Simon Cameron: Lincoln's Secretary of War: A Political Biography (review)

Abstract

84CIVIL WAR HISTORY strategic thinking of Civil War generals is skillfully linked with the teachings of Jomini; but Luraghi simply underlines, rather than belabors, the degree to which the Civil War presaged the two World Wars. In the end, the striking quality of these many pages is their juncture of careful scholarship and literary skill. On landscapes Luraghi can be poetic; he is a master of the dramatic, as in the providential appearance of the Monitor; his character sketches are firm, clear, evocative (especially so of Jefferson Davis). Typographical errors and faulty references need not be itemized here, and are few. Only rarely does Luraghi show weakness in comprehending American institutions of the time, as in his surprise that Lincoln did not conduct a vigorous Presidential campaign. The most persistent misspelling is "Rosencrans." Perhaps only an Italian would think of the illuminating comparison between Grant and Scipio Africanus, the victor over Hannibal. Chester G. Starr University of Illinois Travels in the Southland, 1822-1823: The Journal of Lucius Verno Bierce. Edited by George W. Knepper. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1966. Pp. x, 131. $4.50. ) This small book represents a considerable labor of love on the part of Dean George W. Knepper of Akron University. TraveL· in the Southland, 1822-1823 is Dean Knepper's editing of a journal kept nearly a century and a half ago by Lucius V. Bierce, an early benefactor of Buchtel College (lineal predecessor of Akron University), during a long trip through Ohio, the present West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and Kentucky. With only occasional discursive passages to brighten its pages, Bierce's account of his journey is more log than journal. It conveys little of wisdom and none of wit, and the modern reader can only deplore the missed chances to describe parts of the country little known in the period when the journal was written. Dean Knepper's introduction is written with admirable thoroughness and little illusion of any importance for the narrative except as local history. But any history, local or whatever, needs more spark than Bierce gives bis journal to command any but the most esoteric interest. Richard Harwell Bowdoin College Simon Cameron: Lincoln's Secretary of War: A Political Biography. By Erwin Stanley Bradley. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1966. Pp. 45L $7.50. ) Reading Erwin Stanley Bradley's Simon Cameron has caused me to BOOK REVIEWS85 think more ldndry of the life-and-letters type of biography that was fashionable in the nineteenth century. Of course everybody knows the weaknesses of those two- or sometimes three-volumed chronicles, whose dull green or orange-brown bindings warn of the exquisite boredom within. They were tedious, chaotically disorganized, uncritical, and partisan. But among those endless pages there were enough of a man's speeches and letters to allow an intelligent reader to form his own judgment of the hero's character. Even the most unreadable could be mined for useful information. I suspect they may prove to endure longer than the modern style of academic biography, of which Professor Bradley's Cameron is a fair specimen. To be sure, Professor Bradley's biography shares some of the characteristics of its nineteenth-century predecessors. It makes no pretensions to stylistic elegance but is written in well-worn cliches. In a single chapter I found William Bigler expecting "to receive the nomination on a platter"; Cameron appearing "as a thorn in his side"; Buchanan's right hand not knowing "what his left was doing"; Cameron's group "mending political fences"; ambition bringing Cameron's "chickens home to roost"; a political canard "manufactured out of the whole cloth"; and Cameron knowing "well how to forgive and forget after extracting his pound of flesh." Nor does it make any effort to recreate the personality or to probe the motives of its fascinating but elusive subject. Bradley's Cameron is expressly called "A Political Biography," and its self-imposed limitations are suggested by the fact that Cameron's wife is mentioned precisely three times. But in a number of important ways Professor Bradley's Cameron, like other recent academic biographies, differs from the life-and-letters genre, and on the...