Regarp Book Blog

Prior to Civil War, the southern slave power fundamentally directed the destiny of the American Republic, facilitated at least in part by an unfair advantage in representation baked into the Constitution with the “three-fifths clause” that counted the unenfranchised enslaved as fractional, fictional citizens. But yet the nature of their peculiar institution ravaged the environment and left them ever hungering for new lands to spoil, especially the vast territories of the west that had been seized in the Mexican War. Lincoln’s 1860 election on a free-soil platform foreclosed that expansion and secession ensued. Lincoln, antislavery but hardly an abolitionist, prosecuted the war to preserve the Union; only later was emancipation added as a goal. The Confederacy was finally defeated on the battlefield, yet today many historians might argue that the south actually won the Civil War, as evidenced by the long reign of segregation, institutionalized racism, and the hundreds of monuments to white supremacy that still dot the landscape. But in the three decades that separated Appomattox and Plessy v. Ferguson, the United States embarked on a radical agenda to expand human rights that reached beyond outlawing human chattel slavery to extending the franchise and legislating equality. Although Reconstruction ultimately failed, its unfulfilled promises remain inextricably bound to the soul of our nation, reemerging in other centuries in unlikely places like the Edmund Pettus Bridge and sites of Black Lives Matter protests.

In The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920 [2024], an ambitious, encyclopedic, groundbreaking work of scholarship, noted historian Manisha Sinha takes a fresh look at sixty years of American history and erases the boundaries attached to dates and events enforced in traditional textbooks, while sketching in her own markers. Civil War studies are typically bookended by the Mexican Cession that accelerated the crises of the antebellum, and the “Compromise of 1877” that officially ended Reconstruction—an artificial construct that ignores the fact that significant elements of Reconstruction endured at least until Plessy, with a last gasp when North Carolina Rep. George Henry White’s term expired in 1901, the sole remaining black from the south elected to Congress in the nineteenth century. Sinha, who previously distinguished herself with her widely acclaimed history of abolition, The Slave’s Cause, goes much, much further. In her striking reinterpretation that challenges the conventional historiography, the election of 1860 marked the dawn of the “Second American Republic,” a new era that extended far further than the timeline usually given to Civil War and Reconstruction, and expands the theme of Lincoln’s “new birth of freedom” from emancipation to a whole host of unfulfilled rights those then marginalized would claim for themselves. As such, wide arms are wrapped around such seemingly disparate topics as women’s suffrage, the fate of Native Americans, Gilded Age plutocracy, the suppression of labor, and even overseas imperialism.

An outline of the events of Reconstruction should be familiar to most Americans—but sadly that is not the case. When I was growing up, the story of the Civil War—as scripted by “Lost Cause” mythmakers and overlayed with the dramatic musical refrain from the film Gone with the Wind—was styled as a regional conflict of white men, a brother-against-brother struggle over states’ rights and tariffs. African Americans had bit parts, and slavery was almost beside the point. Then the “gallant” Lee surrendered, Lincoln was shot, the enslaved went free, and a national reconciliation occurred just about overnight. Reconstruction was treated superficially if at all, but once more to the tune of that same leitmotif that had poor downtrodden southerners preyed upon by rapacious northern “Carpetbaggers” in a harsh occupation. Then, in a flash, federal troops did the right thing and withdrew, white people north and south lived happily ever after, and blacks were essentially erased from history.

It remains astonishing that, until relatively recently, that is how most Americans understood the war and its aftermath. All too many still do. But the scholarly consensus has established that the central cause of the Civil War was human chattel slavery, that African Americans played a pivotal role in the Confederacy’s defeat, and that the postwar years in the south had far less to do with depredations by greedy northern plunderers than with the prevalence of violent bands of white supremacists who terrorized and murdered blacks attempting to claim civil rights newly won and enshrined in amendments to the Constitution.

The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic opens at the dawn of Reconstruction. Lincoln left no definitive blueprint for how he would frame the postwar period, but broad hints seemed to point towards generous terms for the defeated, rapid reunification, and at least some guarantees for the welfare of the newly emancipated. What was clear was his conviction that the process was to be directed by the executive branch. Congress—then controlled by the “Radical Republicans”—disagreed. They advocated for some sort of punishment for the south after all the bloodshed, demanded stiff conditions for states that had seceded to rejoin the Union, and imagined vastly expanded civil rights for African Americans—all under the purview of the legislative branch.

Clashes between these competing visions were made moot by Lincoln’s murder, just five days after Appomattox. At first glance, his successor, wartime governor Andrew Johnson—a Jacksonian Democrat known to despise the plantation elite, who had preemptively freed the enslaved in occupied Tennessee—had seemed a likely ally for Congressional aims. But such hopes were dashed early on as it became clear that the insecure and deeply racist Johnson gloried at the prospect of earning the esteem of his old foes by offering blanket pardons, while blocking all efforts to wield federal authority to protect freedmen under threat by their erstwhile masters. Leading Confederates, who once feared retribution, were delighted by the unexpected turn of events.

But Congress fought back. Significant legislation was passed, Johnson’s many vetoes overridden, and the landmark 14th Amendment mandating equal rights for African Americans was enacted in 1866. Johnson barely survived impeachment, but his tenure had wrought much havoc. Legal statutes proved tenuous against militant leagues of white supremacists like the Ku Klux Klan that would routinely intimidate and frequently murder blacks unwilling to be bullied into submission, as well as the whites who stood by them, particularly as the ranks of federal troops thinned with demobilization.

Next in the White House was the politically moderate Ulysses S. Grant, Lincoln’s rightful heir, who both sought unity and sympathized with beleaguered blacks. But for all his good intentions, Grant turned out to be less adept and less effective as president than as general. And in many ways, it was already too late. There was no way to turn back the clock on the Johnson years. One by one, states formerly in rebellion that had rejoined the Union effectively overturned Reconstruction governments and claimed “Redemption” as ex-Confederate elites took power, and African Americans were even more heinously brutalized. Those who had once led the rebellion even took seats in Congress. Reconstruction formally sunsetted as occupying armies were withdrawn in a deal that settled the disputed election of 1876, but that was more ornamental than consequential. Reconstruction had been defeated; that was just a matter of pulling up stakes.

Efforts to realize the goals associated with Reconstruction persisted for the rest of the century, but these were generally marked by some small victories and many larger defeats. A number of blacks were elected to the House and Senate, even as equal protections guaranteed in the 14^th Amendment faded away in practice. Although the 15th Amendment that extended the franchise to African American males became law in 1870, it could not be enforced across the bulk of the old Confederacy. And thus, the old three-fifths clause, officially extinct, had come full circle. Blacks were no longer counted as fractions for the purpose of representation, but as whole numbers. Yet, just as before, they were effectively denied the right to vote. The old slave power, sans the enslaved, had taken back much of what had been lost by secession and war—and somehow gained even more political clout.

For those who have read Eric Foner or Douglas Egerton, there is not much new here, but Sinha succeeds brilliantly in adding much-needed nuance while contextualizing Reconstruction beyond the political to a complex, interrelated movement of social, economic, and cultural forces that coexisted with often competing dynamics of a postwar United States driven by a thirst for wealth and territorial domination, while desperate to bury the past and move forward.  As in her previous work on abolition, the author rightly refocuses the history on the ground to highlight African Americans who did the heavy lifting to advance Reconstruction, rather than their white allies who habitually receive credit in other accounts. And here again she excels, reminding us just how common it was for blacks to be arbitrarily targeted for violence and how many were left for dead. By citing numerous incidents, and attaching names (when possible) to the victims, she restores their humanity from the statistical anonymity of most studies.

But Sinha may be less successful when she leaves the struggle for African American civil rights behind to attach a Reconstruction zeitgeist to much wider arenas that encompass women’s suffrage, the Indian Wars, unbridled capitalism, strike-breaking, and imperialism. To be sure, Reconstruction was a truly radical attempt to remake society that carved deep grooves elsewhere, but there are limits. Certain ostensible correlations might be overstated. There is no doubt that the outcome of the Civil War resulted in a federal government capable of serving as a powerful agent for change, which warrants underscore. But even absent the conflict, it seems that given historical forces already present in the antebellum, such as the explosive growth of manufacturing in the north, an expanded labor pool fueled by immigration, innovations in communication and transportation, and westward expansion, subsequent developments such as the Second Industrial Revolution, an overheated economy, increasing inequality, and clashes between capital and labor were likely to occur regardless. As to overseas adventurism, so-called “filibusters” hankered for Cuba many decades before Theodore Roosevelt helped facilitate that “splendid little war.”

Sinha’s thesis finds its firmest ground in her treatment of the suffrage movement, as the long fight for women’s voting rights was first manifested in a series of alliances—of whites and blacks—that overlapped with causes favoring abolition and equal rights for African Americans. Many white women who had expended so much effort in this behalf were deeply embittered when black men seemed to leapfrog over them to earn the franchise. Some cloaked their disappointment, steadfast in the belief that their time would come. Others turned hostile. Sinha reveals the uncomfortable story of how, for a time, suffrage icons Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton betrayed black women by making common cause with Democrats openly inimical to civil rights in order to advance attempts to obtain the ballot. Other suffragists, loath to view expanding rights as a zero sum game, took a more honorable path. Sinha concludes The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic with the ratification of the 19^th Amendment in 1920, which finally granted the right to vote to all adults, regardless of gender or color. Of course, for black women across the south, like their male counterparts, this was to be an empty promise until the late 1960s.

It is more difficult to connect the dots from Reconstruction to the displacement and near extermination Native Americans: brutally forced off their lands, driven to starvation, herded into reservations, hunted and killed by the cavalry, faced with extinction. Sinha emphasizes that many advocates for black equality witnessed these events unfold with horror and went on record in protest. But these figures represented the tiniest of minorities. The rest of America, north and south, was just as united after the war as in the antebellum in the pursuit of manifest destiny, and either wholly antagonistic or merely agnostic to the plight of the indigenous. Stephen Douglas’s cry for “popular sovereignty” that ended up fanning the flames of secession was deeply entangled with lobbying for a transcontinental railroad that would ride roughshod through domains Indians claimed as their own. Few whites objected then or later. In 1860, southern elites lusted for the western territories to recreate enslaved societies on the plains, while northern free-soilers yearned just as fervently for wide open spaces reserved for yeoman farmers. Neither vision included free blacks, and each excluded Native Americans. The end of the war simply translated into more resources that could be brought to bear upon Indian relocation or annihilation, accelerating a process long underway.

Like many historians, Sinha bemoans the fact that Lincoln’s party, which once cheered abolition and equality, mutated into a coldhearted pro-corporate entity indifferent to rights denied to large segments of its citizenry, and unfriendly to a labor force comprised principally of foreign nationals. Tragic indeed, but how surprising was that? The origin of the Republican Party, after all, was a coalition of former pro-business Whigs, disaffected Democrats, nativist “Know Nothings,” and racist, antislavery free-soilers—most whom despised the tiny minority of abolitionists who clung to the fringes. Antislavery and abolition rarely overlapped in those days. And in 1860, abolitionists were split over whether to endorse Lincoln. Even later, emancipation and civil rights were ideologically dominant in the party for only a very brief period. With the Union restored and slavery outlawed, Republicans cynically returned to their roots.

While impeccably researched and extremely well-written, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic is also a long, dense read, which some readers may find intimidating. Scores upon scores of individuals populate the narrative, further complicated by references to numerous organizations thereafter rendered in acronym. It is, at times, hard to keep track, something that might have been mitigated in appendices by a “cast of characters” and a table or two. Still, I suppose this is a quibble, and should by no means overshadow Sinha’s achievement in turning out this outstanding work of history that is original, illuminating, and thought-provoking. If you have a Civil War era bookshelf, this volume belongs on it.

 

Note: I reviewed Egerton’s Reconstruction work here: Review of: The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era, by Douglas R. Egerton

Try to imagine a one-megaton thermonuclear bomb striking Washington, D.C. You can’t. It’s way beyond your comprehension.

It begins with a flash of light that generates heat of one hundred eighty million degrees Fahrenheit, some five times hotter than temperatures at the center of the sun, producing a gigantic fireball that expands at millions of miles an hour and extends to a diameter more than a mile wide …

its light and heat so intense that concrete surfaces explode, metal objects melt or evaporate, stone shatters, humans instantaneously convert into combusting carbon …

Not a single thing in the fireball remains.

Nothing.

Ground zero is zeroed.

Traveling at the speed of light, the radiating heat from the fireball ignites everything … several miles out in every direction … a great firestorm that begins to consume a 100-or-more-square-mile area that … was the beating heart of American governance and home to some 6 million people …Those incinerated are spared the unprecedented horror that begins to be inflicted on the 1 to 2 million more gravely injured people not yet dead in this first Bolt out of the Blue nuclear strike …

There is a baseball game going on two and a half miles due east at Nationals Park. The clothes on a majority of the 35,000 people watching the game catch on fire. Those who don’t quickly burn to death suffer intense third-degree burns. Their bodies get stripped of the outer layer of skin, exposing bloody dermis underneath …Within seconds, thermal radiation … has deeply burned the skin on roughly 1 million more people, 90 percent of whom will die. [p xvii-xix]

This excerpt from the opening pages of Nuclear War: A Scenario [2024], by Annie Jacobsen, serves as a sort of fitting sequel to Oppenheimer, restoring the gory details so conspicuously absent from that film that dramatically told us the truth of the bomb’s creation while elegantly omitting the consequences. Of course, it’s important to recall that Oppenheimer’s weapon was a somewhat primitive fission device that in 1945 was yet responsible for the deaths of more than a hundred thousand residents of Hiroshima. But, as terrible as that was, an atomic bomb like that is today relegated to a more or less junior role as the triggering mechanism that produces the high temperatures necessary for the complex fusion process that detonates a thermonuclear weapon with a potentially explosive force a thousand times more powerful than an A-bomb, capable of killing millions.

But that’s only a single hydrogen bomb. And in any nuclear conflict there would never be only one bomb. By best estimates, there currently are 12,119 total nuclear warheads in the world, spread among nine nations: the United States, Russia, the UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea. Of these, there are 3,880 active nuclear warheads. There are also hundreds and hundreds of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), many armed with Multiple Independently-targetable Reentry Vehicles (MIRVs). Washington and Moscow, once more engaged in a tense relationship, each have something like 400 of these, capable of deploying 1,185 warheads to multiple targets, along with decoys to confuse the enemy. And this destructive potential is reinforced by their ever combat ready “nuclear triad” that can simultaneously launch thermonuclear attacks from land, sea, and air. Mutually assured destruction—MAD—has never simply been a theoretical construct.

Horror has long been a favored literary genre, and until very recently, my most frightening read was a toss-up between the original Dracula, by Bram Stoker, and Stephen King’s The Shining. But when it comes to sheer terror, these fictional attempts to breed fear are far outstripped by the fact-based content in this latest book by Jacobsen, an acclaimed if sometimes controversial investigative journalist. In a brilliant blend of science, military technology, geopolitics, and history, combined with an all too plausible apocalyptic vision, the author demonstrates both keen analytical skills and talent with a pen in a fast-paced narrative that is—so unusual for a nonfiction work—all but impossible to put down. It is also, to be quite honest, deeply depressing.

The ”scenario” of the title imagines what is termed a “Bolt out of the Blue” surprise nuclear strike on the Pentagon by a “mad king,” in this case the North Korean dictator. We are not told why. It hardly matters. What does matter is that such a thing could occur, at any time, without warning, by accident or design. If the plot is fiction, the premise of what would follow is based upon nothing less than scientific certainties. Once launched, this ICBM takes a mere 33 minutes to travel more than 6,800 miles to obliterate the nation’s capital and murder millions of people. And that’s just the beginning. The worst is yet to come. Jacobsen guides the reader minute-by-minute from the instant that early warning systems alert American officials that an ICBM is on the way to the moment of the blast and its aftermath. Spoiler alert: it does not end well.

Along the way, I learned that for someone who has spent his lifetime in the nuclear age, there’s an awful lot that I did not know. For instance, I had no idea that the president of the United States, keeper of the nuclear codes, has only six minutes after notification of a first strike in progress to decide whether to respond via the briefcase dubbed the “nuclear football” with a counterattack that will set forces in motion that will surely end civilization as we know it. Six minutes. And in this six minute window, the president must decide not only whether to strike back, but also to select targets and determine how many nuclear weapons to use. Only six minutes. It is said that most people on average devote about eight minutes to their daily shower routine. The president has less time than that to decide whether to destroy the world.

And what if he’s wrong? Because I also did not know how common nuclear false alarms are. The answer: all too common! In November 1979, believing that 1,400 nuclear missiles had been launched by the USSR, a retaliatory strike was about to get underway when it was discovered that the origin of the alleged Soviet attack was a training cassette carelessly left in the command computer system! In June 1980, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, informed that 2,200 Soviet missiles were headed our way, was reportedly one minute from making a phone call to President Jimmy Carter urging an immediate nuclear response when word came that it was a false alarm! In September 1983, a Soviet early warning system falsely signaled a small-scale impending attack by the US; nuclear war was in this case averted by quick-witted Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov, the officer in charge that night, who doubted the alert and defied military protocol by not notifying Moscow! In October 1960, the NORAD nuclear command center reported a Soviet atomic attack in progress that turned out to be just the moon reflecting radar waves back at the monitoring station! There are many, many more such incidents. Especially relevant for Jacobsen’s scenario, as recently as January 2018 there was another false alert that this time assumed an attack from North Korea! (Note: every exclamation point in this paragraph is deliberate!)

I also did not know that despite all the discussions over many decades about continuity of government in the event of nuclear war, there is no bunker in Washington that would withstand nuclear attack, so wherever missiles might strike, if continuity is even remotely plausible it would have to take place elsewhere. And that means, assuming the president is in residence at the White House in a time of crisis, the bunker beneath the East Wing would not be suitable shelter. Which means that with all this going on, the president would have to be whisked away to some place like the Raven Rock Mountain Complex near Pennsylvania’s Blue Ridge Summit, a free standing city constructed within a massive, hollowed out mountain. Could he get there in time? In one piece?

What if the president is missing or incapacitated? And what if the vice-president cannot be located? Provisions have been made for a “designated survivor” in the event of a “decapitation strike” that takes out the top leadership, but in reality it seems like whoever is left standing would have to play it by ear. And who wants to make such plays? Who would want to survive, and what kind of survival would that amount to? And for how long?

The reason Soviet Lt. Col. Petrov gave for not passing that dubious alert of a small-scale attack on to Moscow that night in 1983 was that “when people start a war, they don’t start it with only five missiles.” That’s a good—if chilling—point. In the six minutes that the president has to decide how and to whom to respond to, he has to know that there are certainly more missiles on the way, or will be soon. Will he correctly identify the enemy? And if he does, when he launches a counterstrike, will other nuclear-armed nations like Russia realize that the retaliatory missiles targeting Pyongyang are not heading their way instead? Apparently, we learn from Jacobsen, when crisis calls are made from Washinton to Moscow, Moscow doesn’t always answer the phone. Things are hazy in the fog of war. And amid Armageddon.

Mistakes made by any party cannot be taken back. An ICBM is irrevocable; it cannot be recalled once initiated. Neither can a submarine-launched SLBM. The bomber leg of the triad is the only one with some flexibility; their pilots perhaps get to be the last ones to die. Also, it turns out that Anti-Ballistic Missiles (ABMs) are, in practice, so unreliable as to be nearly worthless in such circumstances. Nuclear war game theory has demonstrated that nuclear weapons are only useful as deterrence. What if deterrence fails? The answer, in each and every simulation, is a colossal global loss of human life and the absolute end of civilization. Every simulation. Every time.

If hydrogen bombs aren’t bad enough, for the unlucky survivors there’s another gem in the enemy’s arsenal likely to be launched concomitantly: a nuclear electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack that knocks out all power and neutralizes all technology. There’s also the sudden solution to the problem of global warming that is an enduring nuclear winter. There is death. There are the burned and mangled. There is the slow death of radiation poisoning. There is disease. There is more death. Spoiler alert: civilization does not end well.

My earliest recollection of elemental fear as a child experiences such a thing dates back to October 1962, with the whispers and sometimes louder voices of grown-ups talking about how it could happen. I was only five, but I was already all too familiar with the concept of what might follow, probably more so than most in my age bracket because my grandmother, who raised me, often spoke to me as if I was an adult. She once casually noted that in nuclear war our bodies would disintegrate. Now, as the grim talking heads on our black and white TV preempted regular programming, even my beloved cartoons, it seemed all too real. “Grandma,” I asked as the panic took hold, “If I’m disintegrated, how will God know it is me so I can get into heaven?” Then I suddenly had to use the bathroom. After this episode, grade school “duck and cover” drills would seem quite unremarkable.

For a long time, I believed what they told me, which was that this event, the Cuban Missile Crisis, was likely the closest we came to nuclear war. But Jacobsen’s book is a sobering lesson that the prevailing wisdom is not always correct. That may have indeed been the closest we came to deliberate nuclear hostilities, but that is hardly reassuring. The number of accidental nuclear alarms are … well … far more alarming. And as tense as the days of the Cold War were, we can look back on them with almost a kind of nostalgia for Kennedy-Khrushchev given the instabilities of today’s world, with the Russo-Ukrainian War, the powder keg that is the Middle East, and the ongoing brinkmanship with North Korea. There are nuclear powers in each vicinity.

That Jacobsen’s scenario is focused on Pyongyang is not entirely fanciful. Whether or not he means business, Kim Jong Un certainly acts the belligerent villain, and while stockpiling nuclear weapons and delivery systems, he has constructed vast subterranean cities with an eye on survivability. When Donald Trump was president, he first taunted Kim as “Little Rocket Man” and then courted him by exchanging “love letters,” but in the end, if there really ever was a brief moment for détente, Trump’s bold if sophomoric approach at diplomacy achieved nothing. Catastrophe yet looms.

Nuclear war is a significant component to the metaphorical “Doomsday Clock” that was originally set to seven minutes before midnight in 1948. In 2024, it is now set at ninety seconds to midnight. Jacobsen’s clear frustration at the lack of real efforts to lower tensions, improve safety valves for nuclear triggers, and reduce the risks of atomic confrontation—accidental or deliberate—are palpable in the pages of her book. Unfortunately, there’s little room for optimism. Still, I would urge the leaders of every nuclear power to read this book, experience the horror that lies within, and look for ways, large and small, to mitigate the story it foretells from ever coming true. Every leader, that is, except Kim Jong Un … it might give him ideas.

 

Noted biographer David Herbert Donald, confident in his conviction that Abraham Lincoln’s character was defined by what he styled as “his essential passivity,” was to take him at his word in an 1864 letter in which the then-president alleged that “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.” That someone of Donald’s stature could be so utterly deceived by Lincoln’s celebrated acumen for spinning different yarns for assorted audiences simply astonished me. While I bristled quietly, acclaimed Lincoln scholars objected both audibly and vehemently, and do so to this day. But if ever there truly was a passive occupant of the White House driven almost entirely by outside events, it was the William McKinley that emerges in The President and the Assassin: McKinley, Terror, and Empire at the Dawn of the American Century [2011], by international correspondent Scott Miller, a fast-paced, well-written portrait of America in the final years of the nineteenth century burdened by one of the most ill-conceived and awkward titles in recent memory.

McKinley, the mild-mannered pro-business twenty-fifth president, is largely remembered—when he is remembered at all—for his assassination at the turn of the century, which catapulted his far more colorful and politically progressive Vice President Theodore Roosevelt into executive office. Yet, it was McKinley who presided over a newly-expansionist America’s initial violent baby steps towards a global presence in its first significant act of overseas aggression, the Spanish-American War of 1898. But here too McKinley was upstaged by Roosevelt, who in his then-role as Assistant Secretary of the Navy helped instigate the war, and then famously led his “Rough Riders” on charges up Kettle and San Juan Hills in Cuba. Meanwhile, McKinley spent much of his time quietly vacillating over policy, when not tending to his sickly, likely hypochondriac, wife Ida. McKinley, who was quite popular and even beloved, won reelection in a landslide, but his second term was abruptly cut short by bullets fired by anarchist Leon Czolgosz during his attendance at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York on September 6, 1901. He died of his wounds one week later.

Those who turn to The President and the Assassin for a focus upon McKinley’s untimely end may be disappointed, because despite the title this incident represents only a small slice of the narrative. But that turns out to be just as well, because Miller instead serves up a much wider menu that ranges from the explosive expansion of the American economy fueled by industrialism and innovation, the roots and endurance of labor unrest, the related growth of political radicalism and its sometime close cousin anarchism, and Washington’s lust to join the other Western powers in an orgy of imperialism that included the peaceful annexation of Hawaii, along with the ill-begotten gains from the war with Spain that added Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines as overseas territories, while asserting an “Open Door” right to access Chinese markets. Each of these topics merits a book-length treatment, but Miller succeeds in blending these themes and much more into a fascinating and immensely readable account of disparate forces that coalesced to shape the nation as the nineteenth century drew to a close.

The post-Reconstruction Republican Party largely abandoned African Americans and their struggle for civil rights while embracing big business and pro-growth policies that in an era lacking any real regulation created enormous wealth for some while tethering the welfare of masses of wage workers, many of them immigrants, to the whims of the few who controlled factories, mills, mining, and other industries. The vast economic inequality that characterized the Gilded Age bred deep resentment and anger among the working class, who found themselves paid a pittance of near-starvation wages while compelled to labor long hours in often unsafe conditions and liable to be fired at a moment’s notice if they advanced even the slightest objection. The protectionism in vogue at the time—McKinley made his political career championing tariffs—kept prices high even when wages arbitrarily fell. The law favored business and their captains of industry, such that the attempts of organized labor to improve their lot were frequently crushed with the support and active participation of the police and the military, leaving workers dead, imprisoned, or unemployed, even blackballed from being rehired ever again.

McKinley, who many years earlier served pro bono as counsel for striking miners, as president demonstrated little concern for the plight of workers, but he was, as the author emphasizes, consumed with the growing problem of overproduction that was threatening the nation’s long-term economic health. In short, the buying power of the population of the United States could not support purchasing the amount of goods that factories were churning out. Rather than producing less, as the typical capitalist supply and demand economic imperative would dictate, manufacturers kept up a frenetic pace of increased supply, cutting wages by caprice to increase profitability. It was this dilemma that got the president to shift his gaze overseas. If cutting production was unthinkable, perhaps expanding the market for American goods to foreign shores would do the trick. And it was that notion that saw McKinley, a Civil War veteran who had witnessed enough bloodletting in his time to enter office firmly resistant to any kind of jingoist adventurism, begin to temper that opposition even as larger events presented a convenient opportunity to do so.

Those events centered around the ongoing guerrilla war in Cuba by insurgents seeking the island’s independence from Spain. Americans were generally sympathetic to the rebels and eager to see the Spanish driven from the hemisphere. In 1897, McKinley even offered to purchase Cuba, but was rebuffed by Spain. When the US battleship Maine exploded for unknown reasons and sank while docked at Havana Harbor in February 1898, forces were set in motion that would lead to war. At first, McKinley sought a diplomatic solution, but he also dithered, while others—especially Roosevelt—lobbied for aggressive action. Finally, McKinley’s longing for foreign markets for American goods aligned with the pleadings of those who urged him to act in the national interest, and a shooting war was on. The once-mighty Spain fell rapidly to American firepower on land and at sea. The United States acquired Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Cuba was granted its independence, as such, even as it fell under the thumb of US domination for six decades to come. The real war, with Filipino guerrillas seeking their own sovereignty, had just begun, and was put down brutally by the United States. Later termed the Philippine–American War, it resulted in the deaths of over 200,000 civilians. While Miller’s coverage here generally deserves high marks, he tends to be far too sympathetic to American objectives and little dwells upon the terrible atrocities committed by US forces in the process of pacifying the Philippines. For that, the reader must turn elsewhere.

Meanwhile, as attempts at organized labor fizzled and union-busting went unpunished, more radical politics began to inform the disenfranchised seeking some form of satisfaction. At the fringes were anarchists like Emma Goldman who preached against any form of authority, a message that resonated among some sectors of the oppressed. Still, the powers that be feared anarchism far out of proportion to its actual influence. I have often compared George W. Bush’s vague, ill-judged “War on Terror” with comparable efforts against anarchism back in the day. Since neither jihadists nor anarchists can commonly be identified with any formal organization, attacking each with all forces at your disposal amounts to little more than punching at paper bags in a darkened room, with similar results. Chicago’s Haymarket Affair, now recalled as the origin of International Workers’ Day, began as a peaceful assembly in support of a workers’ strike that turned violent when police interceded, and a bomb was thrown by an individual who was never identified. Eight anarchists were arrested, and four were hanged, including the well-known activist Albert Parsons, even though there remains no evidence any were involved with the bombing, while the responsibility for the deaths of nearly a dozen at Haymarket were likely the result of police gunfire.

But there was indeed also an authentic violent streak in anarchism. In the two decades leading up to McKinley’s assassination, anarchists murdered the Russian tsar, the president of France, the Spanish prime minister, the Austro-Hungarian empress, and the king of Italy. It was Czolgosz’s turn next, but in Miller’s characterization, he comes across as the unlikeliest of assassins. A lazy, aimless, disaffected, and socially-awkward loner, his passion for ideology seemed to come in a far distant second to his desperation for finding a place to fit in. Instead, it cost him his life. Still asserting that he acted in support of the working man, he was swiftly tried and executed in the electric chair only forty-five days after McKinley succumbed to his wounds.

Presidential biographies are a favored genre. I found The President and the Assassin on the shelves of my personal library shortly after reading two books on James A. Garfield back-to-back, including Candice Millard’s Destiny of the Republic, which is devoted to Garfield’s long, excruciating death from gunshot wounds. McKinley and Garfield had much in common. Both were Civil War Union officers. Both mourned the loss of young children. Both were Republican politicians, highly regarded by their peers, who advanced to the presidency. Also, tragically, both fell to an assassin’s bullets, almost exactly twenty years apart to the very month. Unlike Lincoln and JFK, who were shot in the head, both Garfield and McKinley suffered injuries to the torso that need not have been fatal. Garfield, whose wounds were probed with unwashed fingers, lived an agonizing seventy-nine days before dying of the resulting infection. Medical care had improved dramatically since Garfield’s day, but it did not save McKinley, who mercifully only lingered for a week, but yet died of gangrene.

While it was perhaps a morbid fascination with McKinley’s end that first brought me to The President and the Assassin, the book turned out to have far more to offer. I want to believe that the ungainly title was forced upon Miller by an editor eager for book sales who either disregarded or disdained the author’s intended audience, but it certainly shortchanged the value of this book, which deserves not only a better title but an expanded readership. I highly recommend it.

 

Sidney Blumenthal objects to Donald’s characterization of Lincoln in the prologue of this biography: Review of: A Self-Made Man: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln Vol. I, 1809–1849, by Sidney Blumenthal

For more extensive coverage of the Spanish-American War and especially the Filipino insurgency: Review of: The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire, by Stephen Kinzer

For an account of Garfield’s long death: Review of: Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President, by Candice Millard

More on Garfield and Republican politics: Review of: President Garfield:From Radical to Unifier, by C.W. Goodyear

Like politics, all history is local, at least at first. It seldom remains that way. Key events in one geography almost always send fierce if perhaps unacknowledged echoes elsewhere. Chroniclers preoccupied with the action unfolding at the center often neglect the effects upon far distant edges. More than sixty thousand books have been published on the American Civil War, but few examine the outsize influence of the conflict beyond the borders of the United States and the then-Confederacy. A notable exception in the literature (although not specifically a Civil War book) is Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton, which describes how the stifling of cotton exports from southern ports sparked a mad scramble for new sources of raw material that saw the heavy hand of British imperialism utterly transform the countryside of the Indian subcontinent—eight thousand miles away from Fort Sumter! American Civil Wars: A Continental History, 1850-1873 [2024], a powerful, insightful, and extremely well-written narrative by historian Alan Taylor, points to dramatic impacts much closer to home.

The central cause of the Civil War was human chattel slavery, which powered the economies of the southern slave states. Studies have established that the slave system of agriculture was highly destructive of environments, and thus required aggressive expansion to new lands in order to thrive. To this end, and with the full (if often tacit) support of plantation and political elites, adventurers known as “filibusters” looked to occupy and annex locales in the West Indies and Central America. But the mother lode of wide open spaces turned out to be the vast territories in the west and southwest obtained by conquest in the Mexican War, jealously lusted after by both the southern slaveocracy and northern Free-Soilers. Neither had concerns for dispossessed Mexicans nor the indigenous. Or African Americans, for that matter: southerners would have them only as enslaved laborers, while northerners would ban them absolutely. Lincoln’s election foreclosed the spread of slavery to the territories, and seven states seceded, then four more after shots were fired at Sumter.

Typically, what then follows is the familiar story of Bull Run to Appomattox baked into most Civil War accounts, but Taylor, a distinguished Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar whose body of work has dwelled predominately on the Early Republic, stands apart from most historians in approach and perspective with a thought-provoking fresh analysis of ground otherwise exhaustively covered before. Moreover, Taylor ever compels the reader to not simply look back to what was as we now know it, but rather to consider what might have been, in a time when there were many possibilities, and nothing had yet been decided.

It is this notion that brilliantly shapes his earlier book, American Colonies, which skillfully underscores that boundaries later stenciled in on maps of North America and the West Indies were hardly preordained, that what came to form those thirteen colonies that turned into the United States could very well have encompassed a larger—or, for that matter, smaller—area consisting of other regions then controlled by the French, British, Spanish, and Amerindians. Taylor later has American Colonies serve as the first volume in a series that to date includes American Revolutions, American Republics, and the latest, American Civil Wars. The plural in “Civil Wars” is deliberate, because there is indeed more than one going on in various corners of the continent, including a shooting war in Mexico, a political one in Canada, and something that is a bit of both in the rapidly shrinking lands once exclusively occupied by Native Americans. And all of it is informed by the twin principles that guided nineteenth century America: the Monroe Doctrine, that proscribed interference in the Americas by foreign powers, and Manifest Destiny, that promised the whole of the continent to the United States.

Some of the best content in American Civil Wars leaves the war between Washington and Richmond behind, and takes a deep dive much further south. Like many former colonies, Mexico was plagued by political instability after winning its independence from Spain in 1808, which was exacerbated by tensions in a highly stratified society marked by a gulf between a tiny slice of wealthy landowners and the masses of desperately impoverished landless peasants. In the twenty-five years that preceded the American Civil War, nation-building was further crippled by a series of land grabs by the United States that stripped Mexico of more than a third of its territory. The first was the loss of Texas, a region settled by invitation to Americans who established a slave society. Mexico’s abolition of slavery and other factors led to an armed conflict supported by the US that resulted first in Texas independence and then annexation. The greater blow, of course, came as a result of the Mexican War, a blatant act of armed aggression by the Polk Administration that obtained present-day California, New Mexico, and Arizona, as well as parts of Nevada, Utah, and Colorado. The so-called Mexican Cession amounted to an enormous steal of an astonishing 529,000 square miles. Later, Mexico was strong-armed into ceding even more territory in the Gadsden Purchase.

Beset by its own series of civil wars, and deeply in debt to European powers, the Liberal Republic of Benito Juárez—which had routed reactionary forces on the battlefield—was no match for French adventurism encouraged, indeed invited in, by defeated Mexican conservatives. The French crushed resistance and placed a hapless Hapsburg archduke on the throne as Emperor Maximilian I. The Monroe Doctrine proved to be no deterrent. Republicans in Congress sympathetic to Mexican democracy bristled, but Lincoln was not only fully preoccupied with saving the Union, but worried that a strong rebuke might provoke France to recognize the Confederacy. Meanwhile, Richmond imagined an alliance with Maximilian that would entice France to do just that. In a masterful treatment of the many moving parts here of war, diplomacy, socioeconomic factors, and much more, Taylor succeeds in shifting the focus so that the reader’s perspective is dramatically redirected to view the fractured United States from the Mexican side of the border, a significant accomplishment.

Taylor just as adeptly goes north to explore the dynamic in a then still divided British Canada, anxious at what a restored union to her south by a powerful neighbor further emboldened by victory could mean for her territorial integrity. This tension had a very long history. In American Colonies, Taylor reminds us that in slightly altered circumstances parts of Canada could very well have been incorporated into the United States. In American Revolutions, he chronicles how colonists were angered that the treaty that concluded the French & Indian War also protected much-coveted French Quebec (later dubbed “Lower Canada”), adding to the catalog of grievances that would subsequently foment rebellion and lead to independence. Those hostilities were marked by a failed invasion, and the Battle of Quebec. After the war, loyalists fled to Canada’s west, present-day Ontario, then termed “Upper Canada.” Communities on both sides of the border formed strong trade and cultural relationships, intertwined with the region’s native tribes, which were ruptured by the War of 1812 and another series of failed invasions by the Americans, a story superbly rendered in Taylor’s The Civil War of 1812. When the British, exhausted by the Napoleonic Wars, made peace from an existing stalemate that likely would have gone badly for the United States in the longer term, the result was a mutual respect for US-Canadian borders that endured for decades.

American Civil Wars describes how that respect grew more tenuous in the Antebellum as stress cracks widened. As enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act grew more vigorous, for the enslaved seeking liberty the most secure terminus of the Underground Railroad became Canadian soil, which infuriated slaveowners seeking to have their “property” restored. Blacks were treated favorably at first, but as their numbers grew so did racism and resentment towards immigrants competing for jobs and resources. During the Civil War, diplomatic tensions with the British extended to Canada, as well, which although officially neutral was openly sympathetic to the Confederate cause. Richmond attempted to open a second front in Montréal and Toronto, leading most famously to the raid on St. Albans, Vermont. But as the fortunes of the south faded, and rumblings could be detected in the United States of a reenergized Manifest Destiny that had seized lands to the west and south and was now looking north once more, self-preservation fueled a sense of urgency for unity among the various provinces. The result was the landmark 1867 Canadian Confederation that set forces in motion that within a few years brought all of Canada east and west together as a single entity, better capable of resisting appetites for expansion from Washington.

A consistent theme in Taylor’s works are the marginalized peoples frequently neglected in other histories, especially Native Americans. This time the author focuses on competing attempts by the Union and the Confederacy to recruit the indigenous as allies, such that the Civil War saw the phenomenon of various tribes fighting for the Blue or the Gray. Of course, before, during, and especially after the war, Federal forces employed brutal tactics to put down native peoples, seizing their lands on false pretexts, driving them to starvation by hunting the bison to near extinction, forcing them into reservations known for appalling conditions, and occasionally massacring entire villages. Whatever side they chose, Native Americans always lost.

Those who turned to Taylor’s latest book chiefly for yet another history of the American Civil War may come away disappointed, because that is hardly the main event in this volume. Still, that can be deceiving, because he does devote much print to a fast-paced summary. Indeed, sometimes fast-paced seems to turn into a veritable sprint, and along with that comes some unfortunate missteps. Taylor recycles the long-disproven canard that the term “hooker” was derived from prostitutes accompanying the army of Major General Joseph Hooker, when in fact that moniker dates back to the 1840s. There are also some issues with interpretation, as when he unfairly castigates Meade for failing to pursue Lee with appropriate alacrity after Gettysburg, which aligns with Lincoln’s view at the time but now has largely been discarded by scholars of the campaign.

Still, none of this is fatal, and if I winced here and there it is only because I have spent decades chasing down the Civil War. Moreover, such quibbles are more than offset by the triumph of the final product, which not only enriches the historiography but does so in an engaging style accessible to audiences both popular and academic. The beauty in nearly every work by Alan Taylor is that each leaves the reader treating what was once familiar territory as uncertain terrain demanding reevaluation. So too American Civil Wars. But the real triumph this time is that those turning its final pages will no longer again be capable of thinking about the war without considering its ramifications elsewhere—no small achievement indeed!

 

NOTE: This review is dedicated to Dr. Peter Carmichael, Director of the Civil War Institute (CWI) at Gettysburg College, a remarkable scholar, educator, and friend whose recent untimely death is an incalculable loss to the historical community. Pete was a huge supporter of my work, introducing me to others in the field with praise I hardly felt I deserved, but which left me deeply flattered because of my admiration for him. He will be much missed by all who knew him.

NOTE: I reviewed other works by Alan Taylor here:

Review of: American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804, by Alan Taylor

Review of: Thomas Jefferson’s Education, by Alan Taylor

Review of: The Internal Enemy: Slavery and the War in Virginia 1772-1832, by Alan Taylor

Review of: The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies by Alan Taylor

Review of: American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850, by Alan Taylor

NOTE: I reviewed the Beckert book here:

Review of: Empire of Cotton: A Global History, by Sven Beckert

 

 

 

Those who have heard of Benjamin Butler tend to remember him principally by the pejorative sobriquets dipped in venom attached to him by Confederate military and civilian leaders during the American Civil War: “Beast,” an epithet earned when as military governor of occupied New Orleans he issued an order equating all the fine southern ladies in the city with prostitutes, following certain episodes that saw them dumping chamber pots out of windows upon passing Union soldiers; and, “Spoons,” assigned based upon a more than passing suspicion that while establishing order he was also regularly lining his pockets. But he was actually an individual of far greater significance than implied by the unfortunate monikers meant to mock him. A Zelig-like figure—or perhaps a craftier Forrest Gump—Butler pops up everywhere, not only during the Civil War where he made a name for himself (for both good and for ill), but on the eve of secession, during Reconstruction, and in the decades that followed. And he was funny-looking too— a dead ringer for Dennis Franz as Detective Andy Sipowicz on NYPD Blue—making him an ideal target for the outlandish political cartoons that ruled his day. Thus, there exists in the historical record a Butler of legend that is mostly caricature, as well as a more nuanced portrait of a complex, fascinating, and by all means flamboyant character who carved a deep groove on his era, for better and for worse. Larger-than-life is an often-overused cliché, but it suits Butler perfectly.

That life gets a detailed scholarly treatment in Benjamin Franklin Butler: A Noisy, Fearless Life [2022], by award-winning historian Elizabeth D. Leonard, a meticulously researched, well-written, if sometimes tedious chronicle that is long on the laudatory and too often a bit blurry when tracking her subject’s many trails of malfeasance. Leonard, a professor at Colby College, Butler’s alma mater when it was known as Waterville College, found inspiration for this work in an article written by her late mentor, Colby’s Civil War historian Harold B. Raymond. Her book explores Butler’s public life without neglecting his private one, a welcome approach for the reader who looks to biography to go beyond dates and deeds to establish a sense of greater intimacy with the protagonist.

Benjamin Franklin Butler (1818-1893) was born in New Hampshire, but as a boy moved with his family to Lowell, Massachusetts, where his mother ran a boarding house for workers at the local textile mills. After Waterville, he became a lawyer and took cases in turn representing the mills, where he also invested, as well as their beleaguered employees. He seems to have developed genuine empathy and affection for these workers, especially the young girls, who labored fourteen hours a day in often brutal conditions, and he became a spirited advocate for “ten hour day” legislation. A pro-slavery, pro-southern “doughface” Democrat who supported first Jefferson Davis and then John C. Breckinridge in the election that put Lincoln in the White House, secession transformed him into a Major General who occupied Baltimore and helped keep Maryland in the Union. Next he went to Fort Monroe in Virginia and demonstrated in the bungled Battle of Big Bethel the lack of military prowess that was to define him on the battlefield throughout much of the war. At the same time, he distinguished himself by devising a clever legal loophole that declared the enslaved who fled to federal lines “contraband of war” who would not be returned to the rebels, a landmark policy later adopted by the Lincoln Administration.

Next up was his stint in New Orleans, which began when he had a civilian tried and executed for tearing down a United States flag. But despite the contempt he provoked in the subject population, he also effected a humane administration that saved many from starvation and disease, and he formed the very first African American regiment in the US Army, the 1st Louisiana Native Guard. That Jefferson Davis loudly called for his execution if captured only added to his popularity back home. Still, in concert with his felonious brother, he confiscated cotton and resold it for personal profit, just one of many financial irregularities that followed his military career.

Glaring examples of corruption led to his being replaced in New Orleans, but as one of Lincoln’s “political generals” who abandoned the Democrats and was reborn as a leading Radical Republican, he was reshuffled rather than cashiered, eventually ending up in Norfolk, Virginia in command of what became the Army of the James. Here he famously created multiple regiments comprised of former rebel prisoners of war who became known as “Galvanized Yankees,” while also allegedly enabling illicit trade between northern merchants and the Confederacy. Yet, in 1864, Grant gave him critical responsibility for a planned attack on strategic Petersburg, but Butler dropped the ball entirely and his army ended up out of action, bottled up at Bermuda Hundred. He then botched an attempt to take Fort Fisher, which not long after fell almost effortlessly to Adelbert Ames, his future son-in-law. Finally, Grant and Lincoln had enough of him.

After the war, he embarked on a career in Congress that soon had him managing the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson, which failed for a variety of reasons, not least his own mediocre performance. He championed civil rights, women’s suffrage, and the working poor, but managed to drift through a variety of ideologies, alliances, and parties that saw him develop his own peculiar brand of politics known as “Butlerism,” and led to a single term as a populist Democratic Governor of Massachusetts, followed by a landslide defeat in his bid for the presidency as nominee of the Greenback and Anti-Monopoly parties. Near the end of his life, he published a one thousand page autobiography—Butler’s Book—that revels in his self-importance, and sits on the shelves of my home library. Through it all, he amassed vast wealth and proved to be ingenious, opportunistic, stubborn, difficult, ego-driven, ambitious—and so chameleon-like that many wondered if he was less given to populism than demagoguery.  For all his passions on various sides of various issues, in the end the question was whether Benjamin Franklin Butler actually fervently believed in anything other than Benjamin Franklin Butler.

I first encountered Butler back in 2014, when I had a key role in a grant-funded project to digitize the recently rediscovered letters, diaries, and memoirs of the 31^st Massachusetts Volunteers, the regiment Butler commanded in New Orleans, materials now available on the web for public access. This motivated me to read up on him, in a number of sources. Some biographers might claim that much of the calumnies charged against Butler were grievance-driven slanders manufactured by proponents of the “Lost Cause” to magnify minor peccadillos in an enduring retaliation for his insults to the honor of southern women and his eagerness in putting African Americans in uniform. Leonard seems to take that position, as well, acknowledging, for example, the financial improprieties that clung to Butler’s tenure in New Orleans, but laying all the blame on Butler’s brother. But the more one reads about Butler, who was hardly naïve and indeed quite shrewd, the more difficult it is to accept that he was some kind of innocent bystander to corruption—or that his shifting allegiances to ideas and principles were always sincere.

Ever the opportunist, Butler did however seem to muster up honest sympathy for the downtrodden, even if he often only put it to best use when there was a mutual benefit for him. Leonard may have missed an opportunity to focus more deeply on Butler’s paternalistic relationship with the Lowell mill girls he sought to shield from overly harsh conditions, since this seems to have left a truly lasting impression. Those who have read Robert Caro may find similar echoes in young Lyndon Johnson’s defining moment as schoolteacher to poverty-stricken Mexican-American children. Both men deeply felt those respective sufferings, and both carried that with them ever after. And each, a century apart, became ardent defenders of black Americans in their struggle for civil rights.

As noted earlier, Leonard dwells a good deal upon the private sphere of Butler’s life, which was marked by a long and happy marriage blessed with several children, and by all indications he was a loving father and an attentive family man. But sometimes the author goes overboard: throughout the book, too many paragraphs are plagued with excerpts from correspondence given to insignificant chatter about quotidian happenings that add nothing to the narrative. There are even multiple references to Butler’s gratitude for the homemade sausages his sister sends him! This stands in stark underscore to Leonard’s coverage of Butler’s part in Johnson’s impeachment, which the astonished reader will find amounts to all of three paragraphs. Moreover, whenever Butler stumbles, as he did mightily in this episode, or seems to be caught with his hand in the cookie jar, as occurred more than once, Leonard takes him at his word and ever gives him the benefit of the doubt, which frequently equates to a superficial treatment of negative incidents that then give way to longer looks at his accomplishments. It should be noted, though, that Leonard is a careful historian who does report dissenting views, even if the latter sometimes seem to have been tacked on begrudgingly.

Still, this tendency towards the all-too-forgiving only serves to dial the volume down on Butler’s so-called “noisy, fearless” life, in which he cast himself as both hero and scoundrel. To varnish away the villain only dulls the outsize impact of his legacy. As it turns out, this book is not quite a hagiography, but it does suffer from a lack of balance that consistently celebrates Butler while rarely finding fault. And that’s a shame, because Butler, warts and all, was a colorful, intriguing character made far more compelling by his manifest blemishes. But for more on that, the reader will have to turn elsewhere.

 

Link to letters, diaries, and memoirs of the 31^st Massachusetts Volunteers:  31st Massachusetts Volunteers: Honoring the Civil War Soldiers of the Western Bay State Regiment