THE MAKING OF A GENERAL
Kudos on another great issue. I was especially impressed with Glenn LaFantasie’s article on Ulysses S. Grant [“The Making of a General,” Vol. 15, No.1], which expertly portrayed the prewar Grant at his most insecure time. His innermost inadequacies were on full display, and LaFantasie did a good job showing how Grant—largely through the efforts of his congressman—was able to secure a colonel’s commission in 1861.
I have been a subscriber to the Monitor since Day 1. As the scheduler of the Tallahassee History Roundtable—a group of historians, archivists, and academics that meets weekly—I’ve found the Monitor’s lineup of excellent authors to be a solid base of recruitment, as a number of our speakers were gleaned from your pages.
Ron Block
Via email
A GRAPHIC HISTORY
Even though there was a lot of great stuff in the Monitor’s Spring 2025 issue, I was especially happy with Andrew Fialka and Anderson Carman’s “Redrawing the Guerrilla War.” As a lifelong comic book fan, I was ecstatic to see that genre merged with my other love, history. Keep up the good work!
Pete Hale
Via email
THE IMAGINED EMANCIPATIONIST
In your excellent Spring 2025 issue, a statement by Matthew Hulbert struck me as odd, to say the least. In his column [“Observatory: The Imagined Emancipationist,” Vol. 15, No. 1] he refers to Shelby Foote as “an amateur historian” who drew the “chagrin of academic historians” such as Hulbert, an associate professor at a small college.
Library of CongressRobert E. Lee observes the Battle of Fredericksburg from a distance in this chromolithograph by Henry Alexander Ogden. In Harry Turtledove’s novel The Guns of the South, Lee’s prowess as a battlefield commander is supercharged by access to AK-47s.
Foote, who lived in Memphis when he wrote his Civil War trilogy, spent five years on each volume. Each is roughly 1,000 pages. He wrote them with a dipped pen. He honored scholarship and history—and public television—with his dignified presence in Ken Burns’ documentary series The Civil War. Hulbert makes Foote sound like a blogger or zealous hack. By his lights, I guess Babe Ruth was an amateur baseball player.
John Branston
Memphis, Tennessee
Ed. John, we forwarded your letter to Matthew Hulbert for response. He writes: “Thanks very much for reading ‘Observatory.’ On the one hand, in the simplest terms, Foote was a novelist by trade and not professionally trained as a historian. Hence the ‘amateur’ designation. Of course, this isn’t to say that amateurs can’t still be great writers or even great historians, particularly when it comes to narrative history. David McCullough and Erik Larson immediately come to mind. On the other hand, though, in the case of his three-volume history of the conflict, Foote’s amateurism shines through methodologically as well: in a complete lack of historiographical context (he frequently relied on outdated secondary material) and in the underlying—and completely erroneous—notion that the Union won the war with a hand tied behind its proverbial back.”
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I am a firm supporter of efforts to root out Lost Cause ideology from presentations of American history, but Matthew Hulbert’s article “The Imagined Emancipationist” is a bridge too far.
Alternate history is an effort to imagine what might have happened if some significant event(s) in history either did not occur or occurred differently. Contrary to what Hulbert implies, to imagine that something might be different is, by definition, not an attempt to claim that something actually was different. In works of alternate history, changes multiply and accumulate as a timeline proceeds from one or more points of divergence from actual historical events. Not only do events change in these fictional scenarios, but historical figures often become different people than they were in real life, sometimes to the point of unrecognizability.
Harry Turtledove’s The Guns of the South imagines that Robert E. Lee might have changed his thinking and behaved differently as a result of a different chain of events. That is not the same thing as endorsing Lost Cause distortions of Lee’s abilities and character, if only because Turtledove’s intention is to present a fictional Lee who is manifestly different from the man who actually lived. The Lost Cause myth asserts falsehoods about the real past. Alternate history only speculates about explicitly fictional possible alternate routes through the past. Hulbert doesn’t seem to understand the nature or purpose of alternate history.
Anyone who is familiar with Turtledove’s work would also know that he is far from an apologist for Lost Cause distortions. His other works dealing with the American Civil War make that very clear.
As for whether it is plausible to suggest that Lee might have changed his admittedly hateful and arrogant beliefs and attitudes over time: We have several examples of Civil War figures who, quite unexpectedly, did just that. Although James Longstreet continued to support a states’ rights view of the U.S. Constitution for the rest of his life, he conceded that the defeated South had no business trying to justify or resurrect Confederate goals, and he supported equal rights for black Americans. William Tecumseh Sherman was no admirer of black people, but in his old age he genuinely changed his views of their capabilities and of their rightful place as equal citizens in the United States. Perhaps most notably, Nathan Bedford Forrest, who was indisputably guilty of vicious racist beliefs and murderous racist behavior, eventually arrived at a different view of black people, and he worked to support their efforts to acquire and exercise political power. Certainly, none of these men had completely pure motives for the changes they made, but there are very few pure altruists in this world, and the common failure to live up to that ideal does not justify discounting the positive results that people who harbor at least some good intentions can achieve.
Ken Dibble
Conklin, New York
Ed. Thanks, Ken. We also asked Hulbert if he cared to respond to your note. He writes: “I appreciate your feedback. Under certain circumstances, counterfactual history can be a useful exercise for understanding the Civil War in different ways—particularly the role of contingency in determining political and military outcomes. However, that usefulness has its limits. When it comes to The Guns of the South, it’s admittedly a stretch to draw meaningful conclusions about how Lee’s feelings toward slavery might have evolved in response to time-traveling Apartheid extremists providing him with AK-47s. Perhaps more importantly, Lee survived for nearly five years after Appomattox—and had his fair share of chances to exhibit a change of heart a la Longstreet’s political defection or Sherman’s late-life politicking for black suffrage. He never did. So, when push comes to shove, it’s safer for historians to deal in the past and not ‘what ifs,’ however entertaining they may be.”
ABOUT THAT PHOTO
Re: the photograph of the Colt Model 1860 Army Revolver that appears on page 14 of your Spring issue [“Primer: Union and Confederate Small Arms,” Vol. 15, No. 1]: The image is reversed. It shows the scalloped area of the frame where percussion caps were loaded onto the nipples one at a time. This scalloped area is only on the right side of the frame just below the hammer and not on the left side as shown in the photo. It could only be loaded with percussion caps on the right side.
Since the majority of people are right-handed, the pistol was held in the left hand and the small percussion caps were placed on the nipples one at a time with the fingers of the right hand as the cylinder was revolved.
This is another great issue. I really liked the colorizations of the Ulysses S. Grant photos that appear in it.
Ralph A. Heinz
Via email
