear rather than what he needed to know. The new president lived in a bubble, despite the fact that the nation was beginning to crumble around him. During his first year in office, an economic depression (referred to as the Panic of 1857) hit the country and persisted for his entire term in office. With striking ineptitude, Buchanan failed to deal with the economic crisis in any effective manner, which only helped to increase bitterness between Northern commercial interests and Southern agrarians. Spouting his philosophy of limited government, he told the public that the government lacked the power “to extend relief” to those hardest hit by the depression. As he promised to reduce the federal debt and all government spending, Buchanan nevertheless oversaw during his one term in office a growth in federal spending that amounted to 15 percent of the budget in 1856. When he left office, Buchanan handed over a $17 million deficit to Lincoln.

In the heat of mounting sectional discord and as the economy bottomed out, Buchanan abandoned the traditional understanding in U.S. politics of regarding his political enemies as a loyal opposition; instead, Buchanan, like George W. Bush 150 years later, accused his political opponents of disloyalty, extremism and treason. “The great object of my administration,” Buchanan wrote in 1856, “will be to arrest, if possible, the agitation of the Slavery question at the North and to destroy sectional parties.” In other words, Buchanan wanted to eliminate the Republicans, not just defeat them, rather like how Karl Rove worked strenuously to create a “permanent majority” for the Republican Party during Bush 43’s presidency.

While Buchanan condemned Republicans and abolitionists as the source of all the nation’s troubles, the Kansas problem continued to boil over. When the pro-slavery minority in Kansas submitted a fraudulent constitution legalizing slavery in the territory, Buchanan endorsed the document as legitimate. Then he tried to force his arch-rival, Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, to do the same. In a White House meeting, Buchanan threatened Douglas by pointing out that since Andrew Jackson’s time no senator had opposed a presidential measure successfully without then losing his next bid for reelection. Furious, Douglas replied: “Mr. President, I wish you to remember that General Jackson is dead!” He then stormed out of the White House. (Douglas won reelection to his seat, successfully defeating Abraham Lincoln in the Illinois Senate contest of 1858.)

Buchanan went forward and submitted the Kansas issue to Congress. Then, in his annual message, he enjoyed a “Mission Accomplished” moment by declaring that “Kansas is … at this moment as much a slave state as Georgia and South Carolina.” But Congress had not yet decided the fate of Kansas. After fierce debate, the Senate approved the bill admitting Kansas as a slave state, but the House of Representatives did not. Finally, in Kansas, the free-soil majority voted against the pro-slavery constitution in a fair election. (Kansas would remain a territory until 1861, when, after the departure of Southerners from Congress, it was admitted into the Union as a free state.) With a smugness that smacked of delusion, Buchanan took credit for making Kansas “tranquil and prosperous.”

Even as Buchanan was fanning the flames of sectional strife over Kansas, another crisis in the West demanded his attention as president. In Utah territory, the Mormons combined an overt patriotism and demonstrations of loyalty to the U.S. government with rebellious rhetoric and actions — such as the practice of polygamy, otherwise outlawed in the U.S. — that left many Americans outside of the Great Basin convinced that the members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were intent on dominating the government of Utah, ignoring federal officials and authority in the territory, and enforcing a “Theodemocracy,” rather than a true democracy, under the leadership of Brigham Young. When reports reached Washington in the spring of 1857 that the Mormons were in a state of near insurrection against federal authority, Buchanan concluded — on something less than reliable evidence — that the Utah settlers had “for several years past manifested a spirit of insubordination to the Constitution and laws of the United States,” that the inhabitants of the territory were under “a strange system of terrorism,” and that those who resisted the federal government were therefore traitors. Accordingly, he ordered, in his capacity as commander in chief, a military expedition to the territory that was “not to be withdrawn until the inhabitants of that Territory shall manifest a proper sense of the duty which they owe to this government.” The army blundered its mission, and the Mormons fought an effective guerrilla campaign against the federal troops. Eventually, Buchanan felt the heat of political pressure to end the so-called Mormon War, and a peaceful end to the fiasco. True to form, however, Buchanan claimed credit for a victory in Utah.

The president was a saber-rattler. To solve a dispute between the U.S. and the British over the boundary through the Strait of Juan de Fuca in the Northwest, Buchanan sent troops under the command of Gen. Winfield Scott to Puget Sound. Luckily the argument was settled peacefully. He also dispatched 2,500 sailors and Marines to Paraguay after a U.S. naval captain had been killed there. The campaign lasted months without any appreciable results. Like other presidents who would follow him, including George W. Bush, Buchanan resorted to military force without qualms and then, when the use of force did not quite work out as he intended, he simply declared victory and hoped that everyone would forget his mistakes. At least he did not say out loud to the Mormons, the British or the Paraguayans, as Bush 43 did to his enemies, “Bring them on.” Even so, he assumed the posture of an aggressive commander in chief — one who conveniently overlooked the fact that Congress, and not the chief executive, was supposed to declare war.

Meanwhile, Buchanan pushed ahead with what he considered his most important piece of business: acquiring Cuba for the United States. After his nomination for the presidency, Buchanan reiterated his extraordinary lust for Cuba. “If I can be instrumental in settling the slavery question … and then adding Cuba to the Union,” he exclaimed, “I shall be willing to give up the ghost.” Yet Spain had not changed its mind since the time of the Ostend Manifesto. It had no interest in relinquishing Cuba to any other country, including the United States. A bill to purchase the island languished and then died in Congress. Undeterred, Buchanan kept saying over and over, “We must have Cuba.” Because his desire for Cuba was not fulfilled, he did not give up the ghost.

Instead, he led the nation into its worst crisis. The crisis, at least, was not entirely of his own making, although he surely contributed to the steady escalation of belligerent feelings between North and South while he sat in the White House. He also helped bring about a schism in the Democratic Party that led to a four-way race for the presidency in the election of 1860: in the North, Abraham Lincoln (R) versus Stephen Douglas (D), and in the South, John C. Breckinridge (D) versus John Bell (Constitution Union Party). Buchanan did not run for reelection because he had promised the nation he would serve only one term. In that sense, he was a lame-duck president from the moment he had been elected in 1856, and his disputes with Congress suffered because everyone in Washington knew that he would be gone after four short years.

What triggered the immediate chain of events that led to the Civil War was Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency on Nov. 6, 1860. Fearful that Lincoln was a die-hard abolitionist, rather than a Republican who simply wanted to prohibit the spread of slavery into the western territories, a good number of Southern extremists called “fire-eaters” vowed to take their states out of the Union if Lincoln became president. With his election, South Carolina quickly called a convention to consider the matter of secession, and on Dec. 20, after Lincoln’s election had been confirmed by the Electoral College, the Palmetto State jubilantly declared that it was no longer in the United States. Despite all the rationalizations and elaborate justifications for secession, then and ever after, the action taken by South Carolina was illegal and traitorous. Buchanan, as the nation’s chief magistrate, watched with a slack jaw as the South warned the nation that it would not abide Lincoln’s election, despite the fact that the Illinoisan had been legally elected (and not, say, appointed to the presidency by the U. S. Supreme Court as George W. Bush would be in 2000). Rather than taking the South’s threats seriously, Buchanan in his annual message ignored the impending crisis and asked one last time for a congressional appropriation with which to purchase Cuba. He also suggested that it might be prudent to send a military expedition into Mexico for the purpose of establishing an American protectorate in Chihuahua and Sonora to ward off Indian attacks and bandit raids into Texas and New Mexico. Congress refused his requests.

At first, though, it looked like Buchanan might take decisive action against disunion. In his annual message to Congress, in December 1860, he denied “the right of secession.” The Founders had established a perpetual union, he said, and the federal government had the duty to defend it from all enemies, foreign and domestic. In Buchanan’s estimation, there was no wiggle room when it came to disunion: “Secession is neither more nor less than revolution. It may or may not be a justifiable revolution; but still it is revolution.” By inserting the word “justifiable” in this last sentence, one could detect Buchanan faltering, his knees buckling like a boxer who’s about to collapse to the mat. Sure enough, Buchanan also declared in his message that he and Congress lacked the authority to force any seceded state back into the Union. “The power to make war against a State,” he contended, “is at variance with the whole spirit and intent of the Constitution … Our Union rests upon public opinion, and can never be cemented by the blood of its citizens shed in civil war.”

But he said this 17 days before South Carolina or any other Southern state had left the Union. He was, in other words, providing the South with a handy justification for secession and letting them know the federal government would do nothing to stop the disintegration of the nation. No longer did Buchanan rattle sabers, as he had done in Utah or had threatened to do in acquiring Cuba or invading Mexico. When it came to the South and secession, the president professed to be powerless. In the North, his professed impotence seemed inexcusable, especially among those anti-slavery Democrats who remembered how Andrew Jackson had effectively handled the Nullification Crisis of 1832, when South Carolina tried to void a federal tariff law. Jackson had responded by threatening to use military force against South Carolina, which wisely had backed down. Stephen Douglas was right, though: Jackson was dead, and Buchanan was nothing like him.

Buchanan’s lack of resolve, once South Carolina and the other states of the Deep South did abandon the Union, opened the door for those rebellious states to take possession of federal property — forts, armories, post offices, customs houses — without hindrance. Fort Sumter in South Carolina, which sat on a small island in the middle of Charleston’s harbor, was among the few federal military installations that remained in the hands of the U.S. government. The fate of Fort Sumter threw Buchanan into a fit of indecision. Always something of a sponge who absorbed the ideas and strength of others around him, like W did under the mesmerizing influence of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, Buchanan continued to listen to his Southern advisors who told him to tread carefully or not at all. Throughout the month of December 1860, Buchanan nearly suffered a complete breakdown: He cursed aloud, he wept, his hands trembled, he could not remember orders he had given or documents he had read. Some mornings he found it difficult to get out of bed. Observers noticed that there was a constant twitching in his cheek, an indication that he might have suffered a minor stroke as the crisis mounted. Finally, he decided not to give up the fort, and the Southern members of his Cabinet resigned in protest. Buchanan replaced them with Cabinet officials who were more decisively Unionist in their sentiments.

He wanted someone — anyone but himself — to find a solution to the nation’s problems. Nevertheless, by the end of December Buchanan ordered a supply ship to Fort Sumter; the effort failed, however, when the ship was forced to abandon Charleston harbor when it came under heavy fire from batteries along the shore. Buchanan decided to do nothing else about the fort and the troops who defended it. In fact, it became clear that he intended to take no action against the South for the remaining eight weeks of his term. When he shared a carriage with Lincoln back to the White House after the new president’s inauguration, Buchanan said, “If you are as happy in entering the White House as I shall feel on returning to Wheatland [his private estate in Pennsylvania] you are a happy man.” Lincoln’s reply, if any, is not recorded.

Buchanan spent the rest of his life at Wheatland justifying his actions — and, more pointedly, his inaction — in a memoir in which he referred to himself in the third person, as if he were a figure he had never met in person. He continued to blame abolitionists and the Republican Party for the nation’s troubles, and he absolved himself of any responsibility for the Civil War, stating that he was “completely satisfied” with everything he had done as president. Forgotten by his countrymen as he spent his last years at Wheatland, he died in 1868. Many Americans had assumed he was already dead.

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Numerous historians have said that no president was better qualified to serve in the White House than James Buchanan, given the vast amount of experience he had gained in elected and appointed offices over the course of a long career in public service. In 1988, some pundits said the same thing about George Herbert Walker Bush, who had served as vice president, ambassador, congressman and director of the CIA before winning the presidency. Too few pundits, however, pointed out how injuriously unqualified George W. Bush was for the presidency. But, then, we all learned that for ourselves over eight long years.

Lately some historians have tried to rehabilitate Buchanan. “It is unrealistic,” writes a recent historian, Russell McClintock, “to think that in 1860 the White House could have been occupied by a chief executive willing to take a sufficiently bold stand” in the secession crisis. Really? McClintock believes that “few of the men who have occupied the White House could have stood up to the challenge of the moment.” But that’s nonsense. It amounts to admitting that most presidents are mediocre, and Buchanan should be forgiven for simply being more mediocre than most of them. Yet Lincoln had no experience in leadership when he took the oath of office. And while it’s true that he fumbled during his first weeks in office, he eventually rose “to the challenge of the moment.” What distinguishes Buchanan, then, is not that his mistakes can or should be excused, it’s that he totally lacked the capacity to rise to the occasion, to act when action was necessary, to defend the country precisely when it needed defending. In other words, he was a terrible president.

Even so, Buchanan’s incompetent incompetency resulted in our worst national catastrophe, though the Civil War cannot entirely be laid at his feet. Other forces, beyond his blunders, led to secession and war, and to some extent, when all’s said and done, there was probably little he could have done to prevent the cascade of Southern states that left the Union after South Carolina marched out in December 1860. Indeed, it’s just possible that if he had attempted to coerce South Carolina to rescind its secession, other Southern states might have seceded in even more rapid order than they ended up doing. That’s not an excuse for his inaction, and my statement differs significantly in substance than McClintock’s apologia for Buchanan. Buchanan might not have been able to change the course of history or to stop the onslaught of Civil War. But he might have at least tried.

As for George W. Bush, and his incompetent competency, he did not usher in a civil war — not quite. But he did make a mockery of the Office of the President of the United States, initiate foreign wars without provocation, mismanage the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, overstep his constitutional authority as president and commander in chief, violate human and civil rights, approve the use of torture, call his domestic political opponents enemies of America and traitors, alienate most of the nation’s allies around the world, lie about WMD, pass tax cuts for the wealthy that brought the national economy to its knees, sign the TARP bill into law while letting foreclosure victims eat cake, and spend a great amount of time pedaling his trail bike and clearing brush on vacation.

Buchanan’s sins were many. Their consequences were felt by Northerners and Southerners through four years of a bloody Civil War. And so we still feel the effects of his ineptness 150 years after the fact. But we are still too close to Bush 43’s despicable actions in office — the ripple effect of all the mayhem he sought purposely to create — for us to understand just how much lasting damage he actually accomplished. Even so, Bush’s eight years in office were an unmitigated disaster. In fact, the more we learn as time goes by, the worse Bush’s presidency continues to get; there will undoubtedly be more damning revelations in the years and decades ahead.

Hence my verdict: As of today, Presidents’ Day 2011, James Buchanan wins the dubious distinction of having been our worst president. Nevertheless, it is well within the realm of possibility — once historians have a chance to reckon more completely with all of Bush 43’s extraordinary transgressions as president — that W might someday unseat Buchanan as the very worst president this nation has ever had.

Sadly, I have to agree with his assessment, and it pains me to do so. Buchanan is the most famous alum of my alma mater, Dickinson College, and he is my home state of Pennsylvania’s only president. His weakness and inaction triggered the Civil War, the cataclysmic event that cost 600,000 American lives in four years of bloodletting. His sitting by and doing nothing while the Union unraveled is, in my humble opinion, unforgivable and an egregious breach of his constitutional duty to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States. Any redeeming values that he may have had, and any qualifications that he may have had for the job, pale in comparison to Buchanan’s epic failure as Chief Executive.

As for Bush 43, time will tell, and I would prefer to leave the discussion of modern politics out of this particular discussion.

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I took a suggestion from Steve Stanley and returned the black and white Nook and exchanged it for the color version. The color version scales the PDF’s much better, and it also has a larger storage capacity than the black and white version. With the 8GB micro-SD card plugged in, the device now has 16GB worth of storage capacity. The display is 7 inches, as opposed to the 6 inch display for the black & white unit. The color version is larger, and weighs a good bit more, but the color is vivid.

Downside: The black and white unit comes with free built-in 3G wireless as well as built-in WiFi. The Nook Color does not have the 3G wireless capacity, only the built-in WiFi, which means that it can’t be used in as many places.

I’m also having a real challenge finding a decent case for the thing. There aren’t many out there, and I don’t like most of them. A lot of the makers say they’re coming, but I need something in the interim. I really liked the M-Edge case that I had for the black and white version, but it’s not available for the color version yet. I guess I will just have to be patient and wait.

So far, I am pleased with the upgrade. I’m looking forward to messing with it further.

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