Lincoln Observed: The Civil War Dispatches of Noah Brooks (review)

l62CIVIL war history Although understaffed and with limited supplies, Scott led his forces successfully in Mexico. In 1 852 Scott became the last Whig presidential candidate. However, some of his personality traits were not popular with voters. His nickname of "Old Fuss and Feathers," his tendency to be blustery and be preoccupied with personal appearance, worked against him. He predicted a long Civil War before anyone in Washington, D.C, would grasp the reality of the conflict. President Abraham Lincoln and Scott last consulted with one another in June of 1862 at West Point. Scott had served in the Army for fifty-three years, under fourteen presidents. The day of his funeral, cannons fired at every Army post, and Federal executive offices and the New York Stock Exchange were closed for the day, in his honor. The giant general now rests at his favorite Army post, West Point. John Eisenhower's biography is ajoy to read! The writing is clear and smooth. It is admirable that Eisenhower traveled to major places where Scott soldiered. He examined the terrain from Lundy's Lane, Ontario, Canada, to Mexico City, Mexico. However, Eisenhower's biography does not mine scattered manuscript collections; scholars looking for such may wish to study Timothy D. Johnson's recent Winfield Scott: The Questfor Military Glory (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998). Eisenhower's fresh look at Scott is a welcomed readable biography ofone ofthe top military and political figures ofnineteenth-century North America. Alan C. Aimone U.S. Military Academy Library Lincoln Observed: The Civil War Dispatches ofNoah Brooks. Edited by Michael Burlingame. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UniversityPress, 1998. Pp. xii, 291. $25.95.) It is almost impossible to heap too much praise on Abraham Lincoln scholar Michael Burlingame's editorial accomplishment in bringing us Noah Brooks's firsthand account of Lincoln and some of those around him during the period of late 1862 to mid-May 1865. Burlingame not only has made Brooks's pro-Lincoln, pro-Union observations in Brooks's wartime dispatches to theSacramento Daily Union readily accessible to all who may read this compact book, but he has enriched the book with a critical biographical introduction about Brooks; an appendix with Brooks's personal recollections about Lincoln; and fifty-six pages of vital annotations and sources regarding the people, places, and events surrounding Lincoln. It is this sort of painstaking research and devotion to accuracy that should gratify both readers and researchers. As Burlingame makes clear, Brooks admired Lincoln, and through his frequent access to the president and Mary Lincoln, he acquired some rare information . And, since his dispatches to California were not printed until about a month after he composed them, he was freer than eastern journalists not only to make rather candid observations about public figures, but also to report on the immediate political intrigues and military maneuverings of Washington's "best and book reviews163 brightest." Moreover, while Lincoln buffs will not find any surprising revelations in those of Brooks's 258 dispatches that Burlingame has selected, they will find entertaining vignettes of such cabinet personages as Edwin Stanton ("inexorable as death and as reticent as the grave"), Gideon Welles ("slightly fossiliferous"), and John Usher ("fair, fat, fifty and florid"). And they will discover such caustic reports as those that reveal that the officer corps of theArmy of the Potomac "is one vast hot-bed of bickerings, heart-burnings and jealousies ." In fact, with only slight digging, they will glimpse—for free, white males anyway—that long-lost more-egalitarian and less-bureaucratized society ofthe republican political culture in pre-industrial America. Thus, Brooks notes that Lincoln exhibited "plain republican manners and style as becomes a President of a republic." And, later, he notes Lincoln's deference to the common soldiers when Lincoln "touched his hat in a return salute to the officers, but uncovered to the men in the ranks." Despite the near hagiographical view with which Brooks writes about Lincoln, his observations contain many insights that only eyewitness accounts can bring us. Still, one must be conscious ofBrooks's bias and be informed by Burlingame's judicious comments to guard against such exaggerated and self-inflated claims as Brooks's unsupported...