New Aspects of the Civil War

...in the previous August, Stanton was in New York, where he wrote, "I have spent most of my time for the last two days in seeing the principal moneyed men from whom the Government is now attempting to make a loan and urging them not to lend a dollar till Cameron and Welles have been driven from the Cabinet...

...His description of the actual fighting in the Wilderness, for example, deserves to rank among the gems of military literature...

...An adequate biography of Edwin M. Stanton is still badly needed...

...Clearly overlooked in recent military history have been two things: the description of battles and an appreciation of the men who fought them...

...It offers nothing in the way of fresh interpretation and presents no new facts...

...Unfortunately, Pratt's book can serve no other useful purpose...

...One might readily think, from the plethora of military histories on the Civil War...

...Pratt presents Stanton as Cameron's friend who ga\e him legal advice...

...Yet, with all the writing, some subjects have been left untouched...

...Yet, almost without exception, these histories have dealt with the weighty problems of military strategy or political policy...

...By direct statement and clear implication...

...Mechanization, and the total war fought by men reduced to robots, lacks glamour, drama and, for the most part, personal heroism...

...From the horrors of modern war, men turn to seek the record of a conflict in which romantic deeds seem to give a new dignity to the individual...

...But perhaps the basic significance of Catton's work lies in his ability to capture the drama and the romance of the Civil War...

...In accepted tradition and in most of the books of recent years, Stanton appears as an evil-tempered, bitter fanatic whose sole distinction is his efficiency...

...He served in Buchanan's, Lincoln's and Johnson's cabinets, and the consensus is that he "betrayed" each of his superiors...

...Pratt, however, has been content to rely, for both his facts and his interpretation, on two 50-year-old partisan biographies of Stanton...

...And, out of the medley, there seems to have emerged about as many controversies as there were differences of opinions among the contestants during the War Against the States...

...Perhaps the book by Fletcher Pratt will serve to call attention to the need for a biography of Stanton...

...Bruce Catton never loses sight of the soldiers who fought in the Army of the Potomac, and his story of that army becomes a dramatic glorification of the common man...

...It is not a guide to the materials, for it contains neither notes nor bibliography...

...His point of orientation is the combat soldier, and he gives only minimum attention to the commanding generals...

...It is a job that needs to be done...

...But no recent historian has undertaken to examine Stanton's record, to explore the mainsprings of his character, and to assess his significance in the confused picture of the Civil War...

...The Civil War was the last great conflict in which romance was possible...

...This hardly indicates that Stanton was Cameron's friend, and, considering the plight of the Government in the summer of 1861, it has a slight tinge of disloyalty in it...

...Certainly it seems that each man has his own private version of the American Civil War, and, within the past few years, the number of these private versions which have been made public has run into the hundreds...

...Lee and his generals, Grant and his generals, Lincoln and his generals, his Governors, his Cabinet officers, and even his wife's relatives have been examined and evaluated, praised and condemned...

...One case may suffice for illustration...

...They begin with the wrong dates for Stanton's attendance at Kenyon College, an inadequate and erroneous account of Stanton's young manhood in Steubenville, a mistake in the place of his admission to the bar, and proceed through the book and into the index, where the subject of the volume is listed as "Edward...

...He tricked Simon Cameron, Lincoln's first Secretary of War, into making an unacceptable report and got Cameron's job after his victim was removed...

...It is, instead, an amazing compendium of errors, a reiteration of partisan claims, and an uncritical defense of Stanton's controversial conduct...

...This, after all, is probably the basic reason for the multitude of Civil War books, Civil War movies, the dozen or more "Civil War Round Tables" scattered over the country, and the endless stream of visitors to Civil War battlefields...

...His book is an uncritical rehash of the biased, and occasionally fatuous, books by Gorham and Flowers...

...These Catton brings into focus...

...They have mulled over, with the comfortable gift of hindsight, the problems of McClellan...

...Their orientation has been in Washington, or, at best, at Grant's headquarters...

...The letter, incidentally, appears in a manuscript biography written by Stanton's sister...

...Pratt, for example, devotes 111 of his 500 pages to a conventional excoriation of "Little Mac") Or they debate the "problem of command"—whatever that is—as it concerned the intricate relations of Lincoln, Grant and Meade...

...He captures, too, from letters, diaries, memoirs and the oft-neglected regimental histories, the sights and sounds of battle and the emotions of the fighters...

...Reviewed by William B. Hesseltine Professor of History, Wisconsin University: Visiting Professor, Rice Institute Perhaps, as Carl Becker once announced in pontifical mood, every man is his own historian...

...that there was nothing new to be said about the army which was organized by McClellan, led to defeat by a succession of ill-chosen commanders, and finally whipped into a fighting force and led to victory by Ulysses S. Grant...

...He posed as General McClellan's friend until he got into office through McClellan's influence, and then turned against the general...

...Pratt discusses the Cameron dismissal with no mention that Stanton inspired him to write a report which Lincoln would have to reject...

...One of them is the private character and public services of Edwin McMasters Stanton, Lincoln's Secretary of War and the self-acclaimed "organizer of victory" for the Northern armies...

...Otto Eisenshiml clearly implies that Stanton was an accessory before the fact of Lincoln's murder, and dozens of writers have shown him conspiring with Congressional Radicals to sabotage Johnson's reconstruction program...

...The errors are, perhaps, the most striking feature of the book...

...Although in private hands, it is readily available to competent researchers, and a simple and logical inquiry would have located it...

...Yet...

...Far different in method, literary excellence, insight and contribution is the last volume of Bruce Carton's trilogy on the Army of the Potomac...