Review: Master of War Pt. 2

There were two things I didn't like about he book -- first is the author's overly flowery diction in describing how awesome George Thomas was. Here's an example from page 292:

Thomas stood with his field glasses on a hill near the main salient in the Federal outer works east of the Hillsboro Pike. From time to time, his head swiveled slowly like a gun turret as he surveyed the undulating ground.

I mean, come on. "Like a gun turret"?

Bobrick also confuses a few antebellum facts. He explains that "several agreements had been forged between the states ... the adoption of a Senate and a House of Representatives to mediate between the claims of federal and state authority." I thought that was strange -- Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution specifies the Supreme Court for that.

Then "related to this was a clause in the Constitution that allowed the South, in the apportionment of its representation, to count each slave as three-fifths of a man."

That's a bit misleading. At the time of the Constitution, both New York and New Jersey still permitted slavery; it wasn't just the South that benefited. Plus, that whole phrase "three-fifths of a man" is charged. Three-fifths was the compromise between the North (who didn't want slaves counted at all), and the South (who wanted to count all of them). The fact that they couldn't vote either way probably didn't make too much of a difference -- back then a lot of white males couldn't vote either.

Finally, there's "since 1789, free and slave states had been admitted in pairs to ensure parity between the two interests...." There are several many things wrong with that.

1. According to the dates of admission, several states were admitted without a pair -- Louisiana and Florida, for instance.
   
2. There was no "parity" in 1789. There were five free states and eight slave.
   
3. The idea of parity only became an issue at around 1820, after all the lands of the South had been "statified." Even then, parity was an ideal that made compromise easier, not a rule.

Here's a good map that illustrates all this:

The author's error comes from misunderstanding how the idea of "progress" changed between the Enlightenment and Manifest Destiny eras. Before the invention of the cotton gin, everyone viewed slavery as a necessary evil that would die a natural death. The North was therefore willing to tolerate it for the present, as it meant their compromises would be moot at some point in the future.

It was only when the plantation system became highly profitable that people's views changed. Instead of a "necessary evil," Southerners viewed it as their path to success. And in the North, the expansion of slavery alarmed those who had expected it to die naturally. Their idea of progress through free labor conflicted with that of the South, which felt that their -- now -- "Constitutional right" required continual expansion.

It was because of that conflict -- the South's social requirement for expansion against the North's more modern notions of progress -- that the Civil War became inevitable.