Clio Muses

No word from Lee. Tension rises at Union headquarters. Grant has a persistent headache. Mead is suffering nausea. Around noon a reply comes from General Lee. He asks Grant for a discussion concerning “the restoration of peace”. The wording is vague, but it is clearly a request to negotiate a political solution. Grant immediately replies that he has no authority to negotiate a political settlement and his request for Lee’s surrender stands. President Lincoln anticipated this moment. On 3 March 1865 (the evening before he gave his second inaugural address) he sent a letter to General Grant in which he specified that if Lee were to surrender, Grant had no authority other than a military surrender of Lee’s army. Lincoln would retain the power for political negotiations if any were required. This is an important document because it affirms Article II, Section 2, of the United States Constitution that places the President, a civilian, in command of the armed forces, and thus responsible fo...

Friday, 7 April 1865. The action yesterday at Saylor’s Creek had cut off a third of Lee’s army, captured 6,000 Confederate soldiers, and destroyed most of the wagon’s in Lee’s supply column. This morning all three columns of the Army of the Potomac continue to advance. General Grant sent a messenger under a flag of truce through the lines with a letter to Lee. Grant asked Lee to surrender immediately. Lee responded by asking what were Grant’s terms? Grant replied that his terms would be the same as he offered at Vicksburg in 1863: parole until exchanged. Lee and Grant both knew that Lee’s surrender would virtually end the war. The offer of parole was a formality. The day passed without a reply from Lee.

Let’s catch up to General Grant’s pursuit of Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia (ANV) in the closing week of the Civil War. On, Tuesday, 4 April 1865, President Lincoln visited Richmond. I have told this story along with my visit to Richmond in 2007 in Clio Muses, “Lincoln’s Walk”, 6 December 2007, and invite you to scroll though this blog and read that essay. On 3 April 1865 the last of the Confederate forces evacuated Richmond and various Union cavalry units moved into the city. Richmond had been under siege for several weeks; many buildings had been burned, some by the Confederates as they retreated; and the Confederate government (along with most white residents) had fled the city. Lincoln had been visiting Grant and on his return to Washington, D. C., he stopped at Richmond. Accompanied by Admiral Porter and a Navy guard, Lincoln walked from Rocket’s Landing on the James River to the Capital and President Davis’ house. He walked around Davis’ office and, according to eye-wi...

As General Picket is attempted to withdraw from yesterday’s devastation at Five Forks , General Grant directs the Army of the Potomac (AOP) to pursue Lee in three columns. The center column composed of three infantry corps and part of the Sheridan ’s Cavalry Corps will follow the main body of the Army of Northern Virginia (ANV). The columns to the left and right (or north and south) will use forced marches to outflank and outmarch the ANV in order to circle around it. The first objective of the southern column was to interdict the Richmond & Danville Railroad south of Amelia Court House thus preventing supplies from reaching the ANV or from the ANV using the rails to flee south. At this point, the ANV consisted of about 30,000 troops, 200 guns, and around a 1,000 wagons. If Grant is successful in the next couple of days, those wagons will not pick up supplies at Amelia Court House. It has been over 72 hours since Lee’s soldiers have eaten. Their horses are becoming so weak from hun...

1 April 1865: The retreat to Appomattox continues. Sheridan renews his attack on Lee’s flank at Five Forks , VA. Lee orders General Picket (of Gettysburg fame) to “Hold at all costs.” By evening the cost to the Army of Northern Virginia is 5,000 casualties, the loss of General Picket’s division, and a valuable road network that now would serve to speed up the Union attack. “. . . the Army of the Potomac , officers and men, were so elated by the reflection that at last they were following up a victory it its end, that they preferred marching without rations to running a possible risk of letting the enemy elude them. So the march was resumed. . . .” General Ulysses S. Grant, The Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant William S. McFeely, ed. (De Capo Press: New York ), 1982, p. 543.

It is Friday, 31 March 1865. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia (ANV) has withdrawn from the trenches around Petersburg, Virginia  and is retreating to Appomattox Court House. Lee must reach Appomattox quickly because he desperately needs the rations that have been moved by train from Danville , Virginia to Appomattox . On 30 March General Grant released General Sheridan’s cavalry to move fast and turn Lee’s left flank. Philip Henry Sheridan, born in Albany , New York in 1831 and graduated from West Point in 1853, had been given command of the Cavalry Corps of the Army of the Potomac (AOP) the previous year. In September and October 1864 Sheridan , in a swift and hard hitting campaign, defeated General Early and drove him out of the Shenandoah Valley . For the entire war the Valley had been the “bread basket” for the ANV. Now, about five months later, Sheridan strikes hard on the left flank of Lee’s retreating army at White Oak Road, Dinwiddie Court House, Virginia agai...

Pearl Harbor Day. 7 December 1941. Americans were outraged and angered seventy years ago today when the Japanese Imperial Navy (JIN) unexpectedly attacked the United States Navy Base, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. At the time the success of the attack was perceived as a major military set back for the United States. No one at the time, however, knew that Pearl Harbor was going to be the JIN’s last (and only) naval victory in World War II. Pearl Harbor for the Japanese was a catastrophe. Even though the attack at Pearl was well planned, practiced, and well executed, it was far from being tactically brilliant. The most important targets at Pearl were not the six battleships, which were obsolete, but the fuel tanking station, the maintenance shops, dry docks, and ship yards. Six months after Pearl Harbor, 4 June 1942, the United States Navy won a decisive victory at the Battle of Midway sinking all four of the JIN’s largest carriers, a heavy cruiser, and 322 airplanes. While the JIN was trying...

“What explorations or discoveries did each of the following named persons make? Give the date in each case. a. De Narvaez. b. Coronado. c. Marquette. d. LaSalle.” A candidate for the 1909 plebe class of West Point would have answered such a question on his (there were no hers) written entrance exam. The candidate would also have been asked questions on algebra, plane geometry, English grammar, English Composition and Literature, geography, and history. In order to prepare, a candidate would have found sample questions from the encountered year’s exam in the Official Register of the Officers and Cadets of the United States Military Academy, West Point, New York, June 1909. For the history questions, it advised, “Candidates must be thoroughly familiar with so much of the History of the United States, and of Ancient Greece and Rome as is contained in good high-school text-books on these subjects, and must have a good knowledge of the important facts in General Ancient History and...

December is the month in which popular journals publish their “Ten Best Books of 2009”, as the New York Times did last week. I too use December to consolidate my reading for the year (which is usually between seventy to eighty books, some that are new and some that I am re-reading), collect my notes, and update my bibliographic and research software (I use Citation – but there are several good programs available). Never wanting to be upstaged by the New York Times , here is my list of the “Ten Best Books I Read This Year”. Appleman, Roy E. East of Chosin: Entrapment and Breakout in Korea, 1950. (College Station, Texas: Texas A&M University Press), 1987. Baggini, Julian. What’s It All About?: Philosophy & The Meaning of Life. (New York: Oxford University Press), 2004. Bak, Per. How Nature Works: The Science of Self-Organized Criticality. (New York: Oxford University Press), 1997. Coyne, Jerry A. Why Evolution is True. (New York: Viking), 2009. Faust, Drew Gilpin. This Re...

In a recent post I called attention to three history books that were based on primary sources and, through the scholarly apparatus, let the reader check the interpretation against the sources. Moreover, all three books contributed a new and deeper understanding of their subjects and a provided fresh interpretations. The direct relationship between the usefulness of the interpretation and the reliance on primary sources is unavoidable. Let us consider a recent history book that was well reviewed and successful in the market place that did not contribute a new and deeper understanding or suggested a fresh interpretation: David Halberstam, The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (New York: Hyperion), 2007. Halberstam was a long-time, successful journalist, a capable narrative writer, and winner of many awards. He was intelligent, a good interviewer, and an above average writer. The book is based mostly on secondary sources with a few author interviews. Halberstam’s book has 20...

Educated readers and students often ask, “How do I select a good history book?” Michèle Lamont, in her new book How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts), 2009, explores how various disciplines evaluate scholarship within their fields. Drawing upon her research on grant proposals, she suggests that within the “humanities”, historians as a professional group are more likely to agree on the quality of a particular research proposal or its product, a book, than are other fields. That is to say, historians know a good history book when they read it. Understanding how historians agree on what are good books helps the non-historian in selecting books. Why do historians have a wider agreement on superior scholarship than do scholars in political science, sociology, or literature? Dr. Lamont’s answer is no surprise to historians: history is evidence based where other fields are theory based. For the historian...

A good friend with whom I served in Southeast Asia (SEA) in 1968 and 1969, made, during a recent email conversation, an observation about many in the draftee Army of that era. He wrote that many of the men with whom we served were draftees (as he was; I was RA and we were both enlisted) were upset about being drafted, being in the Army, and being in SEA. They resented that their lives and careers had not only been interrupted, but put on hold; that they had been placed in conditions that were at worst very dangerous and at best very miserable. Many, such as my friend, were college graduates who wanted to get on with the careers. Many had some college or technical school and wanted to complete their degree. Many were married or engaged and wanted to move on with their personal lives. They all had lives that markedly differed from the Army’s agenda. However, my friend went on to write that the vast majority of those with whom he served no matter how much they hated the Army, hated being ...

Americans remember 11 September 2001 in many different ways. One, but by no means the only way, is to ask, “Where were you on….?” That question appeared on my Facebook account this morning and I intended to make a “comment”. However, Facebook, like similar social networking platforms , is not able to handle too many words and thus not too many thoughts. So, below is what I would have posted had the technology been able to support it: One wonders how many times in one’s life is it necessary to recall where they were on a given date? To be sure, on 7 and 8 December 1941, staff members of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D. C., conducted a series of oral history interviews with people randomly selected as they walked up or down The Mall. The interviews were recorded on “wire” recorders and remain a fascinating source of popular history for the period. For the second half of the twentieth century, those interviews reinforced the habit of asking, “Where were you when. . . .?...

The annual meeting for the Society for Military History at Middle Tennessee State University this past weekend was enjoyable and successful. My paper, “The National Guard as Community, 1903-2008”, was well received. The other two presenters on the panel, Shawn Fisher (University of Memphis) and Eric Jarvis (King’s University College) were extremely interesting and it was an honor to be on a panel with two such excellent scholars. I was especially impressed by the panel chairperson, Professor Jeff Roberts (Tennessee Technology University) whose comments were insightful and helpful. Thank you, Jeff! The conference was also a splendid opportunity to meet old friends (Peter Kindsvatter, Allen Millett, Steve Bourque, and especially Jim Williams) as well as to make new contacts. I especially enjoyed visiting the Indiana University Press (IUP) booth and Bob Sloan, the Press’s Editorial Director. I have many fond memories from when I was an Acquisitions Editor at IUP. It was a delight to se...

For the past several days there has been an interesting discussion on the LSTSRV H-WAR concerning the importance of the Agadir Affair, also called the Second Moroccan Crisis, in terms of the causes of World War I. In the decade and a half prior to World War I there were a series of international disputes that involved or affected the major European powers that in 1914 went to war as members of either the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy) and the Triple Entente (France, Russia, and Great Britain). An important question concerning World War I has been to gauge the relative importance of these various diplomatic crisis’s and evaluate them in terms of the so-called Alliance System that developed as each participant attempted to guarantee its own security and protect its own national and dynastic interests. The Second Moroccan Crisis and Agadir Affair are interesting because they led to results that the Germans, French, and British had not intended or anticipated. Belo...

According to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics’ constant dollar calculator, twenty-five cents in 1913 has the same buying power of $5.36 in 2008. In 1913 an enlisted member of the Ohio National Guard received twenty-five cents in pay for attendance at each scheduled drill. According to Article XV, Section 5272, of Regulations for the Ohio National Guard , 1912, members of the Guard were required to meet for the purpose of “drill and instruction” at least once a week but not to exceed 48 days per year. Article XVII, Section 5288 of the same regulation stipulates that enlisted members will receive twenty-five cents for each drill day, paid quarterly. In addition to weekly drills, Ohio Guardsman also attended the annual “encampment”, which would last from eight to fourteen days. According to Paul H. Douglas, Real Wages in the United States, 1890-1926 (Houghton Mifflin: Boston), 1930, p. 108, real wages in all manufacturing in the United States in 1913 averaged $2.09 per day...

Today the Society for Military History published the program for their annual conference, 2 – 5 April 2009, at Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, TN. My paper, “The National Guard as Community, 1903 – 2008”, will be presented in the panel “Changing Role of the Militia and National Guard”, Session 7-6, 3:30 PM 4 April. There are two other papers in this panel: “Helmets in the Halls: The Arkansas National Guard at Little Rock Central High” by Shawn Fisher (University of Memphis), and “In Defense of Our City and Our Nation: Military Preparations by the Citizens of Philadelphia following the Burning of Washington, 1814 – 1815” by Eric Jarvis (King’s University College). Both are highly respected scholars and I look forward to hearing their papers. The Chair and Commentator is Jeffrey J.Roberts, chairman of the Department of History at Tennessee Technology University. Dr. Roberts did his Ph.D. at Ohio State University, long known for producing excellent historians. I am very p...

According to an article in The Columbus Dispatch (Mark Niquette, “Society Board: 26 Jobs History”, April 12, 2008, pp. B1-B2), the Ohio Historical Society (OHS) is discharging 26 employees; curtailing its operations at its main facility, the Ohio Historical Center (OHC) in Columbus, from six days a week to four; and cutting hours at many of its 52 state-wide sites. Moreover, 21 open positions will not be filled and 49 current employees will be working fewer hours per week. These cut backs are the result of a $2 million deficiency in OHS’s annual budget. This short fall, which accounts for approximately nine percent of the Society’s annual budget, has been primarily caused by the state legislature’s failure to support the OHS. State funding for the OHS accounts for nearly 60 percent of their total budget, according to the OHS Annual Report (2007). The State began reducing their support for the OHS in 2000 and there is no indication at present that either political party or the governo...

In September 2007 my wife, Ginny, and I took a “busman’s holiday” to Richmond, Virginia. Our plan was to trace Lincoln’s 1865 visit to Richmond and to travel the route of V Corps, Army of the Potomac, from Petersburg to Appomattox Court House. Let me discuss the Richmond visit first. James W. Loewen in his splendid book, Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong (Simon & Schuster: New York), 1999, describes President Lincoln’s walking tour of Richmond, Virginia, 4 April 1865 (pp. 310-317). Five days later, General Lee would surrender at Appomattox Court House. Ten days after his walk, President Lincoln would be dead from assassination. Loewen provides a detailed account of the walk including a map, which we used to re-trace Lincoln’s steps (p. 311). In his book Loewen also noted that there were no historical markers indicating the landing site on the James River or the walk itself. Moreover, he was unable to find a brochure or a map that gave a self-guided tour of ...

My essay below, “Does the Munich Analogy Fit?”, was published in the online journal History News Network on 3 March 2003 (http://hnn.us/articles/1286.html/). Analogies appear frequently in historical writing. Julian Baggini and Peter S. Fosl in their helpful book The Philosopher’s Toolkit: A Compendium of Philosophical Concepts and Methods (Blackwell: Oxford), 2003, point out that analogies are also used by philosophers, lawyers, and journalists to enhance reasoning, to make arguments, and as illustrations. Analogies are, according to Baggini and Fosl, “strong” if they “share a large or decisive number of relevant similarities” while at the same time they “do not exhibit a large or decisive number of relevant differences” (p. 47). To the extent that an analogy does not satisfactorily fit those two conditions, then the analogy is “weak”. The essay below discusses some of the difficulties of using analogies in historical arguments. “Does the Munich Analogy Fit?” By Robert Cook Recent wo...