Against the Grain: Colonel Henry M. Lazelle and the U.S. Army by James Carson (review)

There is no shortage of biographies about successful Civil War generals. When it comes to writing about an officer whose career before, during, and after the conflict was often marked by failure, however, one might legitimately question the need for a biographical treatment. James Carson’s Against the Grain: Colonel Henry M. Lazelle and the U.S. Army shows that even largely unsuccessful army officers can sometimes merit their own study. Carson demonstrates that Henry M. Lazelle, even in his constant setbacks, played a small but important role in westward expansion, the nineteenth-century U.S. Army, postwar race relations, and Civil War memory.

Born in Enfield, Massachusetts, in 1832, Lazelle attended West Point in the early 1850s. At the academy he quickly demonstrated his problems with authority and was suspended for a year by Superintendent Robert E. Lee. Finally graduating in 1855 near the bottom of his class, Lazelle was assigned to the Eighth Infantry Regiment at Fort Bliss, Texas. In 1861, Texas authorities imprisoned and paroled Lazelle and his unit. Because he was not exchanged until April 1862, Lazelle was assigned to work for William Hoffman, the Union’s commissary general of prisoners. Disliking both Hoffman and his work reporting on conditions in Union prisons, Lazelle took command of the Sixteenth New York Cavalry Regiment in October 1863. As was the case in prewar Texas where his regiment failed to defeat the Apaches’ unconventional tactics, Lazelle failed to stop Confederate colonel John Singleton Mosby’s irregular forces in northern Virginia. Resigning his volunteer commission in 1864, Lazelle returned to his old regular army regiment. After the war, Lazelle and his family spent most of his career living in various army outposts in the West.

Lazelle’s two greatest shortcomings were his inability to get along with his superiors and his incredible knack for courting controversy wherever he went. These faults were readily apparent in his two most important postwar appointments in the East, his time as commandant of the corps of cadets at West Point from 1879 to 1882 and his overseeing of the publication of the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion from 1887 to 1889. Unlike during his cadet days at West Point, Commandant Lazelle was a strict disciplinarian. He gained national notoriety for arguing that an attack on a black cadet, Johnson Chestnut Whittaker, was a hoax and was ultimately dismissed early from his position for constantly quarreling with the school’s superintendent, General Oliver Otis Howard. Later, during his time at the War Records Office, some Republican editors and politicians falsely accused Lazelle of destroying Civil War records and including false documents as part of the Official Records. Although Lazelle was exonerated of both charges and even secured additional congressional funding for the Official Records, he was again dismissed early from this assignment. After each dismissal, Lazelle was assigned to posts back in the West. He finally retired in 1894 and died in Canada in 1917.

The author, a retired CIA and army officer, inherited this biographical project about his great-grandfather from his mother, Barbara Lazelle. Carson supplemented her work with his own archival research. As one might expect from a family history project, Carson strenuously defends his ancestor—for example, lauding him for courageously criticizing problems with General Emory Upton’s famous tactical manuals. But Carson is also not afraid to criticize Lazelle, noting his frequent problems with superiors, his failure to defeat Mosby, and his racism. Full of interesting photographs and drawing on family papers and records not previously available to historians, Carson’s thorough biography is a worthwhile read for both Civil War and nineteenth-century military historians.