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Henry Halleck's War, by Curt Anders
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A controversial general-in-chief keeps Lincoln from losing the Civil War.
- Sales Rank: #4197913 in Books
- Published on: 2009-09-04
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.10" h x 2.20" w x 6.00" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 738 pages
About the Author
Curt Anders was a native Texan, a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, and held a master s degree from Columbia University. He was an infantry rifle commander during the first year of the Korean War. Mr. Anders authored several books on military and political history focusing on the American Civil War.
Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Good Book- provides several pieces to the Puzzle of Henry Halleck
By Alex
I came across this book in trying to find a good read on Halleck. Ambrose's book was written in the mid 1960s; This book was written in 1999, Marszalek's book came out in 2004. The author of this book, Anders, is a west point grad. The book is about 700 pages of text. This book offers several strong points, features and perspectives. Anders's text is comprised of numerous letters and telegrams written and received by Halleck, as well as many other officers and politicians. Many of these letters are not utilized in other works, and it is refreshing as well as fascinating to read them. Ander's also departs from the customary approach by many historians in their treatment of Lincoln, in which they refuse to treat Lincoln as anything other than a genius in all his endeavors, and as someone who was smarter militarily than his generals. (This method is consistently found in the works of authors whose sense of political correctness rather than historical accuracy guides their pen, such as Doris Goodwin and James McPhereson) These writers usually rely upon the second hand account of one of Lincoln's clerk stating that, after being the general in chief for several months, Lincoln was so dissatisfied with Halleck , that he thought nothing more of him than a "first rate clerk." Anders clearly shows that Halleck was anything but a first rate clerk, and subsequent historians to treat him thus were really just taking the lazy approach to addressing one of the most fascinating generals of the civil war.
In this book, Anders is highly critical of Lincoln's military handling of the war, especially in the summer and fall of 1862. Ander's rightly points out Lincoln's bungling of the Virginia theater during Stonewall's campaign through Antietam.
A stated above, the author is a grad of west point. Unfortunately his view point is very limited and shallow in analyzing the totality of the war and political arena at that time. For example, Anders hammers Lincoln for appointing so many political generals early in the war, and attributing the length of the war to this decision. While they may be true tactically, Ander's does not bother to discuss or analyze why Lincoln made those appoints, or discuss the political realities of the time, the interplay between the regular army, the volunteer army and state governors. Too often Anders forgets that the civil war, first and foremost is a political war, and that the time period was one were the general consensus was that the regular army officers consisted of many West point grads who had betrayed their country by joining the rebels, that the militia was the true success of the american fighting man, and that Lincoln needed volunteers as well as bi-partisan support to fight the war. (Thereby, the appointing political Generals, like Banks and Butler, who could raise troops, etc. See Work's "Lincoln's Political Generals")
Anders openly acknowledges his intention of rehabbing the image of Halleck, and he is right to do so, as Halleck has become the whipping boy of almost every historian, save for Ambrose. This is due to Grant and Sherman's dislike of Halleck, However, Anders comes across as over zealous in his defense of Halleck, and either glosses over, or simply ignores certain elements of Halleck's actions which undermine the would be image that Ander's seeks to create. A good example of this can be found in Ander's discussion of why Halleck selected Grant as the second in command of the combined armies for the Corinth siege. Anders states that Halleck showed his confidence in Grant by selecting him to that post, for if Halleck was killed, Grant would be in command. However, Grant's memoirs do not even support this. Grant, Sherman, Pope (anyone who was involved in that campaign) knew that Halleck put Grant in second in command because Halleck had NO confidence in Grant. There are numerous other examples, the other being the pontoon train at Fredericksburg. Anders revisits many of the notions of HAlleck which have been set in stone in the civil war story. This includes some interesting perspectives on HAlleck's relationship with McClellan
However, with that said, I think this book is a must have for the serious civil war student. However, they should also get the Marszalek book on Halleck as well. the two books together really give a great treatment on Halleck. To further understand Halleck, the book on Buell, "Most promising of all" is a great source as well.
26 of 30 people found the following review helpful.
Some Books are Easier to Write than to Review
By The author, Curt Anders
When I sent copies of this book to members of my family and some friends, their reactions were all the same: "It sure is big!" That's true. Henry Halleck's War is more than 700 pages long; it uses roughly 250,000 words; its 20 chapters contain close to 1,800 source citations -- what we used to call footnotes; and it weighs three pounds, six and a half ounces. Why is it so big? A great many pages are devoted to messages, letters, and reports General Halleck wrote during the war. They show that his contributions to the Union's successful war effort were both numerous and valuable -- and that critics such as Gideon Welles were wrong. It was Welles who said, "Halleck originates nothing, anticipates nothing, takes no responsibility, plans nothing, suggests nothing, is good for nothing." Hardly anyone ever said anything good about Halleck during his lifetime. His friend Cump Sherman urged him to defend himself, to fight back. General Halleck refused. He was willing to be judged by what was in the records. In them, he told Cump, some future historian would find the truth about him and what he did. But during the past hundred years, too few scholars have bothered to go through the 128 thick volumes of the Official Records, flip through crumbling pages until they found the documents that involved General Halleck, and study them. As a result, just about everyone has agreed with Welles that Henry Halleck was a disaster. However, recently Guild Press of Indiana put the entire wall of books called the Official Records on a single wafer-thin CD-ROM. That made it possible for me to do what General Halleck trusted someone would do -- study his record. But I've gone beyond that. The messages, letters, and reports included in this book enable readers to judge Halleck for themselves -- which, I think, is what he hoped would happen. In the course of selecting all these materials and providing enough narrative to place them in historical context, several things surprised me. First, the requirements of the job of general-in-chief were very different from what Halleck's critics assumed. No one knew what a general-in-chief was supposed to do. No valid precedent or standards for judging his performance existed. Even so, ignorance didn't stop anyone from declaring General-in-Chief Halleck a failure. Second, his relationship to Abraham Lincoln had a special aspect that has been completely overlooked. Both men were lawyers: Lincoln in central Illinois, Old Brains out in San Francisco -- indeed, he was the respected senior partner of California's leading law firm. Accordingly, Halleck's performance ought to be judged as that of a special counsel retained to help Lincoln prosecute Union versus Confederacy -- a case that was being tried on battlefields from eastern Virginia to New Mexico. In everything General Halleck wrote you will find precision of thought and expression reflecting his expertise both in military art and in the ability to reduce complex questions to basic principles -- and then to apply them. These were skills that Lincoln needed desperately. Some observers have hailed him as a military genius -- but if you read closely some of the documents he signed, you will see how dependent he actually was on special counsel Halleck. Third, this book also contains messages and letters to Halleck from Don Carlos Buell, George McClellan, William Rosecrans, Cump Sherman, Ulysses Grant, and many other generals. I was surprised by how much they revealed about themselves in what they wrote Halleck. I had never known enough about General Buell, for example, to have an opinion about him. But from the messages he sent Old Brains, I learned why he was such a disappointment. Same regarding McClellan -- the "Young Napoleon." If you doubt that he was a spoiled brat, just read his messages to his wife and to General Halleck. My fourth surprise was that I could compress the quarter of a million words in this book into a single simple sentence: General Halleck didn't win the war, but clearly he kept Abraham Lincoln from losing it. Lincoln was completely unprepared to be Commander- in-Chief, and initially he made some dreadful mistakes. That stopped in mid-1862 when he sent a peremptory order to Halleck to come to Washington. Halleck saved the Union capital by moving McClellan's Army of the Potomac northward to help John Pope. He saved Grant when Lincoln secretly gave command of the Vicksburg operation to a political general already notorious for incompetence. But Halleck couldn't always save Lincoln from blundering. Behind Halleck's back, Lincoln gave command of the Army of the Potomac to "Fighting Joe" Hooker -- with General Lee's brilliant victory at Chancellorsville as a humiliating result. Ordinarily, however, Old Brains and the President reached a meeting of the minds. Both men, being lawyers, placed great weight on principles. Halleck was driven by a high sense of duty and of honor and of love of country. But he was also an expert on the principles of military art, and he enforced them. He told Lincoln and later Grant, You cannot, you dare not try to control a battle from a desk hundreds or thousands of miles from the killing site. "I hold," Old Brains declared, "that a general in command of an army in the field is the best judge of existing conditions."
That was the Halleck Doctrine. It was turned on its head recently during military operations in the Balkans directed from the White House. Reputations, Professor Walter McDougall has written, are the only things over which historians have control. Historians destroyed Henry Halleck's reputation. It's time to give some of his good name back to him.
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