Book Reviews
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To this task General Fuller brings his o w n analysis of the elements
of military leadership, both personal and professional. He essays a
comparison of the personalities of Grant and Lee and of their generalship. He finds Grant a n enigma, inscrutably simple, a silent man
whose strangeness is evidence that he was a deep one who belonged
to the age of Titans. Lee, on the contrary, was the chivalrous, pious
man whose very nobility of mind was his undoing, and rendered him
no match for Grant. Lee is charged with having a parochial mind and
so preoccupying himself with Virginia alone; with too great submissiveness to civilian control so as to fail largely as a quartermaster. Fuller
suggests Lee should have remedied this last by seizing the government
as a dictator, and winning the war by surrendering what he was fighting for (States Rights, etc.). Further, Fuller finds Lee’s strategy
under a false spell cast by the Federal capitol. History does record
Lee’s strategic use of the politicians’ panicky fears for the safety of
Washington, and of Grant’s campaign for the capture of the Confederate capitol.
Strangest of all, Fuller attempts to charge Lee with reckless loss
of his men in defense of Grant against just such a charge. This he does
by presenting a table of battle losses calculated on the basis of the
percentages the losses were of the strength of the total army. This table
is favorable to Grant. But a better index of a general’s handling of
his troops is to be derived from the ratio of the enemy’s losses to his
own effective strength, while the ratio of his own losses to the total
effective strength of the enemy is the best measure of his conserving
the lives of his men. Such figures are heavily in Lee’s favor.
Comparisons of generals, even those who contend against each
other, are seldom conclusive. A most interesting speculation for another
General Fuller might be found in an imaginative exchange, whereby
Lee would be given Grant’s army with all its greater strength and
resources, and Grant given the army of Lee with its lack of reserves,
equipment and supplies, and then to t r y to forecast what each might
have accomplished. I n this way the factor of generalship might be
isolated. But, of course, such speculation is idle.
In spite of what is written above, this book belongs on the shelf
of anyone who finds the Civil War interesting and who studies leadership as it may be found anywhere. Such a reader will not be bothered
by a few slight errors, and for example will recognize General “C.” E.
Pickett as Virginia’s George Pickett. The Indiana University Press,
which has reprinted the work (first published in 1932) as part of its
“Civil War Centennial Series,” has been of good service to today’s Civil
War enthusiast.
Robert B. Browne
University of Illinois
Mirage in the West: A History of the French Image of American
Society to 1815. By Durand Echeverria. (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1957. Pp. vii, 300. Bibliographical note, index. $5.00.)
Durand Echeverria has attempted in this exceedingly interesting
volume to trace the historical origins of the principal French conceptions and misconceptions of America from 1767 to 1816, for, as Gilbert
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Indiana Magazine of History
Chinard points out in the Foreword, this country has remained a
terra incognita to the French in spite of a natural sympathy which has
bound them to Americans. Thus the title Mirage in the West was
chosen with intent and conviction.
I n the 1760’s there appeared to be a distinct cleavage in French
opinion of America between those who regarded the Americans as Europeans who had been strengthened and liberated by the New World and
those who considered them as people who had degenerated in the forbidding and unhealthful climate of America. The influence of the latter
thinkers, including such prominent persons as Cornelius DePauw, the
Abbe Raynal, and the famous naturalist, the Comte de Buffon, was somewhat mitigated by the attacks of Dom Pernetty on the doctrine of degeneration and later on by the writings of Benjamin Furly, Voltaire, and
Montesquieu who tended to “idealize the Americans as exponents of
religious, economic, and political liberty.” In addition, as French and
American citizens began to have frequent contact and communication
with each other, highlighted by the enthusiastic reception given to
Franklin in France in 1776, French admiration for Americans generally increased. From then until about 1795 this mirage characterized
the New World as the epitome of the ideals of the Philosophes, the Progressionists, the Rousseauists, and the Physiocrats in spite of some
criticism registered by French travelers and emigrants who had spent
some time in America.
After the calling of the Estates General in 1789 and the announcement of the terms of the J a y Treaty a few years later, however, a reversal of this happy picture of America took place, and, as
Mr. Echeverria says, the American dream disintegrated. This development was in part attributable to the unhappy experiences of some
French Bmigres, many of whom could only view experiments in democracy with distaste, to disappointment over the J a y Treaty, and to the
fact that to Frenchmen, disillusioned with the anarchy and violence of
their o w n revolution, the American dream was superfluous and irrelevant. They had begun to feel that the glories of the American experiment either had been misrepresented or that i t was simply a case of
what was one man’s meat was another man’s poison.
Finally, during the consulate and empire, though there was some
distrust of the Americans by French diplomats and considerable difference of opinion on the part of French visitors to America, Napoleon
attempted to resurrect the American dream of earlier years for his own
purposes. Curiously enough his efforts were seconded by his enemies
who looked to America as the hope of democracy.
Mr. Echeverria has done a fine piece of work in clarifying and
explaining the shifts of French opinion toward America in this early
period, and his individual points are well documented in the footnotes.
One wonders at times whether he has taken into sufficient account the
great divergence of opinion on America in most periods, though it is
possible that opinion in France proper was more unified than the attitude of French travelers would suggest. The author has perhaps
neglected the differences of opinion exhibited by the French when they
considered the Atlantic seaboard area as contrasted to the frontier,
or the North as contrasted to the South. I n speaking of the hfarquia
Book Reviews
of Chastellux he concluded, for example, that Chastellux “arrived in
the New World, consequently, with the most favorable prejudices, and
he left with his opinion undiminished” (p. 110), a statement which
hardly gives one a hint of the caustic criticisms which that particular
traveler showered upon a variety of persons and conditions in America.
There are few serious typographical errors, and the book is attractive in format and print. The bibliography is inadequate and disappointing although perhaps the lay reader would regard a list of the
original source materials as superfluous. In spite of these objections,
the book is eminently worth reading, clearly written, and altogether
fascinating.
Franklin Colkge
Mary Steele Owen
Half Horse Half Alligator: The Growth of the Mike Fink Legend,
Edited by Walter Blair and Franklin J. Meine. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956. Pp. ix, 289. Frontispiece, illustrations,
bibliography. $5.00.)
The editors published a biography of Mike Fink in 1933. I n this
earlier volume they produced a lively word portrait of one of backwoods
America’s most fabulous characters. Up until that time i t was difficult to tell for sure whether Mike Fink was man or legend. Associated
with him was the half-horse, half-alligator personality which whooped
and sweated its way up and down the western rivers. Mike in fact
epitomized a great mass of humanity which beat and poled its way
into the pages of history with fist, hard head, loud bragging, close
spitting, and keen-eyed marksmanship.
The Mike Fink legend was not a part of a single frontier, but of
several. H e was active in the upper Ohio in the years of the great
international struggle for colonial possession of this continent, he helped
open the great Ohio Valley to traffic, and then he followed the Mississippi and Missouri upstream to the Rocky Mountain Indian and f u r
empires.
Scarcely a moment of Mike’s life could be considered a quiet one;
even as a hunter the woods offered him a threat to both life and
happiness. The editors have searched diligently through the contemporary literature to find the literary traces of this man who was
as unliterary as a rotten cottonwood stump.
Mike Fink became a central character in early American writing.
A list of the sources used in this book indicates how widespread the literature of this frontiersman became. Almost as fascinating as the
literature itself is the fact that so many really capable chroniclers of
the frontier scene found in Mike Fink a symbol of the arduous task
of subduing wild country for the safety of women, children, preachers,
and schoolhouses. The editors have woven their selections into a
cohesive pattern of evolution. It is fortunate that two scholars 60 well
grounded in this area of American literature have undertaken this
meticulous task. They have traced the creation of an American figure
who gave a touch of personal color to the whole process of breaking
ground for a national civilization.
University of Kentucky
Thomas D. Clark