It's been a while since I posted to this blog, so I thought I'd update. It seems like the last century when I decided to write a book about the lawyer-generals of the Civil War, and I actually began by writing some mini-biographies of a few generals, but I soon found that I had two huge problems. First, I didn't know enough about the Civil War. Second, there were too many lawyer-generals. Four things have happened since I made these twin discoveries.
First, I have boned up on the Civil War, and I am continuing to study it as much as possible. It is a depressing study.
Second, my study has destroyed my working hypothesis that lawyers had unique skills which made them good generals. I still think that trial lawyers have skills which could translate to military leadership, but I see now that they also have major defects (arrogance is one) which make it difficult to overcome a lack of military education. As a result most lawyer-generals were miserable failures as generals, and the successful lawyer-generals had military educations (e.g. Henry Halleck, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Patrick Cleburne).
Third, I have scaled back my ambition. As we say in the North Florida Piney Woods, I'm boring with too big an auger. I need to put it down and get a smaller one. I can't write about all the lawyer-generals without the book becoming a multi-volume encyclopedia. I have lowered my aim to write only about the lawyers who were colleagues of Lincoln. The working title will be "Lincoln's Attorney Generals: The Eighth Circuit Goes to War."
Fourth, I have embarked upon another project which is consuming my time--a professional biography of Francis L. Wellman, the author of "The Art of Cross-Examination." I've got to finish with Wellman before I get back to "Lincoln's Attorney Generals." It may be a while. Several of Wellman's cases merit treatment as stand-alone books.
Wish me luck with my literary endeavors. I'm going to need it.
Showing posts with label Abraham Lincoln. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Abraham Lincoln. Show all posts
Thursday, August 30, 2018
Monday, June 5, 2017
ATTORNEY-GENERALS OF THE CIVIL WAR
While working on my last book, Prairie Defender: The Murder Trials of Abraham Lincoln, I noticed
that a remarkable number of Lincoln’s colleagues at the bar became generals
during the Civil War. I attributed this fact to my belief that trial lawyers
and military leaders shared a constellation of skills equally adaptable to the
courtroom and the battlefield—including but not limited to analytical ability,
decisiveness, ability to adapt to a rapidly changing tactical environment, and the
ability to communicate clearly and unequivocally. After finishing Prairie Defender, I investigated the
number of lawyers who became generals on both sides of the conflict. Omitting
military school graduates and counting only law students who died during the
war and practicing attorneys who returned to practice after the war, I found
170 Union generals and 123 Confederate generals who were lawyers by trade and
that lawyer-generals were outnumbered only by professional soldier-generals.
My counting method left out a number of well-known lawyer-generals, William Tecumseh Sherman being one of those omitted.
I decided to write a book giving biographical sketches of all identified Civil War
lawyer-generals, and to supplement these biographical sketches with
references to webpages containing additional information I collected on
each of them. As I continued my research, I found many more Union and Confederate lawyer-generals who fit my criteria. It began to look like I might wind up writing a multi-volume biographical encyclopedia. The deeper I got into the project, the more involved it became, but I learned a lot of interesting facts about a lot of remarkable men.
My initial inclination was to write twenty extended biographies--ten Union, ten Confederate--of the most interesting and representative of the lawyer-generals and then supplement those biographies with short sketches of the lives of the other lawyer-generals. I'm afraid, however, that I'll wind up with an impossibly long book doing it that way. Being at somewhat of a loss as to how to proceed, I have decided that I'm going to forge ahead and write a collection of 500 word biographical sketches of all the lawyer-generals I can identify and then decide precisely how to put them together into book form.
Almost every book I've ever written, I've learned all kinds of interesting things considerations of space forbade me including in the books, and I'm seeing the same thing happen again after writing only a handful of biographical sketches. This blog is going to be my solution for that problem. Interesting things that I won't have room for in the book, I'm going to put in this blog.
I've already decided what my next entry is going to be. I found a transcript of a speech by a Confederate soldier in which he describes what the "Rebel Yell" sounded like. It seems that one of the great mysteries of the Civil War is what the Rebel Yell sounded like. My next blog post will reveal one Confederate soldier's rendition of the Rebel Yell. Not only that, he also describes the "Yankee Yell." I didn't even know that there was a Yankee Yell. Stay tuned for my next blog post and all will be revealed.
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BORING WITH TOO BIG AN AUGER
It's been a while since I posted to this blog, so I thought I'd update. It seems like the last century when I decided to write a boo...
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR [This brief sketch is abridged from the Dictionary of American Biography , 6:196, 197, supplemented by the Confederate...
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Well, I’m continuing to bone up on the Civil War preparatory to writing “Attorney-Generals.” I’ve read approximately 2,000 pages, includin...
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