Beauregard: Napoleon in Gray (review)

Book Reüteu;*437 had cast, arose after a night of celebration widi some Baltimore friends. So, widi each of die principals in die drama of diat day, Mr. Bishop weaves a pattern of dieir individual courses. At eight o'clock Lincoln had breakfast widi his family. His son, Robert, recendy returned from duty at Grant's headquarters, showed his father a picture of General Lee. Putting on his glasses, the President studied die photograph and said, "It is a good face." At nine o'clock Schuyler Colfax, Speaker of the House, accompanied by Congressman CorneUus Cole, came to see the President. WhUe Lincoln talked to them, John Wilkes Booth stepped out of a barber shop, and Mary Surratt, in her home on H Street, was reading a letter from her son. Other morning visitors were received in die White House, and at eleven o'clock a cabinet meeting was held. MeanwhUe, at Ford's Theatre, actors were rehearsing Our American Cousin, with John Wilkes Booth among the spectators . At high noon James Ford, carting a load of flags to the dieatre, saw Booth and stopped to chat with him. Washington was quiet, and die two men talked of the coming evening performance. One by one, the hours moved closer to die evening of violence and die seemingly endless night of waiting diat foUowed. At eight o'clock Lincoln, about to depart for die dieatre and stiU busy widi visitors, scribbled a note on a card: AUow Mr Ashmun & friend to come in at 9 A.M. to morrow. A. Lincoln April 14, 1865 At ten o'clock that night, a dying Lincoln was carried across the street to the Petersen house. WhUe Dr. Charles Leale held die President's hand and waited through eight hours for the end, Edwin Stanton took charge of the government, dispatching messages and giving orders; and when death finally stopped Lincoln's labored breathing, it was Stanton who said, "Now he belongs to the ages." Despite certain defects, including an overly harsh portrait of Mrs. Lincoln and the occasionally irritating technique of "this-is-how-it-might-have-happened ," Mr. Bishop's book has a great emotional impact. He transports the reader to that one day in 1865 and in die minutiae of trivial occurrences develops the theme of a minor comedy as a prelude for a major tragedy. The technique is highly effective. Although most Americans are weU aware of the final curtain scene, the hour-by-hour approach to the fatal moment carries a heavy sense of foreboding and affords a larger perspective of the terrible drama. Arnold Gates Garden City, New York Beauregard: Napoleon in Gray. By T. Harry Williams. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 1954. Pp. xiii, 345. $4.75.) pierre Gustave TOUTANT Beauregard had a paradoxical personality and a dramatic life from the time he entered West Point at die age of sixteen until 438civil war history he died in his beloved New Orleans in 1893, and T. Harry Williams has faithfully recreated diat personaUty and life in diese pages. Not since Beauregard and Alfred Roman coUaborated and finaUy published The Military Operations of General Beauregard in 1884 has a work of any magnitude been done on this colorful person, one of the eight fuU generals of the Confederacy. As Mr. Williams states in his preface, "He deserved it." It is also stated in die preface that CivU War fans are bound to raise die foUowing two questions. Was Beauregard a great general? Was he even a good one? The audior's answer to the first query is "No, widi a caveat for Beauregard that there are few great generals." Then he immediately answers the second, "Yes, widi several caveats against him." These judgments form the framework of the entire book, which falls into three sections: first, Beauregard 's early life and service in die Mexican campaign; second, the CivU War years; and lasdy, his life in the Reconstructed South. More than haU of the book is devoted to die Civü War, but the audior's careful distribution of emphasis , smooth transitions, and painstaking factual research achieve for die reader a continuity and completeness in die life of...