Joshism
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While reading over lunch my waitress brought my food but wanted to be careful not to disturb my "studying."
Same review format as last time.
Overview of Chapter Contents - Part: Subjects (Page Numbers)
1: First Bull Run / First Manassas (73-86)
2A: Western Theater - Kentucky & Missouri, including Wilson's Creek, Lexington, and Fremont's fall (86-99)
2B: McClellen, from assuming command of the AOTP until Winfield Scott's retirement (99-114)
2C: Ball's Bluff (104-110)
3: Naval War - Anaconda Plan, Blockade, Privateers (110-120)
4A: Virginia - Jeff Davis including his falling out with Beauregard & Johnston, plus Lee's West Virginia Campaign (120-134)
4B: Confederate Diplomacy (134-140)
4C: Lincoln & McClellan (140-144 & 153-156)
4D: Western Theater (144-153)
4E: Union Diplomacy, including the Trent Affair (156-163)
4F: Attitudes toward the war in late 1861, North & South (163-167)
Chapter 3 will be the start of 1862.
General Thoughts
These long chapters, and even long sections within the chapters...yeesh. And this 95 pages isn't even the longest chapter yet. At the very least Part 4 should have been two parts: one for military and domestic affairs and one for the foreign affairs.
Lincoln vs Davis is definitely Foote's main plot, though I'm not certain which he would consider protagonist and which antagonist. (Remember, the protagonist is not necessarily the hero, merely the character driving the narrative while being opposed by the antagonist.)
I'm noticing Foote is very physically descriptive of notable characters. He's also generally positive about almost everyone. I think he genuinely admires Lincoln AND Davis, Grant AND Lee.
For all the concerns about Foote being am amateur historian, he seems pretty good about acknowledging rumor and media exaggeration as such.
There's at least one further reference in this chapter to Southerners being "hotheads", continuing a theme from the first chapter about the South's fatal flaw being their own arrogance.
Foote likes to make callbacks, repeating a line he used earlier verbatim rather than simply alluding to it. I think he's done this a half dozen times so far. Given that he otherwise doesn't feel repetitive and he uses enough good turns of phrase that he's clearly a clever writer, this seems to be some kind of deliberate literary technique on his part, and I really dislike it.
While I liked coyness of "T. J. Jackson" in Chapter 1, the use of initials started getting a little annoying in Chapter 2. At one point Foote mentions N. G. Evans...then soon after mentions his nickname of "Shanks" and his serious wounding...without ever giving his first name.
Foote thusfar hasn't made a single mention of lighthouses (one mention of channel markers before the attack on Port Royal). While they're a subject I don't expect to get more than a passing mention outside of a focused work, modern scholarship does reveal the recapture of key lighthouses like Cape Hatteras were actually pretty important to the Union Navy. It's a small bit of obselecence in Foote's work; none of his sources and none of his peers probably gave them any thought either. I expect there will be other, more relevant examples in the course of the trilogy where Foote isn't "wrong" but his work is slightly handicapped by being more than a half-century old. (We'll see if the destruction and attempted destruction of some lighthouses as part of the Confederate withdrawls from many coastal areas in early 1862 is mentioned in the next chapter; I doubt it.)
Comments On Specific Items (with page numbers)
79: The widow Judith Henry died in her house during First Bull Run, victim of an artillery shell. This much is widely accepted truth. Foote goes further, claiming her body was "riddled" with bullets and her house burned, neither of which I think is accurate. This seems to be a rare bit of embellishment by Foote.
80: I loved the comparisin of the first Rebel Yell (at First Bull Run) to "20,000 foxhunters".
87: "Polk was a West Pointer who had gone into the ministry..."
This makes it sound like Leonidas Polk served in the Army for awhile then became a preacher. In fact, he resigned his commission immediately after graduation, way back in 1827. Foote really undersells it here.
88: Foote claims Grant was going to occupy Columbus, KY but Polk beat him there by one day. I can't find any verification of this.
103-104: Is there any evidence why the Quaker gun was left behind at Munson's Hill by the Confederates? Foote says the media thought this proof the Confederates were much weaker than the appeared, but also implies it was some clever ruse to deliberately make the Union uncertain which cannons were real and which were fake. Seems more like Confederate carelessness to me. Why give your opponent the idea that any of your cannons are fake? To taunt them?
114: When Lincoln threatened to hang privateers as pirates, Davis "replied that for every Confederate sailor so hanged he would hang a Union soldier of corresponding rank..." Which I think is an accurate description of Davis' response. Just one problem: privateers are civilians with a document allowing them to commit certain acts against certain opponents, but they are no part of the navy; they have no rank. Even if you want to match common sailors to Privates, how do you match the ship's officers? The commander of a vessel is always the "captain", but he is only a Captain if the vessel is sufficiently large. Smaller vessels would be commanded by lower ranking officers, or even non-commissioned officers. The equivalency is really stretching there.
122: Beauregard proposed not just to invade the North in 1861, but to drive all the way to Lake Erie and split the country in half? I'm pretty sure the only person would fail to see why that idea was delusional is named Jake Featherston.
126: Joe Johnston writes a six-page rant and sends it to Jeff Davis. President's response, translated to 21st century English: "I'm sorry that you feel that way."
127: Foote recounts an anecdote about Jeff Davis: "He received from a general in the field a confidential report that a subordinate must be dismissed. This officer was an old friend of Davis..." Davis is unwilling to show any leniency on his friend or explain himself "Choosing rather to alienate a friend rather than to betray a confidence, or even infer that there was a confidence he could not betray..." Do we have any idea who the dismissed officer was, and the reason for his dismissal?
135: "In selecting Yancy to represent her, it was if the South said plainly to Europe: 'To get cotton you must swallow slavery.'"
137: "You have no friends in Europe... The sentiment of Europe is anti-slavery." -William Yancy, after returning from a diplomatic mission to Britain and France in 1861
I don't imagine Yancy was telling the resident of New Orleans that the British were abolitionists to inspire them to give up slavery. And it's an echo back to my comments on Chapter 1 that Foote thinks slavery caused the war, as the primary divide between North and South.
159: Foote quotes Lincoln claiming he didn't understand the implications of a blockade. ("I supposed Seward knew all about it and I left it to him.")
I was curious about this quote (the full quote runs five lines). It appears to have appeared widely in Southern newspapers in 1867, attributed to Thaddeus Stevens (quoting Lincoln). Interestingly, Foote merely says Lincoln spoke the words to "a learned visitor."
On the one hand one does expect Lincoln to unfamiliar with such legal ramifications, and he should have been able to rely on Seward (and Attorney General Bates) to be more familiar with them. On the other hand, a blockade of the Confederacy was a realistic necessity, regardless of legal ramifications. I'm inclined to think Lincoln would have ordered the blockade even knowing the potential legal ramifications.
I'm not a Lincoln expert (I'd love to hear some chime in about it), but I consider the quote dubious.
160: I found the idea of Lincoln deliberately not mentioning the Trent Affair and the resulting tensions with the British in his 1861 address to Congress to be rather interesting. Defusing tension by pretending it doesn't exist. (I'll mention more about this in a separate comment.)
Same review format as last time.
Overview of Chapter Contents - Part: Subjects (Page Numbers)
1: First Bull Run / First Manassas (73-86)
2A: Western Theater - Kentucky & Missouri, including Wilson's Creek, Lexington, and Fremont's fall (86-99)
2B: McClellen, from assuming command of the AOTP until Winfield Scott's retirement (99-114)
2C: Ball's Bluff (104-110)
3: Naval War - Anaconda Plan, Blockade, Privateers (110-120)
4A: Virginia - Jeff Davis including his falling out with Beauregard & Johnston, plus Lee's West Virginia Campaign (120-134)
4B: Confederate Diplomacy (134-140)
4C: Lincoln & McClellan (140-144 & 153-156)
4D: Western Theater (144-153)
4E: Union Diplomacy, including the Trent Affair (156-163)
4F: Attitudes toward the war in late 1861, North & South (163-167)
Chapter 3 will be the start of 1862.
General Thoughts
These long chapters, and even long sections within the chapters...yeesh. And this 95 pages isn't even the longest chapter yet. At the very least Part 4 should have been two parts: one for military and domestic affairs and one for the foreign affairs.
Lincoln vs Davis is definitely Foote's main plot, though I'm not certain which he would consider protagonist and which antagonist. (Remember, the protagonist is not necessarily the hero, merely the character driving the narrative while being opposed by the antagonist.)
I'm noticing Foote is very physically descriptive of notable characters. He's also generally positive about almost everyone. I think he genuinely admires Lincoln AND Davis, Grant AND Lee.
For all the concerns about Foote being am amateur historian, he seems pretty good about acknowledging rumor and media exaggeration as such.
There's at least one further reference in this chapter to Southerners being "hotheads", continuing a theme from the first chapter about the South's fatal flaw being their own arrogance.
Foote likes to make callbacks, repeating a line he used earlier verbatim rather than simply alluding to it. I think he's done this a half dozen times so far. Given that he otherwise doesn't feel repetitive and he uses enough good turns of phrase that he's clearly a clever writer, this seems to be some kind of deliberate literary technique on his part, and I really dislike it.
While I liked coyness of "T. J. Jackson" in Chapter 1, the use of initials started getting a little annoying in Chapter 2. At one point Foote mentions N. G. Evans...then soon after mentions his nickname of "Shanks" and his serious wounding...without ever giving his first name.
Foote thusfar hasn't made a single mention of lighthouses (one mention of channel markers before the attack on Port Royal). While they're a subject I don't expect to get more than a passing mention outside of a focused work, modern scholarship does reveal the recapture of key lighthouses like Cape Hatteras were actually pretty important to the Union Navy. It's a small bit of obselecence in Foote's work; none of his sources and none of his peers probably gave them any thought either. I expect there will be other, more relevant examples in the course of the trilogy where Foote isn't "wrong" but his work is slightly handicapped by being more than a half-century old. (We'll see if the destruction and attempted destruction of some lighthouses as part of the Confederate withdrawls from many coastal areas in early 1862 is mentioned in the next chapter; I doubt it.)
Comments On Specific Items (with page numbers)
79: The widow Judith Henry died in her house during First Bull Run, victim of an artillery shell. This much is widely accepted truth. Foote goes further, claiming her body was "riddled" with bullets and her house burned, neither of which I think is accurate. This seems to be a rare bit of embellishment by Foote.
80: I loved the comparisin of the first Rebel Yell (at First Bull Run) to "20,000 foxhunters".
87: "Polk was a West Pointer who had gone into the ministry..."
This makes it sound like Leonidas Polk served in the Army for awhile then became a preacher. In fact, he resigned his commission immediately after graduation, way back in 1827. Foote really undersells it here.
88: Foote claims Grant was going to occupy Columbus, KY but Polk beat him there by one day. I can't find any verification of this.
103-104: Is there any evidence why the Quaker gun was left behind at Munson's Hill by the Confederates? Foote says the media thought this proof the Confederates were much weaker than the appeared, but also implies it was some clever ruse to deliberately make the Union uncertain which cannons were real and which were fake. Seems more like Confederate carelessness to me. Why give your opponent the idea that any of your cannons are fake? To taunt them?
114: When Lincoln threatened to hang privateers as pirates, Davis "replied that for every Confederate sailor so hanged he would hang a Union soldier of corresponding rank..." Which I think is an accurate description of Davis' response. Just one problem: privateers are civilians with a document allowing them to commit certain acts against certain opponents, but they are no part of the navy; they have no rank. Even if you want to match common sailors to Privates, how do you match the ship's officers? The commander of a vessel is always the "captain", but he is only a Captain if the vessel is sufficiently large. Smaller vessels would be commanded by lower ranking officers, or even non-commissioned officers. The equivalency is really stretching there.
122: Beauregard proposed not just to invade the North in 1861, but to drive all the way to Lake Erie and split the country in half? I'm pretty sure the only person would fail to see why that idea was delusional is named Jake Featherston.
126: Joe Johnston writes a six-page rant and sends it to Jeff Davis. President's response, translated to 21st century English: "I'm sorry that you feel that way."
127: Foote recounts an anecdote about Jeff Davis: "He received from a general in the field a confidential report that a subordinate must be dismissed. This officer was an old friend of Davis..." Davis is unwilling to show any leniency on his friend or explain himself "Choosing rather to alienate a friend rather than to betray a confidence, or even infer that there was a confidence he could not betray..." Do we have any idea who the dismissed officer was, and the reason for his dismissal?
135: "In selecting Yancy to represent her, it was if the South said plainly to Europe: 'To get cotton you must swallow slavery.'"
137: "You have no friends in Europe... The sentiment of Europe is anti-slavery." -William Yancy, after returning from a diplomatic mission to Britain and France in 1861
I don't imagine Yancy was telling the resident of New Orleans that the British were abolitionists to inspire them to give up slavery. And it's an echo back to my comments on Chapter 1 that Foote thinks slavery caused the war, as the primary divide between North and South.
159: Foote quotes Lincoln claiming he didn't understand the implications of a blockade. ("I supposed Seward knew all about it and I left it to him.")
I was curious about this quote (the full quote runs five lines). It appears to have appeared widely in Southern newspapers in 1867, attributed to Thaddeus Stevens (quoting Lincoln). Interestingly, Foote merely says Lincoln spoke the words to "a learned visitor."
On the one hand one does expect Lincoln to unfamiliar with such legal ramifications, and he should have been able to rely on Seward (and Attorney General Bates) to be more familiar with them. On the other hand, a blockade of the Confederacy was a realistic necessity, regardless of legal ramifications. I'm inclined to think Lincoln would have ordered the blockade even knowing the potential legal ramifications.
I'm not a Lincoln expert (I'd love to hear some chime in about it), but I consider the quote dubious.
160: I found the idea of Lincoln deliberately not mentioning the Trent Affair and the resulting tensions with the British in his 1861 address to Congress to be rather interesting. Defusing tension by pretending it doesn't exist. (I'll mention more about this in a separate comment.)
