Joshism
Captain
- Joined
- Apr 30, 2012
- Location
- Jupiter, FL
Brown tends to take liberties like this, making his presentation problematic. He says at one point Meade had no topographic maps and at another point he says Meade looked at his map and saw that Pipe Creek would be a good place for a defensive line.
It's possible that Meade had topographic maps of parts of Maryland, but not of Pennsylvania.
Brown’s entire presentation smacks of someone who is trying to twist the evidence to fit what he wants to be true instead of having the evidence tell him what was true. One is best advised to corroborate everything he says with other sources.
Am I the only person who immediately thought of Tom Carhart's Lee's Lost Triumph? Especially both assume extensive knowledge of tactical thought from men whose pre-war talents lay predominately in engineering.
Have you read Brown's Retreat from Gettysburg: Lee, Logistics, and the Pennsylvania Campaign? Was "twist the evidence to fit what he wants to be true" an issue in that book?
I found it odd too that there were no questions. All the other talks I've seen had time for questions afterward.
I got the impression that there were computer difficulties at the beginning (perhaps that was just C-SPAN picking up coverage too soon?) and/or Brown ran long on his talk.
As @Bee knows, I spoke with a couple of historians after that talk, one of whom is writing a biography of Meade, and asked if they thought his claims about Meade remembering Mahan's words and using Clausewitz and Jomini held water. They were skeptical as well.
How many Meade biographies are in the works right now?
It's not insignificant that Meade graduated 19th of 56 cadets in 1835. In other words, 12 years before Mahan's book and as an unremarkable student (despite being a pretty good engineer and someone who I would not think got many demerits).
I have a vague recollection from a Lee biography about an extra-curricular military study club, presumably sponsored by Mahan (Lee graduated 6 years ahead of Meade).
If it hasn't happened already, someone definitely needs to write a book on what West Point soldiers actually studied from the 1820s to the 1850s as there seem to be some rather diverse ideas on the subject. Does Carol Reardon's With a Sword in One Hand and Jomini in the Other: The Problem of Military Thought in the Civil War North cover this?