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it was amazing
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Ron Chernow's biographies of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton were excellent, so when I reached POTUS #18, Ulysses S. Grant, Chernow's biograp
Ron Chernow's biographies of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton were excellent, so when I reached POTUS #18, Ulysses S. Grant, Chernow's biography was the one I naturally picked up. I wasn't disappointed; he covers the Union-general-turned-President in just the right amount of detail, from his early life to his post-White House career, with a big chunk of the book spent on his campaigns during the Civil War. The only slight criticism is that as is often the case with biographers, Chernow's fondness for his subject is obvious, so when Grant's deficiencies come up (and he had quite a few), Chernow always offers an explanation most sympathetic to Grant. Hiram Goes to West Point Ulysses was actually born Hiram Ulysses Grant. He came from Ohio, from middle class abolitionist parents. At age 17, his father got him a nomination to attend West Point. According to Chernow, Grant had never been planning to attended West Point, but he went along with his father's wishes. Grant had never liked his first name and didn't go by "Hiram," and the congressman who nominated him wrote his name incorrectly as "Ulysses S. Grant." The West Point admissions officer refused to change it, so his name remained, officially, Ulysses S. Grant forever after. One of the frequent stories told about Grant is that he graduated "near the bottom of his class" at West Point. Here Chernow takes up the defense of Grant's reputation; he actually graduated 21st out of 39. Chernow calls this "in the middle of the pack," which is basically true if a somewhat favorable way of saying "in the bottom half," and Chernow then goes on to point out that this was after West Point had already weeded out a large percentage of those who first entered, which is also true but just seems to be protesting too much that Grant was totally not just a mediocre graduate. Grant had a classmate, Fred Dent, who liked him a lot and wanted to set him up with his sister. Ulysses and Julia Dent did hit it off, and became engaged, though they didn't get married until after Grant returned from the Mexican-American War. Julia was the daughter of a Missouri slaveholder. Grant's abolitionist parents did not like the Dents, and Julia's parents did not approve of Ulysses, whom they thought wasn't good enough for her. This echoed the troubles Abraham Lincoln had with his slave-owning in-laws. Unlike Mary Todd Lincoln, though, Julia was a kind and supportive wife, and though she wasn't always happy about the hardships of being an officer's wife, she didn't pout and pine for slaves and luxurious living like Lincoln's wife did. Drinking Problems The alcoholism that would plague Grant throughout his life first became evident during his time in the army. He served with distinction in the Mexican-American War, but after the war, it became evident that he had a drinking problem. Eventually he ran into a commanding officer that wasn't willing to overlook it. The exact details of his resignation from the army remain a little vague; Grant claimed he resigned because he promised he would if he couldn't get his drinking under control, but others would later claim that he was essentially told to resign or be court-martialed. His long-suffering wife Julia and his father's attorney, John Rawlins, who would become his lifelong friend, did what they could to keep alcohol out of Grant's hands, even as he was in command of the Union Army, but not always successfully. He returned to Ohio, entered into a number of failed business ventures, had to accept humiliating financial assistance from his father-in-law, and seemed destined to become a washed-up nobody. "I Need This Man. He fights!" When the Secessionist Movement broke into a civil war, Grant was stirred by patriotism to rejoin the army, though he did try to hold out for a higher rank than he was initially offered. The path from a volunteer Colonel to Lieutenant-General in command of the Union Army would have seemed, in the beginning, as unlikely as Grant eventually becoming President. Chernow covers the entire Civil War, and every battle Grant fought, in detail. Essentially, Grant moved up the ranks by winning battles at a time when the Union desperately needed officers who could win battles. Lincoln kept promoting him, even after word reached him that Grant had a drinking problem, because he had been plagued by ineffective, foot-dragging generals, while Grant got shit done. This is not to say Grant always won; he didn't. But over time he won more often than he lost. Another historical controversy to this day is Grant vs. Lee. There are critics who say Grant was a mediocre general who won only because the Union had to win, eventually, with its vast superiority in material and manpower. Chernow, of course, argues against this and describes Grant's strategic acumen in detail, depicting him as a decisive and bold leader who wasn't afraid to put himself in harm's way (there were several instances of soldiers having to yell at the general to get back behind lines as he exposed himself to fire to get a better view) when not a few other Union generals seemed to be passive at best, cowardly at worst. Robert E. Lee, for his part, was also a very capable general, but Grant considered him overrated, and at one point yelled at his generals, who were constantly worried about what Lee would do next, to stop worrying about what Lee would do and to start thinking about what they were going to do to stop him. Southerners revered Robert E. Lee after the war, and to this day, but during the war he was sometimes considered too slow and unresponsive and Southern newspapers called him "Granny Lee" for his failure to go after the Yankees. When Grant finally defeated Lee, he received his former West Point classmate cordially and hospitably, and was gracious in victory, demanding unconditional surrender but allowing the Confederacy's officers to keep their weapons and horses. Lee was less gracious; he spurned Grant's attempts at chit-chat, and stayed coldly polite in their interactions. After the war, Grant continued to keep his promise to protect Lee and his officers from being tried for treason, despite a strong vengeful sentiment among Northerners in favor of doing so. A Swing Around the Bottle The Lincolns invited the Grants to accompany them to that fateful night at Ford's Theater; Grant declined, citing an earlier engagement. Supposedly, they wanted to go to their home in New Jersey, but this was probably an excuse: Julia Grant couldn't stand Mary Lincoln, who had been very rude to her. (In fact, Mrs. Lincoln was rude to pretty much everyone, but especially the wives of anyone she perceived to be a rival to her husband). Grant was summoned back to Washington after Lincoln was shot. He continued to serve as commander of the Army in the Andrew Johnson administration, and initially he got along well with Johnson. This didn't last. Johnson was an irascible man who reversed himself on reconstruction; Grant wanted to protect the rights of freed black citizens who were now being terrorized throughout the South, while Johnson clearly prioritized restoring the Southern states to full statehood as quickly as possible, and preserving the privileges of the white aristocracy. (Johnson, born a poor "white trash" Southerner, both despised and envied the aristocratic plantation class.) When Johnson staged his disastrous "Swing Around the Circle" tour of the country to build support for his administration, he dragged Grant and Admiral David Farragut and General George Armstrong Custer with him. Grant was bored, disgusted with the entire thing, considered Johnson's speeches to be disastrous, and ended up bailing on the tour early. He also reportedly starting drinking heavily again during this farce. When Andrew Johnson was impeached by Congress, he became increasingly isolated, and turned his ire on Grant, among others, whom he correctly perceived to be more popular than him. An Honest President in a Corrupt Administration Grant was now in favor with the so-called "Radical Republicans" who wanted to preserve black suffrage and continue prosecuting a vigorous Reconstruction policy. He easily won the Republican nomination (with running mate Schuyler Colfax, an abolitionist former Whig Congressman from Indiana), and running against Democrat Horatio Seymour, won both the popular and electoral college vote in a landslide. Grant's administration is generally regarded as one of the worst in US history. It was rife with corruption and cronyism. Chernow does an admirable job of defending Grant's honor, arguing (mostly convincingly) that he had always been a bit naive and overly trusting, and that he was probably unaware of most of the unsavory activities of people in his administration. (The fact that Grant was repeatedly fleeced by con-men throughout his life, including after he left office, makes this more believable.) Most of the scandals involved people in his administration probably operating without his knowledge, but the famous Whiskey Ring scandal (involving tax evasion by whiskey distillers on a grand scale, with huge kickbacks to federal revenue agents) touched Grant personally, as he had a financial interest in some of the whiskey production, and people who knew him used their association with him for clout and claimed he was completely on board. (Grant denied this; at worst he was probably willfully ignorant.) Grant wasn't completely without successes: he did vigorously combat the rise of the Klu Klux Klan and tried to protect the rights of black citizens, even ordering troops to mobilize in the unreconstructed South. His opposition to the Klan helped him win reelection in 1872. He instituted civil service reform, and (with more mixed results), put the US on the gold standard and vetoed an inflation bill. Although he considered running for a third term, the failure of Reconstruction and a series of investigations by Congress for corruption dissuaded him. He supported his Republican successor, Rutherford B. Hayes. The First Presidential World Tour After leaving Washington, Ulysses and Julia Grant traveled around the world. They took a tour of Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, and were received by Queen Victoria, Tsar Alexander II, Pope Leo XIII, Otto Von Bismarck, and Emperor Meiji of Japan. As an unofficial representative of the United States, with the tacit support of President Hayes and the State Department, this was the first case of "Presidential diplomacy" by an ex-President. The Grants were well-received everywhere (though some state leaders had unflattering things to say about the doughty Julia), and he returned to America, landing in San Francisco to cheering crowds. Would-be Third Termer Enormously popular after his world tour, Grant's name was being bandied about as a potential nominee for the Republican ticket in 1880. He would have become the first President to serve non-consecutive terms. He was in the lead at the Republican Convention and won a plurality of votes in the first ballot, but not enough to secure the nomination. In those days, conventions often voted over and over and over again, and it took 36 ballots before dark horse candidate James Garfield finally won the nomination. Grant didn't like Garfield, but publicly supported him, and he was devastated when Garfield was assassinated by a crazed office-seeker; a man who had, in fact, repeatedly accosted Grant also in preceding months. Fleeced and Dying Ex-Presidents also didn't usually get lucrative speaking, consulting, and publishing deals. Not only was there no pension for ex-presidents at that time, but upon becoming President Grant had had to resign his commission in the Army and thus lost his military pension. Despite Ulysses S. Grant being a hero of the Civil War and an ex-President, the Grants were now poor. Wealthy supporters literally gave him and his wife a house on Manhattan's Upper East Side, but Grant still struggled to earn a living. This was when he and his son fell in with a con-man named Ferdinand Ward, who set up what would later be called a Ponzi scheme. Not just the Grants, but many of their friends, were taken in by Ward, on the strength of Grant's word. Ward even talked Grant into talking the wealthy William Vanderbilt into throwing more money into the venture. Everyone lost their entire investment; Grant signed over his house to Vanderbilt, who accepted it but with the proviso that he would only take possession of it after both Grants passed away. Grant was approached to write a memoir, something he had initially refused to do, thinking he had nothing interesting to say (!). But in 1884, he was diagnosed with throat cancer; likely the result of his lifelong cigar habit. Now he was dying and almost penniless and afraid of leaving Julia unsupported. (Congress, upon learning of Grant's condition and their financial situation, would eventually vote to restore his pension and Julia's widow's benefits.) The famous author Mark Twain, a friend of the Grants, offered him a very generous publishing contract (Grant, as usual, was about to be fleeced by another publisher). He wrote his memoirs even as he was dying, and finished them just before he died on July 23, 1885. Mark Twain praised his clear, honest prose style and to this day they are considered one of the best military memoirs ever written. The one thing Grant didn't write about (though Twain thought he should) was his struggles with alcohol. The Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant became a best-seller. Julia was able to live out her life in comfort thanks to the royalties. The entire country mourned, and his funeral became a massive state affair, with ceremonies and parades and flags lowered around the country. He was beloved in both the North and the South, where he was remembered fondly for having been an honorable foe who had been gracious and generous to the defeated Confederacy. I would rank Grant as one of the best presidential biographies I've read (though not quite as good as Chernow's biography of Washington). Chernow does seem to go out of his way to defend Grant's reputation, but other historians generally consider him to have been a great general and a mediocre but not terrible president. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Oct 06, 2024
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Sep 24, 2024
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Audible Audio
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| 1663220301
| 9781663220301
| B092PWCM22
| 3.46
| 13
| unknown
| Apr 05, 2021
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liked it
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[image] Following the magnificent magnum opus that was Michael Burlingame's biography of Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson was doomed to be a disappointm [image] Following the magnificent magnum opus that was Michael Burlingame's biography of Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson was doomed to be a disappointment. Lincoln's vice president, who became our third "accidental president" following Lincoln's assassination, Johnson is mostly known for being the one who botched Reconstruction, consigning recently freed slaves to almost a century of racial violence and Jim Crow, and for being the first president to be impeached. Previously, I had read Garry Boulard's biography of James Buchanan (the mediocre president who preceded Lincoln), so I picked up his biography of the mediocre president who followed Lincoln. Surprisingly, after reading this fairly short biography (because I didn't really feel like reading a long one for an accidental one-term president), I sympathized with Andrew Johnson more than I thought I would. He wasn't great. His failure to restrain the South following the Civil War had lasting effects on African-Americans and indeed, the entire South. (It is arguable that the enduring "Lost Cause" myth and ongoing sympathy for the Confederacy could have been crushed during Johnson's administration, had he the will to crush it.) He was argumentative, grudge-holding, and obstinate. If he were alive today, he'd be a Ben Shapiro or Jordan Petersen type, always lecturing, hectoring, and certain of his own certitude and blind to his own blind spots. Still, even as frustrating as I found POTUS #17, he never struck me as evil or malicious. Like many flawed politicians, he did everything in the sincere belief that he was right and what he was doing was right. He was a very honest and incorruptible man, maybe even as honest as "Honest Abe," and the Constitution was his Bible. He even specified that he was to be buried with his casket wrapped in the American flag and a copy of the Constitution laid beneath his head. Unfortunately, he just wasn't the man to fill Lincoln's shoes. Johnson was a poor white Southerner from Tennessee. He and his brother were essentially sold into indentured servitude to a tailor at a young age. He and his brother both ran way (for reasons that are unclear, as Johnson never really spoke about it), and Johnson eventually made his way to another town and set up his own tailor shop, where he became quite successful. He married his wife, Eliza, when he was 18 and she was 16. Eliza was well-educated, sickly, and introverted; as First Lady, she would rarely appear at social occasions. They would be married for 50 years. Johnson's beginnings as what today might be called "white trash" informed his attitudes and his politics for the rest of his life. He was a Southerner, with no great sympathy for black people, and he was never an abolitionist, but while he was indifferent to blacks, he hated the wealthy Southern aristocratic class of slaveholders. His longtime enemy in Congress, Jefferson Davis, a rich plantation owner, held Johnson in contempt. That Johnson would later hold Davis's fate in his hands only made them each more contemptuous of one another. Johnson's political career began as Mayor of Greeneville, Tennessee, which would remain his hometown for the rest of his life. He ran for the Tennessee legislature, and was later elected to Congress. In 1853 he became Governor of Tennessee, and in 1856 he was elected to the Senate. During the secession crisis that arose when Abraham Lincoln was elected President, Johnson became popular nationwide as a Southern Democrat who made blistering pro-Union, anti-secession speeches, fueled in large part by his class hatred of wealthy Southerners. When Tennessee seceded, Johnson remained a Unionist, and thus was the only sitting Senator from a seceded state. This brought him to Lincoln's attention, and in 1862, Lincoln appointed Johnson as the military governor of Tennessee, in charge of civil authority there even as Union and Confederate armies fought in the state. (This was one of many moves by Lincoln that was of questionable Constitutionality, but then, a civil war wasn't really something the Constitution had been meant to take into account.) Johnson did not get along with the Union generals. He wanted them to send more troops to take eastern Tennessee back from the Confederates; they mostly ignored him. Eventually the Confederate Army threatened Nashville, and Johnson was in direct danger of being captured and hung. (His wife was actually forced to flee ahead of him.) Johnson proved that if nothing else, he was no coward; he took a private carriage along the road north. He was shot at by a few partisans, but though the Confederates almost certainly could have intercepted him, Jefferson Davis himself ordered that they let him go, deciding that having Johnson assassinated would look poorly for the Confederacy (who were concerned about enlisting sympathy both in the border states and from European powers). The Vice President Who Showed Up Drunk to His Own Inauguration 19th century politics were certainly interesting. Today, a party would never elect a VP from the opposite party, and it would be rare and politically momentous to replace the current VP on the ticket. But in 1864, with the war winding down (but not quite over yet), the Republicans decided that Lincoln's vice president, abolitionist Hannibal Hamlin of Maine, was more of a liability than not, and they decided to replace him... with a prominent, popular War Democrat. Thus Andrew Johnson became Lincoln's running mate for his reelection. Lincoln himself reportedly had little say in the matter and didn't comment publicly on the choice. (Could Lincoln have prevented Johnson from being his running mate, if he were absolutely opposed? Probably - but it seems Lincoln respected Johnson well enough and agreed with his party's judgment.) [image] Lincoln was reelected (it was a surprisingly near thing), and the night before their inauguration, Andrew Johnson went to a party in his honor where he drank heavily. The next morning, hung over, he some "hair of the dog," and showed up to the inauguration absolutely hammered. He gave a long, rambling 20-minute speech that was painful to everyone to listen to; Lincoln himself was visibly trying not to wince. This did serious damage to Johnson's reputation, including starting the rumor that he was an alcoholic (which probably wasn't true; there don't seem to be any other stories of Johnson drinking too much). Lincoln, characteristically, defended him and insisted that Johnson was not an alcoholic and that he had every confidence in him. Johnson returned to Greeneville to hide from the public embarrassment, but returned to Washington in time for the Lincoln assassination. While John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre, Booth's co-conspirators also plotted to kill Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward. Seward was badly wounded by his attacker, but the guy who was supposed to try to kill Johnson got drunk and chickened out. Johnson quickly came to Lincoln's side, avoiding Mary Lincoln (who hated Johnson). When Lincoln died, Johnson was sworn in as POTUS #17 and the United States' third "accidental President." Bungling Reconstruction The "Radical Republicans," as they were called, were the liberals of the post-war period. They wanted the former Confederate states to be harshly occupied until all secessionist sentiment was crushed out of them, with former slaves granted full civil rights and the protection of the federal government. Johnson told his cabinet that he wanted to carry on Lincoln's Reconstruction plan and make no cabinet changes. This would be one of several mistakes: he kept Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who basically ran the White House in the immediate aftermath of Lincoln's assassination, and considered himself to still be in charge. According to Boulard, Stanton was a powergrubbing backstabber who undermined Johnson repeatedly. I am not sure whether this is entirely fair or one of Boulard's more opinionated projections, but certainly he caused problems for the new president. For example, when General William Tecumseh Sherman negotiated a surrender from Confederate generals, he offered a conditional surrender that would have allowed the surrendering states to keep their slaves. This was in direct contradiction to Lincoln and Johnson's demand for an unconditional surrender, and Johnson quickly repudiated it and forced Sherman to retract it, but Stanton went further, and all but called Sherman a traitor in the press. General Ulysses S. Grant had to calm Sherman down and keep him from immediately resigning. At first, the Radical Republicans were delighted by Andrew Johnson's ascendency to the Presidency. His animosity for the Southern slaveholding class was well known (although Johnson had also owned slaves, though he freed them in 1863) and he frequently made bellicose speeches about hanging all the secessionists, including Jeff Davis. The Radical Republicans believed Johnson would treat the South with an iron fist; instead, he punted. Soon after taking office, he gave a speech in which he announced that he would not be instituting a military occupation of the South, and would not be granting the right to vote to freed blacks. He decided it was more important to reintegrate the South back into the Union, and he basically ignored pleas from Republicans to protect former slaves who were now being subject to waves of white violence throughout the South. Republicans felt betrayed, and Johnson's popularity began to plummet, as most of the North was in a much more punitive mood. Johnson wasn't an abolitionist, had been opposed to abolitionists, and had owned slaves himself. He made it clear he considered the rights of white Southerners to be more important than the rights of former slaves. There is an anecdote in this book about Frederick Douglas, during a visit to the White House, at one point catching Johnson in an unguarded moment staring at him with disgust and contempt, which he took to be a "mask off" moment revealing how Johnson really felt about a black man speaking to the President. Like many Southerners, Johnson was pleasant and generous to blacks he knew personally. With the Confederacy defeated, Johnson had to decide what to do with Jefferson Davis and other Confederate leaders. Johnson and Davis had always hated each other, but notwithstanding his threats to hang him, it was clear Johnson didn't really want to have his old political foe hung. He probably did enjoy the visits of Davis's wife Varina, and other Confederate wives, pleading for their husbands' lives. Swing Around the Circle At this point, Johnson decided the thing to do was take a tour around the country, explaining his position and rallying public support. He strong-armed General Grant and Admiral Farragut into accompanying him. This tour would come to be known as the "Swing Around the Circle," and it would be a disaster. His first stops were in New York. This went well; Johnson gave good speeches and he was well received. But when he went West, he started getting heckled. Crowds chanted "New Orleans!" at him (referring to civil unrest and mass murder of blacks that was happening there) and some demanded to know what he was going to do with Jefferson Davis. Unwisely, Johnson let the hecklers bait him into shouting back at them, and soon he was regularly arguing with crowds. Grant, bored, disgusted, and hating every minute of this trip, started drinking a lot and eventually bailed, deciding he had better things to do. After that, Johnson started bad-mouthing Grant, and the two of them became absolute enemies. Indictment By now, the Republicans were thoroughly pissed at Johnson and already talking about impeaching him. Johnson proceeded to veto the Freedman's Bureau, vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and vetoed the Fourteenth Amendment. Republicans had had enough; they overrode Johnson's veto of the Fourteenth Amendment. They also passed the Tenure of Office Act, which said that the President needed Congress's approval to fire cabinet members. Johnson vetoed it, and Congress overrode his veto. When Johnson fired Secretary of War Stanton, in defiance of the law, Congress voted to impeach. This made Johnson the first president to be impeached. During the three months that his impeachment trial lasted, he had considerable support, including from "insurgents" who threatened to storm Congress. Even some of the Republicans who hated him admitted that the grounds for impeachment were rather thin (the Tenure of Office Act was Constitutionally questionable and later repealed). Ultimately, he survived impeachment by one vote. When your own party turns its back on you Johnson very much wanted to run for reelection in 1868. The Democratic Party rejected him, however, and chose New York Governor Horatio Seymour instead. Johnson sulked for a while, and only belatedly came out in support of Seymour, which he regretted when Seymour lost resoundingly to Johnson's nemesis, Republican candidate and former commanding Union General Ulysses S. Grant. In his last few months as a lame duck president, Johnson pardoned essentially all former Confederate officials, including Jefferson Davis. He and Grant despised each other so much so that he didn't even attend Grant's inauguration. Instead, he took up residence in Washington for a few months, before quietly returning to Greeneville, Tennessee. Political Comeback Like many politicians, Johnson declared at this point that he was done with politics and had no further ambitions. Of course, this was bullshit. He ran for the Senate again, but lost because neither Tennessee Republicans nor former Confederates were willing to forgive him. He ran for Congress and lost. There were jokes that he might resort to running for Mayor of Greeneville again. His political career seemed dead. He caught cholera during an epidemic that swept the country in 1873, but survived. He traveled to Washington, D.C. for his son's graduation from Georgetown, and gave an interview where he issued another blistering condemnation of President Grant. While intemperate, Grant was having problems of his own, and Johnson began to gain popularity again. Johnson staged an impressive political comeback in 1875, when he was once again elected to the Senate, becoming the first ex-President since John Quincy Adams to return to Congress after having been in the White House. He was riding high and all of Washington awaited one of his famous long speeches, which he gave in 1875, lambasting President Grant once again for sending federal troops into Louisiana. At this point, Johnson was experiencing a resurgence in popularity. There was even talk of him running for President again in 1876. Taking a short trip to make some speeches in July of 1875, he stopped at his daughter's farm, where he suddenly had a stroke. He died three days later at the age of 66. President Grant issued a solemn press release announcing the "painful duty" of informing the public of Johnson's death. At that time, Johnson had been the only surviving ex-president. Boulard points out that had their positions been reversed, Johnson would probably have been less gracious and respectful towards Grant. Legacy Mostly remembered for failing to finish Reconstruction and being the first president to be impeached, Andrew Johnson isn't rated highly by many historians. That said, he was in probably one of the most unusual and difficult situations for any president to take office. He wasn't helped by his argumentative and petty nature, but he couldn't be accused of dishonesty, and his administration was less corrupt than the more popular Grant's. Garry Boulard's book was a decent summary of Johnson's life and political career and about the right length, without dipping too much into speculation. Nor did it dip into deep analysis. I didn't sense a strong bias on Boulard's part; he seemed to find Johnson admirable in some respects while not really admiring him. The writing, if anything, felt a bit routine; I suspect this wasn't his favorite subject or a book he really put his heart into. (I also noticed an unfortunate number of typos and grammatical errors, which have sadly become more common in published books nowadays.) But if you're treading through presidential biographies, I can recommend this one as a readable and fairly even-handed treatment of Johnson. ...more |
Notes are private!
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it was amazing
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[image] In my chronological journey through presidential biographies, I have arrived at the first A-lister since the Revolutionary Way: Abraham Lincoln [image] In my chronological journey through presidential biographies, I have arrived at the first A-lister since the Revolutionary Way: Abraham Lincoln. "Honest Abe." The Rail Splitter. The Great Emancipator. I've read presidential bios of varying lengths now, but Abraham Lincoln deserved first class treatment, and since I got started down this path of reading presidential volumes with Robert Caro's four-volume magnum opus on Lyndon Johnson, I couldn't justify taking the easy out with some lesser work on Lincoln. Michael Burlingame is a historian whose life's work is Abraham Lincoln, and after having written several other books about Lincoln, he retired to write this one, which clocks in at 2024 pages in print, 83 hours on audiobook! It's split into two massive volumes, the first covering Lincoln's entire life up to his election as president, the second covering his presidency and the Civil War. And boy does it cover everything. Most biographies necessarily have to leave out a lot of detail. With over 2000 pages, Burlingame covers every documented year of Lincoln's life, with letters and interviews with childhood friends and family, and deep dives into the fascinating world of 1850s Illinois politics. I think Burlingame tracked down just about everything anyone who knew Lincoln ever said about him. There is coverage of every one of the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates, the maneuvers and political brinksmanship that led up to the Civil War, a thorough examination of Lincoln's attitudes, words, and legislation regarding slavery, how he selected his cabinet, and how all the 19th century political sausage was made. This isn't a book for someone who wants to speed-run through presidential biographies. It is going to be way too much detail for someone who doesn't care about details. But I wasn't bored. I felt immersed in Lincoln's era and Burlingame goes much deeper than all the things "everyone knows" about Lincoln. He does somewhat fall into the trap most biographers do, which is being so fond of his subject that I sometimes questioned the objectivity of his conclusions. Abraham Lincoln: A Life isn't an extremely opinionated biography (Burlingame doesn't reveal much about his personal politics), but it is opinionated, the author sometimes engages in a bit of speculation ("there is no hard evidence for this, but it seems likely"), and it is definitely favorable to its subject. That said, when the author does speculate, he cites extensive sources to justify it. The Son of Dirt Farmer Volume one starts with Lincoln's childhood. A lot of presidents exaggerated their own personal histories, or their histories were exaggerated for them, sometimes posthumously. In Lincoln's case, there was no exaggeration: he was literally born in a one-room log cabin in Kentucky, the son of a no-account dirt farmer and a decent but uneducated mother. Lincoln's mother was known to be the smarter of the two, but she died when he was nine years old. (Here, Burlingame engages in some of his more dubious speculations about how this impacted Lincoln's psyche and his relations with other women.) His father remarried, and Abraham had a very close and affectionate relationship with his stepmother, who was rather shocked at the rude surroundings in which she found herself and did her best to tidy up and "civilize" the Lincoln family. Abraham's father, Thomas Lincoln, sneered at young Abraham's "book learning." He became much closer to Abraham's step-brother, who also turned out to be a sort of shiftless no-account like his father. Abraham visited his stepmother regularly right until he left for the White House, but when his father died, he declined to visit him on his deathbed or attend the funeral. Burlingame's account of Lincoln's early life makes it clear both how rough and violent early frontier society was, and how obviously exceptional Lincoln was. He was recognized at a young age as being unusually smart and good-natured. The man who someday would become president never had more than a few years of formal schooling, and yet he became first a lawyer, then a congressman, then a senator, and then president. But his early life was mostly failures. He started many businesses (shopkeeper, ferry operator, surveyor), most of which failed and left him in debt. Even then, he developed a reputation for honesty, and the moniker "Honest Abe," such as when he ran a general store (which failed because he and his partner didn't have good business sense) and would actually walk to a customer's house when he realized he'd accidentally shortchanged them. He was also starting to enter local politics. He took time out from his unsuccessful political campaigning and his even less successful business to enlist in the local militia during the Black Hawk War. Lincoln never saw combat, but he did see the grisly aftermath of some combats. He entered as a Captain, and mustered out as a Private, just because of how the militias worked back then. All of this was actually interesting (it really painted a vivid picture of rural Kentucky society, where people were crude, violent, and low-trust, making it all the more remarkable that it could produce a man like Lincoln), but Burlingame goes into even more detail when he reaches Lincoln's legal career. (This was back in the day when anyone could become a lawyer basically under a sort of informal apprenticeship program; no law school or bar exams required.) Lincoln the Lawyer Once, when I was a kid, I read a comic book biography of Abraham Lincoln. I remembered one story in that comic in which Lincoln, like some brilliant 19th century Perry Mason, springs a "gotcha" on a witness who claimed to have seen Lincoln's client kill a man under the full moonlight. Lincoln pulls out a Farmer's Almanac and shows the jury that the moon was barely visible that night. Even as a child, I was sure this was a piece of embellished mythology, like George Washington and the cherry tree. Turns out, not so! People vs. Armstrong was a real case, Lincoln really did that, and his "gotcha" really did get his client (who probably was guilty) acquitted. Another notable case Burlingame talks about is in re Bryant, also known as the "Matson slave case." This was a case where Lincoln, despite being anti-slavery, defended the property rights of a slave owner. It's a case that has troubled many Lincoln historians. Burlingame argues, with many citations, that this was consistent with Lincoln's extreme devotion to the law as written and his belief that lawyers were morally obligated to "take clients as they come" and provide legal representation to everyone. It foreshadowed some of his later political positions, where despite being anti-slavery, he would hew to "the law as written" even if he didn't like it. The book details many mixed reports of Lincoln's actual talents as a lawyer. He was known for being honest and diligent in his duties, and he seemed to win a few notably difficult cases. He was also becoming known for telling stories at trial, with folksy, jocular humor, in a way that won over juries the same way he would win over voters later. There are no accounts of him ever being dishonest or sleazy in his law practice. However, apparently not all his fellow lawyers were impressed by him. Some said he was at best a mediocre legal mind, others called him lazy and more interested in kicking back in the law library to read newspapers than actually do work. Some of the negative accounts of him were almost certainly class prejudice; that he was a backwoods hick from Kentucky would follow him all his life, and on several occasions he was treated very haughtily by big city lawyers, even on his own team. It does seem that Lincoln was a conscientious lawyer, but he didn't exactly hustle for clients or shoot for the big cases, which means had he not entered politics, he probably would have remained a modestly successful if well-regarded small-timer. Lincoln's Love Life Lincoln was awkward, gangly, and unhandsome. According to the author, he felt abandoned and mistrustful of women because of his mother's early death. (I am not sure Michael Burlingame, as steeped in Lincoln lore as he may be, is quite qualified to diagnose the man's psycho-sexual issues posthumously.) But he did have several romantic affairs, including Ann Rutledge. Apparently, there is some debate among historians as to whether Ann Rutledge and Abraham Lincoln were ever really sweethearts, let alone engaged, but Burlingame is firmly on Team Ann+Abe, and cites contemporary accounts of both their infatuation for each other, and Lincoln's devastation when she died of typhoid. According to Burlingame, it was one of a couple times in his life when Lincoln fell into a nearly suicidal depression. He eventually recovered, engaged another woman in a semi-long distance relationship, and then when she got prematurely old and fat, he completely lost all attraction to her. And yet he still proposed to her, because he thought it would have been dishonorable of him not to. He was rather humbled when she turned him down! And then came Mary Todd Lincoln. Her Satanic Majesty [image]
History has not been kind to Mary Todd Lincoln. Widely regarded now as Lincoln's crazy "hell-cat" wife, there have been some attempts to rehabilitate her reputation, arguing that she suffered a difficult if privileged childhood, and that losing most of her children weighed heavily on her. This is true, but Burlingame documents a lot of the things she actually said and did, in front of witnesses, and, well, Mary may have been a traumatized, grief-stricken mother and later widow, but there was a reason Lincoln's White House staff referred to her as "Her Satanic Majesty." Mary Todd was ambitious, perpetually dissatisfied with Lincoln's failure to earn to his potential and keep her in the manner she thought she was entitled, and at the same time, she claimed long before he even seriously entered politics that she was going to "make him President." There are multiple accounts of her screaming at him, physically assaulting him, even throwing hot coffee in his face right in front of guests. In one incident, she literally chased him around their yard with a knife! Lincoln grabbed her (and the knife) and dragged her inside only when he saw that the neighbors were watching. Burlingame speculates that Mary Todd may have suffered from BPD, among other things, but it's clear that she was, by all accounts, an unpleasant woman who constantly embarrassed her husband, caused a great deal of trouble once they were in the White House, and probably was narcissistic and mentally ill. (Burlingame goes on to detail the entire Todd family - it turns out that many of them were horrible and/or crazy, and most ended up joining the Confederacy. That the author took time to drag Lincoln's in-laws so thoroughly says something both about his attention to detail and where his sympathies lay.) Lincoln said, during their engagement, "It would just kill me to marry Mary Todd," and it seems pretty clear that while she was infatuated with him, he probably never loved her and knew he wasn't going to be happy with her. Which leads to the obvious question: why did he marry her? The answer appears to be that like his earlier engagement, having led her to believe that he would propose, he felt obligated to actually do it. It rather reminded me of Pierre marrying Helene in War and Peace - he's just so agreeable that he has a hard time resisting where he's being pushed. Lincoln just went along with what appeared to be his fate. When asked where he was going on his wedding day, he said, "To hell, I suppose." They did not have a happy marriage, and one of Burlingame's more interesting observations is that, if they had, Lincoln would probably never have become president. By nature, he was a homebody and if he'd had a pleasant home to return to, he'd have been content doing an ordinary day's work and then coming home to sit by the fire with his family. Instead, he actively avoided returning home to Mary Todd, and became a workaholic, even traveling frequently and staying at friends' houses overnight (who apparently figured out that he was avoiding going home to his wife), and this played a large part in his rising professionally and then politically. Mary, of course, would take credit for this later. In the White House, her behavior was equally bad. She was haughty, imperious, needed to be the center of attention, and flew into rages if another woman (literally) so much as looked at her husband. There is also a great deal of evidence that she took bribes, embezzled public funds, and was involved in more than one scheme with shady White House employees and DC politicians to peddle influence and favors. Lincoln, when he became aware of some of his wife's misbehavior, would quietly settle any debts and fire any staff who'd conspired with her, but he probably (willfully or not) was never aware of the full extent of her venality. That Time Lincoln Almost Fought a Duel Lincoln's entrance into politics was fairly unremarkable. Burlingame argues that it was Lincoln's aversion to his rough upbringing as a farmer, and his disgust at his early exposures to slavery, that caused him to reject the Democrats (at that time, the pro-slavery and agriculturalist party) and join the Whig party. Lincoln was an early supporter of Henry Clay, and he entered the Illinois state legislature as a Whig. As a state legislator, he gained a reputation for witty and scathing takedowns of his opponents, using both the same folksy, funny stories and dad-jokes he used at trial, and much less jocular, satirical, often mean-spirited attacks on political opponents. Like many public figures did back then, he sometimes wrote letters to the papers published under a pseudonym. When he attacked a prominent Democratic rival named James Shields, Shields demanded to know who the "anonymous" letter writer was, and obtained Lincoln's name. He then hunted Lincoln down and demanded an apology or a duel. What followed was a sort of comedy of manners, with a grim undertone. Lincoln was morally opposed to dueling, but he was no coward, and more importantly, he knew he could not be seen as a coward. When he and Shields were unable to agree on terms (they went back and forth on who would apologize for what first), Lincoln finally accepted the duel - and as the challengee, chose cavalry broadswords for weapons. Given that he was almost a foot taller than Shields and had much longer arms, this would clearly give him an advantage. Shields's party objected that swords were "barbaric" (the usual weapon was pistols), to which Lincoln replied that duels were barbaric, and anyway, Shields was the one who issued the challenge. They went out to the dueling grounds (in neighboring Missouri, where dueling was still legal), where the two parties finally came to a satisfactory face-saving agreement and the duel was withdrawn. [image] One Term Congressman [image] In 1846, Lincoln was elected to Congress. It wasn't his first attempt at the House, but he served an unremarkable term as Illinois's 7th District representative. During this time, he was most notable for attacking President James Polk over the Mexican War, which Lincoln opposed. This would come back to bite him later; much like the later Iraq War, America's intervention on foreign soil would come to be seen as a manufactured, unnecessary war by some partisans, and a patriotic litmus test by others, and Lincoln would later be accused of having attacked American veterans and disparaged their sacrifice in the war. (Lincoln himself would regret the tone with which he attacked Polk, if not the substance.) A long-time supporter of Henry Clay, Lincoln didn't think Clay could win the presidency in 1848, so he supported Zachary Taylor instead. This would also be used against him later, when he was accused of "betraying" Henry Clay. (The fact was that Clay tried many, many times to win the presidency, and by 1848, his time had come and gone, he just wouldn't accept it.) Lincoln was not rewarded with the post he wanted (Commissioner of the Land Office), which led to some bitterness. He was offered the governorship of the brand new Oregon Territory, which he might have accepted if not for his wife, who refused to go out to the far western frontier in the middle of nowhere. Mary Todd Lincoln would later take credit for "saving" him from dead-ending his political career. (continued in comments) ...more |
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it was amazing
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This is going to be a long review, but I will save it for volume two. This is just the first volume of a 2024 page (83 hours as audiobooks!) magnum op
This is going to be a long review, but I will save it for volume two. This is just the first volume of a 2024 page (83 hours as audiobooks!) magnum opus on the life of Lincoln. Not for those who want to speed-run through presidential biographies, but I decided Lincoln deserved grade-A treatment, and these audiobooks were also free with my Audible subscription. I've been working my way through every POTUS in chronological order, and this one is really worth the time (if you are an American history geek). Abraham Lincoln really lived up to his legendary status! He really was "Honest Abe." He really was born in a log cabin and a self-made man. And Mary Todd Lincoln really was cray-cray! Volume One covers his entire life (in great detail) all the way up to when he enters the White House. So stand by (for a while, Volume Two is a beast!) for the full review. ...more |
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liked it
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In the long slog through C-list presidents, we finally arrive at the one who many historians label the Worst President Ever. There is some stiff competition for that title, but Garry Boulard makes a pretty good case for James Buchanan being, if not the very worst president ever, certainly in the bottom tier. He died after watching his party implode and his policies lead directly to the Civil War. He had no real heirs, and even in his home state of Pennsylvania, mourning was rather pro forma. Today he's remembered, if at all, as the guy who preceded Lincoln. Was he really that bad? Well, yeah. He had some political game and not much else Buchanan, like many POTUSes, began life as a lawyer. His family was well to do. (To this day, he is the only former president from Pennsylvania. Poor PA.) He began his political career as a Jacksonian Democrat, and was a six-term Congressman and later a Senator. He served as Minister to the UK under Franklin Pierce, as Secretary of State to James Polk, and Minister to Russia under Andrew Jackson. Most of the presidents he served under were basically awarding him positions for party loyalty, and to get him out of the way. None seemed to really respect him. If there is one positive thing that can be said about Buchanan, it's that he did appear to genuinely respect the Constitution and make decisions based on his interpretation of it. That said, he was a fussy, pusillanimous pedant whose desire to avoid conflicts dragged the country into its very worst conflict. Personally, Buchanan was a lifelong bachelor (so far, the only US President who never married). As a young man, he was engaged to a rich heiress, who later broke off the engagement and then unexpectedly died. Her father refused to let Buchanan come to her funeral. Buchanan, so far as is known, never had any kind of romantic relationship again... ...unless you believe the speculation that Buchanan might have been our first gay president. This is based on some very thin evidence (which Boulard goes over) that certain "intimate friends" of his were intimate indeed. The main candidate is Alabama Senator William King, with whom he shared a room in Washington as a Congressman. But despite the eagerness with which some historians have latched onto this theory, all we really have to go on are a few ambiguous letters, and some of Buchanan's personal characteristics, which could certainly be described as "effeminate." Buchanan was a stiff, charmless, humorless man. Boulard relates several anecdotes of him behaving in a manner that can only be described as "cringeworthy." He was, basically, a huge dork. Known for giving wonky, wordy speeches that often left his audience confused, he nonetheless managed to capture the Democratic Party nomination in 1856, as a Northerner with Southern sympathies. He routed Republican candidate John C. Fremont - the Republicans were a new party formed from the ashes of the Whigs and they didn't have their electoral game in place yet. He became the 15th President of the United States at the age of 70, the oldest president yet. His inaugural address was uninspiring and set the tone for how he would deal with the looming crisis over slavery:
He wasn't complaining about slavery here. He was complaining about the "agitation" over slavery. Basically he wanted the issue to just go away and hoped that a Supreme Court case or two would put it to rest. His administration in general was at best mediocre and mostly pretty terrible. He supported the pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution in Kansas, and lost most of the House to the Republicans in the mid-terms. In 1860, the House launched an investigation known as the Covode Committee, sponsored by Buchanan's enemies seeking impeachment. They found tons of corruption and bribery in the administration but not enough evidence to impeach; Buchanan declared victory. Buchanan had promised not to seek reelection and he didn't, but in the final days of his presidency, he would face the beginning of the secession crisis, triggered by the election of Abraham Lincoln. Was the Civil War Buchanan's Fault The last few presidential biographies I've read have placed some of the blame for the Civil War on each of them, going all the way back to Andrew Jackson, but I've become convinced that the Civil War was more or less inevitable and nothing any POTUS might have done would have prevented it. Different choices might have changed the timeline, maybe shortened it, and I suppose there are some alternate histories where a president actually lets the Confederation secede. But I've been pretty wary of putting the blame for the Civil War on any one man. Well, I still think the Civil War was probably inevitable, but I was persuaded by this book that if any president could possibly have prevented it (or at least turned it into a brief insurrection, swiftly quelled), it was James Buchanan, and Buchanan instead failed to do a damn thing except wring his hands. When Lincoln was elected, multiple Southern states immediately declared their intention to secede, and the flashpoint became South Carolina, and Fort Sumter. Boulard argues that had Buchanan taken a firm stand against secession, and been willing to send troops immediately, then instead of a four-year civil war, we might have had some pitched battles and a lot of seething resentment. Maybe the South would have tried to break away anyway, but it took a certain critical mass for them to be willing to do it, and a federal inertia that let them know they could get away with it, and Buchanan provided this with his indecisive hand-wringing. On Lincoln's election, as his Southern supporters and northern allies both waited eagerly for him to weigh in on the threat of secession, Buchanan consulted with his Attorney General to determine whether the Constitution did, in fact, give states the right to secede. Their joint conclusion was essentially that there was no such Constitutional right, but neither did the federal government have the Constitutional right to prevent them! In an absolutely miserable speech, Buchanan delivered this opinion, which angered everyone on all sides. As New York Senator William Seward said, Buchanan's message was essentially, "That no state has the right to secede unless it wishes to," and that "It is the president's duty to enforce the law, unless somebody opposes him." South Carolina would soon fire on Fort Sumter. Most of Buchanan's cabinet would leave (some of them resigning even before he was out of office), including his longtime friend Jefferson Davis, and join the Confederacy. Buchanan cordially welcomed Lincoln to the White House on Inauguration Day, and then retired to his home in Pennsylvania, where he would watch the war unfold, still hoping the North would offer the Confederation peace terms. He would later become the first president to write a presidential memoir, Mr. Buchanan's Administration on the Eve of the Rebellion, in which he sought to vindicate himself, as he was sure history would. It was panned in reviews. Best bio about the worst president? I'll be honest, I chose Garry Boulard's book both for its spicy title and because it was short. I've trudged through thick biographies of other President Who?s and I just wasn't feeling it for James "Why Won't (Arguments About) Slavery Just Go Away?" Buchanan. Boulard writes almost entirely about Buchanan's presidency, with only a brief sketch of his early life and career. But in this short book he does capture Buchanan's personality pretty well, as well as make his argument for Buchanan indeed being the worst president ever. Now there are a few on the list I haven't gotten to yet, but while I'm still not convinced that even a more competent president could have actually prevented the Civil War, it's clear that Buchanan all but guaranteed it, and being as generally useless as he was in all other respects, I'm inclined to agree with Boulard's judgement. If like me, you are proceeding through the entire list of presidents, this book is probably your best best for understanding Buchanan, unless you really want to get into the weeds with "the Old Public Functionary." ...more |
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liked it
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This is a self-published Western page-turner. It's a pretty good example of the pros and cons of self-publishing. It's hard to find anyone writing West This is a self-published Western page-turner. It's a pretty good example of the pros and cons of self-publishing. It's hard to find anyone writing Westerns nowadays. The genre is just not a big seller and hasn't been for decades. But a self-published author with some verve and some marketing ability can cultivate an audience among the few aficionados still hankering for tall, dark strangers, six-gun duels, range wars, and damsels in distress. So I stumbled upon this book and chewed through it quite quickly. It's a fast, and fast-paced read. It's fun and cheesy and a paint-by-numbers smorgasbord of tropes, with very simple writing that hops from character to character and spells out their motives and internal dialogs and narrates their backgrounds, usually just before they get gunned down. The Man Called Justice is discovered by a pretty widow after some outlaws strung him up and left him hanging from a tree. A bolt of lightning struck him, bringing him back to life and embedding the silver star he was wearing into his chest. Yes, really. "Justice" has no memory of his past, but he is mysteriously uber-competent with all weapons, hand-to-hand combat, and riding, and is driven by an unwavering sense of right and wrong and too-good-to-be-true nobility. Naturally, he falls in love with the hot young thing who rescued him and her six-year-old son, but of course since she is a chaste and Godly woman and he doesn't know if he has a family of his own out there, they cannot consummate their love or even admit it until the end of the book. The plot is your basic Western formula, a big honcho from Texas is trying to take over all the local ranches with bribes and threats, unleashing bad men on whoever won't sell. Justice guns his way through one opponent after another, collecting booty and bounties like an RPG character, until the final showdown. Bad guys are unambiguously bad, good guys are unwaveringly good, there are no shades of gray here. Everyone who dies either totally deserved it or must be nobly avenged for their dastardly murder. Justice is a killing machine who finds out he might be part of a secret cadre of almost supernaturally capable lawmen known as "Silent Justices," and the Big Bad he fights in this book turns out to be just a smaller boss, with a Bigger Bad to be hunted down in the next book. A Man Called Justice is basically a Western comic book without pictures. If these are your expectations (and this appeals to you), it won't disappoint. But Larry McMurtry or Cormac McCarthy it ain't. ...more |
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liked it
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In my sequential read-through of presidential biographies, we're almost to the Civil War. Most of the presidents leading up to Lincoln are blamed, to
In my sequential read-through of presidential biographies, we're almost to the Civil War. Most of the presidents leading up to Lincoln are blamed, to various degrees, for causing the Civil War, even though I am increasingly convinced that none of them could have actually prevented it. This applies to the fourteenth president, Franklin Pierce, an anti-abolitionist Northerner whose Southern sympathies contributed in large part to the creation of the Republican Party, the election of Abraham Lincoln, and the inevitable secession. This short biography by Michael Holt seemed to have been mostly a workmanlike summary of longer biographies. Schlesinger writes clearly and concisely and only occasionally editorializes or interjects his own observations. Pierce was a favorite son of New Hampshire. His father was the Governor of New Hampshire, a Jeffersonian Republican (or a Jeffersonian Democrat - in Jefferson's time, they were the "Democratic-Republicans"), and a Revolutionary War hero. Franklin Pierce wanted the glory and respect his father had. In school, he was known for being athletic, handsome, charming, and not exactly the sharpest tool in the shed. He was best friends with novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, who wrote a campaign biography for Pierce when he ran for president. Doughface Pierce served as a lawyer, then a state attorney general, and then went to Congress to represent New Hampshire, first as Congressman and then as a Senator. This is where he gained a reputation for being a Southern sympathizer; while Pierce never owned slaves himself, he considered slavery to be a states rights issue, and he despised abolitionists as self-righteous nags. He supported the Fugitive Slave Act (though there is some evidence he personally thought it was inhumane), and while he did not support the South's attempts to make a rule that Congress would categorically reject all abolitionist petitions, he did endorse the "Gag Rule" which basically tabled them without discussion. This attitude got him called a "doughface," a term used for Northerners with Southern, pro-slavery sympathies, but which also implied cowardice. Pierce once clashed with John C. Calhoun on the Senate floor because Calhoun attacked New Hampshire by reading an abolitionist article from a New Hampshire newspaper that called Pierce a doughface. Pierce was an unremarkable politician who largely got by on charm. He was only successful when he had no real opposition, and he quit his Senate term when his party became a minority. His wife, Jane, never liked politics or Washington. Constantly sickly and anxious, the Pierces lost all three of their children young. After the Mexican-American War, generals run for president Franklin Pierce's father fought in the Revolutionary War and was a member of the Cincinnati Society. Franklin's brothers had fought in the War of 1812. So when the Mexican-American War broke out, he seized the chance to earn a few medals himself. While Pierce was a competent commander, his performance at the time was not exactly inspiring. During a charge outside Mexico City, his horse spooked and slammed his groin against the saddle pommel so hard that he blacked out. He fell off the horse, and the horse then fell on his knee. To everyone else, it looked as if Pierce had fainted under enemy fire. One of his officers yelled, "Take command of the brigade. General Pierce is a damned coward!" As they marched into the next battle, Pierce's injured knee gave out and he collapsed while his men marched past him. The battle after that, Pierce was laid up in the hospital tent with severe diarrhea. As humiliating as this was, Pierce somehow emerged as a hero of the Mexican War. The Whig General Zachary Taylor was elected President in 1848, but after he died in office, the Whig party began to fall apart. Never a particularly stable alliance, the Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Act splintered Northern and Southern Whigs. Franklin Pierce's former commanding officer, General Winfield Scott, ran on the Whig ticket in 1850. Pierce was a dark horse candidate during the Democratic primary, and eventually won the party's nomination after 39 ballots. His wife Jane was not pleased; she didn't want to go back to Washington. The election of 1852 was nasty but not exciting. Rumors of Pierce's cowardice during the war, as well as claims that he was "Hero of many a well-fought bottle" made for spicy attack ads, but Pierce still trounced the disorganized Whigs. Following the election, but before Pierce's inauguration, he and his wife and their surviving son, 11-year-old Benjamin "Bennie" Pierce, were riding a train back from Boston when it derailed. Bennie was crushed and decapitated before his parents' eyes. Pierce carried on, but he and his wife were obviously dramatically affected by this, and many historians believe that Pierce's poor performance as president, and subsequent alcoholism, were at least partly a result of this trauma. One-Term President Pierce was, all things considered, not a terrible president, he just wasn't a very good one at a critical time when the country really needed someone brilliant. The rift between North and South was growing, slavery was becoming an irreconcilable divide, and while Pierce was consistently on the side of slave-owning Southerners, he wanted to hold his party together first, and the country second. His greatest blunder was supporting the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which opened up Kansas and Nebraska to the slavery question, and effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise. The result of this was a series of armed conflicts known as "Bleeding Kansas," and Pierce's growing unpopularity in the North. In the 1852 gubernatorial and congressional elections, the Democrats got slaughtered, largely because of Pierce's unpopularity. The disintegrating Whigs and Northern Democrats were splitting away and allying with former Know-Nothings to form the Republican Party. Nonetheless, Pierce wanted to run for reelection in 1856. At this point, the author of this biography offers some of his rare editorial comments, where he points out that Pierce was delusional to think he had a chance. He had no hope of winning, as Southern Democrats were peeling away from the North in droves, and Pierce couldn't even get renominated by his own party. To this day, Franklin Pierce is the only incumbent President ever to be denied renomination by his own party. Instead, his former minister to the UK, James Buchanan, won the Democratic nomination and went on to become his successor and possibly the worst president ever. Retirement and Death by Cirrhosis Pierce and his wife did the usual ex-President thing, and went traveling, staying with some of their rich friends, and then took a tour of Europe. Jane's health continued to deteriorate, though she clearly did better in warm climates. Pierce mostly stayed out of politics, though some of his allies floated his name for a possible presidential run again in 1860 and 1864. Pierce firmly rejected any such suggestions. During the Civil War, Pierce fell under some criticism for his Southern sympathies. A letter he had written to his former cabinet member and good friend Jefferson Davis was publicized, he openly criticized President Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, and he was at one point accused of being part of a Copperhead (pro-Confederacy) conspiracy. Pierce vehemently denied this and there is no evidence that it was true. Pierce supported the Union, albeit tepidly, and when Lincoln's own son died in the White House, Pierce sent the President a consoling letter. He later talked down a mob who was angry at him for not flying a flag in solidarity after Abraham Lincoln's assassination. His wife Jane died in 1863. Pierce began hanging out with his old friend Nathaniel Hawthorne again, and Hawthorne died in 1864, literally in the next room, while the two of them were traveling together. Pierce began drinking more heavily (he had always been a hard drinker, though his wife had apparently gotten him to control it while she was alive). He donated money to Hawthorne's children and tried to help his old friend Jefferson Davis (who had been imprisoned after the war while the government decided whether or not to try him for treason). He bought some land. In 1869, he died of cirrhosis of the liver. He was buried next to his wife and sons. Franklin Pierce was not a terribly interesting president, though his administration was relatively scandal-free. His main failures were political; he tried to hard to keep the Democrats together and didn't do enough to keep the country together. He made the same mistakes many of his predecessors did, in thinking he could somehow take slavery off the table as a political issue. He was apparently an honest if not brilliant politician. This biography was short, which was mostly what I was looking for since frankly I didn't have the heart to read another 500-page biography of a forgotten POTUS whose impact on American history was pretty minimal. ...more |
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| Oct 22, 2019
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really liked it
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I read Pekka Hamalainen's The Comanche Empire, which was a very dense and scholarly work which in many ways provided a more thorough treatment of the
I read Pekka Hamalainen's The Comanche Empire, which was a very dense and scholarly work which in many ways provided a more thorough treatment of the Comanche than the more popular Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynne. So I approached his second book about a major American Indian tribe kind of knowing what to expect: a lot of historical detail with a bit of "decolonial" gloss on his historical take. Hamalainen is trying to present Native Americans as self-deterministic, politically adept empire builders who were every bit the equal of the colonial powers who eventually subjugated them. Rather than being primitive savages crushed by Europeans, he presented first the Comanche and now the Lakota as a full-fledged civilization that held its own and even shaped the course of American history, until superior numbers and technology eventually wore them down. The problem is, I just don't buy his thesis. So I enjoyed learning more about the Lakota Sioux and I did appreciate Hamalainen giving them more agency than is often the case in narratives about the clash of colonial powers versus natives. But in the case of the Comanche, I was not convinced by his attempt to portray the very loosely affiliated confederation of wide-ranging Comanche bands who raided across a vast area as a proper "empire" (with trade and diplomacy and strategy and all the other things that empires manage), and I was not convinced by his attempt to portray the Lakota that way either, though they certainly came closer. Hamalainen's version of history is that the Lakota owned the plains and controlled American expansion, until the U.S. Army finally smashed them. This is true, but it is also merely pointing out the inevitable and trying to make it seem like the Lakota ever had a chance, or the endgame was anything but a foregone conclusion. The Seven Fires Properly known as the Lakota (like many tribal names used by whites, "Sioux" was originally a name given to them by their enemies, derived from either "stranger" or "snake", depending on the etymology), the Lakotas are split into seven bands, or "Council Fires," and have been since at least the 1600s, when Europeans first made contact with them. Originally they lived in the upper Mississippi valley (Hamalainen speculates that they originally migrated there from further south), where they warred with the powerful Algonquins. Hamalainen's early history of the Lakota is not of a powerful tribe that commanded respect. Their first encounters with Europeans were accompanied by encounters with Iroquois and other Indians who had allied with the Europeans and been given guns and horses. The Lakota were getting their asses kicked in every battle, and came to the more powerful tribes and the French essentially begging for pity. What they did have was numbers and land, however. Eventually, they acquired guns, and horses, and became a horse tribe, and began expanding. Their first major appearance in American history was during the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Lakota repeatedly stopped the expedition, demanding gifts and bribes. A combination of cultural mistakes and Lewis and Clark's arrogance came close to resulting in a battle several times, and could have ended the expedition but for a few close calls. Lords of the Plains For a few decades, the Lakota enjoyed supremacy on the plains, in a territory stretching from the Ohio River Valley to the Great Plains. They dictated terms to the Americans, with whom they were eager to trade but to whom they considered themselves equal, notwithstanding their willingness to use "Great White Father" language. [image] The Lakota were powerful because they were one of the most numerous tribes, and much of their territory was uncharted by whites. Like most Plains tribes, their lifestyle was one of nomadic hunting and warfare. They subsisted largely on buffalo, and traded with other tribes for the carbohydrates they needed. (The need for carbs is a frequent theme of Hamalainen's, in his books about the Comanche and the Lakota.) But warfare was also a way of life for them. Brutal, genocidal warfare. Here we hit another of my criticisms of Hamalainen. He goes out of his way to describe the Lakota as autonomous, rational actors managing an empire, just like Europeans did. And when he describes how the Lakota would descend on a smaller, less militant tribe and wipe them out and carry off their women, he acknowledges the brutality of the warfare (it's one of many reasons that the U.S. turned hostile to the Lakota, because many of these tribes were American clients as well and Americans were horrified by this Indian-on-Indian violence) but hastens to point out that this was actually rational and understandable behavior from the Lakotas' perspective. These other tribes were threats, you see. Because they were consuming resources that the Lakota needed. They occupied lands the Lakota needed. They limited Lakota expansion. Well.... yes. There's a word for that. The Lakota, literally, did the same thing that was done to them. You can argue that they were later treated in a brutal and inhumane fashion by whites and the United States was wrong to expropriate their lands, but you cannot do that while describing Lakota practices as just "their way of life." Hamalainen is never willing to address this irony. Wasi'chu and Indian Giving The Lakota word for white people, "wasi'chu," is believed to have originally meant "fat eater." The modern story told about the history of Lakota-Wasi'chu relations is the story told about many Indian tribes: that they had their own sovereign territory, whites began encroaching on it, the Lakota reacted violently, leading to a few decades of Indian wars followed by their inevitable subjugation by the United States Army. Usually there's a lot of stuff about massacres and broken treaties added to the narrative. This is all true, but it's more complicated than that, and while Hamalainen is clearly sympathetic to the Lakota, he does present the entire history in a thorough if not unbiased manner. It is true that the Lakota signed a number of treaties with the United States defining where whites could and could not settle, or travel without their permission. One of the Lakotas' grievances was that white settlers would frequently violate these agreements, and the U.S. Army would do little or nothing to enforce them. Essentially, the Lakota started attacking settlers because the wasi'chu would not police their own. But there were also misunderstandings on both sides, and of course, the Americans made the same mistake they often did with Indian tribes, which was assuming that "the Lakota" constituted a single people and that signing a treaty with one band meant that everyone who called themselves "Lakota" would be bound by it. Rarely were treaties simply unilaterally broken by one side or the other. By and large, the U.S. tried to uphold their end of agreements. The problem was that the two sides often had very different understandings of what they had agreed to. The Lakota had an oral tradition, and to them, what they heard said to them face to face was what they had agreed to. The legalistic terms written down on paper meant little to them, and often these terms were either insufficiently explained to them, or they chose to ignore them in favor of what they thought they had been told. Hamalainen gives several accounts of Lakota chiefs being sat down in Washington to go over what their treaties said, and angrily discovering conditions no one remembered agreeing to. The Lakotas and other tribes felt that they had been tricked, but there was probably no intent to deceive them when the treaties were signed; whites just didn't bother to make sure the Indians really understood what they were signing. One example was a clause guaranteeing the Lakota the rights to their lands, with no U.S. claim upon it, "So long as buffalo hunting is viable there." The Lakota did not immediately realize that whites meant that when the buffalo ran out, then as far as the U.S. was concerned, the Lakota wouldn't need the land anymore. And of course, Lakota and U.S. officials would have very different ideas of what "viable" meant. It also didn't help that whites slaughtered as many buffalo as possible to make the Indians' way of life less viable. The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 signed with several tribes including the Lakota, was meant to establish permanent peace. It promised safe passage for white settlers along the Oregon Trail, allowed the U.S. to build forts and roads and trading posts, and acknowledged a large section of land as Indian territory unclaimed by the U.S. government. It also promised regular annuities to the Lakota and other tribes. The Fort Laramie Treaty caused problems that lasted to the present day. Part was the result of the U.S. Army again not preventing white settlers from violating it. The Lakota were given exclusive rights to the Black Hills. The problem with this was that several other tribes also considered the Black Hills their territory and weren't happy to discover that the U.S. had just handed it over to the Lakota. In the aftermath of the treaty, rival tribes continued to fight for resources and the Lakota pushed more of them out of their territory. The Lakota were happy to collect their annuities, coming to U.S. Indian agent offices annually to get their guns and ammunition, food, and other goods. The United States dutifully provided this even as some Lakota bands increased their aggression, but there was a great deal of corruption, with contractors providing rotten meat, bad flour, and other substandard goods. This of course exacerbated the deteriorating relations with the American government. This led eventually to a war that the Indians actually won, led by Lakota Chief Red Cloud. Having been humiliated by a Lakota-led coalition, the United States signed a second Fort Laramie Treaty in 1868. The second Fort Laramie Treaty set aside additional unceded Indian Territory, reaffirmed the Lakotas' possession of the Black Hills, and stipulated that the U.S. would abandon forts they had built that had violated the original Fort Laramie Treaty, while the Indians would begin transitioning to a "farming way of life." It didn't work. The second Fort Laramie Treaty was also problematic from the start. Lakota chiefs did not all agree to the treaty. Lakotas continued fighting with other tribes. White settlers continued ignoring Indian sovereignty, and the U.S. continued to distribute justice unevenly, punishing Indians who killed white men while not consistently punishing white men who killed Indians. Lakota began to split between "Agency Indians" who hung around Indian Agency stations and tried to take up farming and other white man occupations, and non-Agency Indians who continued to live as horse nomads (including raiding other tribes and white settlers) and then showed up at the stations for their gimmes from the Great White Father. Agency officials knew who was raiding and crimeing, but didn't have much power to do anything about it and had to adhere to the terms of the Fort Laramie Treaty. The situation was not sustainable, relations continued to deteriorate, white settlers wanted more land, and then gold was discovered in the Black Hills, giving the U.S. even more incentive to force the Lakota off their land. Sitting Bull and the Sun Dancers The sun dance was a rather grisly annual ritual in which Lakota warriors would pierce their flesh and hang by their piercings until they tore free. Sitting Bull, a Lakota chief, began leading a movement among the Lakota to live independently of the white man, and accept none of their handouts or promises, but continue their traditional way of life. Similar to the later prophet who started the "Ghost dance" movement to the south, Sitting Bull preached a vision of the Lakota becoming immune to bullets, and the wasi'chu disappearing. He participated in a ritual in which another man cut off fifty strips of flesh from his arms while he danced and had visions. Although they didn't actually start anything, it made U.S. officials paranoid about this cult-like behavior. They thought Sitting Bull was up to something, and demanded a greater troop presence, and that led to… Little Big Horn and Wounded Knee The most famous Indian battles of all are associated with the Lakota. The Battle of Little Bighorn, in 1876, in which Lakota Chief Crazy Horse destroyed a U.S. Army battalion led by General Custer, was the high point of Lakota power, and also, of course, what led to their final downfall. Because obviously, the United States was not going to let stand the massacre of an entire army battalion. Whereas in the past, the Lakota had elicited public sympathy, especially during much-publicized state visits to the White House by their chiefs (some of whom learned to play the PR game quite well), now the American people wanted them crushed. The Lakota did not fare so well in subsequent battles, and they were chased, ground down, and eventually reduced to near-refugee status in their own territory. The nadir of their power was reached in 1890, when U.S. Cavalry troops entered a Lakota camp in South Dakota to disarm them. According to one version of the event, one man refused to give up his rifle, and a shot went off. According to another version (which Hamalainen doesn't explicitly advocate but seems sympathetic to), the cavalry went in looking for a fight, and with Little Big Horn still on their minds, over a decade later, they didn't need much of an excuse to open fire. Men, women, and children were slaughtered in what became known as the Battle of Wounded Knee. It's hard to overstate just how brutal warfare was during this time period. Plains Indian warfare had always been some of the most brutal in the continent. It was simply understood that losing tribes were wiped out, captives were tortured to death, women were raped, and cannibalism was not a distant memory well into the 19th century. American soldiers sent to fight Indians soon became just as brutal. Soldiers collected Indian scalps as souvenirs, and it was standard cavalry tactics, when attacking an Indian camp, to target women and children to distract the warriors. Wounded Knee today is regarded as some sort of special atrocity. The reality is that while it was remarkable for the number of non-combatants slaughtered, and the seeming senselessness of it, it was essentially just a continuation of the warfare that had been going on for decades, and neither whites nor Lakota could really claim this violence was shocking or out of the ordinary. Shapeshifters Hamalainen frequently refers to the Lakota as "shapeshifters," meaning they were adaptable, malleable, and transformed themselves to changing circumstances. They went from a pathetic underdog tribe being preyed on by their neighbors to fearsome horse nomads and plains barbarians, to politicians extracting promises and concessions from U.S. presidents, to guerrilla fighters and savvy manipulators… And as sympathetic as I want to be to the Lakota, I still feel like Hamalainen's thesis that the Lakota were practicing power politics all along to be a cope. In the end, they wound up in the same place all the other Indian tribes did: conquered by superior firepower. They weren't hapless victims; they also weren't innocent. Empires clash and borders are redrawn by the winners. Today, we look with abhorrence at Russia launching an invasion of Ukraine, because these things Just Aren't Done anymore. But in the 19th century, they were done. They were done by everyone. They had been done for millennia. This isn't to excuse the United States for mistreatment of Native Americans or abrogation of its responsibilities. But violence and imperialism was a game played by everyone who could pick up a rock. Hamalainen ends the book in 2016, after briefly covering the recent history of the Lakota. They were central to the American Indian Movement of the 1970s, and continue to be activists both on the reservation and in court. It was the Lakota leading the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline built through their reservation. In 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Lakota were entitled to compensation for violation of their rights to the Black Hills, according to the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie. They were awarded $122 million, but refused to accept it; they want the Black Hills back. To this day, the money gathers interest in a BIA account, and is now over one billion dollars. But corruption and cronyism has also been endemic in Lakota tribal politics. The largest Lakota reservation, the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, is one of the poorest in the nation, with rampant unemployment, alcoholism, and suicide. The once proud lords of the plain are now largely living in third world conditions. I came away from this book feeling more sympathetic to the Lakota than I did the Comanche. The Lakota were no less fierce, but they were, as Hamalainen describes them, much more adaptable. They got screwed by their interactions with white people, but it wasn't an entirely one-sided screwing. I do have a hard time mustering any generational guilt for power politics as practiced from the dawn of civilization until yesterday, figuratively speaking. But having watched a few videos about conditions on Pine Ridge Reservation today, it is sad. So what is my final opinion of Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power? As a history, it was somewhat dry reading. It's a very good concise history of one of the most important American Indian tribes. Hamalainen thoroughly discards the "noble savage" trope, but leans a little too heavily into the "noble oppressed marginalized POC" trope. To be fair, he avoids painting the Lakota as victims, because his entire thesis is that they practiced indigenous power politics that reshaped America. But I find it hard to reconcile two things being true at once, that the Lakota were power players who gave as good as they got, and that the Lakota are reduced to their current sad circumstances because of the brutality and perfidy of whites. To say they were simply losers in a game of power politics would be harsh. But I feel like Hamalainen wants to have it both ways. ...more |
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| 1869
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War and Peace. That benchmark by which all long books are compared. (Note that War and Peace is not the longest novel ever written by a long shot, or
War and Peace. That benchmark by which all long books are compared. (Note that War and Peace is not the longest novel ever written by a long shot, or even the longest novel on the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list.) It's got a reputation for being very long, very difficult, and very Russian. Okay, it is long. Weighing in at 587,287 words, it's 1400-2100 pages depending on edition and font size. But it's big. Very Russian, for sure, and this is what makes it difficult for most English readers, I think. Russian names are a whole thing ("Count Pyotr Kirillovich Bezukhov," even if he's just Pyotr, or "Pierre," throughout most of the book), and everyone is a Count or a Prince or a Princess. And there are a lot of named characters... literally hundreds. But is really that difficult to read (by which I mean, understand and follow the story)? Nah. Not if you've ever read a big book before. And especially not if you have read epic fantasy doorstoppers like Lord of the Rings or The Stormlight Archives or The Wheel of Time or Game of Thrones, etc. Yes, there are a ton of names, but Tolstoy mostly focuses on a handful of main characters (not to omit some real scenery-chewing speeches by Napoleon), and the story is basically about the Napoleon's invasion of Russia, with high society soap operas between battles. Now here is where I admit that while I enjoyed this book, I didn't love it. I read a lot of big fat classic novels, but Russian literature, to be honest, has never been my favorite. And frankly I kind of think Graf Tolstoy was a bit full of himself. (His Kreutzer Sonata is quite a trip. The man had issues.) But the man was a genius, and this is considered the quintessential Russian novel (so much so that when Hollywood made it into a movie in 1956, the USSR decided that Russian honor required them to film a proper version, produced in the early 1960s with 12,000 Soviet soldiers drafted as extras for the battle scenes). What makes it such an epic book, and not just a fat historical drama? Partly, of course, as is often the case, its place in history. It's an early example of a historical novel; Tolstoy published War and Peace in 1867, over 50 years after the events he was depicting. The Napoleonic Wars ended before he was born, but he did talk to surviving veterans before writing it. Timewise, it would be the equivalent of someone born in the 1980s writing a novel about the Vietnam War today. (Tolstoy did not, of course, invent the historical novel. Charles Dickens published A Tale of Two Cities, about the French Revolution, in 1859.) But Tolstoy doesn't just write about France's invasion of Russia, and the vices and financial and marital woes of Russian nobles. He digresses frequently, especially towards the end, with his views about history and historians, morality, and free will. The author getting up on a soapbox to lecture the reader with his critique of the Great Man theory of history for three chapters is not something authors can do today, so this book is both a grand epic tale and a heavyweight dose of Russian moralizing. And somehow it works and fits with the story, and when you finish this book, you have seen a glimpse into the Russian soul. (One of my favorite books about books, Jane Smiley's Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, includes a detailed analysis of American, British, French, and Russian novels and how they differ, observing that while American novels have always glorified the heroic outsider and British novels are usually about class, Russian novels are about Russian identity; Russians are always asking the question "Who and what is a Russian?") Of course I read an English translation, and there are several translations which each have their fierce partisans and critics. The version I listened to was Thandiwe Newton's excellent 60(!) hour reading of the original English translation by Aylmer Maude. Count Pyotr "Pierre" Kirillovich Bezukhov No one character features in every chapter, and Tolstoy writes in omniscient third person and focuses on several characters over the course of the book, but if War and Peace has a single "main character," it's Count Pyotr "Pierre" Kirillovich Bezukhov. Pierre is introduced as a socially awkward dork praising Napoleon as a great man. He's the most bookish, least heroic of the central characters, though he ends up fighting a duel, marrying the hottest chick in the book (too bad she's a greedy narcissist who cheats on him with every man in sight, including her own brother), schemes to personally assassinate Napoleon, is taken prisoner by the French, and eventually marries his childhood sweetheart. Pierre is the illegitimate son of the very wealthy Count Bezukhov, who dies in book one and unexpectedly recognizes Pierre as his legitimate heir and leaves him everything. Pierre instantly becomes the most popular man in St. Petersburg. Fabulously wealthy, he remains idealistic throughout the book. He spends some time deciding he's going to liberate his serfs (and Tolstoy describes in detail how all his naive efforts are thwarted by greedy managers who put on a great show for him while siphoning off his money). He spends some time becoming deeply involved in Freemasonry. Still searching for a purpose for himself, he eventually goes to war himself, thoroughly unprepared, and survives a horrific stint as a prisoner of war being force-marched by the French out of Moscow. But he does get a happy ending, unlike most of the other characters. Prince Andrei Nikolayevich Bolkonsky Prince Andrei, Pierre's best friend, is the other main character. Andrei is handsome, intellectual, and cynical. He starts the book married to a faithful wife whom he regards with benign contempt. Conveniently, she dies in childbirth, and Andrei courts Natasha Rostova. He also spends much of the book fighting on the front lines. He is wounded at the Battle of Austerlitz, and again at the Battle of Borodino. He's a cynical, worldly counterpart to Pierre's naive idealism, and his character arc is one of redemption and forgiveness, as he has stacked up grievances and grudges over the course of the novel, which he eventually lets go before he dies. His sister, Princess Maria, is a pious, intelligent girl who spends most of the book being dominated by their eccentric father and seemingly doomed to spinsterhood (well, "doomed" in that she kept rejecting jerks who want to marry her, not that you can blame her), but eventually marries Nikolai Rostov. Countess Natalya "Natasha" Ilyinichna Rostova Natasha starts the book at age 13. She's the closest War and Peace has to a "heroine" (though Princess Maria Bolkonsky shares the spotlight a bit). She's a nice enough girl but as you might expect from someone who's basically a teenager for most of the book, she falls in and out of love easily and ruins her engagement to Andrei Bolkonsky by letting a cad seduce her. But she gets a happy ending with Pierre. Count Nikolai Ilyich Rostov Nikolai, Natasha's older brother, has the same basic decency but lack of sense as his sister. He joins the Hussars to go fight Napoleon, blows a huge chunk of his father's money twice gambling, and despite rejecting his family's plans for him to marry a rich chick to rescue their family's fortunes, ends up not marrying the childhood sweetheart who was waiting for him. Instead, he winds up with Maria Bolkonsky, who is exactly the sort of rich heiress his family wanted him to marry, but he salvages their fortunes on his own. These five characters are the protagonists around which most of the chapters revolve, with many other secondary characters moving in and out of the story. War and Peace starts in 1805. Napoleon is starting to threaten Europe, but he and Emperor Alexander are buddies so of course there's no danger he will invade Russia, and anyway that would be stupid, right? Well, it was stupid, but he did it, and the book spans 15 years, Napoleon's invasion, the occupation of Moscow, and the French army's eventual disastrous retreat. Pierre, Andrei, Maria, Natasha, and Nikolai are involved throughout in various ways, and the chapters alternate between descriptions of the war, including the great battles, and the peacetime antics of Russian aristocracy. Tolstoy zooms in on the lives and petty squabbles of his characters, then zooms out to cover the war in a way that makes it clear that individuals, including Napoleon himself, are largely irrelevant to the forces of history. If anything, this is the thesis of War and Peace. Tolstoy explicitly criticizes the "Great Man" theory of history, whereby historical events happen because of the decisions of individuals, and despite casting Napoleon himself as one of his secondary characters (who gets some great speeches, while being depicted, as you'd expect a Russian to depict him, as a two-faced narcissistic egomaniac), makes it clear that he thinks Napoleon, Tsar Alexander, and everyone else were just cogs being moved by historical forces generated by a sort of collective will.
War and Peace is a deep and richly rewarding book. I do recommend it to everyone to read at least once. But I won't remember it as one of my favorites. Honestly, I remain indifferent to Tolstoy's philosophy and moralizing, and while I appreciated how he wove so many characters together in so many intertwining plot threads, they were very realistic but really not that interesting. I didn't like or care about any of them, because they all felt very much like cogs being moved by plot forces generated by the will of the author. Skillfully and intricately portrayed, like finely painted figures, but Tolstoy seemed to regard them as much as mouthpieces for various points of view he wanted to express as characters. ...more |
Notes are private!
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| 1786257122
| 9781786257123
| B06XGPBCSQ
| 3.69
| 1,579
| 1959
| Nov 06, 2015
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[image] I have been progressing through presidential biographies in chronological order, and I've hit one of America's historical doldrums: the period [image] I have been progressing through presidential biographies in chronological order, and I've hit one of America's historical doldrums: the period between Andrew Jackson (an asshole, but he at least made history interesting) and Abraham Lincoln. Millard Fillmore, to the degree that he's remembered at all, is little more than a historical punchline today. His name is satirized in political cartoons. Fictional "Millard Fillmore High Schools" are used in 80s sitcoms and comic books to indicate "This school is a hellhole of mediocrity." As far as I can tell, in reality there are actually no schools in the entire United States named after poor POTUS #13. (The University at Buffalo, which Fillmore was once chancellor of, used to have a building named after him, but it was renamed in 2020 during the wave of cancellations of any historical white dude who ever did a racism.) Fillmore was our second "accidental president," taking office after the death of Zachary Taylor. He served one term, declined to run for reelection, and ended up presiding over the death of the Whig Party and the rise of the Republican Party, with his attempts at striking a "moderate" position between "slavery good" and "slavery bad" manifestly a failure. Unsurprisingly, biographies of Millard Fillmore are not exactly abundant. So, in diving into the life and times of So, HARD MODE it is. Robert Rayback's biography is indeed quite positive about Fillmore. Indeed, while not quite a hagiography, Rayback is fulsome in his praise, constantly describing Fillmore as principled, polite, and motivated by the best and most noble of intentions. Millard Fillmore was a New York machine party politician who rose to the top at the height of the spoils system (you got and kept office by promising to reward political allies, explicitly with jobs and contracts). He presided over a party (the Whigs) that literally had no foundational platform or principles, and he did everything he could to hold the Whigs together to maintain political power. At the beginning of his career, he cynically joined the Anti-Masonic Party despite having no real convictions about Masons. At the end of his career, he cynically joined the nativist, anti-Catholic Know-Nothing Party despite having no real convictions about immigrants or Catholics. During his presidency, he supported the Missouri Compromise of 1850, which included the Fugitive Slave Act (which is why the University of Buffalo cancelled him 180 years later). Arguably, he had utilitarian reasons for all of these political moves, and Rayback makes a valiant effort to present it as pragmatic realpolitick motivated by a desire to hold the Union together. But, let's face it, Fillmore might have been a pleasant, well-mannered fellow, but as a president he was at best unremarkable, living in an unremarkable period, and at worst, a grifter and a useless "moderate" who was never guided by anything other than political advantage. The Man From Buffalo Unlike many other presidents, Fillmore grew up poor. His father was an unsuccessful tenant farmer in upstate New York. Young Millard, hoping to make something of his life, decided he liked the law, and got himself apprenticed to a Quaker lawyer named Judge Walter Wood. This experience was both an opportunity and an experience for Fillmore. Judge Wood was sour, dour, and miserly, yet he advanced Fillmore money he needed for his clerkship. However, Judge Wood was also a landlord, and most of Fillmore's work for him involved evicting poor tenants. The judge also wanted control over him, and reprimanded him when Fillmore had the opportunity to make a little money on the side. Eventually, Fillmore worked his way free of Judge Wood and became a lawyer in Buffalo. He then moved to Albany, arriving as a well-dressed dandy who looked nothing like his hayseed upbringing. Here, he got his start in politics. Anti-Masons: the first QAnon The Anti-Masonic movement of the early 19th century has been described, with some justification, as an early QAnon-type movement. Freemasonry had been around for a long time, and many of the Founding Fathers were Freemasons. They were (and are) an ancient fraternal order with secret signs and handshakes and a mystical bent that frequently aroused the animosity of Catholics and protestants, and spawned many conspiracy theories. In 1826, a Freemason from upstate New York named William Morgan disappeared, in shady circumstances. Morgan was in debt and reportedly had been writing an "expose" of the Masonic Order to make a quick buck. Local Masonic lodges had him arrested, but were not able to keep him jailed. When he subsequently turned up missing, lurid tales of his abduction, torture, and execution by being thrown over Niagara Falls spread throughout New York, touching off anti-Masonic hysteria which led to the forming of a full-fledged political party devoted to removing all Freemasons from office. Even former president John Quincy Adams was drawn into the Anti-Masonic movement. At around this time, Millard Fillmore was entering politics, under the wing of political boss Thurlow Weed, who would be his great patron and later his greatest enemy. Weed saw the Anti-Masons as a "Trojan horse" to fight his political rivals in Albany, and Fillmore rode that horse without ever leaving much record of any real anti-Masonic views. It would not be the first time that he'd sign onto a platform for political advantage without really caring what it was endorsing. Much of the next part of Rayback's biography details the political machinations of New York in the first half of the 19th century. Having already read a biography of Martin Van Buren, whose origins were similar to Fillmore's and who also rose to become a major power in New York state politics, I already understood a little bit how things worked - and also how tedious it could be reading about the ins and out of the various factions operating out of Albany, New York City, and Buffalo. Political parties were still a relatively new development in America; George Washington never acknowledged an actual party affiliation, and many politicians considered parties unnecessary and dangerous. Martin Van Buren was probably the first president to wholly and completely embrace party politics. By the early 19th century, political parties were definitely a thing, but they still weren't particularly defined by a cohesive set of principles or a "party platform." The early Federalists were basically those who supported a strong government and the Constitution, while the Anti-Federalists were defined by being... well, anti-Federalist. The Democrats started as Thomas Jefferson's party (Jefferson himself was reluctant to claim party affiliation), and evolved to be more or less the party of the South and agrarian interests. Thurlow Weed, an influential New York newspaper editor, had long been a rival of Van Buren's "Albany Regency" Democrats, who held a lock on New York politics until the Anti-Masonic party disrupted it. Weed and Fillmore jumped on board the Anti-Masonic ticket, but it turned out that the 19th century version of QAnon, made up of people who believed that Freemasons were creating an invisible empire doing nefarious Satanic things in their lodges, did not have much staying power as a national issue. So eventually they created the Whig party. The Whigs started as the party of everyone who really hated Andrew Jackson. Really, this was their only unifying trait. Besides absorbing most of the former Anti-Masons, the Whigs included everyone from Northern abolitionists (including John Quincy Adams) to Southern slaveholders (including Henry Clay). The first Whig President, William Henry Harrison, was elected on a campaign of... not being Martin Van Buren. With Jackson and Van Buren out of office, you might wonder what held the Whigs together. The answer is that they were a self-perpetuating party mostly defined by trying to stay in power. Not only did this present certain problems (like trying to hold Northern abolitionists and Southern slaveholders together in the same party on the principle of "We don't want to let those other guys win, do we?") but even regional Whigs were not unified. New York mercantile Whigs had different interests than upstate agrarian Whigs. Some Whigs were conservative, some were liberal. Their stance on protectionism changed according to whoever held the party reins. Rayback meticulously details all the political and economic shenanigans that defined New York and its patronage system at the time. It is a gruesome (tedious) account of how the sausage was made, which mostly proved that Rayback actually read every one of those letters he cites in footnotes. With Friends Like These Fillmore was elected to Congress in 1832 on the Anti-Masonic ticket, during Andrew Jackson's presidency, and became a powerful national figure. Despite being a historical footnote today, Millard Fillmore was a big deal in his time. He engineered a tariff bill to screw over John Tyler, the Whig VP who upon succeeding William Henry Harrison as the first "accidental president" started openly opposing Whig policies. During this time Fillmore continued to correspond with Thurlow Weed; as Rayback tells it, Fillmore was relentlessly polite, charitable, and willing to give his old patron the benefit of the doubt, even though Weed kept backing Fillmore's rival William H. Seward. Thurlow Weed became a kingmaker in New York. Fillmore was originally his friend, but they split over slavery, but more importantly, Weed's ego, as Fillmore insisted on actually maintaining autonomy. William H. Seward was openly anti-slavery, unlike Fillmore, who thought slavery was morally wrong but not wrong enough to make Southerners mad. This led to Weed and Seward conspiring against Fillmore, and this conspiring and backstabbing would continue even once Fillmore improbably found his way to the White House. Eventually, Fillmore left Congress and returned to Buffalo to work in his law practice. However, he was too political to give up politics. Still deeply embedded in the Whig Party, he negotiated with Weed over who would be the Whig VP candidate in the election of 1848. Fillmore wanted the job but was too much a party loyalist to create a schism over it. Weed did not want Fillmore to become VP because that would give him too much power over the Whig Party (especially, the patronage appointments controlled by the White House). So Weed schemed to get the Whig convention to reject Fillmore as a candidate because "We need him as Governor of New York." Rayback provides another detailed account of the Whig Party convention, the backroom negotiations, and the votes which led to Fillmore unexpectedly becoming Zachary Taylor's running mate. General Zachary Taylor, a national hero after the Mexican War, was an attempt by the Whigs to repeat their success with William Henry Harrison, running a war hero military commander who had basically zero political experience. It worked. Taylor and Fillmore took the White House, handily defeating Democratic candidate Lewis Cass, in part because former President Martin Van Buren, running with the son of John Quincy Adams, split the vote with his Free Soil Party. Taylor and Fillmore had barely had a relationship, and Fillmore was sidelined, like many afterthought VPs, while he was alive. Fillmore had been working out the division of spoils in New York with Thurlow Weed, but Weed was all the while planning to stab him in the back with the help of now New York Senator Seward. They seized control of all Whig patronage appointments throughout New York, and made a point of disempowering Fillmore and getting rid of all his appointments in his home territory of Buffalo, openly bragging about the fact that Vice President Fillmore was impotent and had no power to give anyone anything. When President Taylor repeated history again by unexpectedly dying in office, Fillmore became the second accidental president, and Weed and his cronies were suddenly suffering a serious case of heartburn. The Great Compromiser When Zachary Taylor died, the Weed-Seward camp assumed Fillmore would retaliate, so they doubled down and lashed out, trying to undermine President Fillmore right from the beginning. Fillmore tried to offer compromises, and refrained from taking back all of Weed's patronage appointments, hoping he'd see the olive branch and reciprocate. Instead, Weed and Seward stepped up their attacks and threatened to split the Whig party. At the New York convention, Seward was pressing for stronger anti-slavery planks while Fillmore wanted to stay centrist to hold the North/South Whig party together. This was another section of the book where it was evident that Rayback was perhaps a little too enamored with his subject. Fillmore did appear to be a reasonable and forgiving man, constantly trying to work things out and show forbearance towards his supposed "allies" in the Whig Party who kept trying to screw him over. Rayback emphasizes Fillmore's very reasonable attempts at compromise, rather than pointing out that (a) he was kind of a chump (at some point it must have been obvious that Weed was the scorpion and Fillmore was the frog) and (b) his "compromises" on the issue of slavery were all about holding the Whig Party together regardless of actual principles. Rayback presents Fillmore's moderate position on slavery ("slavery is bad but let's just wish for it to go away eventually without actually doing anything about it") as reasonable, while taking at face value his position that the abolitionists were a bunch of unreasonable radicals threatening party unity. Fillmore did face a real problem, with Southern Whigs obviously alarmed by the growing abolitionist sentiment among Northern Whigs. This was a problem he was never going to be able to solve. He wasn't a complete failure in office, but the fact is he was just one in a string of presidents who kicked the slavery can down the road, and otherwise had a fairly unremarkable presidency. He presided over the California Gold Rush and filibuster ventures in Cuba. He rejected the Manifest Destiny advocated by his predecessors and opposed American expansionism, while out-negotiating Britain and France, who wanted to sign a treaty with the United States agreeing that none of them would ever colonize Cuba - a proposal which, as Fillmore pointed out, was a significant concession for the U.S. and hardly any concession at all for European powers who'd more or less given up on colonialism in the New World. One of the issues Fillmore faced during his presidency was the struggle over building a canal through Central America, which is one of the few places where Rayback actually criticizes Fillmore. The British had control over the Pacific trade and didn't want Americans to have easy access to the Pacific. They took control of San Juan, Nicaragua, ostensibly in the name of "His Mosquito Majesty," the chief of the Mosquito Indians who were under British protection. This posed a serious problem to efforts to build a canal. Fillmore negotiated with Britain to maintain peace, despite the fact that the British clearly weren't going to budge on San Juan; Rayback argues that Fillmore could have secured the area by force and built a canal many years earlier if he hadn't been so accommodating. Whigging Out Presidents in the 19th century were not like presidents today. They didn't necessarily want to stay in office as long as possible, they couldn't rely on becoming rich and staying in demand after they left office, and Fillmore wasn't the first to decline to run for reelection. Fillmore wanted out, but in 1852 the Whig Party was in danger of breaking apart, and Fillmore first and foremost wanted to keep the party together. His rival William Seward backed Winfield Scott, another former general the Whigs hoped would win votes on his military record. Scott, being an anti-slavery Northerner, would have caused the Southern Whigs to revolt, so Fillmore stayed on the ballot. His original plan was to have his name withdrawn "at an opportune time" once Scott was defeated, but his friend, the legendary Daniel Webster, who had been absent from his Secretary of State duties for most of Fillmore's presidency, leaving Fillmore to do Webster's job, had wanted to be president forever. Webster, despite having very little chance of winning, stayed on the ballot, divided the Whig vote, and ended up throwing the nomination to Scott. The Southerners, as predicted, revolted, Democrat dark horse candidate Franklin Pierce trounced Scott in the election, and Millard Fillmore graciously forgave Webster as he watched the Whig Party go down in flames. Fillmore attended Pierce's inauguration on a cold March winter day. His wife caught pneumonia, and died three weeks later. Fillmore suddenly had a lonely retirement to look forward to. So of course he decided to run for president again. (continued in comments) ...more |
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really liked it
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Slogging through the biographies of presidents leading up to the Civil War is like reading prequel novels: they're full of interesting characters and
Slogging through the biographies of presidents leading up to the Civil War is like reading prequel novels: they're full of interesting characters and background details in a story whose ending you already know. In a sense this is true of any history book, but until the war, there was an almost endearing belief by everyone, North and South, that we'll somehow find a resolution and hold the country together. As names like Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis begin to join that upstart congressman from Illinois on the stage, there is a sense of inevitable futility in their projects. Zachary Taylor was the second president to die in office, only sixteen months into his term. Unlike William Henry Harrison, the first POTUS to die in office, he at least had some time to be president, but at the time of his sudden illness and death, his administration had not done much, and his only real accomplishment as president was signing the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, which settled tensions between Britain and the United States over Central America and the future Panama Canal. So I was intrigued by the thesis presented in this book's introduction, that the almost unremembered twelfth president might have prevented the Civil War had he lived. The author of this biography, John S.D. Eisenhower, was the son of President Dwight Eisenhower, so presumably he knew a few things about presidents. (John Eisenhower had a pretty distinguished career of his own and later became a military historian.) Yet Another Virginian Slaveholder A common thread through most early presidential biographies is the preeminence of Virginia as, at one time, probably the most influential state in the union, and how many presidents came from there. Taylor was born in Virginia in 1784, though he grew up in Kentucky and owned plantations in Mississippi and Louisiana. Like so many of his peers, though, he was one of those men who viewed slavery as a sort of necessary evil that he would have preferred didn't exist, while still benefiting from it. As a military officer in the field for most of his life, he probably had little direct interaction with slaves. But the fact that he was a slave owner who was secretly against expanding slavery would become very significant when he became president, and is probably the reason for Eisenhower's judgment that he could possibly have steered the country away from a war over slavery. Old Rough and Ready Like many undistinguished presidents, even those who survived their term in office, Zachary Taylor's life and career before becoming president is more interesting than his presidency. He was a military man for most of his life, with a career that began during the War of 1812 and continued through the Mexican-American War, during which he was simultaneously one of the two commanding generals over American forces and a nascent presidential candidate. Taylor's life and career in many ways paralleled that of his mentor, William Henry Harrison. Harrison praised Taylor's performance during the War of 1812. Like Harrison, Taylor spent most of the war fighting Indians in the interior. Taylor continued to make his reputation as an Indian fighter, leading American forces in the Black Hawk and Seminole wars. He acquired the nickname "Old Rough and Ready" during this time, for being the kind of officer who rode and camped and fought with his troops and shared all of their hardships. My daughter will never marry a soldier! Taylor's wife was Margaret "Peggy" née Smith, described by multiple sources as "fat and motherly." She suffered greatly from her husband's frequent campaigns, as well as multiple childbirths. She was a semi-invalid and supposedly promised God to remain a recluse if her husband came home safely from his various campaigns. She evidently kept this promise, as when Taylor became President, the unwilling First Lady (she actually prayed for her husband to lose the election) remained secluded on the second floor of the White House and let her daughter take on the role of hostess. There are not a lot of details about Taylor's personal life and habits in this book, probably because while Taylor did write letters, he wasn't highly educated or philosophical, and much of his correspondence was stored in his son's house in Baton Rouge, which was burned by the Union Army during the Civil War. But generally, he seems to have been a plain, honest, and unsophisticated (not to say unintelligent) man who mostly enjoyed being a soldier but also recognized what a hard life it was, especially for his family. Long periods of separation from his wife made them both unhappy, so he became extremely determined not to allow his daughter to marry a military man and suffer the same hardships. This led to a story as old as time: his 18-year-old daughter Sarah fell in love with an officer, and forbidden by her father to see him, the two lovers conspired to meet anyway, and eventually married, without her father's blessing or attendance. That officer's name? Jefferson Davis. Taylor and Davis were estranged after this, even after (or because of) Sarah's untimely death, which left both her father and her widowed husband devastated. Eventually, however, Taylor and Davis would reconcile, when Davis (along with many other future Confederate leaders such as Robert E. Lee ) would serve under him during the Mexican-American War. The Mexican-American War
Despite this light-hearted beginning, the Mexican-American War was a bloody affair that was as political as it was military, and while Eisenhower goes into some detail on both the diplomacy and the battles, the main significance for Taylor is that it made him a national figure and presidential candidate, while also hardening the mutual dislike between himself and President Polk. Polk had initially chosen Taylor over General Winfield Scott to command American troops in Mexico because Scott was a Whig whereas Taylor had until that point appeared relatively apolitical. However, Taylor had often been unhappy at the commands he was given, and he felt slighted by a decision from Polk regarding the precedence of regular ranks over brevet ranks. (Taylor had been given the brevet rank of Major General.) After Taylor captured Monterrey, he more or less ignored Polk's wishes and signed a temporary truce with the Mexican general, allowing him to withdraw most of his troops. Polk sent Winfield Scott to take most of Taylor's troops, which may have backfired, as Taylor then had to fight General Santa Anna with a much smaller force. Outnumbered about three to one, the Americans inflicted far greater casualties against the Mexican forces at the Battle of Buena Vista. After Santa Anna withdrew, both sides claimed victory, but combined with General Scott's landing at Veracruz, these two battles more or less ended the war. The Battle of Buena Vista overshadowed Scott's clear triumph at Veracruz (perhaps because of numerous tragic losses, such as the son of Senator Henry Clay), and Taylor became a bonafide national hero. The Election of 1848 "It has never entered my head, nor is it likely to enter the head of any other person." Prior to becoming a presidential nominee, Zachary Taylor had spent most of his life avoiding politics, to the point that he didn't even vote. He wasn't lacking in ambition, but his ambitions had mostly concerned climbing the ranks in the Army. It seems to have been in large part a desire not to serve under a president he'd grown to dislike (James Polk) that turned him political. Taylor-for-President clubs had already started while he was still in Mexico, but his nomination seems to have come about as almost unplanned and unanticipated by everyone including himself. He was being courted by both the Democrats and Whigs while refusing to align himself with either party, until finally in early 1848 he was persuaded to declare himself for the Whigs. His rivals for the Whig nomination were his frenemies General Winfield Scott and perpetual presidential candidate Henry Clay, but the Whigs eventually decided to go with what had worked last time and nominated the war hero, making Taylor the second former general to become a Whig President. Unfortunately, William Henry Harrison would prove to be another precedent for Taylor. Since Polk was keeping his promise not to run for reelection, Taylor faced Lewis Cass for the Democrats and in one of the most remarkable heel turns in American history, a third-party bid by former President Martin Van Buren and Charles Adams (son of John Quincy Adams), who had started the Free Soil Party. He captured a majority of electoral votes and a plurality of the popular vote, and would be the last president elected before the Republican/Democrat two-party system would control American politics forever after. The Curse of Whig Generals Taylor was technically still a commissioned officer when he was elected president, which made for an awkward few months for his commanding officer and former rival, General Winfield Scott. As a president, Zachary Taylor was unremarkable, and not just because he died early. James Polk, who received him courteously enough when he arrived in Washington, judged him to be crude and almost illiterate (not really true). For someone who had been apolitical for most of his career, it should have been a surprise to no one that his supporters had projected their own politics onto him and not what he actually believed. He ignored most of the Whig Party platform, but conversely, the Southerners who voted for him because they assumed that as a slave-holding Southerner he would be pro-slavery were also disappointed. The big issues facing his administration were California and New Mexico, and more generally, slavery. Every new state was a political landmine, and Taylor tried to be even-handed, but when push came to shove and Southerners started making noises about secession in earnest, he took a page from Andrew Jackson and threatened to lead troops and hang the secessionists if it came to that, thus revealing that in a choice between slavery and the Union, he'd pick the Union. While Henry Clay began putting together what would eventually become the Compromise of 1850, Taylor was also dealing with the embarrassing Galphin Affair, in which his Secretary of War who had been representing an old claim dating back to the American Revolution got the claim, and payment for it by the federal government, approved by the Secretary of the Treasury, coincidentally netting him an enormous fee ($100,000 in 1850 dollars!) as well. All of these conflicts were bruising for his health and morale. On July 4, 1850, he took a stroll around Washington, and ate a lot of cherries and iced milk. He abruptly took ill, suffering gastrointestinal distress that, over the next few days, turned fatal. I am about to die — I expect the summons soon — I have endeavored to discharge all my official duties faithfully. I regret nothing, but am sorry that I am about to leave my friends. As with many deaths in the 19th century, the exact cause of his death is a small mystery, about which historians can only speculate given the medical evidence available. At the time, of course, conspiracy theories sprang up with various factions accused of poisoning him. (An exhumation in the 90s supposedly ruled out arsenic poisoning but not much else.) The second POTUS to die in office left his Vice President, Millard Fillmore, as the country's second "accidental president." The Biography Most biographers like their subjects, probably an inevitable outcome of spending so much time getting to know them. Eisenhower's claim that Taylor could have prevented the Civil War is in fact fairly restrained and speculative. His argument is essentially that Taylor, being a Southerner himself, was able to speak to the Southerners in their language and appreciate their concerns, but at the same time, demonstrated he was willing to proactively shut down any talk of secession, even to the point of threatening to lead troops into New Mexico when Texas was threatening to take it. He was against the expansion of slavery, though he was making no moves to end it. Eisenhower thus speculates that if he had lived, Taylor might have seized control of the debate and kept the Union together. However, he also admits that it might just have moved the date at which the inevitable rupture would start. Eisenhower is not entirely uncritical of Taylor. His description of Taylor's performance as a military commander is lukewarm; while Taylor was a hero to his men and the American public, Eisenhower points out several battles, during the Seminole and Black Hawk wars and again during the Mexican-American war, where, Taylor's tactics were, as Eisenhower tactfully puts it, "open to debate." He's fairly forgiving of Taylor's ambiguity on political issues, but admits that he determinedly avoided taking a stand and making his positions hard to decipher. As Eisenhower himself points out, sometimes presidents are judged more by the significance of the events while they were in office than by their own significance. Zachary Taylor fought in a very significant war but not much important happened while he was president. That makes him mostly a historical footnote, and no one who isn't studying that time period deeply is likely to read a very long book about a mediocre president who only served for sixteen months. That makes this fairly brief volume large enough to cover all the important details and give us a picture of the man and why he's important to history, despite his relatively inconsequential administration, without spending too much time on him. ...more |
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I am now on presidential biography #11. James K. Polk followed John Tyler and preceded Zachary Taylor, and if all three of them are just names you bar
I am now on presidential biography #11. James K. Polk followed John Tyler and preceded Zachary Taylor, and if all three of them are just names you barely remember from U.S. history, you're not alone. Borneman begins and ends this biography of the 11th president by arguing that Polk was in fact one of the greatest U.S. presidents. He supports this with polls of historians, beginning with Arthur Schlesinger, who consistently rank Polk among the top ten. This might be surprising considering who he typically shares the list with: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Eisenhower, etc. Those are A-list presidents, while Polk is just another early 19th century dude who warmed the Oval Office chair before Lincoln. But Borneman makes a convincing case that, by the criteria by which a president's effectiveness is measured, Polk was actually pretty darn effective. That didn't make him particularly interesting, though. Walter Borneman, a historian, tries with Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America, and I came away from this book more educated and largely agreeing with the arguments Borneman makes about Polk's significance, but still... Polk was no Washington or Lincoln, or even a Johnson. Old Hickory's Boy Born in a log cabin (a claim several other presidents made, though some were stretching the truth a bit), James Polk was a physically unimpressive man (5'8") who suffered from health problems and physical frailty his entire life. Borneman describes a trip he made as a teenager to Philadelphia to be seen by a physician for his urinary stones. The bumpy ride proved so agonizing he couldn't continue, and instead, was subjected to emergency surgery in Kentucky. "Emergency surgery" in Kentucky in 1812 was as brutal as it sounds, and while it apparently removed Polk's urinary stones, Borneman and other historians speculate that the surgeon cut out more than some stones, explaining why Polk and his wife Sarah never had children. He recovered, and went on to become a lawyer and a politician, like many future presidents. He was a protege of Andrew Jackson, and became such a stalwart Jackson supporter that he was known as "Old Hickory's boy." Polk served as Congressman and then Governor of Tennessee. And in 1844, as Borneman describes it, Polk's political career was almost dead in the water, as he'd been defeated twice for reelection as Governor. He went to the 1844 Democratic convention hoping to get the VP slot, not campaigning for the presidential nomination. "Who is James K. Polk?" At this point, Borneman goes into excruciating detail about the Democratic party's 1844 movers and how the balloting was done. Ex-President Martin Van Buren was the front runner, and Borneman describes Polk doing some serious asskissing and rhetorical gymnastics to try to convince Van Buren that he should be his running mate, despite having just been whupped twice in his home state. However, Van Buren then pissed off his old mentor Andrew Jackson by opposing the annexation of Texas, and Jackson ended up throwing his support behind Polk instead. After a lot of other political shenanigans and maneuvering (if you are the sort of wonky political nerd who likes following the ins and outs of party conventions and how the sausage is made, here's a book that gives you a good look at the Democrats in 1844), Polk ended up with the nomination. His running mate was George M. Dallas (who?). The Whigs mocked him with "Who is James K. Polk?", but Henry Clay (making his third or fourth run at the presidency) narrowly lost to Polk. Polk was helped by Andrew Jackson, who used his influence to persuade the sitting president without a party, John Tyler, to withdraw from the campaign. Slavery was a major issue, but both Polk and Clay were slave-owning Southerners, so a fabricated story about Polk branding his slaves (what came to be known as the "Roorback Forgery") is believed to have backfired, since it just reminded abolitionists that Clay owned slaves too. Borneman analyzes the election rather thoroughly and concludes that New York, and some votes siphoned off there by the abolitionist Liberty Party, was what cost Clay the election. Manifest Destiny Polk promised during his campaign that he would serve only one term and not run for reelection. Today, it's assumed that anyone elected president is going to try for two terms, and thus is pretty much running for reelection the moment he hits the White House. But in 1844 there was still debate over whether presidents even should be reelected. Polk's pledge was serious. He meant it, and Borneman points out that in many ways, this was what made him such an effective president. He was willing to burn all his political capital during his single term and not worry about his reelection. His first major decision was over Texas. Outgoing President John Tyler had stolen some of Polk's thunder by annexing Texas just before he left office. (Tyler really wanted credit for Texas.) Technically, Polk could have recalled the offer of annexation (which Texas had already approved) to reopen negotiations for more favorable agreements with Mexico and Britain. But this risked Texas not becoming a state at all. Britain had brokered a deal whereby Texas independence would be recognized by Mexico in exchange for a promise to never annex itself to another country, though Texas President Sam Houston refused. So Polk, who was strongly in favor of Texas statehood, allowed the annexation to go through. Polk had his eye on more than Texas. It was during Polk's presidency that the U.S. adopted "manifest destiny," an expansion of the Monroe Doctrine. He would end up adding not just Texas, but also New Mexico, California, and Oregon. The Mexican-American War was an early Iraq War Borneman spends a significant chunk of the book talking about the Mexican-American War. Everyone knew that annexing Texas was almost inevitably going to lead to war with Mexico; Mexico had said as much. Polk did send an ambassador to Mexico City to try to settle claims over Texas, and also buy California and New Mexico outright, but anti-American sentiment was strong and the Mexican president refused to see the U.S. ambassador. Then there was coup, and an even more anti-American general took over, so the ambassador sent word back that they'd have to wait for the Mexican government to change again. I found a surprising number of parallels with the Iraq War. During this time, General Zachary Taylor was camping his army across the river from Matamouros. A Mexican general told them to move. They didn't. The Mexicans attacked and inflicted a few casualties. This gave Polk a casus belli, and in a line that would be thrown back at him later by one Abraham Lincoln, declared that Mexico had "shed American blood on American soil." Borneman argues that this was the point where Polk transformed the Presidency and dramatically increased executive power. Under the Constitution, only Congress can declare war. During "Madison's War" in 1812, James Madison "wrung his hands" about asking Congress to go to war with Britain; it wasn't clear the president had any authority even to ask for a war. But Polk, as Borneman describes it, did not so much ask Congress for permission to go to war, but decided to go to war and then asked Congress to approve it. With a great deal of political pressure, the House and Senate voted in favor of a declaration of war with Mexico, while many politicians complained that they were essentially forced to so as not to look unpatriotic. And thus the precedent was set. There were many interesting figures involved in the Mexican campaign, such as John C. Fremont and Kit Carson. Fremont would be significant politically; he was the son-in-law of a powerful Missouri Senator and one-time Polk ally, Thomas Hart Benton. Thanks to a series of military misadventures, questions about rank and protocol, and Fremont just being kind of an egotistical jerk, he ended up being court-martialed, and while Polk agreed with the military tribunal's recommendation of leniency, he did not do what Benton wanted and exonerate Fremont completely. This caused a permanent rift which was quite damaging for Polk politically. Other interesting episodes from this time period included Thomas Hart Benton's son-in-law storming into Polk's office (according to some rumors, drunk) and demanding a commission, then cursing the president out when he was refused. (These were the days before the Secret Service, and Polk often complained about the constant stream of office-seekers who would just walk into the White House and beg or demand jobs). Polk also brought exiled general Santa Anna back from Cuba, promising to put him in control of Mexico so he could sell California to the Yankees. Santa Anna said "Sure, gringos!", took control of Mexico, and promptly led a bloody military campaign to defend it against the Yankees. As the war ground on, Congress would become increasingly dissatisfied with its progress and cost. Illinois Congressman Abraham Lincoln began introducing "Spot Resolutions" demanding that President Polk "Show the exact spot on a map where American blood was shed on American soil." None of them were passed, but it was an effective bit of political theater. Polk sent another ambassador, Nicholas Trist, to negotiate a peace treaty. When Trist failed to make any progress, Polk tried to recall him. Trist not only refused to be recalled, but sent Polk a 65-page letter explaining why. Polk was, understandably, pissed, and considered sending someone to remove him, but given the distance, let Trist stay, where he eventually negotiated the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which essentially settled the modern border with Mexico. "Fifty-four Forty or Fight!" Another one of Polk's objectives when he took office was to settle what was at the time joint occupation of the Oregon Territory by the U.S. and Britain. He wanted Oregon, and was willing to risk war with Britain to get it. The slogan "Fifty-four Forty or Fight!" is often the only thing most people remember about Polk's presidency. Contrary to popular belief, it was not a campaign slogan: it wasn't circulated until 1846, when hawks were demanding that Britain give up the entire West coast up to the 54th parallel, the southern border of what was then Russian territory and is now Alaska. Polk proved to be a tough negotiator, and Britain needed trade with the United States much more than it wanted a war. The U.S. did not get "Fifty-four Forty," but they did get the 49th parallel. And with that, during his presidency Polk more or less established the boundaries of the lower 48. The One-Term President True to his word, Polk did not run for reelection. He threw his support in 1848 behind the Democratic nominee, Lewis Cass, while the Whigs ran Zachary Taylor, whom Polk had been very unimpressed with during the Mexican-American War. The feeling was reciprocated, but when Taylor won, Polk received him in Washington and they had a very pleasant dinner party with all the winners and losers of the recent election. Polk was happy to leave the White House. His health had deteriorated and he was exhausted. He and Sarah took a little celebratory tour of the South, where he caught cholera and died in June 1949. Polk remains the shortest-lived of all ex-presidents. Sarah, on the other hand, would be the longest-lived ex-First Lady. She would live as a widow for another 42 years. Why was Polk a great president? According to Borneman and other historians: He accomplished all the goals he had when he took office. (Resolve the joint occupation of Oregon, acquire California, reduce the tariff, and establish an independent treasury.) He was the most decisive chief executive until Lincoln. He said what he meant to do, and he did it, without any waffling or second-guessing. He greatly expanded the power of the executive office, especially its war powers. Note that all of these accomplishments speak to his effectiveness, and not necessarily their morality. Depending on how you view Polk's legacy, he was very effective at expanding the Pax Americana or, well, he was very effective at expanding the Pax Americana. Borneman describes Polk as a firm, decisive leader who probably did possess all the qualities we would want today in a chief executive except, perhaps, being on the right side of history. Polk was a slave owner, and he was as resolute on the slavery issue as he was on everything else. Most early American presidents were slave owners, and most of them wrestled with this to varying degrees. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, even Martin Van Buren (who wasn't a slave owner but supported the South)... they all clearly struggled with being complicit in what they knew to be an immoral institution. Not James Polk. If he ever had any moral qualms about slavery, he never expressed them. He regarded it as a purely "political" matter, to be decided by individual states as a matter of law. In his will, he encouraged his wife to free their slaves, but only upon her death. Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America is a thorough biography written in sufficient detail to at times be a bit tedious, but short enough not to overburden someone who isn't that interested in obscure presidents from the 1840s and is grinding through presidential biographies in chronological order. I appreciated Borneman's attention to detail, and the fact that he provided some insights and analyses of his own, though at times I thought he fell victim to the curse of many a biographer, becoming a little too enamored of his subject and thus tending to take his side in various political disputes. ...more |
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On my project to read a biography of every U.S. President in order, I hit the wall a lot of people do with William Henry Harrison: there are very few
On my project to read a biography of every U.S. President in order, I hit the wall a lot of people do with William Henry Harrison: there are very few full-length biographies written about him, and the ones that are available are old and dense. I could have cheated. I could have read one of those "Our Amazing Presidents" series books for junior high schoolers and filled it in with Wikipedia and the official White House biography. but no, I ordered this book, and read it all the way through. It was a slog, but a rewarding one. William Henry Harrison was actually an interesting man with an interesting career, and deserved to be more than a footnote in history as the shortest-term President. The author, Freeman Cleaves, was a journalist who apparently took a shining to the forgotten president and literally followed Harrison's entire life's journey through the U.S. and Canada, digging up ancient newspaper archives, as well as visiting his descendants who showed him old family letters and other documents. The result is a meticulous narrative of Harrison's life, following him almost daily from his youth to his death. At times it's a rather dull travelogue of Harrison's marches through the woods during the Indian wars and the War of 1812, punctuated by much more exciting blow-by-blow accounts of his battles. Later, there is a lot of very detailed electoral counting and discussion of Harrison's cabinet selections and the political calculus behind them, in his final days. Old Tippecanoe is nothing if not informative, and like better and more readable books, it did give me a sense of Harrison's personality and what he was like as a man, and perhaps what he would have been like as president. Still, this is a book only for very serious bibliography readers. It was published in 1939 and uses the prose of the time, including unapologetic references to Indians as "savages" and "redskins." Cleaves writes in a dry, factual manner though it's clear he adored Harrison and so rarely writes critically about him; Harrison's mistakes are described mostly as well-intentioned errors of judgment, and the biographer unequivocally comes down on Harrison's side in his disputes with other military officers and politicians. Born in a log cabin (kind of) During his presidential campaigns, much would be made of Harrison's humble origins as a man born in a log cabin. Well, this was perhaps true in a literal sense, in that the building he was born in on his family's Virginia plantation was made of wood. Born in 1773, Harrison's ancestry was Virginia blue blood all the way through. His father was a Signer of the Declaration of Independence. However, he left his university when his father died, and instead headed west to become a soldier. This began his long career as an Indian fighter, and while Harrison was never precisely poor (he always lived in a huge house and his lifestyle was very much upper class), he was always in debt and struggling to avoid bankruptcy. For the rest of his life he would be more associated with Ohio and Indiana than his birthplace of Virginia, though he didn't hesitate to claim Virginia as his homeland when it was politically advantageous. He married Anna Tuthill Symmes while he was still a lieutenant, in 1794, and the two of them had ten children, most of whom survived. Evidently, they managed to get busy frequently on his trips home from his military campaigns. Like several other presidents, he suffered from bad business decisions while trying to support a large family, and later, an alcoholic failson who added to his debts. Tippecanoe and the War of 1812 Although Harrison made his reputation by fighting Indians, it's not really fair to say he was primarily an Indian fighter. His attitude towards the Indians was much like that of the author of this 1939 book, regarding them with paternalistic affection when they were peaceful, and as naughty children who needed to be spanked when they weren't. The story of peaceful Indians ruthlessly oppressed by white settlers is only half the story; the Indian tribes were rarely peaceful, and were quite happy to make alliances with the Americans and the British as they fought their own wars. They had entirely different notions of what alliances and territorial claims meant, leading to many bloody misunderstandings. From the perspective of whites, Indians would change sides at the drop of a hat, and kept reneging on peace treaties and suffering seller's remorse after giving up land to the settlers. But the Indians saw white settlers frequently violating treaties as well and settling on land they'd agreed not to settle on, and sometimes murdering Indians and not being punished by white authorities. As well, whites often didn't understand that making a deal with one chief of a tribe did not mean that every branch of that tribe would consider it binding on them. Thus, the campaigns in the Northwest Territory against Indians who resisted white encroachment. There were Indians who were friendly to the Americans, and Indians who were friendly to the British, and Indians who just wanted white people to GTFO. Harrison resigned from the Army in 1798 and became the Northwest Territorial Secretary. He eventually ran for Congress, and then was appointed as the Governor of Indiana (then a territory, not a state) by President Adams. For the next twelve years, he would earn a good reputation with the Indians for his mostly even-handed dealings with them. However, a Shawnee chief named Tecumseh was building a confederation to resist white settlers. Along with his brother, a mystic known as "The Prophet" who told the Shawnee that the Great Spirit would make them invincible if they fought the white men, Tecumseh started threatening to abrogate treaties signed by other chiefs, pointing out (with some justification) that they had made agreements about lands that other tribes lived on. He met with Governor Harrison at one point in a tense stand-off that almost ended in bloodshed and could have ended with Harrison being scalped. Harrison convinced President Madison to let him take command of Northwest Territory forces, and led an army to defeat the confederation. Reports of the Battle of Tippecanoe were initially confusing; it wasn't clear until later that Harrison had won a decisive victory. During the War of 1812, Tecumseh sided with the British. The British officer in charge, General Procter, had a tiger by the tail. Tecumseh made it clear he wasn't happy about Procter's decisions to retreat, and Procter knew the Shawnee weren't buddies with the British because they liked them. General Harrison would make his bones in earnest during the War of 1812, and Cleaves describes all of his battles in great detail. Some of them are the stuff of adventures, like sneaking across a river just to seize one little garrison (and then screwing up by hanging around gawking instead of just destroying the cannons and leaving), a mock battle that Tecumseh staged to try to convince the Americans that their relief force was being ambushed and draw them out of their fort (it didn't work), or the speech Harrison gave that shamed his Kentucky militia into staying when they were on the verge of saying "Fuck it" and going home. Notable is that the "significant armies" that affected the outcome of the war in the Northwest often consisted of only a few hundred men. The forts and hills they fought over were relatively tiny. And though there is a lot of documentation, because Harrison and other officers wrote meticulous accounts that were reported back to Washington and repeated in newspapers, fog of war still obscured many details. Tecumseh would eventually be killed in a relatively smaller battle, the Battle of the Thames, in 1813. Echoing many other disputes that would arise after the war, credit for killing Tecumseh would be claimed by many men who were there that day, though it wasn't actually clear that they ever actually identified Tecumseh's body. Harrison's supporters when he ran for President would tout his fame at the Battle of Tippecanoe and call him the man who killed Tecumseh, though Harrison almost certainly did not personally kill him. One of his subordinates, Colonel Richard Johnson, would later become Vice President under Martin Van Buren after claiming that he'd killed Tecumseh. Fame doesn't pay the bills Harrison had several disputes with the Secretary of the Army, who for political reasons wanted him removed. Harrison resigned from the Army and tried to capitalize on his fame and seek political office. He served as a Congressman for Ohio, but his debts continued to grow, especially with one particularly burdensome wastrel son. As an Ohio Congressman, his big issue was increasing benefits for veterans and their widows. He also opposed a large pay increase Congress had just voted themselves, which was understandably extremely unpopular with the public. Harrison's political philosophy begins to take shape here. As Cleaves describes him, we could say he was essentially a centrist of his time. Slavery was becoming the dominant culture war issue, and following a pattern we've seen with previous slave-owning POTUSes, Harrison expressed the sentiment that slavery was an evil that should eventually be abolished, while owning slaves and siding against abolitionists. It may be hard to understand today how you could hold two opposing thoughts like that in your head, but in the context of the times, there was an entire spectrum of attitudes towards slavery from "radical" abolitionism to wholehearted embrace of slavery as the natural order of things, and many nuanced gradations between on which the South in particular took careful notice. Harrison was an "emancipationist," meaning he thought the federal government should establish a program aimed at eventually purchasing the freedom of slaves. This was not a popular position with Southerners, but it wasn't quite as bad as being an abolitionist, or sympathetic to abolitionists. Harrison himself purchased a few slaves but promised them freedom after a certain number of years, which he regarded as a fair exchange for their labor. This was actually a relatively progressive attitude for the time. Despite the pay raise (which he had opposed), however, Harrison was still broke. So he sought and received a post as Minister to Columbia. It was a prestigious and fairly high-paying position, but Harrison was not much of a diplomat. Much of South America was undergoing revolutionary spasms, thanks to Simon Bolivar. Harrison never met Bolivar personally the entire time he was in Columbia, but he got entangled in a number of intrigues, mostly through no fault of his own except his naivete and unfamiliarity with the country. His own fellow Americans were scheming and secretly fingering him as a collaborator with the anti-Bolivar rebels. This wasn't helped by some speeches Harrison made that were misinterpreted. He ended up being recalled by Secretary of State Martin Van Buren, who wanted Harrison replaced with his own man. Harrison returned to America, still in debt, but at least he brought a macaw with him, which would live on his estate for years afterwards. "Old Tippecanoe and Tyler Too" Still struggling to get his head above water financially, Harrison reentered politics. There was growing opposition to the Jackson administration. Harrison was a war hero. One of his friends tried to make the nickname "Old Buckeye" stick (in contrast to Andrew "Old Hickory" Jackson). It didn't, but eventually "Old Tippecanoe" did. Harrison was drawn into the newly-coalescing Whig party, which was a hodgepodge alliance of anti-Jacksonians, abolitionists, supporters of Henry Clay, and anti-Masons. The Anti-Masonic party was actually a significant force in some parts of the country, and Harrison tried to take a typically centrist position when asked about them. He obviously didn't really care about Masons, and didn't think the government should be trying to suppress them just because some people were going wild with conspiracy theories about them, but he couldn't completely blow the anti-Masons off. At this time he had to respond to a lot of claims and counterclaims about what happened during the war. His opponents accused of him of everything from mismanagement of funds to poor military leadership. Some of his fellow officers were trying to claim shared glory, which Harrison disputed "under ancient military principal." He was particularly annoyed by Colonel Johnson trying to claim that they had been "coleaders." In the election of 1836, Harrison narrowly lost to Martin Van Buren. The 1840 campaign began almost immediately. This was the start of modern political campaigning; previously, it had been regarded as somewhat unseemly for presidential candidates to go around openly campaigning as if, you know, they actually wanted to be President. Harrison's supporters rolled logs, carried around miniature replicas of Fort Meigs and other sites of Harrison's military victories, composed campaign ditties, and threw parties wherever Harrison went. "Matty Van," a consummate machine party politician, was depicted as an aristocratic wine-sipping dandy with a taste for European luxuries, while Harrison was a rough-hewn military hero and man of the people who sipped hard cider in his log cabin. All of this was effective, but what was probably more effective was the fact that the Panic of 1837 had caused a major depression, and the economy was shit, which was blamed on Andrew Jackson and his successor Van Buren. (Like most economic crises, the actual cause was a variety of factors, many of which weren't really under the President's control.) His fellow Whigs included the venerable Kentucky Senator Henry Clay (the man who really wanted to be President) and a young Illinois Congressman named Abraham Lincoln. Harrison won a decisive victory in 1840, swept into office with Vice President Tyler (a Southerner because he couldn't win without a Southerner), and died 32 days later. The 32-day President According to popular legend, Harrison gave the longest inauguration speech ever on a rainy day in March, caught a cold, and died of pneumonia a month later. This is only partially true. He did give the longest inauguration speech in history (one hour and forty minutes, edited by Daniel Webster), and it was a cold, rainy day. He probably did catch a cold that day. But for the next month, he was pretty busy. He walked around Washington on errands (we had not yet had our first presidential assassination, and the president could still just wander down the street to visit with people), formed his cabinet (with a lot of maneuvering and input from, among others, Henry Clay, who was quite upset to find out he was not going to be calling the shots in Harrison's administration), and had a couple of very congenial meetings with the outgoing president, Van Buren, and some of the Senators he expected to soon be opposing him. He established his intention to limit the power of the Executive Branch, support states rights, and remain hands off on the issue of recreating a national bank. He had already sworn that he would be a one-term president and not seek reelection. Somewhere along the way, he became seriously ill, and his physicians soon realized he was on his deathbed. There is debate today about whether it was actually pneumonia that killed him; Harrison was 68 years old (the oldest president ever, until Ronald Reagan), and Washington was a disease-ridden place. Freeman Cleaves's biography ends very abruptly, at the very paragraph where Harrison is buried. Harrison's last hours were spent in a state of delirium. Supposedly his final words were: "Sir, I wish you to understand the true principles of the government. I wish them carried out. I ask nothing more." My impression of William Henry Harrison is that he was an intelligent if not brilliant man, not a deep political thinker, but capable enough. He was honest and quite meticulous about defending his integrity. He was a moderate who wouldn't have done much to end slavery, but his attitude towards Native Americans was relatively benign. It's impossible to say how effective his foreign policy or economic policies might have been. Friendly and even-tempered, he might have been a good President, or he might have been eaten alive by scandals and political disasters. Instead, we got John Tyler. The Whig Party would soon collapse and disappear into history, and the Civil War would loom ever closer. ...more |
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The author is obviously a huge fan of Jane Austen. So am I, which is why I indulged myself in this debut novel. Jane Austen time travel stories are not The author is obviously a huge fan of Jane Austen. So am I, which is why I indulged myself in this debut novel. Jane Austen time travel stories are not exactly an unexplored genre. There's a whole category of them. There was also the amusing (if crass and fan-servicey) 2008 Lost in Austen miniseries. Most of these stories involve time travelers going back to meet Austen's characters, though, while The Austen Project is about time travelers going back in time to meet Jane Austen herself. It's well-researched, and the author takes pains to get the historical details right (as far as I could tell). The justification for this time travel journey seemed a bit thin, though. Supposedly they come from a future in which, following a "Great Die-Off," Britain has reemerged as a great world power, and advances in supercomputing allow for things like time travel. So they send researchers back in time on carefully planned missions with strict rules of engagement to avoid changing history. So they know it's possible to change history with butterfly effects, yet the reason for sending a couple of time travelers back to the 19th century is to recover a lost Jane Austen novel? I mean, those must be some Austen fans in the 22nd century. Rachel Katzman (Jewish) and Liam Finucane (Irish) seem unlikely choices to be sent back to 1815 to pretend to be wealthy English gentry, but they have studied for their roles and mostly they pull it off. Pretending to be Doctor Liam Ravenswood and his spinster sister Mary, they soon insinuate themselves into the Austens' social circle, and against the odds, Rachel/Mary manages to befriend Jane herself. What follows are some obvious shoutouts to Austen novels, as Jane's brother Henry woos Rachel/Mary, while Rachel falls in love with Liam. So imagine an Austen novel, except with time travel and sex scenes. And not much of the humor or wit. Flynn is a decent writer but I never really liked either Rachel or Liam much, and I didn't care about their (literally) timeless love. These well-practiced time travelers forgetting to act like their roles were also annoying. To the author's credit, Rachel doesn't try to introduce feminism to the Austens, but she does keep "forgetting herself" (i.e., speaking up in ways that she knows a woman in this era would not). These mistakes made Rachel seem emotional and unprofessional. Of course, so did fucking her engaged colleague who's playing the part of her brother. The most interesting parts were the interactions with the locals, and especially, of course, Jane herself. Flynn writes a very believable Jane — ferociously intelligent and perceptive, and witty in the dry Austen style, but also reserved and a woman of her time, making things very difficult for Rachel and Liam as Jane is too smart not to figure out that something isn't quite right about them. The ending combines the climax of a romance with a science fictional time travel twist, and mostly pulls it off. I appreciated the self-contained nature of this book, though the author does leave room for a visit to the Brontës... ...more |
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Martin Van Buren was the first in a string of mostly unremarkable presidents between Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln that nobody really cares about
Martin Van Buren was the first in a string of mostly unremarkable presidents between Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln that nobody really cares about, so unlike the previous presidents I've read about, pickings were slim for a thorough biography of the POTUS whose chief claim to fame may be Most Impressive Sideburns. Donald Cole's book is not meant for the casual reader of presidential biographies. This is a scholarly, heavily-footnoted work for serious historians, and you'd have to be a pretty serious grind to read this just because you're on a mission to read a biography of every American president. So I read it. And it was... kind of interesting. Donald Cole's area of research was Jacksonian democracy, and he writes about Van Buren largely in that context — as the heir to Andrew Jackson and his party. Martin Van Buren and the American Political System is more of a political history than a biography, so while President Sideburns himself was not exactly the most fascinating man personally (Cole repeatedly points out that Van Buren was not charismatic or a great speaker), his rise, and his impact on American politics, is not uninteresting or insignificant. A Professional Politician First of all, Van Buren was probably the first POTUS who was genuinely a career politician. He started out as a party boss in New York, and from early on he was deliberately and methodically planning his political career. He considered this to be a perfectly legitimate profession and would have been puzzled by people who denigrate "professional politicians." Secondly, he was the first real party president. No, I don't mean the fun kind. Unlike his predecessors, he didn't just reluctantly ally himself with a political party — he embraced party politics and openly advocated for a party system. He considered political parties not just inevitable, but necessary and useful, and actively opposed those who wanted to bring back the "Era of Good Feelings" from the Monroe era, in which party politics temporarily faded away. Parties, to him, were how professional politicians should organize and consolidate power, which was what professional politicians should be doing. If this sounds all very calculating and mechanical and well, political, that was Van Buren. He lived and breathed politics and he was good at it. Kissing Cousins from Kinderhook Van Buren's origins were fairly humble; his father was an innkeeper in Kinderhook, New York, the son of a Dutch immigrant. The Van Burens weren't poor, but they certainly weren't wealthy. Almost all other presidents have had one or more of: college education, a military career, or a wealthy family. Van Buren had none of those. Van Buren's wife, Hannah, was a distant cousin and childhood sweetheart who was also from Kinderhook. They had four sons before Hannah died of tuberculosis at the age of 35. We know almost nothing else about her. Van Buren almost never spoke of her again; in his own autobiography, in which he goes on about every other last detail of his life and political career, he never even mentions her! Van Buren was known to be flirtatious and enjoyed the company of beautiful women, but he never remarried, and if he ever had a mistress, it's not recorded and he must have kept any relationships he had very discreet. Raising four young sons by himself would have been pretty difficult for a single father, even one of means. Van Buren evidently put them in the care of nannies, which probably didn't do a lot for his relationships with them. Probably the most personally scandalous rumor that ever afflicted him was the one that Aaron Burr was actually his father. They were physically similar and Aaron Burr did actually frequent Van Buren's father's tavern before he was born, so it was theoretically possible, but there was no other evidence for this. "The Little Magician" of the Regency The Regency revolutionized American politics, not only by creating a new type of political machine, but also by popularizing a new theory of political parties. Van Buren helped create the Albany Regency, which controlled New York state politics for decades. This was an era of unabashed spoils systems: you supported a candidate and expected to get handed lucrative appointments and government contracts as a reward. Andrew Jackson would become infamous for this during his presidency, but he didn't invent the system. Van Buren gamed the system like a pro. He was a pro. He gained the moniker "The Little Magician" for the way he carefully controlled his party, neutralized rivals, and engineered elections throughout his career. "There is such a thing in politics as killing a man too dead." The era is full of interesting parties. Van Buren was originally a Democratic-Republican, and considered himself a Jeffersonian, and later a Jacksonian. The Democratic-Republicans would eventually become the modern Democrats, though Van Buren would end his political career as a candidate for the Free Soil party. Cole goes into great and exhaustive detail about political infighting and caucuses and factions, with names like the Loco-Focos, the Bucktails, the Hunkers, and the Barnburners. (Most of these were essentially single-issue parties with names that came from some obscure reference to their origins - the "Loco-Focos" for example, were named after a kind of match that they supposedly used to light candles after their rivals in Tammany Hall turned off the gas to try to prevent them from meeting.) All of these names are historical footnotes now, as are the many, many names of Van Buren's friends, allies, and rivals. If the minutiae of 19th century New York politics (eventually becoming regional and then national politics) doesn't excite you, then this book will really be a slog, but like Robert Caro's exhaustive biography of Lyndon Johnson, you can see the genius that makes some men great politicians, not because they are particularly brilliant, or charismatic, or visionary, but just because they are really, really good at politics. Van Buren was that kind of man. "The Sly Fox" According to legend, Van Buren managed to avoid committing himself in the speech. In one popular tale a wool buyer told Benjamin Knower that it was a "very able speech," but neither Knower nor the buyer could decide on which side of the tariff question it came down. Van Buren himself recalled that "directness on all points had not been [the] most prominent feature" of the address. Van Buren's opponents took to referring to him as a "sly fox." It wasn't intended as a compliment, and Van Buren didn't take it as one. While he was a very even tempered man who took criticism and insults throughout his life with equanimity, he was known to resent being depicted as some sort of scheming scoundrel. He was a schemer, and to his opponents he might have seemed a scoundrel, but Van Buren was actually principled and relatively uncorrupt... as far as playing as playing the game by the rules went. Whether the game itself was corrupt was not a question that ever troubled him. This is most evident in his position on slavery, which can charitably be described as "equivocal" and less charitably as "mealy-mouthed." Van Buren was a classic centrist. He triangulated, compromised, and never took a position on anything without calculating its political advantageousness. Van Buren didn't keep slaves (though he did own some earlier in his life), but he was anti-abolitionist and one of the Southerners' best friends in the North. Not because he was particularly "pro-slavery," but because the South was an important part of his voting block. Like so many politicians of the era, he'd occasionally say things that suggested he found slavery kinda sorta unpleasant and regrettable, and he took a typically equivocal stand about allowing free blacks to vote, and later in life he would take a (slightly) firmer stance against slavery, but as Cole points out, despite the efforts of some Van Buren supporters to portray him as anti-slavery all along, the burden of proof is on them to show he ever really opposed it. In the famous Amistad case (where former President John Quincy Adams would represent a ship full of captured Africans who had freed themselves and killed their captors), Van Buren issued an executive order to turn the slaves over, to win the favor of Southern slaveholders. (Adams would win the case in the Supreme Court.) His tactical style throughout his career was to seek the moderate middle that would placate, or at least not overly antagonize, either side. While he did have some convictions on political matters (he continued to claim he was an heir to Jefferson, in favor of states rights and limited government), he never let his convictions get in the way of a good compromise that would get him what he wanted. Jacksonian Democracy After reading a biography of the violent and confrontational Andrew Jackson, it seemed strange to me that a mild, urbane New Yorker would become one of Jackson's closest confidantes. But Van Buren was a quiet, diplomatic fixer who despite lacking Jackson's charisma and bluster, agreed with him on most points politically. Van Buren negotiated everything from bank crises to the Peggy Eaton affair with his usual equivocal diplomacy that avoided committing himself too much. He even negotiated an exit from Jackson's cabinet when he perceived that his position as Secretary of State was harming both himself as Jackson. Jackson, famously touchy about disloyalty, not only acquiesced to Van Buren's plan, but appointed him Foreign Minister to Britain. Ironically, it was John C. Calhoun, Jackson's former Vice President whom Jackson had just "fired," who probably put Van Buren on the path to the presidency. In a bit of partisan spite, Calhoun had the Senate reject Van Buren's appointment. Van Buren, already enjoying London high society, received word that his appointment had been withdrawn and that he had to return to the US. It was embarrassing for Van Buren, but it also allowed him to run on the Jackson ticket as Vice President. Which led to him becoming Jackson's successor as President. The Rise of Modern Presidential Politics
One of Cole's themes in writing about Van Buren is Van Buren's introduction of modern party politics to the American political system. He ran on an explicitly party platform, "downplaying the nominee and stressing the party," as Cole puts it. While Van Buren was attacked for being an "effeminate fop," indicating that the modern culture war is not very modern at all, his opponents in the Whig Party were hopelessly divided. Van Buren won the election of 1836 against a field of four rival candidates. Initially, he signaled that he would continue to walk the path of Jacksonian Democracy, opposition to abolition and national banks, and generally defending the rights of the South. Over time, Van Buren would begin to distance himself somewhat from the Old Hero, but he masterfully kept Jackson on his side even when he went against his former mentor and President. Van Buren had been a magician, a fox, and a political mastermind for his entire career. But as President, he seemed to lose most of his art. His presidency was mostly unremarkable, but in the late 1830s, the US suffered a severe economic panic (caused largely by English banks being forced to call in notes due to England's own economic woes), and Van Buren entered the election of 1840 with the economy in full depression. The Log Cabin Campaign Cole once again analyzes the election of 1840 in great detail, crunching the delegate counts and electoral college votes and what Van Buren needed to swing this state or that, but the really interesting part of it was that it was the first election with what we'd recognize as modern political campaigning. Van Buren's opponent was William Henry Harrison, whose chief claim to fame was being the hero of the Battle of Tippecanoe. A mythology built around Harrison that he had personally killed Tecumseh (almost certainly untrue), that he was a humble man "born in a log cabin" (perhaps technically true, if you call his wealthy father's plantation house a "log cabin"), a true earthy, common man, the kind of president you'd like to have a beer with. As opposed to Martin Van Buren, a "used up man," a "cunning magician," a "cool, calculating, intriguing politician." The Whigs embraced this imagery, and even rolled logs along the campaign trail and built log cabins as publicity stunts. They created slogans like "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too!" and created campaign songs. Notably, the Whigs talked very little about actual campaign issues. With Harrison established in the public mind as a rugged frontiersman living in rural simplicity in a log cabin, it was easy to portray Van Buren as an effete Easterner, living in urban elegance in a mansion. While Harrison drank hard cider from an earthenware mug, Van Buren supposedly drank French wine from a silver goblet. All of this undoubtedly helped push Harrison to victory, but really, it was the economy, stupid. Like more than one future president, Van Buren would become a one-term president because of economic woes which were probably largely out of his control. Free Soiler Having been defeated, Van Buren retired to his New York mansion, and claimed he was done with politics, but of course, a career politician like him could never really be done with politics. He tried to exert influence over the Tyler and Polk administrations, but had a severe falling out with Polk, who essentially turned on the old Albany Regency in favor of his own clique. As mentioned above, Van Buren managed to find a conscience after he no longer had much power, and turned on the South and spoke out against slavery. In 1848, he sought the Democratic party nomination, lost, and ran instead on the Free Soil ticket. (His running mate was Charles Francis Adams, son of John Quincy Adams, who had long been one of Van Buren's political foes.) Summary In the 20th century, Van Buren was largely a forgotten figure, though he did have some fans who saw him as the last true Jeffersonian. (One of these was the notoriously anti-Semitic Ezra Pound, who believed Van Buren's campaign for an independent treasury was a defense against Jewish banking interests. He wrote an epic poem Cantos with tributes to Jefferson and Van Buren.) Today, there are probably few people who could describe anything about President Van Buren. He wasn't the most boring or unsuccessful president, but he will make no one's top 10 list. Donald Cole's writing is clear and describes a lot of very unexciting topics in a way that makes it clear why they were significant. He was an expert on Martin Van Buren and Andrew Jackson, and boy does he show you his research. Should you read this book? Probably not, unless you're researching the era or you're a total presidential history nerd. But as with many other biographies, it put the era in context and explains how a lot of things came to be that are still relevant today. I am glad I read this book, though it does not make me look forward to grinding through similarly dry biographies of the many other mediocre has-been presidents in American history. ...more |
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Most presidents have been alpha males — it kind of comes with the territory — but Andrew Jackson was an alpha's alpha. As a child in the Revolutionary
Most presidents have been alpha males — it kind of comes with the territory — but Andrew Jackson was an alpha's alpha. As a child in the Revolutionary War, he told a British officer who tried to make him shine his boots to fuck off (not quite in those words). The officer slashed him across the face with his saber, leaving permanent scars. That foreshadowed what much of the rest of his life would be like. A man of violence and action, Jackson feared nothing but dishonor to himself or his family. He ascended to the White House on his military reputation, still carrying bullets in his body from duels he had fought years earlier. He killed men in duels, he hanged men because he thought they needed hanging, he invaded Florida and committed multiple acts of war against other countries on very loose interpretations of his orders. He was the first president to suffer an assassination attempt, and he personally attacked the would-be assassin. He was in many ways a bloody bastard, very much a man of his era, and not one of the nicer men. He tends to be seen in a negative light today. As president he was responsible for widespread, brutal Indian removals — what today we would call "ethnic cleansing." He owned slaves, and unlike many other slave-owning presidents, never demonstrated any moral angst over it. To the contrary, he had little sympathy for abolitionists, considering them disruptive to the union and a threat to states rights. He could be gracious in victory, but only to a foe who bent the knee unconditionally. But he wasn't a monster, and he had personal qualities besides ferocious bravery that were admirable. Andrew Jackson is more than just the guy on the $20 bill and the president responsible for the Trail of Tears. Jon Meacham takes the "he was a complicated man" approach in portraying Andrew Jackson with less than reverence but also without condemning him. Having previously read Meacham's biography of Thomas Jefferson (another complicated president about whom I came away feeling more negatively than positively), I think Meacham was more critical of Jackson, though still writing about a man for whom he clearly feels admiration. Growing up a poor country boy, Jackson ironically had much in common with one of his arch-rivals, Henry Clay. His father died before he was born. His brother and his mother died during the Revolutionary War, and Jackson would forever hate the British because of it. His mother had wanted Andrew to become a minister, but instead, he became a lawyer (like Henry Clay, and like most early presidents). In the frontier town of Nashville, he met Rachel Donelson, the young wife of an older man named Lewis Robards. Robards was evidently jealous and abusive. While Meacham never directly says so, probably because the sources he was citing never came out and said so, he was violent and probably beating her. Jackson fell in love with Rachel, and after Rachel and her husband separated and Jackson heard that Robards had petitioned for divorce, he swooped in and married her. Problem was, Robards had only petitioned for divorce. Andrew and Rachel got married while she was still technically married to her first husband. Oops. They eventually got remarried properly, but the charges of bigamy would be no small matter that followed Jackson for the rest of his life. He literally killed a man in a duel over it, and when it broke into a public scandal years later during his presidential campaign, Rachel would be so horrified by the things being said about her that she fell into ill health and died shortly after his election. While that probably wasn't the only cause of the stress that killed her, Jackson would forever blame John Quincy Adams and his supporters for killing his wife. His loyalty to his dead wife would also have a major (and as Meacham argues, history-making) impact on Washington politics with the "Eaton Affair." Andrew Jackson famously led American forces at the Battle of New Orleans, a glorious victory that Americans would continue to regard as proof of their "defeat" of the British... despite the fact that the Treaty of Ghent had been signed months earlier and the battle was pointless. In New Orleans, Jackson would declare martial law and ruthlessly suppress dissent. Continuing his military escapades under President Monroe, he waged a war against the Seminoles in Florida. In the process of pursuing Indian tribes, he actually invaded Spanish territory and hanged two Englishmen who had been trading with the Indians. This was an act of war against both Britain and Spain, and would be another sore point for years afterwards as Jackson and his supporters and detractors would argue back and forth about whether he'd actually been authorized to act as he did. It didn't make him less popular with the public, though, and while Henry Clay scoffed at the idea that Jackson's military credentials made him fit for the presidency, Jackson ran against Clay, John Quincy Adams, and William Crawford in the election of 1824. Despite Jackson winning a plurality of both the electoral and the popular vote, the election was thrown to the House, where in what Jackson would denounce as a "Corrupt Bargain," Clay threw his support to Adams, who won the House run-off. Jackson shook hands with Adams afterwards, but this gesture did not shore up hostilities between them. Jackson relentlessly opposed Adams for the next four years, and in 1828, would defeat him for reelection. Jackson took office as a widower. His wife had just died, so Jackson brought his closest family members with him: Andrew and Emily Donelson, the niece and nephew of his late wife. Emily would serve as First Lady in place of the President's wife, and the two of them would be a major source of friction for Jackson because of.... [image] "The Petticoat Affair" or the "Peggy Eaton Affair" revolved around Margaret "Peggy" Eaton, the wife of John Henry Eaton, Jackson's Secretary of War. Peggy was a beautiful woman. She was also brash, attention-seeking, and flirtatious. Her marriage to John Eaton was her second, there was a whiff of scandal about the end of her first marriage, and it was also rumored that as a teenager, she'd been a barmaid and possibly a prostitute. She hit Washington society like a drama bomb, and as John Quincy Adams' wife Louisa put it: "War is declared between some of the ladies in the city, and ladies' wars are always fierce and hot." At times it seemed like Meacham devoted an awful lot of space to what was basically a Washington society scandal. But it helped to illustrate Andrew Jackson's personality and its dilemmas. He was fiercely loyal to his family, and he regarded the country as an extension of his family. He considered John Eaton a friend, and he saw the attacks against Eaton's wife as very similar to the attacks against his beloved late wife. He defended Peggy fiercely, saying "She is as a chaste as a virgin." (As Meacham points out, Peggy herself would probably not have gone so far.) However, the ladies of Washington, and by extension, everyone in Washington, was lining up for or against the Eatons — mostly against. And in the "anti-Eaton" camp was Jackson's beloved niece and acting First Lady, Emily. This was a Big Deal. Eventually forced to choose between them, Jackson, who could never be made to back down, essentially told the Donelsons to either make nice with the Eatons or leave the White House. The Donelsons, prideful themselves, chose to leave. Andrew eventually returned, such was his loyalty to Jackson, but that left his wife out in the boonies, physically and politically. It was gut-wrenching for all of them, but none of them were willing to give. Political appointments and alliances were shaped during this time, and even foreign diplomats were pulled into the drama. It ended with a purge of Jackson's cabinet, engineered by Martin Van Buren, leading to the "Kitchen Cabinet" of Jackson's personal advisors. (Peggy would outlive John Eaton, and later marry an Italian musician forty years younger than her, who ran off to Europe with her money and her granddaughter.) The Nullification Crisis was a sort of prelude to the Civil War. Originating in the "Tariff of Abominations" which had been signed by John Quincy Adams, the South was revolting against the tariff and South Carolina asserted the doctrine of "nullification" — essentially, that states had the right to "nullify" a federal law they considered unconstitutional. Jackson, despite being a strong believer in states rights, was an even stronger believer in his own power and the power of the federal government. He considered nullification to border on treason, and was ready to personally lead troops to squash South Carolina. This lead to great deal of Congressional debate as he asked Congress for the right to use force against South Carolina. Henry Clay ended up engineering a compromise tariff, and South Carolina backed down, but everyone considered the crisis to be a proxy for the slavery question. Southern states were already explicitly framing federal vs. state power as a slavery issue: they perceived that any power the federal government was given over states would inevitably lead to the power to end slavery. In fairness, the South's assumptions about where federal power would eventually lead were essentially correct. The weakening of state power did mean slavery was eventually going to be put on the table. Andrew Jackson managed to forestall the Civil War by about 30 years. It is interesting to think that Jackson, a Southerner's Southerner and no friend of Northern abolitionists or mercantile interests, would nonetheless almost certainly have been pro-Union had he lived that long. Jackson's Indian policy was unquestioningly terrible. Even Meacham, who tries to be as fair as possible to his subject, is quite harsh on Jackson when it comes to Indians and slavery. Put simply, Jackson believed white men had a right to Indian land, and Indians were better off being sent elsewhere. He put it to the Indian tribes he spoke to in paternalistic terms: that they could not safely coexist with whites and that they would be safer if they moved to lands that the federal government had reserved for them where they could hunt and fish and live without interference. Jackson did at times acknowledge that it sucked for the Indians that whites had invaded their land and taken it from them, but his attitude was basically a shrug and "What's done is done." When he spoke of abundant land for the Indians out west, he may have really believed that his plan of resettling them there was benevolent, and that whites wouldn't keep pressing onward and dislocating them again. But if so, it was rather shortsighted of him, and Jackson wasn't a stupid man. When it came to the actual mechanisms by which Indians were relocated — brutal and often fatal — he again shrugged it off as a matter for the individual states to handle. Even Meacham points out that if Jackson had wanted the Indians to be treated less harshly, he had already demonstrated he was quite capable of exerting his will against the states. The infamous Trail of Tears, in which Georgia evicted the Cherokee (who had done everything right according to the white man's rules) was probably the greatest stain on his presidency. The legal issues were complicated, starting with the multiple Supreme Court cases in which the Court initially ruled that it had no jurisdiction. (Meacham is critical of John Marshall too, pointing out that while Marshall is usually cast as the hero of this story, he actually made a political calculation not to intervene.) When the Supreme Court did rule (after a case was brought by white missionaries) it ruled in the Cherokees' favor. Georgia simply evicted the Cherokee anyway, and Jackson, the president who was willing to lead troops against South Carolina during the Nullification Crisis, did nothing about Georgia ignoring the Supreme Court. (His infamous quote "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it" is probably apocryphal, but it does sum up his response.) It was of course a little more complicated than that; the Cherokee had their own political factions, and political corruption. Most of the Cherokee were against being relocated, for obvious reasons, so Jackson found a band that was willing to essentially be bought off to sign a relocation agreement, and pretended that they were the duly authorized representatives of the entire Cherokee nation. While American Lion describes Jackson's early life and goes into some depth on his personality, most of it is about his presidency. Meacham tries to describe Jackson and his political philosophy, which was often complicated and contradictory, but not the unsophisticated bluster that his detractors often accused him of. Just as earlier in life, his reputation was that of an uncouth backwoodsman, who would then surprise people at dinner parties by being elegant and charming, as President he was capable of being diplomatic and a canny politician, who understood the need to let even his enemies save face. Jackson essentially founded the modern Democratic Party, and the first president to run on an explicitly partisan platform. He was pro-slavery, pro-South, and pro-states' rights. At the same time, he was passionately dedicated to the country as one people united. Meacham repeatedly argues that Jackson saw the American people as an extension of his family... and that he was unable to distinguish between attacks on the country and attacks on himself. He seized power to a degree that no president before him had, and alarmed his critics who called him "King Andrew" after he asserted one prerogative after another. His "Kitchen Cabinet' that replaced the regular cabinet. His "Spoils System" after he sacked most of the political appointees of the previous administration (something that is now routine when a new president takes office, but until Jackson, government officers expected to stay in their jobs even if they weren't supporters of the new chief executive). He made free use of veto power — the previous six presidents put together had used the veto 10 times. Jackson used it 12 times. He waged a campaign to destroy the Bank of the United States. In many ways, he redefined the presidency and it made it the office it is today. He introduced a new level of partisanship to Washington — when he appointed Martin Van Buren as a foreign minister, his former Vice President and now-enemy John C. Calhoun led the Senate in rejecting the appointment, a first, and one that was very explicitly motivated by partisanship and a desire to embarrass Jackson and destroy his protege. He was a polarizing figure during his presidency, as he is today, but like many ex-presidents, he acquired a patina of glory and respectability until when he traveled after leaving the White House, even towns that had been thoroughly against him would turn out to celebrate him. When Martin Van Buren, despite Calhoun's efforts, assumed the presidency after Jackson, Jackson would tell his successor that his only two regrets in life were that "I didn't shoot Henry Clay and I didn't murder John C. Calhoun." That about sums up Jackson's life. American Lion is a thorough political biography, though the vast majority of it is devoted to Jackson's years as president. I felt Jon Meacham did a better job with Jackson than he did with Jefferson, but he still failed to reach the very high mark set by Robert Caro, who remains the gold standard for writing presidential biographies that are thorough, even-handed, not unnecessarily preachy, and yet also critical. I finished this book feeling like Andrew Jackson was a bastard, but a thoroughly American bastard of a type whose time is now past, but we shouldn't feel too smug about no longer glorifying such bastards. He made America what it is, for better and for worse. ...more |
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The other biographies I've read by Harlow Giles Unger were all clearly biased favorably towards his subjects, but this biography of John Marshall is t
The other biographies I've read by Harlow Giles Unger were all clearly biased favorably towards his subjects, but this biography of John Marshall is the most blatant apple-polishing of a historical figure I've read yet. Not only does Unger practically attach a halo to John Marshall's head, he casts a clear villain in the story: Thomas Jefferson. Ron Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton was not particularly flattering to Jefferson, and Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical cast Jefferson as Hamilton's antagonist, but Harlow Giles Unger frequently strips away objectivity in declaring Jefferson cowardly, disingenuous, treasonous, meddling, and generally representing just about everything he did as self-serving and disingenuous, especially when it was in opposition to John Marshall. And I am broadly sympathetic to Unger's POV here. John Marshall was a Federalist who established the independence and equal stature of the Supreme Court, at a time when Jefferson wanted the United States to be no more than a confederation, and the judiciary to be completely subordinate to executive power. From reading previous Founding Father histories, I was already predisposed to dislike Jefferson. Nonetheless, it was notable in this book that everything John Marshall did was wise and principled and patriotic (oh yeah and he owned slaves *cough* *cough*) and everyone who disagreed with him was either Thomas Jefferson or a puppet of Jefferson. Unger really pulls out all the stops in vilifying Jefferson. When our old muckraking friend James T. Callender shows up (he was the guy who exposed Alexander Hamilton's infidelity and Thomas Jefferson's affair with Sally Hemmings), Unger all but accuses Jefferson of having him killed. (Callender, a known drunkard, was found drowned in the James River, and while the timing of his death was convenient and he had no shortage of enemies, there does not seem to have been any actual evidence that he was murdered.) John Marshall's father surveyed the colonial frontier with a young George Washington. John Marshall became a surveyor himself, which was a profitable career at that time, before he became a lawyer. When the Revolutionary War rolled around, Marshall served in the Continental Army, rising to the rank of Colonel. The story of John Marshall meeting his wife, Polly Ambler, who would be the love of his life for the next fifty years, is a sweet and charming love story with an asterisk. He was a young officer who had been invited with several others to attend a ball being thrown by the wealthy Jaquelin Ambler, who had several eligible daughters to show off. They were all very excited to meet the dashing officer, until Marshall stumbled in, haggard, badly dressed, unwashed, unshaven, his uniform much the worse for wear... in other words, he looked like a soldier just coming in from the field. The Ambler sisters were unimpressed... except for fourteen-year-old Polly, who wasn't supposed to be there because she was too young. But she snuck into the ball, met John Marshall, and they fell in love... Yup, 26-year-old John Marshall wooed a fourteen-year-old. This was, of course, not so eyebrow-raising back then, but it certainly got a raised eyebrow from me as Unger waxed on about the saintly Marshall. Polly would prove to be an anxious, fragile woman. Like many women of her time, she spent much of her life pregnant, and suffered multiple miscarriages. This took a severe toll on her physical and mental health, and though John was a devoted husband (even Polly's sisters eventually came to like him), she seemed to live much of her life either recovering from illness or difficult pregnancies, or being terrified for her husband's safety. John Marshall's political career began in the Virginia state legislature, where he defended the ratification of the Constitution, even standing up to the venerable Patrick Henry and calling him a hypocrite at one point. Under President Adams, Marshall was asked to go to France to try to negotiate peace during the "Quasi-War" with Revolutionary France. He was one of the American envoys who was solicited for a bribe by agents of French Minister Tallyrand in what became known as the XYZ Affair. Marshall was one of the few people who came out looking good to the American public. Not so much to his wife, though. While in France, Marshall and his fellow American envoys were put up in the luxurious estate of a wealthy French lady who they thought was just the nicest mademoiselle ever, until they found out she was more of a madam — literally a courtesan in Tallyrand's employ. John Marshall, so far as is known, never succumbed to the little fille's advances, but he made the mistake of writing home about how gay Paris was and the lovely house and the nice lady he was staying with, while Polly was suffering from another failed pregnancy and separation anxiety. It did not go over well. Polly became convinced her husband was being seduced by a fancy French trollop, which did nothing for her mental health. When he returned home, he reunited with his wife, convinced her he had not been out on the town with French courtesans, and ran for Congress. In 1800, John Adams made Marshall Secretary of State, and Marshall was widely considered a future contender for President. Then came the split in the Federalist Party, precipitated by Alexander Hamilton's dislike of both Adams and Jefferson. Realizing that he had probably lost reelection, in the waning days of his administration, John Adams appointed John Marshall to the Supreme Court. (Marshall was not, in fact, Adams' first choice, but John Jay, his first pick, turned it down.) For the man who would later become a stalwart defender of the Constitution, Unger does point out that under Adams, John Marshall was given a vast amount of power that the Constitution does not delegate to the Secretary of State. Adams literally made Marshall his proxy. Along with Marshall, Adams also filled the federal courts with Federalists, who would become known as "midnight judges," and be a source of contention and some of the Supreme Court's biggest legal battles under the Jefferson administration. John Marshall basically created the Supreme Court as we know it today. The Supreme Court is defined in Article III of the Constitution, but it was left to Congress to organize it, and initially, it wasn't a significant part of the government. In the 11 years before John Marshall took the bench, the Supreme Court had decided 11 cases, none of them particularly significant to the country overall. Then came Thomas Jefferson, who as Unger describes it, basically went about trying to strip all power from anyone who opposed him. He started by trying to undo everything the Federalists had done, including John Adams' "midnight judges." He didn't have the Constitutional power to undo judicial nominations that had been confirmed by the Senate, so instead, he simply refused to deliver their commissions. One of the judges who had effectively been prevented from taking the bench he'd been appointed to, William Marbury, filed suit against Secretary of State James Madison (who was technically the one withholding commissions). The court ruled against Madison, and moreover, ruled that a federal law that was tangential to the case was unconstitutional and thus invalid. Many legal scholars consider Marbury vs. Madison the most important case the U.S. Supreme Court ever decided, because it basically established the Court's power to strike down laws passed by the legislature, or executive orders, as unconstitutional. While arguably this power was implicit in the Constitution (obviously, because it's the argument John Marshall made), it came as a surprise to many of the signers of the Constitution, including President Jefferson. It made the Supreme Court an independent and coequal branch of the government. Thomas Jefferson would spend the rest of his presidency trying to get rid of John Marshall. Here, again, Unger takes an extremely partisan view, one that I am partial to, but it would have been a better book if the author had acknowledged that Marbury vs. Madison is controversial to this day, and that Jefferson's concerns were not solely pique at being foiled. All the complaints we hear today about "activist judges" stem from Marbury vs. Madison, and indeed, most of the Founding Fathers didn't envision the Supreme Court as a body that could effectively write new law. For better or for worse, this was an unanticipated evolution of the court as defined in the Constitution, and the Marshall court unquestionably changed the course of history. For starters, Thomas Jefferson tried to have Associate Justice Samuel Chase impeached on trumped up charges of judicial bias. Chase was apparently prone to making scornful and rude comments from the bench, a practice that Marshall convinced him was unbecoming of a judge, but the real reason Jefferson wanted to get rid of him was that he was a Federalist and a friend of John Marshall. Jefferson made many attempts to bring the Supreme Court to heel and dismiss judges he didn't like. He "packed" the court by increasing it to seven judges, and experienced another phenomenon that would plague many later presidents: the discovery that putting someone you think is ideologically aligned on the bench does not guarantee they're going to rule the way you'd like. Jefferson repeatedly appointed anti-Federalists to the Supreme Court, only for them to become friends with John Marshall, and also to decide that they liked being independent and able to rule according to what they actually believed the Constitution said. Good old Aaron Burr, the other arch-villain of Hamilton, and most Founding Father biographies. I've noted that most biographers cast Burr in an extremely negative light, not just for killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel, but for a career of political shenanigans aimed at advancing his own political interests... like every other politician then and now. I wondered if his frequent depiction as an unprincipled gigolo was doing the man justice. Unger is very sympathetic to Aaron Burr, but mostly because Burr was one of Jefferson's enemies. He represents Burr as being a politician, yes, but emphasizes how principled and fair he was in his role as Vice President and President of the Senate... again, because he was voting against Jefferson. When Aaron Burr went off to (allegedly) try to create an empire in Spanish territory, Jefferson had him charged with treason. His case came before the Supreme Court, and John Marshall dismissed the treason charge as having no foundation, but held him over for trial on the misdemeanor charge of trying to start shit with Spain, a charge of which he was eventually acquitted. Other biographers have heavily implied that Burr really was trying to start his own empire, while Unger takes Burr's claims — that he was just trying to acquire real estate and become a farmer — at face value. (According to Unger, Burr also literally became a gigolo when he went off to Europe following his legal troubles.) Jefferson was furious, and stirred up so much hatred of John Marshall that people were burning him in effigy in Baltimore, something that nearly caused Marshall's wife Polly to have another breakdown. Most of the rest of the book covers the Marshall's courts significant rulings, of which there were many. Most every power of the Supreme Court today was created in the Marshall court. McCulloch v. Maryland was probably the most far-reaching case, next to Marbury vs. Madison, as it gave Congress the authority to charter a national bank, and established that states could not tax the federal government. It all but settled the question of the federal government vs. states' rights in favor of the federal government... and essentially made the Civil War inevitable. Cherokee Nation vs. Georgia was probably the most infamous and tragic case of John Marshall's career. The state of Georgia had essentially stripped the Cherokee of all rights and ordered them removed from their lands. Marshall was sympathetic, but unable to help them because, under U.S. law, the Cherokee literally had no legal standing. But when a group of white missionaries brought suit, the Marshall court was able to rule against Georgia. Georgia's response was to flat-out ignore the Supreme Court's judgment, and President Andrew Jackson, refusing to do anything about it, uttered his famous rebuke to the court: "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it." The Supreme Court has always had to perform a delicate balancing act, well aware that it has the responsibility of defending the Constitution against politicians who would love to just do whatever they want, but also aware that they have no enforcement powers, and that Congress and the President have a lot of power to strip the court of the powers it does have. The idea that Supreme Court justices act in a vacuum and never take political considerations into account is false; they have to take political considerations into account, not just for their own ideological reasons, but to preserve their own legitimacy. I didn't learn that from this book, but from other books on the history of the court, but this book described a lot of the early foundations of the court and how it came to be, and just how pivotal a figure John Marshall was. Like all of Harlow Unger's biographies, I found this well-written and informative, but it was definitely more biased than his previous works. Here, his subject is almost saintly, his enemies dastardly enemies of the Constitution. John Marshall was a great and brilliant man, but he certainly had personal and political flaws. I wish we'd seen them through a slightly less adoring lens. ...more |
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Henry Clay is a relatively forgotten figure today, because he never became president, but in his day, he was a national figure with an enormous impact
Henry Clay is a relatively forgotten figure today, because he never became president, but in his day, he was a national figure with an enormous impact on American politics. I've come to quite appreciate Harlow Giles Unger's short biographies; he's written quite a few books about the B-listers of American history, and as accompaniments to the presidential biographies I've been reading, they really fill in a lot of detail. Clay was born the year after American independence. He got his start as a Kentucky lawyer. Fond of drinking, gambling, and womanizing, he married Lucretia Hart, a homely girl with a rich father. Like so many of our early statesman, Henry Clay was complicated, a mix of virtues and vices. He was an able criminal attorney, and more or less invented the insanity defense, when he got a woman off for killing her sister-in-law. He once told a grinning defendant, "Perhaps I save too many like you who ought to be hanged." He resigned as prosecutor rather than prosecute a slave who killed an overseer who was beating him. He often wrote about the injustices of slavery, and his desire that slavery should be abolished. And yet (you may have seen this coming) he was a slave owner. Clay started his political career in the Kentucky state legislature, and while speaker of the Kentucky state house, he challenged another legislator to a duel. Despite firing three times at one another with intent to kill, both of them survived. Clay would later fight another duel while a U.S. Senator, with Senator John Randolph of Virginia, over an insult issued on the Senate floor. Even though the Senate had rules specifically "privileging" speech on the floor so that Senators couldn't challenge each other over insults during political debates, Randolph waived his privileges. He was in fact widely considered to be not in his right mind and Clay was mocked for challenging a crazy person to a duel, though once again, both of them survived, and they played cards together the next week. Honor culture was quite a thing. Clay was elected to the House of Representatives in 1810. He remained a practicing a lawyer even after being elected to public office. His most famous client was Aaron Burr. Clay defended the former Vice President against charges of treason for supposedly planning to create his own empire west of the Mississippi. (In fact, Burr probably was trying to do that, but Clay still believed the charges against him were bullshit and Thomas Jefferson was just trying to railroad him.) He was elected as Speaker of the House, becoming the youngest Speaker ever, and the first (and only) freshman Congressman to hold that office. As Speaker, Clay would transform the House, turning it from what had been a bunch of presidential yes-men and lackeys into an independent branch that challenged executive power. I found Clay's rise in molding the House in his image to be similar to Lyndon Johnson's rise, a century and a half later, as he took over the Senate. President Madison asked Clay to go to Europe with John Quincy Adams to try to negotiate an end to the War of 1812. While John Quincy was up early in the morning to read his Bible, Clay and the other American delegates would still be up from a late night of carousing and gambling. They thought John Quincy was a no-fun Puritan scold, and John Quincy thought Clay was a redneck lout. It was Clay's gregariousness that kept the tired and demoralized Americans from going home, and Adams and Clay together eventually managed to negotiate the Treaty of Ghent. They didn't exactly start as friends, but Adams and Clay would work together for the rest of their lives. 34 years later, as John Quincy Adams lay dying on the floor of the House chambers, Henry Clay would say good-bye to him and be overwhelmed with emotion. Back in Washington, Clay was riding high on the public perception that they had "forced the British to surrender," even though the Battle of New Orleans was fought after the Treaty of Ghent had already been signed. But the hero of New Orleans, Andrew Jackson, was also riding high. Clay didn't think Jackson was qualified for office just because he was a military leader. During the election of 1824, the first of Clay's four attempts to become President, he finished fourth in a five-man race that split the electoral votes, forcing the House to choose the winner. Despite having lost humiliatingly, Clay was suddenly in a kingmaking position, since all the other candidates needed his support (and electoral votes) to win. All of them, even Jackson, approached him, but it was after a private talk with John Quincy Adams that Clay threw his support behind Adams. Adams became President, he appointed Clay his Secretary of State, and Andrew Jackson denounced the "Corrupt Bargain." Clay and Jackson would be mortal political enemies forever after. While Clay has to this day been accused of making a "Corrupt Bargain" to become Secretary of State (which, back then, was an even more powerful position than it is today, and was usually a stepping stone to the Presidency), in fairness, he and Adams had a lot of other reasons to team up. They had gotten to know each other back in Ghent, and Adams supported Clay's "American System," which was an ambitious program to expand America's wealth and infrastructure with a combination of protective tariffs, a national bank, and a national transportation system. In fact, Clay had been inspired by the work of Alexander Hamilton, and he would also revive Hamilton's doctrine of "implied powers." Unfortunately, John Quincy Adams proved to be a mediocre president who was not good at getting his ideas implemented. The "American System" he and Clay championed went over poorly, and Adams lost reelection to Clay's nemesis, Andrew Jackson. Clay was elected to the Senate, and ran against Andrew Jackson in 1832. He actually thought he was winning because he was very popular on the campaign trail, packing crowds and winning much laughter and applause with his stump speeches, but when the votes came in, Jackson had crushed him. Andrew Jackson had dumped his vice president, John C. Calhoun, so Calhoun returned to the Senate, and along with Daniel Webster, Clay and Calhoun became the "Great Triumvirate" who dominated the Senate for the next 18 years. During this period, Clay began to gain a reputation for engineering brilliant compromises — between the North and the South, between abolitionists and slave-owners, mostly — and won the title of the "Great Pacificator." Although he was well respected, his compromises actually tended to piss off both sides, while holding the Senate together — barely. He also became the de facto head of the newly-formed Whig party, which was an unsteady alliance of anti-Jacksonians that never really coalesced as a political party. In the election of 1840, Clay sought the nomination of the Whig Party, and expected to win it, but ended up being backstabbed by the party bosses, who wanted someone more malleable than Clay in the White House. Clay nonetheless loyally supported President-elect Harrison, only for Harrison to die a month into office and be replaced by Vice President Tyler, who then turned on the Whigs. On his fourth attempt at the Presidency, Clay ran against James K. Polk in 1844. Once again, he thought he had it in the bag, only to open the newspaper on election day and learn that Polk had narrowly defeated him. Clay returned to the Senate, until failing health forced him to resign. His crowning achievement was the Compromise of 1850, which narrowly prevented a schism between North and South. Clay would die believing he'd saved the Union. During his last run for the presidency, "Clay Clubs" had sprung up all over the country, and one enthusiastic local chapter head was a young Illinois lawyer named Abraham Lincoln, who would later cite Clay frequently as inspiration for his own political ideals. Like a lot of slave-owning statesmen, Clay spent a lot of time in his final years wrestling with the cognitive dissonance of owning slaves while knowing it was wrong. He had established the American Colonization Society, whose goal was to liberate slaves and send them back to Africa to found a free state. He advocated "gradual emancipation," and freed his slaves in his will. Henry Clay might have been a great president. He'd probably at least have been a good one. Had he been elected, it's possible the Civil War might have been put off for a few more years, though it's unlikely that Clay's compromises would have prevented the inevitable split. Probably one of the most interesting "minor" players in American history I have read about, with the exception of Aaron Burr. ...more |
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really liked it
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This biography, by Harlow Giles Unger, was on the short side, and it's unabashedly laudatory. John Quincy comes off as a man who's hard not to admire
This biography, by Harlow Giles Unger, was on the short side, and it's unabashedly laudatory. John Quincy comes off as a man who's hard not to admire unambiguously; you will have to scrutinize Unger's biography carefully to find any flaws in the man. (His most glaring flaw seems to have been that he was too principled for the presidency.) It took a while for me to warm up to Unger's writing, which for the first half of the book is thorough but neither deep nor particularly opinionated, and read like an extended Wikipedia-level information dump. However, as Unger becomes increasingly admiring, I got caught up in his praise for John Quincy, especially in the final act, where the ex-president returned to Congress (the only former president ever to do so) and gleefully became a gadfly and anti-slavery crusader against the growing power of the South. John Quincy Adams was the eldest son of second president John Adams, who lived to see John Quincy occupy the White House himself. At the age of 9, he rode as a courier from his home in Braintree, Massachusetts to carry messages to the American revolutionary army. At the age of 10, he was studying Greek and Latin. At the age of 11, he sailed with his father to Europe. While the elder Adams never saw battle, John Quincy saw his father arming himself and preparing to fight to the death as their vessel was nearly intercepted by British warships, who would have hung John senior and impressed John Quincy. While in London and France, John Quincy spent a lot of time at the home of Thomas Jefferson, and the two of them remained friends even while Jefferson and the senior Adams spent years estranged. Having spent years in Europe with his father, John Quincy returned to Boston at the age of 17, where he tested for admittance to Harvard. Even in 1785, Harvard had a tradition of legacy admissions. It turns it out it also already had a tradition of self-important academics who sometimes reveled in the petty power they exercised. John Quincy's suave, European manners and his expectation that admission to Harvard for the son of a VIP alumnus was merely a formality rubbed the president of the college the wrong way, and he summarily declared that the young man was not qualified. Adams was forced to spend a year hitting the books and being tutored some more. When he was examined again, this time before a committee, the president grudgingly admitted him. If you're looking for flaws in the younger Adams, you can see one of them manifesting here. He just assumed that being educated, highly qualified, and knowing what he was talking about would be recognized and appreciated and earn him his just due. It did not occur to him that some people don't like hoity-toity know-it-alls. This would not be the first time he would make this mistake. After graduating Harvard, Adams initially avoided politics and opened a law practice. But President Washington asked him to go to the Netherlands as U.S. ambassador. John and Abigail Adams, who were always pushing their son to live up to their considerable expectations for him, talked him into accepting. They were less pleased when while spending a winter in London, John Quincy spent time with a wealthy American merchant named Joshua Johnson, who had seven daughters he was anxious to marry off. They expected JQ to hook up with the eldest, but instead he proposed to the second daughter, Louisa. Abigail Adams, upon hearing that her son was engaged, said: "I would hope, for the love I bear my country, that the siren is at least half blood." Louisa was born in London and had grown up in England and France, which made her British as far as the Adamses were concerned. (Louisa would become the first, and until Melania Trump, the only First Lady not to have been born in the United States.) Abigail's comment probably sounds harsher than was intended, since Abigail, like her husband, had a wry wit that I think often did not come across very well. But reading between the lines (and from what I have gleaned in other biographies), the Adams family might have been warm and personable once you got to know them, but they struck outsiders as humorless Puritan scolds with a stick up their asses, and Louisa definitely started out as an outsider. She had a better relationship with her mother-in-law later in life, but she definitely did not feel as if the family embraced her at first. It didn't help that immediately after their wedding, John Quincy and Louisa returned home to find angry creditors waiting for them. It turned out that Louisa's father, deeply in debt, had fled the country, leaving his creditors demanding payment from his new son-in-law. Since Adams didn't get his promised dowry, he could have legally annulled the marriage. He didn't, but Louisa felt the humiliation of this incident for the rest of her life. Then President Washington sent word that John Quincy was to become the new U.S. ambassador to Portugal. No sooner had they packed and shipped off most of their household goods to Lisbon than the newly-elected President Adams sent him to Prussia instead. This was a much more prestigious post, and John Adams almost didn't send his son, because he was strongly against nepotism. However, John Quincy really had been an extremely capable overseas ambassador, both in his negotiations with foreign powers and at his more important job: collecting intelligence which he sent back to America. So George Washington persuaded the senior Adams not to let appearances prevent him from giving his son a job he was very good at. The result of this was that John Quincy lost a small fortune (getting all your stuff that's been sent to Portugal when you're in Prussia was a little bit trickier in the 18th century) and John Adams senior got smeared in the press for nepotism. After John Adams lost reelection to Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy returned home. Initially he restarted a law practice, but then he was elected to the Massachesetts senate. Here, he began crusading against corruption and being a general pain in the ass. His fellow Massholes decided the best way to get rid of him was to send him to the U.S. Senate instead. This seemed like a good idea because the Senate at the time was mostly useless. They would end up regretting this. John Quincy Adams, throughout his life, would be honest to a fault and refuse to put loyalty to party or even pragmatism over his principles. In other words, he was a humorless Puritan scold with a stick up his ass. (He did find a "principled" way to read a Constitutional justification for Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase: by changing one line to make it "with the consent and agreement of France," it became a treaty which the President had the authority to sign, rather than a land purchase which he did not.) Despite being a Northern Federalist, he voted in favor of a British embargo which Southerners supported and Northerners opposed. This was the last straw for his fellow Federalists, who elected his successor before his term was even up. Having been knifed in the back by his own party, Adams resigned from the Senate and returned to Boston where, despite being shunned professionally and socially by Federalists, he became quite successful, and even argued some landmark cases before the Supreme Court. This would happen again. In 1809, President James Madison asked Adams to go back to Europe, this time as Minister to Russia. He accepted without consulting with his wife first. Louisa was not happy. In fact, Louisa's life and marriage seems to have been kind of unhappy in general. She spent most of her married life pregnant, and had multiple miscarriages. In St. Petersburg, she gave birth to a little girl, who died at the age of two. John and Louisa had five sons who survived to adulthood, three of whom they would see succumb to alcoholism. John Quincy and Louisa didn't exactly have a bad marriage, but from letters they both left behind, it's apparent that she frequently felt frustrated, neglected, and taken for granted. She suffered from depression, and her in-laws were, well, humorless Puritan scolds with sticks up their asses. They did, however, genuinely love each other, and there were some amusing episodes when John Quincy, separated from his wife, sent her erotic poetry. She threatened to publish it. This echoes the flirtatious, teasing love letters John and Abigail Adams used to send each other. But she helped him become president Adams was next sent to England, to help negotiate an end to the War of 1812. For months, there was little progress, as both sides would amend their demands depending on how the war was going. Eventually, however, John Quincy helped negotiate the Treaty of Ghent. James Madison also nominated John Quincy Adams to the Supreme Court. He pushed the nomination through, and Adams turned it down. (His parents were not pleased.) When he returned to the U.S., President Monroe appointed him Secretary of State. John Quincy once again excelled in his role. After Andrew Jackson ran amok in Florida and almost triggered wars with both England and Spain, Adams defended him and negotiated a treaty that essentially expanded the United States almost to its present borders. The Monroe Doctrine was largely penned by Adams. By now, it was well established that Secretary of State was the usual stepping stone to becoming President. Here, John Quincy frustrated everyone from his party to his wife and his father. He wanted to be president. He thought he deserved to be president. He was sure he'd be a good president. But he refused to run for president. Adams, taking one of his principled stands that seems charmingly oblivious now and was naive even then, believed that it was unbecoming to seek office. The people were supposed to want you to take office and, essentially, do any necessary campaigning for you. This had also been Washington's stand, more or less, but no one else but John Quincy Adams ever tried that, at least not and became president. Louisa, realizing that her husband was refusing to do the necessary, took it upon herself to learn the political ropes. A few years earlier, First Lady Dolly Madison had explained a bit about how Washington politics worked to Louisa, when she was having a hard time adjusting. Now, Louisa started throwing parties, inviting other Washington wives over, and doing the behind-the-scenes schmoozing that her husband wouldn't. This didn't get John Quincy into the White House by itself, but it finally mobilized enough political support that in the election of 1824… well, Adams actually lost both the popular and the electoral vote. Andrew Jackson, to whom Adams had offered the vice presidency, won a plurality, but not enough votes to win outright in a five-way race between Adams, Jackson, William H. Crawford, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun. Before the run-off election, Adams met with Clay to talk over their issues and come to an agreement. Whatever the actual terms of their agreement, it had the appearance of a shady deal when Clay threw his support behind Adams, Adams ended up winning the run-off, and then appointed Clay as Secretary of State. (John Calhoun would become his vice president.) Andrew Jackson called this a "Corrupt Bargain," and pretty much from the moment Adams took office was working to undermine him. It is ironic that one of the shortest sections of Unger's book is about John Quincy's presidency. To hear Unger tell it, the second President Adams basically accomplished almost nothing, being sabotaged and sandbagged by hostile Southerners under the command of Andrew Jackson, and spent much of his time moping. He does, however, point out that much of the damage was self-inflicted. Appointing Henry Clay as Secretary of State (and thus as presumptive heir to the presidency) angered both Andrew Jackson and Vice President Calhoun. Adams' inaugural address, which was full of lofty rhetoric about ambitious public works, was tone deaf and alienating. He would repeatedly throughout his presidency come off as a high-falutin' fancy-speaking aristocrat when talking to ordinary people, which made his grand schemes for the improvement of the country seem more like imperial ambitions than national interest. John Quincy Adams was far from the worst president in U.S. history, but his administration had little to show for itself when he was soundly beaten by Andrew Jackson in 1828. He limped out of Washington without attending the inauguration. Most ex-presidents retire, hit the speaking circuit, write memoirs, play gold, sit on boards. John Quincy ran for Congress in 1830, and would hold the office for 8 terms, until his death. As U.S. Representative from Massachusetts, he continued to reject the idea of party loyalty. Instead he turned his sights on slavery. Unger's descriptions of Adams in Congress over the next 16 years are both entertaining and inspiring. The Southerners had created a "gag rule" which basically forbade the issue of slavery to even be put on the table. Adams defied the gag rule repeatedly, so the Southerners kept amending it until they were pretty much adding provisions to the gag rule specifically to shut Adams up. He would get in yelling matches with the Speaker of the House while all the Southern delegates were hissing and booing at him. At one point, after Congress had forbidden the word "slavery" to even be spoken in chamber, Adams stood up to read " A prayer from a women's religious society among my constituents…." (Yeah, okay, whatever, think the Southerners) "... for the abolishment of slavery--" (outrage and pandemonium ensues) I loved this part. John Quincy Adams all but put on a mask and a cape, becoming a villain as far the South was concerned (at one point, they almost gathered enough support to expel him from Congress), but a hero to abolitionists throughout the country, who realizing that Adams would stand for them no matter what state they were in, deluged Congress with tens of thousands of petitions. Adams would eventually succeed in getting the gag rule abolished, as the increasing restrictions that were put on him made more congressmen realize that, gosh, those restrictions could be applied to them too. Besides his relentless opposition to slavery, in which Adams would fight against the Jackson, Van Buren, Tyler, and Polk administrations, he is also pretty much responsible for the Smithsonian as it exists today. A wealthy British scientist left a fortune to the U.S. government for "the increase and diffusion of knowledge." Naturally Andrew Jackson and his cronies saw this as a windfall for them to plunder. But Adams, who despite being hated on the slavery issue, had also earned respect as a principled and nonpartisan politician on other issues, managed to wrangle the money out of various spoils schemes and created the non-partisan trust that established the Smithsonian Institution. In 1839, a Spanish ship, La Amistad, was carrying a "cargo" of captured Africans off the coast of Cuba when the Africans escaped, killed the captain, and demanded that the surviving crew take them home. The navigators obeyed during the day, but at night, pointed the ship north. It eventually wound up in U.S. waters, and when the Africans were taken prisoner, the Spanish demanded their return, claiming they were "escaped property." In the U.S., they were charged with mutiny and murder. Abolitionists took up their case and claimed that the Africans had been illegally kidnapped, and thus they were exercising their legal right of self defense. A New York district court ruled in the Africans' favor, but President Van Buren, who was having political troubles with Southerners, demanded the case be appealed. Running out of money, the abolitionists asked John Quincy Adams for help. He argued the case before the U.S. Supreme Court. In Unger's book, this moment is like the climax of a novel, and his description of Adams' march into the Supreme Court, where he faced a majority of Southern Justices who were hostile to him, to deliver a closing argument that left tears in their eyes, was, well, worthy of a Spielberg movie. (I have not seen the movie, by the way.) As hated as he was by Southerners, John Quincy Adams was a noble enemy they couldn't help respecting. When he returned to Congress after a stroke, everyone applauded him. In 1848, he fell on the floor of the House, while in the middle of protesting yet another bill. He never left the Capitol Building, and died two days later. Besides gaining an appreciation for the unfortunate man who, like his father, failed in office and became a one-term president, I learned a lot more about how many states threatened secession and civil war before we had a real secession and civil war, how quickly national fortunes can change (America went from the dog everyone kicked to the mighty ruler of the Western hemisphere everyone wanted to placate and trade with in the space of a few decades), and how corrupt and venal party politics have always been. All these things were already taking shape starting with Washington's administration, but having read presidential biographies in order, you can really trace the evolution until we get to John Quincy Adams, where battle lines between North and South were now becoming entrenched, and like the growing threat on the horizon in an epic fantasy series, you can hear the rumblings of war from decades in the future. It couldn't have been plotted or foreshadowed better by a novelist: one of John Quincy's admirers in his later years, as he becomes an anti-slavery firebrand, is a young freshman congressman from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln. Obviously, I came away quite liking John Quincy Adams. More than I liked his father, in fact. But how was this as a biography? Well, I think Unger's writing was okay. At times -- when he brings us into the House and describes Representative Adams railing against slavery -- it was compelling and brought his subject to life. At other times, it was just a narrative description of events in his life. A few touches of insight into Louisa's feelings, John Quincy's relations with his famous parents, the political machinations of other actors, were welcome but sparse. There are a number of much larger biographies of John Quincy Adams available, so perhaps this was as complete as it could have been for its length. Unger seems to be a prolific biographer of politicians from this era, so I may read a few more. ...more |
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| unknown
| 4.08
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| Jun 11, 2019
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it was amazing
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Having read biographies of six of the Founding Fathers in the last year, including Ron Chernow's splendid Alexander Hamilton, there are a lot of recur
Having read biographies of six of the Founding Fathers in the last year, including Ron Chernow's splendid Alexander Hamilton, there are a lot of recurring characters weaving through all their lives, as they all wove through each other's lives. It was a pretty small society; everyone knew each other. One character who figures significantly throughout the early Republic is Aaron Burr. [image] The third Vice President, who killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel and was later accused of trying to take Mexico from Spain and create his own empire, tried for treason for allegedly planning to take part of the United States with him, a rascal and a rake who was the toast of Southerners who hated Hamilton, the toast of ladies throughout Europe, later remarried and then was divorced by a rich widow who was represented by one of Hamilton's sons, he has seemed in all the biographies I've read to be an interesting man. But he's always described as more or less a villain. Whatever his charming qualities (he's often mentioned being genuinely beneficent towards poor ladies), very little else good is said about Aaron Burr. Ron Chernow calls him a murderer, and in describing his duel with Hamilton, goes over all the claims made by partisans on both sides but is clearly more sympathetic to Hamilton's version. Biographers of Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe all describe a man who was a political weathercock, devoid of any genuine principals except self-interest. He switched between the Republicans and the Federalists whenever it was convenient, all with the ultimate goal of becoming president himself, and when that didn't work out, he tried to raise an army to take over Mexico. I could not help wondering whether Aaron Burr was being portrayed fairly. After all, to have held so much influence for as long as he did (there was an electoral path that could easily have made him president instead of Jefferson, had things worked out just a little bit differently), he must have had friends. Surely Burr felt justified in his reasons for dueling Hamilton; they had once been friends. Did he just decide he wanted to murder a political rival out of spite? There are biographies written of Burr, including some that appear to be sympathetic. He definitely has his defenders. Yet to get another view of the man, I ended up reading a work of historical fiction, by the late author Gore Vidal, whom I have never read before. Burr is the first in a series of books Vidal wrote about the American empire. In the author's preface, he comes off as a little pretentious, and seems to think he invented the idea of historical fiction. But this novel was truly a fantastic experience, and Vidal absolutely researched the hell out of his subject. Every scene, from major historical events to minor anecdotes from the lives of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton, I recognized from the biographies of those men. The Aaron Burr that Vidal brings us in this book is a fictional character, yet it's a compelling and believable version of him. This Aaron Burr is wry, witty, and oh yes, he was always right and all the others, from Washington to Hamilton, were the real scoundrels, who constantly took advantage of Aaron Burr's good and principled nature. This may not be the truth, and it may not even be how the real Burr would have told his own story. But let's say it's a version of the truth. The device Vidal uses to tell Burr's story is the one fictional character he introduces: a young journalist named Charles Schuyler (not one of those Schuylers, as he has to tell people), who's hired to do a hit piece on the elderly former senator and vice president. The election of 1836 is looming, Martin Van Buren is the heir apparent, and the anti-Van Buren faction wants to torpedo his election by digging up evidence that long-whispered rumors of Van Buren being Aaron Burr's illegitimate son are true. (This, like all the other details in Vidal's novel, was based on historical fact: it really was a rumor that followed them around.) So young Charles Schuyler ingratiates himself with Aaron Burr, and ends up having his entire life history dictated to him, including the "real" story about everything from the Revolutionary War and Washington's generalship (terrible, according to Burr, and again, historians actually agree that Washington was pretty bad as a military strategist) to that fatal duel with Hamilton (in one of the few clearly fictional embellishments — or is it? — Vidal has Schuyler learn of Hamilton's real reason for challenging Hamilton to a duel, a reason that is plausible but, as far as I can tell, not actually mentioned in any historical records). Along the way, Burr absolutely trashes every other Founding Father. His description of George Washington ("He had the hips, buttocks and bosom of a woman") is of a dullard whose stoic, presidential demeanor was a veneer over his greed and ego. According to Burr, they'd have captured Canada if Washington had listened to him. Thomas Jefferson was a sleazy little sneak who considered the Constitution to be just words that meant whatever was convenient for him (more or less true, in my readings of biographies of Jefferson and others). Vidal's Burr gives a very believable version of Jefferson's double-dealing and selling out his own vice president, and later trying to have him convicted of treason over a plan that Jefferson himself supported. Again, it's a narrative that might not actually be true, but it fits the historical facts. James Madison was a brilliant but sad little incel until Burr hooked him up with Dolly. (Again, a harsh version of the story, but not far from the truth.) James Monroe actually hated Washington, all the way back to serving under him during the war. (True? Monroe's biographers don't say this, but on the other hand, the men did have a break, Monroe was pissed at Washington over a lot of things, and we don't know for certain that Monroe ever actually liked him, so Burr's description of Monroe as constantly sneering at an oblivious Washington is, if not true, not unbelievable.) In Burr, Aaron Burr is marvelously bitchy and cynical. As he takes down America's founding fathers while narrating his story to Charles Schuyler, Schuyler's own ambitions and unfortunate love life forms the only definitely made-up part of the novel (though even here, Vidal uses real people, like having Schuyler fall in love with a prostitute named Helen Jewett.) I really enjoyed Burr. Gore Vidal wrote an Aaron Burr who is definitely the hero of his own story, and while it may or may not be true to the real Burr, it at least presents a believable version of the man who wasn't just Jefferson's foil and Hamilton's killer. ...more |
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Jul 18, 2021
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Jul 16, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 3.92
|
liked it
|
Jul 02, 2021
|
Jun 25, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 3.77
|
really liked it
|
Jun 24, 2021
|
Jun 20, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 4.02
|
really liked it
|
Jun 2021
|
May 27, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 4.08
|
it was amazing
|
Apr 28, 2021
|
Apr 21, 2021
|
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