A Civil War Reading List

Everyone knows what the principal issue in the political economy of the Civil War is…right? Many people – perhaps not most people any more – can name the principal political and military figures on either side. Beyond that, probably the most influential figure in forming the impressions and opinions people have about the war is Ken Burns.

That’s too bad.

Someone who is serious about understanding the war could do much better, but it would take time. Today is the 150^th anniversary of its first major battle; it’s not too late to begin a program of reading that offers more than impressions, and will allow you to form, consider, and settle your own opinions.

I began my program with Carl Sandburg’s biography of Lincoln. The whole series runs to six volumes, of which the first two cover the Prairie Years and the last four cover the War Years. Commendably, Sandburg’s narrative is about the times and the man without being about the “culture” and the “inner life,” which to me are not proper subjects for history or biography.

In fact, all the books I recommend meet this important criterion.

Sandburg later made a biography in three volumes, in the nature of an abridgement but with its own principle of composition – it’s another option for learning about Lincoln.

Next, if you want to understand the war as a war, you will have to read some military history. You might not like Lee’s Lieutenants, but there could be no more careful and detailed analysis of the battles of the Army of Northern Virginia. The chief flaw of the three volume series, completed by Douglas Southall Freeman – one of those “Lost Cause” southerners – during the 1940’s, is trying to decide whether, if Jackson had done this or Longstreet had done that, the South might have won the war. Nowadays such explanations/excuses/apologies would be politically incorrect to give.

Another three-volume series, ending with the famous A Stillness at Appomattox, tells the history of the Army of the Potomac, Lee’s rival, as if it were biography and that hard-luck army had a life of its own. The author, Bruce Catton, has written extensively about the war, and if you wanted to read only three volumes, rather than five sets of volumes, you could do worse than reading his Centennial History, The Coming Fury, Terrible Swift Sword, and Never Call Retreat.

All these authors, as boys, knew and talked with veterans of the war – Sandburg with people who knew Lincoln. Subsequent authors, through no fault of their own, were not privy to sources like these. Even if they could not add significant detail, nevertheless they must have given the events a color long since lost to memory.

The leading military figures of the war, North and South, were Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee. Both have found biographers in the authors already recommended.

Grant’s three volume war biography was begun by Lloyd Lewis with Captain Sam Grant, and continued after Lewis’ untimely death by Catton, with Grant Moves South and Grant Takes Command. In some ways Lewis was the best historian and writer of the lot, and his death was a lamentable loss to historiography.

Freeman also wrote a biography of Lee, in four volumes. If you’re going to read Lewis’s volume on Grant, which carries his career up to his commissioning as a general of Illinois volunteers, you had better read Freeman’s first volume as well, which ends with Lee taking command of the Army of Northern Virginia. The bulk of the last volume concerns Lee’s career after the war, so no more than three of the four would have to be put on your program.

That ends my tale. But what of Jefferson Davis? Many people find him an unattractive figure; perhaps necessarily, he cannot be an American hero. For me, of course, he is a thorough-going counter-revolutionary. My program does not include a biography of him, and it does not appear he ever found a Sandburg to write his “definitive” biography.

Researching this circumstance, I found he himself had written several essentially autobiographical volumes, including the lengthy Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. It’s available in a reproduction of the nineteenth century publication, so I’m going to buy a copy, but I can’t vouch for it as yet.

I can vouch for Grant’s Personal Memoirs, and I bet Lewis’s Sherman, Fighting Prophet is also a good read. If you want something personal on Jackson, the best I can do is recommend Henry Kyd Douglas’s I Rode With Stonewall.

I’m reading each series up to a certain event, then picking up the next series and reading up to the same point in time, and so on. My first stopping point was the Seven Days battles, and now I am proceeding as far as Antietam and the Emancipation Proclamation. This strategy accumulates the differences of viewpoint, emphasis, and detail among the authors, leading to a fuller picture step-by-step.

There’s nearly four years to finish the program if you stretch it out to the 150^th anniversary of Appomattox. The only real difficulty is finding the books, though I had no trouble getting Freeman’s biography of Lee at a used book store, and I know that at least some of these volumes are already available on Kindle.

Someone who reads all this, might be able to express opinions worth listening to.

"the quitter former Governor Palin"

[Originally posted on Marx's Theory of Revolutions on June 5, 2011]
That about sums it up, doesn’t it? Most politicians, whether they are being sincere or not, regard or speak as if they regard a public office as a public trust – usually a “sacred” trust, which if it is a gross exaggeration at least expresses a public-spirited attitude.

I submit: we don’t have to wonder about the quitter former Governor Palin’s attitude. Her public duties as governor of Alaska were second, maybe fourth, after her pride, ambition, and thirst for power – and it wouldn’t be difficult to add a few more selfish motives here, putting public duty well down the list – so she quit them and moved to Arizona.

I also submit this disqualifies her for any further public office, even one, like the Presidency, that might satisfy all her dark longings, and that she would accordingly be unlikely to quit.

The Outlaw is Disappointed

[Originally posted on Marx's Theory of Revolutions on June 4, 2011]
The Outlaw finds it disappointing that the judicial branch would interfere with the work of the legislative on the budget repair bill. Actually State Senator Fitzgerald’s language, which I do not recall exactly from the WISN broadcast on the court’s decision in Dane county , was a good deal stronger than that, strong enough again to put his voice outside the law, which of course provides checks and balances, a division of power, one branch over the other – as any schoolchild knows.

Who is Standard & Poor's anyway?

[Originally posted on Marx's Theory of Revolutions on April 23, 2011]

Who is Standard & Poor's anyway?

Or maybe “Whose are they?”

And what a funny spokesman to make the announcement downgrading the U.S. sovereign debt – not good-looking, well-dressed, nor showing much composure on the national stage. He looked as if he really didn’t know he was holding a dagger ready to be plunged into the Backs of the President and the Democratic Party. Or maybe he did and it scared him. Not a man with a historical mission.

What’s the point of this? Why now? It looks like nothing so much as an imposition on the affairs of the nation totally out of proportion with the real importance of an organization which, however reputable, should not be attempting to influence or decide such natters. And how does this serve investors?...which is what I suppose they thought they were doing.

Next it seems the company (the Milwaukee company I work for) is among a number of innocent bystander insurers injured by this ill-conceived attack. We say S&P at the same time changed our outlook from stable to negative because our “business operations and investment assets are largely concentrated in this country” but that is disingenuous at best. Fact is, we own a whole lot of the downgraded U.S. sovereign debt.

Speaking of debt owners: there is China, which owns a whole lot more than the company does. This little organization of pinheads and beancounters has managed to shake the foundations of China’s foreign and economic policy. At least it got her attention.

The fact that S&P is not supposed to have such a gigantic impact, but is merely in the position of being able to do so, suggests that they are paid to do it, doesn’t it? As I say, who owns them, anyway? It certainly has the appearance of wrongdoing, doesn’t it?

I suppose they are professionals first and citizens last. God forbid their “outlook” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Ultimately the action is rash as well as disproportionate, and I hope the pinheads in the other ratings agencies don’t repeat it.

There’s more to be said about how this action overreaches the role of a ratings agency in society and the economy. Are they saying that the “outlook” is, that Congress and the President will not be able to agree on measures to secure the payment of the debt? This is to express a mere opinion on a matter of politics – clearly out-of-scope for them, and equally clearly above their pay grade. Or is there some “objective” measure of a nation’s ability to pay its obligations that the United States has run afoul of? But then who’s to say how these measures or standards apply – in the way they might apply to Greece, Portugal, or Ireland – to the world’s largest economy? There’s no precedent here; objectivity gets swallowed up by speculation.

On either account, and really in spite of whatever reasons they may have had for it, this new outlook puts a potent weapon into the hands of irresponsible people – not just the Tea Party Republications, but the big bourgeoisie who fund their fear and ignorance. A warning could instead have been issued to both sides; it’s certainly valid to say that if they fail to reach compromise, the outlook will become negative. It’s not S&P’s job to influence politics in this way.

Moreover, it’s just barely possible that this announcement has shifted the balance of the debate ever so slightly in favor of those who spend so much of their money teaching impressionable people what to believe and how to vote. What’s good for the big bourgeoisie is not necessarily good for the democracy.

The Outlaw

[Originally posted on Marx's Theory of Revolutions on April 2, 2011]

The Democratic state senators who removed themselves from the jurisdiction of the State of Wisconsin were free to avail themselves of the existing rules of law in order to protect the citizens they represent. Their leader by virtue of being the Majority Leader of the Senate, State Senator Fitzgerald, stirred and finally overwhelmed by the passions of the day, including his passion to make the expropriation of the rights of workers for the state into law, took advantage of their absence, among other things, to have them declared in contempt of the Senate – that is, to be outlaws.

I say, that was the first, anti-collegial, act of outlawry of a now proven outlaw – one who is willing and eager to ignore and act outside the rules and limits of law to obtain what his unbounded passions drive him to obtain.

It got worse.

His second act of outlawry was secretly to redraw the law, that his rivals had had no choice but to flee the state to avert passing, in a way that their flight made no difference to its passage. To do this, in his outlawry, he overreached the rules of law that govern the passage of laws, that is, the very manner in which the legislative branch of government is supposed to function.

Let me say, at first I thought this was the Governor-of-Part-of-Us Walker’s idea. But now I see it could only have come from the brain of a political criminal – if there were political crimes in Wisconsin the way there were in Stalinist Russia or Maoist China. Whatever else he is, the Governor-of-Part-of-Us Walker is no political criminal.

When this second act of political outlawry was followed by a third, the boldest yet, because in it he attempted to impose his passionate will on the decisions of a branch of government over which he has not even the shadow of authority, that is the judicial branch, I finally realized who and what the people of Wisconsin were dealing with. The outlaw State Senator Fitzgerald attempted to confound the orders of the court, by inducing a minion of the legislative branch to perform a seemingly harmless, ministerial act, and then presenting the result to the executive as if it actually made a difference in the legal position of things.

But it only worked for a little while. The Governor-of-Part-of-Us Walker pulled back when he realized, I should say, when he was finally properly advised – and not, at least not at first, by his own Attorney General Van Hollen – that to act as the outlaw State Senator Fitzgerald urged him was to put himself outside the law.

And so the outlaw State Senator Fitzgerald was stopped short of corrupting the third branch of government, and adding the executive to the list of the victims of his lawless passions.

I post this again in my new blog, consistently with its theme, as a warning to the people about what to expect, and guard against, from The Outlaw.

Voters of Wisconsin!

[Originally posted in Marx's Theory of Revolutions on March 13, 2011]

Voters of Wisconsin! Whom have you elected?

The class analysis of revolutions would no doubt provide valuable insights into Governor Walker’s “revolutionary” budget. Of course, it’s not truly a revolution because he hasn’t used violence – yet.

Also, it’s never the case that counter-revolution could ever be revolution. Revolution is always on the side of the little and the many; counter-revolutions are carried out against their gains by the big and the few. We believe history favors the many in the long run – but is this just something it is pleasant to believe?

The great mystery of democracy is how the few could ever command more votes than the many. There is a short answer: fear and ignorance.

I guess there are some people who have figured out the mystery and put the freedom of speech in the awkward position of obscuring rather than guaranteeing the truth even in the long run. That is, under this evil spell the people seem to become more rather than less ignorant the more speech they hear about a matter. Speeches are for sale, after all.

It’s a nice superstition that truth is like a jewel, and always and finally remains or becomes visible to the faithful.

It’s also a palpable truth that civilizations decay and fall. Maybe ours will be the first to die of ignorance –

–  Isn’t this foolish talk? Yet it is undoubtedly the case that a sufficient proportion of the many have been induced to vote against their real interests to elect Governor Walker – at least I don’t doubt it. And if you try to decide whose ox is gored by each and every dollar he is still planning to cut from the budget…

…Or just write “working poor” alongside each item. (Not to mention those who besides have lost rights formerly protected by the law.)

Problem is, the working poor are especially vulnerable to fear and ignorance, even when they summon up enough spirit to vote at all.

There’s another strange class, with hardly enough education to be considered petit bourgeois of the professional stripe, who don’t run their own businesses but own their own homes, and who are bought into the capital markets just enough to be afraid of losing it all some way or another. So they’re not petit bourgeois on any of those accounts.

These people make just enough money to complain about taxes, and begrudge the money going to public purposes, because they’d rather have it for private purposes – to buy those things they envy the real petit bourgeois for having, and for which they occasionally go far too deeply into debt.

And so the passions of envy and frustrated self-indulgence amplify the still deeper ones of fear and ignorance in these unfortunate souls. They can’t identify with the unions, whose members they also envy. They begrudge every dollar government spends on the working poor, when really the only difference between the two classes is that they actually make a living wage – and own their own homes.

That’s crucial, because they also pay property taxes. Governor Walker has made a career out of this specific manipulation.

There’s much more to be said about this.

One thing is that, where there is tension between classes, like as not it is between classes that are very near to each other, as between the sub-petit bourgeois I have been talking about and union members, or between the working poor and (legal or illegal) immigrants. The nearer the threat, the larger it looms. This phenomenon tends to obscure any actual identity of interests that may exist between two such classes. Instead they oddly find themselves rivals, and the rivalry is easily exploited by the few to cover up real disparities of interest, which if recognized, would otherwise lead voters to vote against the interests of the few.

Another thing is the naiveté of the tea party about politics. This has been remarked upon by many pundits.

This might also be connected to the particular sub-petit bourgeois class I am talking about. Where would this class possibly get the generous and liberal ideas normally associated with social progress? From the internet? From the entertainment media? From the pulpits of their evangelical preachers? Maybe at the corner tap.

And then they “vote for the man, not the party” – really just for the impression of the man. It’s actually possible to form, for example, the impression that the quitter former Governor Palin is clever and knows that she is talking about. Or that being able to form an impression of a public figure is a substitute for sound, reflective, genuinely independent judgment.

But I digress…

…And maybe here speculative philosophy gets beyond itself. Maybe no principled reason can be given why this particular class is politically naïve. But it’s not speculation to infer that naïve beliefs are for sale to whoever can buy the most impressions to put in front of the naive. And again, speech may be free, but speeches are for sale.

And this is how it’s possible for a people to elect a Governor and a legislature so destructive to the rights of the many – and now openly so, and not under the shadow of fear cast by an out-of-balance budget.

But there’s a sequel. Could the courts possibly settle this, at the highest level, by restoring the rights of the many?

Voters of Wisconsin! Whom did you elect to your Supreme Court? A man whose lies about the candidate who ran against him suited fearful and ignorant prejudice; a woman who blithely heard cases against her husband’s companies in her court, and ruled in his favor. At least she accepted the richly deserved censure the court itself was unable to agree to levy against him.

But these morally defective figures are not going to help form a majority in favor of pulling your chestnuts out of the fire.