My Life Makes Sense Now!

Reading the mutli-volume, multi-author Oxford History of the United States has been quite an adventure. I’ve read seven of the volumes now, and overall I’m quite happy I put this project on my reading schedule. The quality has gone up and down (although it’s been mostly quite high), and the prices have gone up and down (altough they have tended to be low lately). But even with the vicissitudes, as a whole, it’s been a very satisfying and instructive experience.

The most frustrating problem with the adventure is the lag in publication. When I started this Third Decade list, Bruce Schulman’s contribution, covering the years 1896-1929, was scheduled to come out, I believe, in 2016. Great! I wanted to read the volumes in historical order, and Schulman’s would be out by the time I made it that far. But over the years, I’ve seen the expected date of that volume move back and back. Last year, the year I had originally scheduled Schulman, I had to jump ahead and read David M. Kennedy’s Freedom from Fear, about the Depression and World War II. By that time, Schulman’s book was scheduled to come out in September of 2024. Soon, I was seeing an ISBN number for it and a page length, and Amazon from Canada and the UK were taking pre-orders. So I thought my reordering would only last one year: just wait until September this year, I thought, and fill in the gap. Alas, September came and went this year, and still no Schulman. I wrote to Oxford Press and got an answer from some nice agent of that company saying that the book would come out in September of 2025. We’ll see.

In any case, I had to change gears again and read one more volume “out of order” (this kind of thing is really only a problem because of my mild-grade OCD). So a few weeks ago I bought the next book in the series, James T. Patterson’s Grand Expectations.

I’ve said before that I must have something in common with the Pulitzer committees, because my favorites had all won the prize for history: Daniel Walker Howe’s What God Hath Wrought (2008), James M. McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom (1989), and Kennedy’s Freedom from Fear (2000). The ones I would put in the second tier were finalists, and the one I really didn’t like is not mentioned on any Pulitzer page. That streak of harmonized opinion broke this year. I had only one complaint about Freedom from Fear: that, since its years witnessed two greatest-in-all-history events that demanded all the attention, Kennedy had no time to dwell on sports, clothing, movies, literature, leisure, etc. Well, today I just finished reading Grand Expectations, and I declare it even better than Pulitzer-Prize-winning Freedom from Fear partly because it did cover lots of cultural details in addition to the traditional historical subjects of politics, war, and economics – even though there was naturally plenty to report in all three of those areas in the years 1946-1974. But sadly, it did not receive a Pulitzer Prize and wasn’t, as far as I can see, even a finalist. Obviously, the committee didn’t know what it was doing in 1996. Poor Patterson had to settle for the slightly less prestigious Bancroft Prize instead. (I think he’s probably pretty happy with that honor!)

I should not neglect to say that the book was well researched, that the prose was polished, that it made both factual observations and subjective interpretations, and that it gave proper attention to the widely varying contemporary views and opinions on McCarthy, Korea, Vietnam, the Great Society, Nixon, and other controversial people, movements, and events. But the thing that made this book stand out to me is that it’s the first history book I’ve ever read in which I appear: the baby boom gets a long section and many mentions throughout the chapters. And many events I remember from when I was a kid – two Kennedy assassinations, the space race, color television, hippies, bombing in Cambodia, the My Lai massacre, Watergate, and more – finally made sense. OK, wrong phrase. Most of those events will never make sense! But I understood them in historical context for the first time, which is to say that I understand much of my childhood and youth in historical context now.

So maybe I have a bias that the Pulitzer committee doesn’t share. But this book was terrific! I hope I actually get to read Schulman’s book next year. (Boy, all those delays don’t give me much hope of it’s being any good.) But if not, I’m happy to say that the next volume in the series, Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore, was also written by James T. Patterson. So whether my date with Restless Giant happens in 2025 or 2026, I know I’m in for some more good, eye-opening history.

A Post in which Barnes & Noble, Target, and Kicking All Make an Appearance

I’ve written several times now about Anthony Trollope. I don’t want to pass him by on the blog this year, but I don’t know what to add about him in general. He is, as far as I know, the best Victorian novelist that readers don’t read these days. (I base my notion that readers don’t read him on the very unscientific observation that he generally doesn’t join Dickens and Eliot and Stevenson and Thackeray on the table of cheap editions at Barnes & Noble. Also, I’m 99% sure he never made it into Classic Illustrated comic books. This is the kind of high-level literary criticism you get here, folks.) And I love his habit of talking to the reader in the narration about his craft, the reader’s expectations, and the obligation he senses to develop the plot satisfactorily; it’s as if he occasionally dismantles all the housing of the puppet theater and shows himself holding the sticks that animate his characters.

But I’ve said all that before. So I guess I’ll just respond to some details of the plot of He Knew He Was Right, a plan that decidedly does not meet my obligation to develop this post satisfactorily for you, since you almost certainly don’t know the plot of He Knew He Was Right and don’t know what to think about my response to it.

The book actually has about three plots. Concerning sublot no. 1, I can only say here that Dorothy Stanbury and her aunt are everything the Victorian housewife in me needs. Aunt Stanbury (I confess I can’t remember her first name!) is funny when she’s prickly, and charming when she’s in better humor, and Dolly is that most difficult of Victorian literary achievements: a good girl with actual depth.

And about subplot no. 2, I can only say that Nora Rowley is everything the Victorian feminist in me needs. She’s willing to be married, she’s willing not to be married, and she’s willing to live on her own no matter what people think of it.

This is a long novel, and I found myself picking it up sometimes during the month it took me to finish it and forgetting whether I was reading about Dorothy or Nora. Both are younger sisters who turn down their first proposals, so they were easy to confuse. I decided I needed to use a trick that has helped sometimes before: I picked out two young women I saw in passing one day (one in Target and one on the sidewalk), each having a distinctive face, and I made them the “actresses” for the characters in my head. Is that weird? In any case, it worked.

The main plot, the one indicated by the title, involves Nora’s older sister, Emily, who marries Louis Trevelyan and then gets several visits from an old family friend, Colonel Osborne. And we must say here that Colonel Osborne enjoys the dangerous excitement of getting slightly too familiar with married women, knowing he can (usually) get away with it because of his advanced age. But in spite of Osborne’s gray hair, Louis becomes literally mad with jealousy and tells Emily that she must not see the Colonel again. Emily refuses to obey what she believes to be an inappropriate command. (I think the Victorian housewives that bought and devoured Trollope’s books must have enjoyed staging a minor vicarious rebellion through Emily.) Louis begins to believe his wife to have been unfaithful in the unspeakable way – unspeakable for a Victorian, that is – and sends his wife out of the house. Trust me, one reason I enjoyed the subplots so much is that they provided much needed relief from the thoroughly unlikeable Louis. For a whole month I kept yelling at him in my mind: “Why don’t you quit accusing and exiling your wife and start kicking Colonel Osborne? Problem solved.”

This high-level literary critic gives He Knew He Was Right a big thumbs up. But don’t start here if you, like the editors of Classics Illustrated, haven’t read any Anthony Trollope. I recommend beginning with The Warden and Barchester Towers.

Will and Ariel Durant, What Do You Really Think?

It took Will and Ariel Durant a lifetime to write The Story of Civilization, and it’s taking me nearly a lifetime to read it. I didn’t start the massive work until I was about 30 and didn’t start reading it in earnest until I was 40, but I had fairly salivated over the prospect since I first saw the set in my church library when I was about 14. The landscape of history has changed, of course, over the course of my decades-long journey; ancient Rome and medieval Paris have very different histories, and the Reformation and the Enlightenment are worlds apart in spite of everything they have in common. But the carriage the Durants provide changes, too. For the ancient times, they convey the reader along the road in a sense of wonder. During medieval times, the rough wagon is driven by a teamster with profound respect for the church he doesn’t agree with. And the highway through the sunny hills of Renaissance art and the birth of modern science is enjoyed in an open-air barouche that rattles along merrily with giddy excitement.

I’ve blessed the Durants with encomiums before (especially while I was reading that very respectful volume about the Middle Ages), and I’ve scolded them a bit, especially when they couldn’t stop talking about Rousseau’s dalliances with women, as if the greatest boon of the Enlightenment’s new-found freedom was the right to air publicly one’s desire to be spanked by strange women. But I’m sticking with them for the entire tour, which will end for me in 2026.

This year, my visit with the Durants (I’ve had enough of the traveling metaphor!) was quite pleasant. Gone are the bloody, depressing theological disputes of the Reformation. Gone are the long chapters about Rousseau and his indulgent chaos. The 390 pages for 2024 covered Goethe, the Industrial Revolution, the American Revolution, the art and drama and literature of Johnson’s England, and the Great Man himself: Dr. Johnson. So interesting! So insightful!

But, boy! did I receive a shock when they got to Johnson’s biographer. Apparently, Boswell’s private journals were published in the twentieth century and revealed a man quite different from the respectable, orthodox character he portrays himself to be in the Life. My first reaction was one of bewilderment. Are we talking about the same Boswell?! My second reaction to the revelation of his persistent sexual incontinence centered on acceptance: OK, we all have our skeletons, and I’ve discovered that Boswell wasn’t sinless. I can live with that. My third and final reaction found me arguing on Boswell’s behalf: would Johnson have talked with him, dined with him, traveled with him, shared personal documents with him if the upright, pious persona wasn’t real and sincere?

Now I could have experienced all three of those reactions with little more information than I’ve given you here. But the Durants love a philanderer’s story. Page after page they revel in quoting the confessions in Boswell’s journals and in retelling story after story of affairs and visits with prostitutes. But why? Seriously, what is the significance of James Boswell to the “story of civilization"? The fact that he had a sex drive that overpowered him at times (which is almost the same as simply saying that he was human)? Or his ability and drive to write a monumental book read, loved, and hailed as a classic by students of history for 250 years – a masterpiece that simultaneously begins a literary genre and is unlike any other book in – or ever likely to be in – that genre?

The Durants finish the section on Boswell with this reasonable, charitable, eloquent, and historically relevant statement: “He made amends for his defects by worshiping in others the excellence that he could not achieve for himself.” And when they finally get around to telling about Dr. Johnson himself (strangely, not in the same chapter), they recap Boswell by saying, “[Boswell’s] sins are at present in the public mind, but we shall forget them when we read again the greatest of all biographies.” But if these two sentences truly represent their final judgment on the man, why dwell so long on those amended defects? Why not take their own advice and forget the sins? I know I’ll be following that advice the next time I read the greatest of all biographies.

Conversations with an Old Friend

I don’t think I’ve ever explained in these posts the significance of C. S. Lewis to me. I first encountered Lewis in a comic-book version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe that appeared serially in a Sunday School magazine I once subscribed to. I was about twelve years old, and I wasn’t sure I liked the book. I was, however, sure that the title was the worst I’d ever heard!

My deeper contact with the professor occurred when I went to college and saw all the pastel-colored paperbacks from Macmillan on the bookshelves of all my Christian friends. The uniformity of the set appealed to me as much as anything else, and under the confidence that I could in fact judge a book (or set of books) by its cover, I bought a copy of the set for myself: The Problem of Pain, The Abolition of Man, and others.

Now to take a step back, while many young products of Christian homes turn sixteen and discover that they don’t believe anymore, I turned sixteen and discovered that my pastor didn’t believe anything. Churches were then divided for me into Those With Pastors Who Believe and Those With Pastors Who Don’t. Somewhat naturally thinking, “What’s the point?” about the second category, I looked for a church from the first to attend. Here were unwavering believers, and I felt more comfortable in that way. But they were also a bit . . . underinfluenced by education. It was a routine occurrence, for instance, for someone reading the Bible aloud to stumble over names and (the inevitable sequel to the tongue twisting) for everyone to join the reader in laughing the problem away breezily.

Everyone but me that is. I couldn’t figure out how people of The Book could laugh about illiteracy. But I remembered that God chose the foolish things of this world to confound the wise, and I went on, genuinely admiring their childlike faith while silently ruing their contempt for the medium through which God chose to speak to us.

But to be fair, they couldn’t figure me out, either. They were constantly telling me to get out of my head, quoting Colossians 2:8 at me, and telling me I was too educated and too knowledgeable to lead worship music.

But then I went away to college and met those new friends. These were smart people. They loved and respected education. They had interesting books on their bookshelves. Heck! They had bookshelves! And they loved C. S. Lewis. So I started reading him. And I loved him! I didn’t always agree with his theology, especially when it countered the tenets my friends at the home church drew out of the two dozen verses they knew well, but I admired him because he was intelligent.

After just three semesters I left that university (it’s an ugly story that has to do with a girl – ekkh!) and came back home. And then there I was back at the old church, with the old friends – and my new books. When I asked questions trying to deepen some common facile understanding, my friends continued to look at me as if I were from Mars and kept telling me that things were simpler than I was trying to make them and that I would be Free Indeed if I would only quit thinking. So I learned to stay quiet (well, less vocal), and at times I felt that Lewis was my only friend.

C. S. Lewis was my only friend.

There. I could have said that up front and gone on to talking about recent reading. But I needed to tell that story so that it would make some sense when I said that I’ve had good, edifying conversations with my friend over the decades. I read one of his books, think about things he says, live a Christian life, raise questions, grow in knowledge, and then come back to the same book ten or twenty years later, when I’ve forgotten the details of what he said to me in the first place. And then I find that Lewis responds to some of my new ideas. It’s a slow conversation but a good one.

No doctrine caused me more trouble in the 1970s than prayer. I’ve gone into enough detail for one post, so I’ll just say that (1) I had bad teaching in the 70s that nevertheless seemed unanswerable at the time, (2) I disagreed then with much of what Lewis had to say about prayer, especially in Letters to Malcolm (at last! the real subject of today’s post!), (3) after decades of wrestling, I came up with a better view of prayer (aided by, of all things, a football analogy?!), and (4) Letters to Malcolm made much, much more sense when I reread it last week.

Topics in this fascinating book include reasons for and against prayers written by others, places to pray (a train is good because it has just the right amount of distraction), problems with saying that our prayer changes God’s mind, how big or small an issue should be in order to be brought to God, “festoonings” of the Lord’s Prayer (is this why I did my own back in the 90s?), people thinking wrongly that it is automatically more spiritual to have transactions “opened with prayer,” determinism, the impossibility of knowing if an occurrence is an answer to my prayer or was just going to happen anyway, the good of anxieties as sharing in the sufferings of Christ (“We are Christians, not Stoics”), demythologization simply being a matter of a new mythology, the difficulty of dropping people from prayer lists as we age (that one sure strikes closer to home now more than it did fifty years ago!), holy places as reminders that every place is holy, and more.

Eventually he starts talking about the problems of prayer for people “in our condition,” i.e. intellectuals who can never take things simply. I don’t know if I thought of myself as one of the people in Lewis’s “condition” when I first read it. I may have thought his intellectual status was a quantum leap above mine with a gap between us as wide and unbridgeable as the river between the rich man and Lazarus. Now, while humbly admitting Lewis’s superiority over me in many facets of the intellectual life, I’m comfortable putting myself in the category of people “in our condition.” I mean, if Malcolm with all of his problems can be part of the in crowd, so can I! (Although I don’t believe there ever was a Malcolm corresponding with Lewis about prayer or any other topic.)

I will talk like a fool, though, and say that, for what I believe was the first time, I knew more than Lewis for one brief, shining moment. He says at one point, “We must aim at what St. Augustine (is it?) called ‘ordinate loves.’ ” Yes! I say to my old friend. Of course it’s Augustine!

The Return of Dinny

When I put together this Third Decade reading list, I thought, “I hope I like Galsworthy since I put one novel from The Forsyte Saga on each of the first nine years.” Thankfully, I do indeed like Galsworthy. These books have become a dependable treat each summer.

It’s year 8, so I’m on the eighth book of the series, Flowering Wilderness. I was glad to see Dinny Charwell (pronounced “Cherrell”) return. In the previous book, she raised questions about duty as she continually tried to help everyone, even when she couldn’t help and even when her efforts put her in bodily danger. In this novel, Dinny is the flowering wilderness of the title, a young woman who is figuring out that she might have her own life to live, not just the life of the dutiful phantom her family traditions have placed in her head. In fact, Dinny has realized that she might even make herself happy by marrying Wilfrid.

*sigh* When two people meet and fall in love near the beginning of a novel, you know they’re going to have trouble. It seems that, while traveling in the East, Wilfrid has accepted Islam at the point of a gun, and the story gets back to England just a few days after our lovebirds plight their troth. All of Dinny’s family and all the family’s friends believe that it is now impossible for Dinny to marry Wilfrid; what he has done is simply not acceptable. The catch is that no one involved is actually a Christian believer, so they can’t agree on exactly what is so wrong about Wilfrid’s conversion. Is it wrong because he betrayed an essential myth? Is it because he acted un-English? Is it because he wasn’t courageous enough to accept death?

Once again Galsworthy critiques modernism in a fascinating way. His modern characters are all very comfortable and self-assured as long as they’re attending clubs and running charity drives. But then an event comes along that shows tension between their agnostic beliefs and their vestigial Christian ethics. The intriguing conundrum plays out through strong, elegant prose presenting full-bodied characters speaking to one another in rational and emotional and absolutely essential dialog. By contrast, I’ll end today’s post with a weak, colloquial, superfluous line:

It’s so good!

Orlando Ritornando

A few years ago I published a post called “Full Circle,” in which I explained that a chance mention of Orlando Furioso somewhere in C. S. Lewis (with all my rereading of Lewis, I still haven’t found the passage!) inspired my whole project of reading the classics of great literature. At the time of the post, April of 2011, I had finally made it to the book that started it all. First encountering the colorful scenes, full-blooded characters, and melodious narration of Orlando made me realize that a part of me was made to love this epic book – a part of me I didn’t totally know the existence of before. My return to it is just as delightful if not as self-revelatory.

Thirteen years ago I mentioned many of the fantastic elements I was enjoying. But fantasy alone doesn’t excite me; I need a fantastic world to be filled with characters I can root for or against, not, as Mark Twain said, tedious characters I wish would simply drown. In the last two or three years, I’ve read two classic fantasies with drown-worthy characters (The Well at the World’s End and The Worm Ouroboros), and I didn’t like them – couldn’t wait to get away from them. But The Silmarillion, The Divine Comedy, Many Dimensions, and Orlando Furioso are among my very favorite books. Oh! I should also add The Chronicles of Narnia, The Phantom Tollbooth, and One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish: fantasies all and every one a favorite.

So let me concentrate this time on some features of characters in Orlando Furioso that I especially like. First, I couldn’t be happier than I am to see Muslim and Christian knights respecting each other while fighting to the death. Join me in savoring this stanza from book I:

O noble chivalry of knights of yore!
Here were two rivals, of opposed belief,
Who from the blows exchanged were bruised and sore,
Aching from head to foot without relief,
Yet to each other no resentment bore.
Through the dark wood and winding paths, as if
Two friends, they go. Against the charger’s sides
Four spurs are thrust until the road divides.

Well, and then they have a choice to make. What common end could make these fierce enemies ride the same horse? It could only be money, power, or a woman, and they’re both too chivalrous to pursue money or power. Angelica, the maid who ultimately drives Orlando furioso, stands down one of these two branches in the road. She is the Most Beautiful Woman in the World (until we meet Dalinda and Olimpia, who are also, each, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World) and she is from China. Angelica, like Helen of Troy (also the MBWitW), is in the end not worth pursuing, but that’s what makes her and the search for her interesting. And can we cheer the sixteenth-century European author for locating ultimate pulchritude in Asia?

Ariosto is progressive in other ways, as well. Rinaldo rescues a woman who has been sentenced to death for having sex with her boyfriend. Rinaldo doesn’t care if she has done the deed or not; he knows it simply isn’t right to punish the girl while the boy goes scot-free. And Bradamante, one of the knights of most prowess and courage, is a woman, doing everything in the field that a man can.

But the poet can be conservative, too, because progressivism and conservatism are not in themselves goals or ideals but merely tools that can and should be used for good. Where a good is threatened, be conservative; where change toward the good is needed, be progressive. Answers aren’t simple, and you need wisdom to know when to preserve and when to reform. And you can’t make things simple again by just deciding that everything used to be good. Hear this wisdom from the preacher of Ecclesiastes: “Do not say, ‘Why were the former days better than these?’ For it is not from wisdom that you ask this.”

OK, enough theory. Where is Ariosto conservative? Where he has Orlando throw the ninth century’s only cannon into the sea, because launching a deadly ball from behind a stone battlement is not chivalrous. (“Aha! I’ve got you!” you say. “Gun control is not conservative!” Yes it is, when what you are trying to conserve is the way weapons used to be.)

So, anyway. Magic, realism, fantasy, heroes, villains, adventure, mystery, intrigue, love, loyalty, betrayal, beautiful poetry, dramatic plots, inspiring philosophy, “dark wood and winding paths,” hippogriffs, and Merlin prophesying from the grave – Orlando Furioso has it all! And I love it!

Two Civil War Biographies

Are these Great Books with a capital G and a capital B? No. Virtually no one will read them in a hundred years. (Sure: some future Ken Stephenson will one day walk through the oldest stacks in the quaint thing called a library, breathe in the delicious, wholesome air of the browned and brittle pages, find these books, and learn from them, so I won’t say absolutely no one will read them a century from now.) They haven’t won Pulitzers (although one has won the American Batllefield Trust Prize). But did these books make me think and rethink about what I understand of American history? Yes.

First, the better-written of the two books: Elizabeth Varon’s Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South. Only last year, I found out that Longstreet plays an important role in the Lost Cause Myth: the notion that the South didn’t truly care much about slavery and fought a noble, hopeless war for liberty, led by great Christian heroes and stopped only by a godless butcher (according to the myth, Grant) and a crass commercial enterprise that simply made more guns (according to the myth, the United States). Whatever the tenets of this poorly supported historical theory, General James Longstreet certainly cared about slavery and white supremacy during the war: his rallying speech to his troops in front of Richmond warned them that a United States victory would mean abolition and a black-run society. But near the end of the war, he explained several times that he saw inevitable defeat for the Confederacy and determined that he would work to live at peace in the new, slaveless polity. He became a Republican (the liberal, pro-civil-rights party at that time, remember), worked to elect Grant, earned a spot as Customs Controller for New Orleans, and then was tapped to head the Louisiana Militia. When, in September of 1874, thousands of white supremacists gathered on Canal Street and threatened a violent end to Reconstruction and black voting rights, General Longstreet led the militia out to defeat them. The former rebel, now determined to abide by the newly amended Constitution and to recognize the constitutional rights of all citizens, led a militia of black soldiers and white soldiers, a militia in which every man of equal rank received equal pay regardless of skin color or former condition of servitude. A militia in which black soldiers could be and were promoted, all the way to the rank of general. A militia in which regiments were integrated. A militia in which white officers led both black and white soldiers and black officers led both black and white soldiers. Southern Democrats never forgave him.

I see a lot to admire in a man who left a life in which racial hatred and fear could lead him to betray his sacred oath to his country (he was a commissioned U. S. officer when secession started) and adopted a new life in which respect for the law could raise members of the recently enslaved race to positions of high authority. But Jubal Early and his ilk didn’t find Longstreet’s post-war stance admirable, and so they started a campaign against him, a campaign whose ramifications are still felt today, whose tenets I’ve read in history books that have won a Pulitzer. By the time Early got the ball rolling, the Daughters of the Confederacy were publishing materials defending the justness of the Confederate cause and, in their words, praising the “moral and military infallibility” of Robert E. Lee.

So look, there’s controversy about Longstreet. The Lost Cause side says that he disobeyed Lee’s orders at Gettysburg and lost that battle, thus losing the war, betraying his new country (let’s ignore the first betrayal), betraying his race (at least that’s what they said in the 1800s), and betraying his commander (whose military infallibility, I guess, couldn’t overcome one supposedly disobeyed order). Do I really, finally know if he screwed up at Gettysburg? Do I really, finally know that he ended up a good guy? No (although my parentheticals in this paragraph perhaps indicate which way I lean). But when the side that started the defamation program claims moral infallibility for their hero, I’m strongly inclined to believe that they have at least stretched the truth about their nemesis, also.

When I say this isn’t a Great Book, I don’t mean to malign Varon’s writing: her research is detailed, her arguments are nuanced, and her prose is smooth and polished. I’m just saying I don’t predict that her work will last as long as Herodotus’. John A. Carpenter’s Sword and Olive Branch, by comparison, is much less literary but, to me, equally enlightening. It, too, relates the life history of a Civil War general. Its subject also was and has been the subject of a smear campaign whose effectiveness can be gauged by its reverberations in Civil War histories of our time. And its subject also worked for the promotion of the four million new citizens naturalized by the Fourteenth Amendment.

Sword and Olive Branch tells the story of Union General Oliver Otis Howard, who watched his corps disintegrate in fifteen minutes at Chancellorsville. For this and for a retreat at Gettysburg (to a more defensible position!), he developed and suffered, as the history books continue to tell us, a bad reputation with the rest of the Army of the Potomac. And yet, when I continue to read accounts of the Civil War, I find him later in a place of high authority acting nobly and effectively under Sherman, without, to my recollection, authors pointing out that his earlier bad reputation may not have been deserved or had at least been atoned for by greater success later in the conflict. Carpenter points all this out, though, and I’m glad to see Howard’s full war record properly celebrated.

But the story gets really good after the war. As the Director of the Freedman’s Bureau, General Howard fought hard to get black citizens housing, jobs, pay, and, above all, education. I knew he founded Howard University, which is why I wanted to read about him. I didn’t know his work with the Bureau actually helped create several other colleges open to blacks (and women!) as well as almost two thousand elementary and preparatory schools. And I didn’t know that Howard by himself achieved in a few days what the government backed by the Army had not been able to do in thirteen years by treating successfully with Cochise (and apparently to Cochise’s satisfaction!) and almost eliminating violence between whites and Apaches in Arizona. I’m not quite finished with the book, and I think things don’t go so well or so honorably with the Nez Perce later. But what I’ve read so far makes Howard fascinating and admirable.

If these two books teach anything, they at least demonstrate that you can’t believe anything just because you read it in black and white. So let me just clarify before I close this too lengthy post that, while I have now read one biography of each general, each biography decidedly tending toward approval of its subject, I haven’t drawn any lines in the sand: I won’t say definitively whether either of the two was a good guy or a bad guy. But I tentatively admire each general while firmly believing that neither was either morally or militarily infallible.