Martin Van Buren

Posted on December 12, 2025 by smellincoffee

Who is Martin Van Buren? When I cast the name into the pool of my imagination, I can see his face reflected there, framed by wild sideburns and seeded by a guide to the US Presidents I read cover to cover obsessively in middle school. (It covered everyone from George W to George W.) The trivia factoid assigned to him in the book was that he was the first US President to not be a subject of Parliament when he was born, though frankly knowing he didn’t speak English when he was young would’ve been more interesting. I picked this book up as part of an old-but-rarely-pursued course of presidential biographies that I’ve gotten more interested in continuing as America’s 250th looms. Ted Widmer’s Martin Van Buren is a short and often punchy biography of this singular figure in American life, a man frequently forgot despite having a large ‘quiet’ role in how American politics developed in the early 19th century.

Van Buren, it seems, was instrumental to the creation of the Democratic party, which he forged in an effort to reconcile the interests of New York and Virginia. He had a knack for party organization, in fact, building a machine in New York before he ascended to the national stage. He came of age when the balance of economic and political power was slowly starting to shift from the South to the North, and would ride that transition — ultimately helping create the Free Soil party, precursor to the Republican party that later Democrats raised quite a fuss about in 1860. The book largely focuses on Van Buren’s political career, so that it’s hard to get a sense of the person underneath the president. At first I thought this was a fixation of the author, but after doing more background reading it appears to be a consequence of the man himself. He was widowed early and focused obsessively on his work: his ‘leisure’ activities of reading, socializing, and travel were all fastened to politics as surely as a bridle to a horse. He appears to have met luminaries of different ages — visiting with John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in their declining years, serving under Jackson’s tutelage, and still later enjoying an evening with a young lawyer named Abraham Lincoln, quite by accident. (During a grand tour of the country, Van Buren was forced to hole up for the evening in a little inn in Rochester: the proprietor was so eager to amuse his unexpected guest that he sent for a storyteller and raconteur he knew had an interest in politics.)

This was an interesting little read. The writing is very accessible and sometimes drift toward being overly casual to me, but it’s often funny despite the fact that the main attraction is a man not known for great policy decisions but instead the quiet under-the-table work that makes modern politics function. While Van Buren still feels like a bit of a cipher, considering that he rarely wrote about himself in his own journals, it’s possible that no one but his late wife knew him beyond the civil but savvy political creature he was.

And on a completely unrelated note, nonfiction has FINALLY CAUGHT UP from the three months of CJ Box. Also, my next obscure president will probably be Franklin Pierce.

Quotations

In the long annals of the presidency, it would be difficult to find a presidential spouse we know less about than Hannah Van Buren. There are no likenesses of her, and she died long before Van Buren was elected. She is not mentioned in the enormous manuscript of his autobiography. Yet there is not the slightest whiff of scandal about their love, and it is telling that he never remarried after her death in 1819.

We have lost the sense of what the law once stood for to ambitious young men. As the nineteenth century dawned, it still commanded an awe that transcended the political realm. Lawyers were the priests of a secular order. Their learning was majestic: their Latinate vocabularies, their parchments, their stately mien, their effortless command of the Common Law, the repository of Anglo-Saxon cultural habits dating back half a millennium. The United States may have been writing a new chapter in human history, but its lawyers, the people who really ran things, were part of an ancient guild connecting them to the Middle Ages. Tocqueville wrote, with understatement, “The government of democracy is favorable to the political power of lawyers.”

Just as Lincoln would do in Illinois, he traveled the circuit, talking about people and politics everywhere he went. One source claims that he was developing a useful skill for a politician—the ability to walk into a tavern and hold an enormous amount of alcohol without any sign of impairment.

In 1842, Jabez Hammond published The History of Political Parties in the State of New York, in three octavo volumes. If you can even find it in a library, there is a good chance that you will be the first person to have taken it out in a century and a half. Yet beneath its ancient leather binding, the brittle pages teem with life.

But as usual, many of Van Buren’s best moves took place far from the public eye. Like a nineteenth-century Vito Corleone, he was always thinking ahead of his enemies, forging a new network of families and alliances that would forever redraw the map of power in the United States. Everything he did contributed to the goal of unfurling a new national party, nominally Jeffersonian but now hitched to the rising star of Andrew
Jackson.

None of this activity was lost on President [John Quincy] Adams, who could not have looked upon Van Buren’s activity with more disfavor if he was an emissary from the Vatican seeking to convert Yankee maids to Papism and then sell them into white slavery. In one of his most vituperative journal entries, he managed to disembowel Van Buren for reasons ranging from his parentage to his politics to Aaron Burr’s treason (the Adamses were nothing if not efficient—why write only one insult when three would get you so muchmore for your ink expenditure?).

Since Dolley Madison’s benign rule over Washington in the teens, a formidable force had been gathering strength in the capital—the influence of political wives. Nearly as soon as the British retreated, they advanced, and in the 1820s, as Washington became less an architectural sketch and more a genuine community, it was inevitable that these powerful spouses would feel their growing power over the destinies of the young republic. And they would advance their power through what passed for weapons of mass destruction at the time: gossip, innuendo, and outright slander.

Even later that spring, when he might have recanted, he refused, saying he would not trim “his sails to catch the passing breeze.” This was Van Buren at his best.

It would take a long time before the wounds of the 1844 convention were healed. Thomas Hart Benton, Van Buren’s friend from Missouri, saw a dark design behind the scenes in Baltimore: “Disunion is at the bottom of this long-concealed Texas machination. Intrigue and speculation cooperate; but disunion is at the bottom; and I denounce it to the American people. Under the pretext of getting Texas into the Union, the scheme is to get the South out of it.”

Charles Sumner, who hardly would have defended the old Van Buren, admired “the Van Buren of to-day,—the veteran statesman, sagacious, determined, experienced, who at an age when most men are rejoicing to put off their armor girds himself anew, and enters the lists as the champion of freedom.

That was a more than respectable performance, especially given that the Free Soil party could not get on the ballot in the South, with the exception of Virginia, where Van Buren won a grand total of nine votes. When some of his supporters claimed fraud, a Virginian answered memorably: “Yes Fraud! And we’re still looking for the son-of-a-bitch who
voted nine times!”

Throughout the decade before the Civil War, Van Buren enjoyed seniority among the ex-presidents, ultimately resembling one of the elderly patriarchs invented by Faulkner, who outlives first his own cohort, then his children’s, until no one is quite sure who he was in the first place.

Van Buren had only so much revolution in him. In 1858 he told a visitor, “I have nothing to modify or change. The end of slavery will come—amid terrible convulsion, I fear, but it will come.”

He lingered into the war’s second year, and then expired at 2 a.m. on July 24, 1862, a day and a half after Lincoln read the first draft of his Emancipation Proclamation to a startled cabinet. Van Buren could hardly have chosen his entrance and exit more dramatically.

But to this day, there have been sufficiently few biographies of Martin Van Buren that a reader with time on his hands (and what other kind of Van Buren acolyte is there?) can reasonably expect to read every work on Van Buren ever written—something that would be impossible to say about the other giants of the early republic

.

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Confederate Women

Posted on December 11, 2025 by smellincoffee

Continuing in my march through Bell Irwin Wiley’s social histories of the Civil War,   I bought Confederate Women immediately after reading Billy Yank.    Confederate Women looks at the diaries and letters of three socially prominent southern belles and finished with a fourth section on those whose blood ran less azure. Although Wiley has written elsewhere about how strongly southern women supported the war effort materially – sewing clothes and that sort of thing – his three women cataloged are evident exceptions, as they appear to spend most of their time living in a Jane Austen novel, attending social events and talking. This was a fun read, though I wish its fourth section were the main of the book.  

The first chapter is drawn from the wartime diary of Mary Chestnut, which was later published as A Diary from Dixie. Wiley comments on the diary’s issue-laden publication: not only  did Chestnut censor herself to a degree after she began thinking she might publish it, but the diary was later revised by Chestnut herself in the postwar years, and then further changed by an editor to make it more ‘readable’.  These edits, however, were deeper than line-editing:  not surprisingly,  a book published after her death during the bourbon restoration period of Southern history  contained omissions of her criticism of slavery,  as well as minor related edits. She declared of one man whom she disdained that he could always be found in the company of a looking glass, a whisky bottle, or a Negro woman;  later editions simply referred to a bottle or a woman. (I am not sure that omitting whisky would have any effect at all: no one reads a phrase as that and thinks  the man was nursing a bottle of milk or apple juice!)  Chesnut’s husband was an aide to President Jefferson Davis, so she spends time in both Richmond and Montgomery and was on close social terms with a later subject of the book, Varina Davis. 

The second subject is easily the most forgettable, as she spends the war moving from friend’s home to friend’s home as a refugee, gossiping all the while.  The third main section concludes with Varina Davis, and because most of her letters have not survived – she deliberately destroyed her intimate correspondence with her husband – it’s based on more secondary sources.  In my past reading I have only encountered Davis as president,  typically having issues with his generals: it’s interesting to meet him here as a man, one who was described as hard as flint outside the home but soft as molten wax before his wife.  He was widowed early by another woman, evidently, and withdrew from society to fuss about on his farm and hole up in his brother’s library reading:  it was meeting  Varina that drew him out into society again, and based on her portrait I cannot blame him. I enjoyed this chapter on Varina: while she did her best to be a proper lady of society and First Lady of the Confederacy, she had an easy sense of humor that led to some social gaffes, like guffawing over mistakes instead of cooing sympathetically. 

The fourth part, which merits and receives a larger portion than the individual subjects preceding it, covers women in general during the war.  Wiley notes that Confederate women were extremely passionate about the Cause, urging their men – husbands and sons – to enlist. One woman lost nine sons to the war. Wiley cites one woman in my own hometown who sent a  young lad who was slow to enlist a petticoat, along with the instructions to wear these if he did not wish to serve.  They were also instrumental to wartime production, sometimes being responsible for their boys’ uniforms. Households in areas as yet untouched by Yankee marauders could also send boxes of food (cured meat, bread, &c), at least until transportation broke down in late 1864.  The aforementioned women were not good illustrations of this, as they seemed to principally occupy themselves attending parties and talking – though they had plenty of zeal for the Cause.  Women took over the administration of their home farms or plantations themselves,  and without their men found that the workload was onerous indeed: those who lived near the front often found what little they had stolen by both Union and Confederate troops, and those women who lived in areas that Federal raiders were savaging often fled if they could.  Casual, senseless violence – the destruction of clothes and household goods, even the molestation of women – was all too common, and it was not restricted to confirmed “rebel” families:  Wiley records Yankee troopers pillaging slave cabins and raping women there, as well.   This section ends with Wiley observing that the Civil War changed relations between men and women,  leading to more overall agency for women and a slight softening of the patriarchy. This final section is broad, covering all classes and races as best it can given the lack of documentation on poorer black and white women.

This was an interesting collection, though the last section was easily the best. I enjoyed Chestnut and Davis’ sections well enough, especially seeing as I’ve intended on reading A Diary from Dixie at some point and appreciate knowing that parts of it are suspect. I could have done with much less social chatter and more of the content that arrives last, but on the whole this was an illuminating little read.

Quotations

The Sandusky, Ohio, Register of December 12, 1864, reported: ‘*One day last week one of the rebel officers . . . [imprisoned on] Johnson’s Island gave birth to a ‘bouncing boy.’ This is the first instance of the father giving birth to a child, that we have heard of . . . tis [also] the first case of a woman in rebel service that we have heard of, though they are noted for goading their own men in[to] the army, and for using every artifice . . . to befog and befuddle some of our men.’’!

On August 29, 1861, Mary Chesnut noted in her diary: *‘ All manner of things . . . come over the border under the huge hoop skirts now worn… . Not legs but arms are looked for under hoops.’’

‘There were just not enough daylight hours . . . for her to do all the tasks that must be done and still cultivate her crop. She would get all the children to bed . . . and then go out to the fields to work at night by the light of the moon.’’?

Captain Charles Wills of an Illinois regiment wrote from near Oxford, Mississippi, in December 1862: ‘‘Rebels though they are, ’tis shocking and enough to make one’s blood boil to see the manner in which some of our folks have treated them. Trunks have been knocked to pieces with muskets when the women stood by, offering the keys . . . bed clothing and ladies’ clothing carried off and all manner of deviltry imaginable perpetrated. Of course the scoundrels who do this kind of work would be severely punished if caught, but the latter is almost impossible. Most of the mischief is done by the advance of the army… . the d——d thieves even steal from the Negroes!’’

“ A Wisconsin corporal wrote at the conclusion of Sherman’s March to the Sea’ in December 1864: ‘‘The cruelties practiced on the campaign toward citizens have been enough to blot a more sacred cause than ours. We hardly deserve success. . . . Straggler’s under nobody’s charge . . . ransack the houses, taking every knife and fork, spoon, or anything else they take a fancy to, break open trunks and bureaus, taking women or children’s clothing, or tearing them to pieces. . . besides taking everything eatable that can be found. . . . there is certainly a lack of discipline in our army.’’

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WWW Wednesday

Posted on December 10, 2025 by smellincoffee

WHAT have you finished reading recently? The Battle Cry of Freedom, James McPherson. Review in progress. I have three more ACW books stacking up: Confederate Women, by Bell Irwin Wiley; 1858, by Bruce Chadwick; and The Civil War: An Aerial Portrait by Sam Abell.

WHAT are you reading now? Nothing immediately, as I just finished a thousand page history book, though I am reading bits of Deadly Passions, Dangerous Sins, a review of how Orthodox monks adopted practices to combat anger, etc that modern psychology has some similarities to. I am also listening to an Audible production of The Silver Chair, but it’s early days yet: Eustace and Jill have only just met Puddleglum.

WHAT are you reading next? I need to return to the zombie insects book for my biology read and then knock out something for local astronomy. I was hoping Starry Messenger would work for that category but it was far too general. I also began nosing into a Martin van Buren biography. As part of my America @ 250 reading next year, I want to begin filling out my presidential biographies list. It’s fairly dismal at the moment. I may post it as a page next year….we shall see.

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Selections from the Battle Cry of Freedom

Posted on December 9, 2025 by smellincoffee

Quotes

Austere and humorless, Davis did not suffer fools gladly. He lacked Lincoln’s ability to work with partisans of a different persuasion for the common cause. Lincoln would rather win the war than an argument; Davis seemed to prefer winning the argument.

The Internal Revenue Act of 1862 taxed almost everything but the air northerners breathed. It imposed sin taxes on liquor, tobacco, and. playing cards; luxury taxes on carriages, yachts, billiard tables, jewelry, and other expensive items; taxes on patent medicines and newspaper advertisements; license taxes on almost every conceivable profession or service except the clergy; stamp taxes, taxes on the gross receipts of corporations, banks, insurance companies, and a tax on the dividends or interest they paid to investors; value-added taxes on manufactured goods and processed meats; an inheritance tax; and an income tax. The law also created a Bureau of Internal Revenue, which remained a permanent part of the federal government even though most of these taxes (including the income tax) expired several years after the end of the war. The relationship of the American taxpayer to the government was never again the same.

The tactical predominance of the defense helps explain why the Civil War was so long and bloody. The rifle and trench ruled Civil War battlefields as thoroughly as the machine-gun and trench ruled those of World War I.

Disease was a greater threat to the health of Civil War soldiers than enemy weapons. This had been true of every army in history. Civil War armies actually suffered comparatively less disease mortality than any previous army. While two Union or Confederate soldiers died of disease for each one killed in combat, the ratio for British soldiers in the Napoleonic and Crimean wars had been eight to one”and four to one. For the American army in the Mexican War it had been seven to one. Only by twentieth century standards was Civil War disease mortality high. Nevertheless, despite improvement over previous wars in this respect, disease was a crippling factor in Civil War military operations.

“You remember my speaking to you of what I called your over-cautiousness,” Lincoln wrote [General McClellan] on October 13. “Are you not over-cautious when you assume that you can not do what the enemy is constantly doing?” McClellan had argued that his men could not march twenty miles a day and fight without full stomachs and new shoes. Yet the rebels marched and fought with little food and no shoes.

As the two armies bedded down a few hundred yards from each other, their bands commenced a musical battle as prelude to the real thing next day. Northern musicians blared out “Yankee Doodle” and “Hail Columbia,” and were answered across the way by “Dixie” and “The Bonnie Blue Flag.” One band finally swung into the sentimental strains of “Home Sweet Home”; others picked it up and soon thousands of Yanks and Rebs who tomorrow would kill each other were singing the familiar words together.

This sense of Butternut identity with the South and hostility to the Northeast gave rise to talk among western Democrats of a “Northwest Confederacy” that would reconstruct a Union with the South, leaving New England out in the cold until she confessed the error of her ways and humbly petitioned for readmission. However bizarre such a scheme appears in retrospect, it commanded much rhetorical support during the war. “The people of the West demand peace, and they begin to more than suspect that New England is in the way,” warned Vallandigham in January 1863. “If you of the East, who have found this war against the South, and for the negro, gratifying to your hate or profitable to your purse, will continue it . . . [be prepared for] eternal divorce between the West and the East.”

While 100 percent of the congressional Republicans supported the draft bill, 88 percent of the Democrats voted against it. Scarcely any other issue except emancipation evoked such clearcut partisan division. Indeed, Democrats linked these two issues in their condemnation of the draft as an unconstitutional means to achieve the unconstitutional end of freeing the slaves. A democratic convention in the Midwest pledged that “we will not render support to the present Administration in its wicked Abolition crusade [and] we will resist to the death all attempts to draft any of our citizens into the army.” Democratic newspapers hammered at the theme that the draft would force white working men to fight for the freedom of blacks who would come north and take away their jobs.

Although civilians were going hungry in Mississippi, Grant was confident that his soldiers would not. A powerful army on the move could seize supplies that penniless women and children could not afford to buy. For the next two weeks the Yankee soldiers lived well on hams, poultry, vegetables, milk and honey as they stripped bare the plantations in their path. Some of these midwestern farm boys proved to be expert foragers. When an irate planter rode up on a mule and complained to a division commander that plundering troops had robbed him of everything he owned, the general looked him in the eye and said: “Well, those men didn’t belong to my division at all, because if they were my men they wouldn’t have left you that mule.”

“Amnesty, sir, applies to criminals. We have committed no crime. At your door lies all the misery and crime of this war. We are fighting for INDEPENDENCE and that or extermination we will have. You may ’emancipate’ every negro in the Confederacy, but we will be free. We will govern ourselves, if we have to see every Southern plantation sacked and every Southern city in flames.” – Jefferson Davis, letter to Abraham Lincoln.

Clement Vallandigham’s story is wild. He was exiled by Lincoln for speaking out against the war, ran for governor of Ohio from exile in Canada, and then accidentally shot himself five years after the war ended while using a pistol in a courtroom demonstration.

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The Battle Cry of Freedom

Posted on December 9, 2025 by smellincoffee

Battle Cry of Freedom is widely regarded as the finest single-volume history of the Civil War — and after finally reading it, I understand why. McPherson compresses an era of extraordinary complexity into a narrative that feels both sweeping and intimate. Although McPherson begins in the 1850s to lay the groundwork for secession, the book never bogs down; once the shooting starts, he manages to keep the guns of military, political, and social history firing together in concert.  The result is a portrait of the Civil War era that feels alive: battles and generals appear alongside labor unrest, civilian hardships, and the illicit trade that persisted despite wartime edicts. Rather than distracting from the conflict, these episodes show how deeply the war reached into ordinary life.  It draws from a deep well of primary and secondary resources, so many that I had to stop writing down books I wanted to look in for fear of making my TBR even more of a goliath than it is.    Thorough, diverse,  fair, and eminently  readable,  Battle Cry  fully deserves its reputation as a masterpiece. 

Battle Cry of Freedom begins in the decades before the Civil War, as sectional divisions grew. This was partially aided by immigration patterns: Germans and Irishmen who arrived to begin working their way into an American life had no experience with slavery, and were immune to the “That’s just the way it is” mentality that functionally maintained slavery for decades after the revolutionary generation declared that all men were created equal.  A second Great Awakening also increased religious fervor, and in a direction that viewed slavery as inherently sinful, an offense against the notion that all men were created in the image of God, and deserved accordant dignity.  Of course,  there had been sectional disputes from the beginning of the Union, because different areas of the country had different economies and interests. Tariffs that protected northern manufacturers did so by raising the overall price of manufactured goods in the largely rural South, where the ease of making money from massive plantations made risky factory ventures far less common. As Americans and immigrants continued to pour west, different economic interests led to armed and bloody conflicts, as in Kansas. 

Battle Cry of Freedom’s military portions include both the Eastern and Western theaters, though casual readers should know by ‘western’ we are discussing Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kentucky. The Texan invasion of New Mexico is not included. This is not purely a military history, though: McPherson focuses on it when momentum is important, but otherwise takes breaks to look at home front issues,  changing politics, etc.   The book makes it  clear from the beginning that the war’s origins are complex:    it was caused by slavery, but not necessarily  about slavery, save for a vanishing minority of Union soldiers and Confederate planters.  The majority of Union soldiers fought to preserve the Union and in outrage that a fort flying the Stars and Stripes had been fired upon;     Southerners had viewed the North with increasing animosity for decades and fought to create a new,  southern Confederacy that would remain truer to the Constitution as they interpreted it.  McPherson’s early chapters do an excellent job of bringing the secession crisis to a boil:   the more popular  and militant abolitionism grew in the North, the more entrenched the southern elite and southern culture in general became about the slavery issue.  A “necessary evil”  in 1800 had become a positive good by 1860.   Lincoln was extremely cautious about any anti-slavery rhetoric or measure at the beginning of the war, in large part because the loyalties of several states (Missouri, Kentucky, and Maryland) were not guaranteed. This meant offering assurances in the early part of 1861 that no anti-slavery measures were contemplated, and even during the first two years of the war Lincoln countermanded the actions of Union officers who  attempted to materially weaken the local opposition by declaring their slaves free.  This would, of course, become a Union strategy as the war developed:  slaves were viewed as material assets of the Confederacy that needed to be removed from the equation.  Not only did freeing them diminish the Southern labor pool, but these new wards of the Union could free up soldiers from fatigue duty.  The Union’s legal definition of slaves they ‘freed’ at this point tried to side-step the question of emancipation by declaring freed slaves to be “contraband”: seized property.  Eventually,  Lincoln decided to adopt emancipation as a total-war measure to help speed up the defeat of the rebellion, and it had the double boon of ensuring that Britain and France did not recognize the Confederacy more overtly than they already had, tacitly.  Lincoln’s use of the ‘lever of emancipation’ continued to be a problem for him, especially in 1864 when it was revealed he’d rejected several diplomatic forays by the South preemptively because they would not countenance emancipation. (Jefferson Davis  was similarly obdurate, but for a different reason: he declared that the South would rule itself,  even if slavery vanished and every Southern plantation and city were set ablaze.) 

Although I’m fairly familiar with the course of the war from obsessive reading of histories in high school, a book this big could not fail to turn up areas I’d never heard of.   The most fascinating unheard of story was the presence of a few political figures in the Midwest who greeted the increasing abolitionist nature of the war with hostility:   they proposed to create a new  confederacy  with other northern states outside of New England where abolitionism was most strident.  In addition to racial animosity,  they also declared that they were not sending their boys and men to die to free other men who would then drift northward and compete with them for jobs!  I also appreciated McPherson’s separate chapters on the coastal and river wars: I didn’t appreciate how many ports were seized by the US Navy from the opening weeks of the war. McPherson also covers bread and draft riots throughout the war:  the South’s struggle to feed itself grew worse with Sherman and Wilson’s raids, and many men began  deserting to return to their homes to help their wives and children.  McPherson does not shy away from the depredations of war,  including Sherman’s spiteful attack on South Carolina which had marginal military significance but served to brutally punish the people for secession.

This is, in summary, quite a history.  It manages to be comprehensive without becoming overwhelming, and remains surprisingly nonpartisan  – recording in the same voice Confederate soldiers focusing their ire on black troops at the Battle of the Crater as the appalling behavior of Union troops marauding through Fredericksburg in 1862,  destroying evacuated homes for no reason other than malice.  Although I’ve shied away from it for years because of its size,  I found the writing so compelling that once I began I could scarcely stop. It is, simply, magisterial.

Selected quotations will be posted separately.

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Top Ten Books Set in the Snow

Posted on December 9, 2025 by smellincoffee

Today’s TTT is “books set in snowy places”. Well, that rules out anything in Alabama! But first, a couple of Tuesday Teases from The Battle Cry of Freedom, by James McPherson.

“Soon after dawn on February 16, Buckner sent a proposal to Grant for discussion of surrender terms. Back came a blunt reply: ‘No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works.’ Buckner was nettled by these ‘ungenerous and unchivalrous’ words. After all, he had lent the down-and-out Grant money to help him get home after his resignation from the army in 1854.”

“The boost that the battle [of Chancellorsville] gave to Southern morale proved in the end harmful, for it bred an overconfidence in their own prowess and a contempt for the enemy that led to disaster. Believing his troops to be invincible, Lee was about to ask them to do the impossible.”


But mostly [Martin van Buren] eludes us because no one is looking for him anymore. He’s a lost president, floating in purgatory between Jackson and the Civil War, unremembered by most, and doomed to occupy the least heroic categories designed by historians (he has a lock on “average”). Once it was not so. Approximately six generations ago, it was impossible not to have an opinion about Martin Van Buren. And these opinions were not for the faint of heart.” MARTIN VAN BUREN, Ted Widmer

Ten Books for Playing in the Snow…

(1) The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis. Bit of a gimme: the whole premise is that when the Pensevies arrive in Narnia it’s always winter and never Christmas.

(2) The View from the Summit, Sir Edmund Hillary. The first man to mount Mount Everest recalls some of his adventures.

(3) Sunlight at Midnight, a history of St. Petersburg. I first visited St. Petersburg in a bookish way via American Phoenix, in which John Quincy Adams complained of the city being constantly frozen in.

(4) The Saxon Stories series by Bernard Cornwell, which is set in England and Scandinavia in the middle ages and presumably has snow in the winter books.

(5) Winterkill, CJ Box. The natural landscape and weather are usually huge factors in Box’s game warden series, and this starts early with #2, Winterkill.

(6) Winter World, Bernd Heinrich. A look at how animals have adapted themselves to extreme cold.

(7) Winter, Gary Paulsen. The story of a teenager marooned in the Canadian forests in winter.

(8)If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home Now, Chris Ingrahm. A memoir of moving to the midwest and and having to learn on how to respond to snowmageddon that’s so normal no one realizes they’re coping through a disaster every single year.

(9) A Tudor Christmas, Alison Weir. A social history of Christmastide in medieval England, where there was probably snow. Also, ghost stories, since that used to be a big thing in English at Christmas.

(10) Lost on Purpose, Patrick Taylor. A man’s memoir of trying to follow Lewis and Clark’s explorations in the mountains…..as snowstorms move in.

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The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Posted on December 8, 2025 by smellincoffee

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader opens with one of my favorite lines from Lewis’s fiction, and repeats that achievement toward its close. “There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.” Said lad is the cousin of the Pevensie children, and he’s a bit of a rotter. One can imagine him getting on quite well with Dudley Dursley, almost. Edmund and Lucy are visiting him when all three are drawn inexplicably into a portrait of a ship at sea: the Dawn Treader. They find themselves three years removed from their last visit to Narnia. Young Prince Caspian is now King Caspian, and he’s on a mission. Now that peace reigns once more, he wants to seek out several exiled lords who were loyal to his father before Caspian’s evil uncle began getting up to mischief. They are scattered throughout the Lone Islands, and so the children and their companions set about visiting different isles, each offering its own dangers and delights.

While this appears to be a straightforward adventure story, it runs on a layer of Christian theology that occasionally makes itself obvious. When Eustace finds himself literally encased in his own vices (in a way I won’t name for fear of spoilers), he tries to tear them off only to find the viciousness still there. Finally, he’s gently told by Aslan that this is something He, the Lion, must do. A secular reader might take this as merely an instance of Aslan being stronger than Eustace, but a Christian sees an overt statement about the need for grace to overcome sin. Aslan is constantly appearing at points where characters are in need of that grace. This isn’t a deus ex machina device; it’s more like Nathan reproaching David after the death of Uriah, or God Himself confronting Jonah after the silly ass pitches a fit when Nineveh is not destroyed.

Although Voyage flags a bit in its last third for me, the first parts of the book are delightful—especially with a good narrator who can bring the Duffers’ inherent absurdity to life. Reepicheep was the only weakness, vocally: it’s hard for a grown man to present both the gravitas of Aslan and a noble mouse-warrior. I loved Jacobi’s Aslan in particular. The book ends with King Caspian having fulfilled his quest and the Pevensies and their cousin on the verge of re-entering our world. Here Aslan tells Lucy and Edmund they are getting too old for Narnia, and that they will never come this way again. The result is one of my favorite passages not just in this book, but in all of the Narnian stories. I am very much looking forward to The Silver Chair and The Last Battle—especially the latter, because it’s narrated by PATRICK STEWART!

“Please Aslan, before we go, will you tell us when we can come back to Narnia again? Please. And oh, do, do, do, make it soon.”
“Dearest,” said Aslan very gently, “you and your brother will never come back to Narnia.”
“Oh, Aslan!!” said Edmund and Lucy both together in despairing voices.
“You are too old, children,” said Aslan, “and you must begin to come close to your own world now.”
“It isn’t Narnia, you know,” sobbed Lucy. “It’s you. We shan’t meet you there. And how can we live, never meeting you?”
“But you shall meet me, dear one,” said Aslan.
“Are — are you there too, Sir?” said Edmund.
“I am,” said Aslan. “But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.”

This passage resonates with me the way it is because Lewis somehow accomplishes the task of making Aslan Jesus-like without endlessly quoting the Gospels: he captures Aslan’s dangerous strength, but also his mildlness and compassion, and….gentle knowing. There’s a sweet scene in Prince Caspian wherein Reepicheep the mouse is bemoaning the loss of his tail in battle, and the great Lion settles down and takes him seriously. Reepicheep is so small and his complaint so petty — vain, almost — but the Lion’s love for the mouse is such that he listens and grants the noble warrior his tail back. It made me think of how silly creatures we can be, and yet still receive grace.

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A Fine, Quiet Sunday Morning in December….

Posted on December 7, 2025 by smellincoffee

Today’s annual remembrance of the sneak attack at Pearl Harbor has an especially salient echo given that it’s a Sunday. I am reminded of Captain Billy Mitchell’s interwar warning, quoted in The Airman’s War by Albert Marrin. By chance, I happened to find some color footage from the Pearl Harbor attack. It’s mostly just buildings burning, but the historian in me is thrilled by seeing one day 84 years ago suddenly alive in any capacity.

The Japanese will not politely declare war . . . Hawaii … is vulnerable to the sky. It is wide open to Japan. Yet we bring our Navy in at Pearl Harbor and lock it up every Saturday night so that the sailors can spend their week’s pay to please the merchants and politicians. . . . And Hawaii is swarming with Japanese spies. . . . That’s where the blow will be struck — on a fine, quiet Sunday morning.” –

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Man of Iron

Posted on December 4, 2025 by smellincoffee
“What is the use of being elected or reelected unless you stand for something?”

Grover Cleveland may have lost his claim to fame in being the only president to be elected to two nonconsecutive terms, but he is nevertheless a striking and memorable figure. Hailed as ‘the last Jeffersonian’  by another biography,  his two terms in office spread across a sea change in Democratic politics:  Jefferson’s party of constitutional reserve and deep skepticism of government intervention would be overtaken by populists who were willing and eager to go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.   Cleveland,  Troy Senik writes, is the only two-term president to have fallen into the memory hole, despite winning three popular votes in a row. Perhaps this is because his approach to governance was so unlike any that followed him – his commitment to principle over party….or popularity. Although in his second term Cleveland was slightly more willing to bow to that devil of political expediency,  he was as H.L. Mencken described, a “man of iron” – one fixed on his values, popularity or success  be hanged. 

Cleveland is an extraordinary figure: the son of a struggling preacher who became a struggling teenager himself, forced by his father’s premature death to provide for his mother and siblings.  He eventually found a place where he could study law while working,  and developed a reputation for himself as a man of integrity . This is a rare commodity in politics, and it guided his career in politics from sheriff to mayor to governor to President in relatively short order.  Cleveland is in fact the only president who has served all three of those executive offices, let alone serving them in such a consequential order. Cleveland’s reputation as a stiffnicked man of principle came in handy for the Democrats: they had been out of power since the Civil War, when  the Democratic party divided into two geographical parts and the Republicans swept elections by default, leading to southern Democrats seceding from the Union until being forced back in by the bayonet and the bullet.  Republicans had gotten soft  after decades of power: they were corrupt and sore in need of a serious antagonist. That arrived in the mustachioed and rotund form of one Grover Cleveland,  whose rise to power was so swift his first home was the Governor’s Mansion. 

Cleveland established a reputation for himself in his lower offices as a man who was intolerant of corruption and immovable on principle:  he often took actions that weakened his own party (like not filling positions with party-approved favorites, instead choosing the men most qualified), or annoyed his friends. He  often chose an unpopular option in the name of principle, as when he vetoed a bill that would grant flooded farmers free seed.  Cleveland was not a cold man: he gave generously to those in need, helping support a friend’s widow and child, but he saw no legal authority for disaster relief in Article 2 of the Constitution that concerned his office.   That would eventually come to bite him in the end,  once his unyielding views on monetary policy caused short-term economic issues that soured the entire country on the Democratic party,  but it made his career and made him to be something of a legend.   It’s harder for a modern reader to appreciate Cleveland’s policies, in part because  the expected powers of the presidency have expanded so enormously – and in part because some policies are simply obscure to us.  Monetary policy in general is an arcane subject, even to economists,  but at the risk of making too sweeping a generalization –  I have gotten the sense that the pure-gold standard was best for sound money, but made credit harder to access for poorer Americans, whereas including silver in the currency tended to  risk inflation.  We have not been on a gold standard since Nixon, and our constantly inflating prices testify to the fact – but back in Cleveland’s day,  the amount of money in the banking system was fairly strictly tied to the amount of available gold to spend.   It is an economic truism that there are no solutions, only tradeoffs,  and part of Cleveland’s task as president was managing those tradeoffs. As a Jeffersonian, he was for low tariffs, because these kept prices  lower for the working man, especially farmers and Westerners — but low tariffs also allowed gold to escape the country, as more specie flowed out buying foreign goods. The chapters on monetary policy will, in fact, be the hardest parts of this book to appreciate.

This is not a book about the policies of Cleveland, though:  while they are considered at length, we also get a look at Cleveland the man.  His contemporaries claimed he had “Cleveland luck”:  Senik writes that if Cleveland were not a political genius, he had a remarkable ability to stumble into situations that made him out to look like one. He is intensely admirable, with a sterling work ethic and sense of moral order that reminds me of John Adams.  Another contemporary remarked that the “Cleveland luck” was nothing more than obsessive work.     Once G.C. was married, he relaxed a bit: it helped that his wife was younger than him, and so pretty that all of Washington was distracted by her.  Senik occasionally comments on the personal scandals that Republicans tried to gin up about Cleveland, but sees no merit in them.   Although I’d previously read a Cleveland biography, I found plenty of new information here: I didn’t realize  how involved the plot to keep the public ignorant of his mouth-cancer was. He wound up being operated on in a boat, for privacy’s sake. This volume is also girthy enough to include Cleveland the man, not just Cleveland the politician, so we see him taking pleasure in fishing and hunting and being caught in reverie over sunsets and mountains and such. 

I enjoyed Man of Iron enormously, and not just because of its subject whom I increasingly admire. Senik did a wonderful job of presenting Cleveland in the context of his times, and making him come alive. Although he’s very complimentary of his subject, Senik doesn’t shy away from him when that is merited – as he does during Cleveland’s second term. Senik sees Cleveland’s defense of an independent Hawaii as more posture than substance, since the expansionist Congress would overwhelm him anyway,  and there’s similar criticism during the last gold-vs-silver debates.  I took pleasure in reading that although Cleveland’s policies had caused disruption that caused the entire Democratic party to tank in his last election, he was nonetheless hailed ten years later as people recognized his unwillingness to bow before popular opinion, fortified as he was by the facts as he saw them.

[H. L.} Mencken, twenty-five years after the death of Grover Cleveland, opened a column about the former president this way: “We have had more brilliant Presidents than Cleveland, and one or two who were considerably more profound, but we have never had one, at least since Washington, whose fundamental character was solider [sic] and more admirable… [he] came into office his own man and he went without yielding any of that character for an instant.”

As Edward S. Bragg remarked during a nominating speech for Cleveland at the 1884 Democratic convention, “we love him for the enemies he has made.”

There is a long history in American life of bellicose men whose hardness was an essential part of their political appeal. Grover Cleveland, by contrast, was most easily roused to wrath when someone was misquoting Tennyson.

If the story of Mayor Cleveland’s inaugural message to the city council had to be summarized with one fact it would be this: it so outraged his adversaries that midway through its reading there was a motion to prevent the clerk from finishing it.

[Teddy] Roosevelt, whose rhetoric, when exercised, tended toward a curious mix of God of the Old Testament and petulant child, bellowed, “You must not veto those bills. You cannot! You shall not! I can’t have it and I won’t have it!” Cleveland had a trademark tic in moments like this. He would raise his meaty hand in the air. He would clench it into a cannonball. And he would land it swiftly back on the desk in a thunderclap. That sound and Cleveland’s simultaneous declaration—“Mr. Roosevelt, I am going to veto those bills!”—are recorded to have landed with such force that the young bull moose fell back in his chair… before subsequently excusing himself.

No one has endured more to make this project a reality than my wife, Veneta, who suffered through two years of her husband spending most of his free time with an obese, mustachioed nineteenth-century politician.

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The Book of Common Prayer

Posted on December 3, 2025 by smellincoffee

The Book of Common Prayer is the heart of the Anglican communion, and for my money contains some of English’s best phrasing outside Shakespeare and the Bible. Since 2011, its liturgy has been part of my life, its phrases embedded in my memory. I’ve long wanted to read this history, and recently writing a short story in which words from the liturgy — “Lift up your hearts” — play a significant role made me pick it up and read, to borrow from St. Augustine’s “Tolle! Lege!” Although I found it fascinating early on, when the history of the BCP is bound up with the breakway of the Church of England and its struggles to find footing as monarchs with varying theological views kept dying and changing the rules, it largely stays focused on the original British BCP until the last few score pages of the book, at which point different versions have multiplied with such fecundity, and Anglicanism has fallen so much in influence, that it hardly seems to be a point. What I will remember it for is the chaos of the BCP’s struggle to establish itself — not simply because Mary disrupted the protestantification of the Church of England, but because Henry, Cramner, Edward, and Elizabeth had wildly different interpretations of Protestantism and what they wanted the Church of England to be. It also made me curious about medieval English Christianity in general: Jacobs claims that sermons were rare and that Communion was a rariety, making me wonder what people did when they came to church. Jacobs indicates that laypeople just said their private prayers while the priest observed some service appointed in the missal. I suspect I would need to read Duffy’s oft-quoted Stripping of the Altars, which appraises medieval English religious practice and the coming of the Reformation, for a fuller story. This book is of interest, I think, but I suspect its audience is niche.

Quotes

The historian Peter Brown has pointed out that the cult of the saints arose in a Roman culture in which ordinary people could do little to remedy any injustice they might suffer, or to clear themselves of any charges of wrongdoing. They needed friends in high places. If a local patrician could befriend them, then they had a chance of receiving justice or at least escaping punishment. “It is this hope of amnesty,” Brown writes, “that pushed the saint to the foreground as patronus.”

The regular prayers of monks and nuns are best understood as attempts by the church to assign some of its members to do what the disciples could not do: to stay awake and pray with the Lord. There is therefore a close link between the monastic hours and the sufferings of Good Friday. In their ideal form, as established by St. Benedict of Nursia in the sixth century, they are conducted every three hours and are named as follows: Matins (midnight); Lauds (3 a.m., or, more commonly, dawn); Prime (6 a.m.); Terce (9 a.m.); Sext (noon); Nones (3 p.m.); Vespers (6 p.m.); Compline (9 p.m.).

But thousands of English Christians read their prayer books and used them faithfully for private as well as public worship. The same cadences they whispered to themselves when alone, or read silently, or read aloud in the presence of their household, also accompanied them to church. It was therefore through public rites and private devotions alike that the book’s language “entered and possessed their minds.” The beauty of that language, together with its great debts to more ancient forms of worship—Lewis rightly notes that Cranmer and the other makers of the prayer book “wished their book to be praised not for original genius but for catholicity and antiquity”—made the book venerable in but a few generations.

When, in 1637, James tried to impose on the Church of Scotland a version of the Book of Common Prayer that closely resembled the 1549 book in its embrace of traditionalism, riots broke out. The most famous tale of the conflict involves one Jenny Geddes, who, when a minister began saying the Communion service in Edinburgh’s St. Giles Cathedral, threw a stool at the man and shouted, “Daur ye say Mass in my lug?” Presumably this story got around quickly, because when Bishop Whitford of Brechin read his first service from the prayer book he did so with two loaded pistols placed on the desk before him, in plain sight of the restive congregation.

Once more we see a sixteenth-century pattern repeating itself: as the ascent of Queen Mary had sent many evangelicals fleeing to the Continent with their prayer books, so now a large body of Royalist Anglicans took their books with them to France, where they continued to pray according to the now-familiar rites, but in exile. As Horton Davies has pointed out, this proved to be a vital moment in the prayer book’s history: during this period—variously called the Interregnum, the Commonwealth, or the Protectorate—“the Prayer Book had become the symbol of a secret, exciting, and prohibited worship (like the Mass for the English Recusants), and, even more significantly, the symbol of loyalty to a suffering church. Even in palmier days, it was never to lose this profound respect; as if it was necessary for it to have been prohibited for it to be fully appreciated.”

Among the more striking new prayers in the 1662 book are the “Forms of Prayer to be Used at Sea,” an indication of England’s ever-increasing sense of itself as a maritime power around the world. These include prayers “to be also used in her Majesty’s Navy every day”—one of which begins, “O eternal Lord God, who alone spreadest out the heavens, and rulest the raging of the sea”—and prayers for particular circumstances, including one for success in naval battle and two for salvation from storms: “Look down, we beseech thee, and hear us, calling out of the depth of misery, and out of the jaws of this death, which is ready now to swallow us up: Save, Lord, or else we perish.” These are accompanied by brief, one-sentence prayers to be used in occasions of great urgency, when the crew cannot gather to pray corporately, and psalms appointed for “Thanksgiving after a Storm.” To read these prayers is to be immersed in a drama, almost as happens to the reader of Patrick O’Brian’s novels about the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars—novels in which we hear these prayers said many times, with fervor corresponding to the demands of the moment, or lack thereof.

For him, and for many who have felt themselves at the mercy of chaotic forces from within or without, the style of the prayer book has healing powers. It provides equitable balance when we ourselves have none.

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