Galahads and Chancers
To Appomattox: Nine April Days, 1865. By
Burke Davis. (Eyre and Spottiswoode, 50s.) Jim Fisk. By W. A. Swanberg. (Longmans, 25s.) WHEN the Civil War broke out, there was a wide- spread belief in clerical and literary circles in the North that the coming ordeal by battle would greatly raise the moral tone of the North. The Union Army, if not composed of Galahads at the first, would become so and the people who stayed at home would profit, morally, by the example of the boys in blue. In the South, there seems to have been less of this feeling, since the South did not see anything in their way of life that needed improvement. With our own experience of wars, it need hardly be said that it did not work out, that way. The 'boys' on both sides behaved as soldiers tend to do. Pollard called Richmond a new Sodom and Gomorrah and Washington became a com- bination of pre-Butler Soho and Glasgow on a Saturday night when whisky was 3s. 6d. a bottle. And if the morals of the front and the front line cities were bad, those of New York and the civilian population were, if anything, worse:
Among those who stayed at home was the jolly Vermont Unitarian Jim Fisk (others were John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and Mark Hanna) and when the Union was saved, Jim moved in for a killing. The war had ended for all practical purposes when the remnants of Lee's broken army fleeing South tried to push through Sheridan's cavalry screen and found it backed by the massed infantry of Ord. At Appomattox, the greatest of American soldiers laid down his arms and in his tactfully magnanimous treatment of Lee, Grant reached the highest point of his life.
Mr. Davis has had the good idea, well executed, of telling the story of the nine-day retreat from Petersburg and Richmond in a daily diary of the pursuit. This is ingeniously con- structed from a great many narratives, Union and Confederate, which give a vivid impression of the last campaign of the Armies of Northern Virginia and of the Potomac, the one dissolving from fatigue, hunger, despair as well as constant battle, the other well fed, well armed, overwhelming in numbers and yet not, at first, sure that Lee could be cut off, that he had exhausted all his guile or that his army had exhausted all its force. it did not matter much in a sense if Lee did get away— he would 'have run into Sherman in North Carolina; but Grant rightly wanted to give the much-tried Army of the Potomac the chance to avenge so many disasters. That it got it was due, more than to anyone else, to the not magnanim- ous, not generous, but tireless, autocratic and clear-headed commander of the Union cavalry, Philip Sheridan. He alone, old General Scott had said, had 'finish' and he went after Lee like John D. Rockefeller I destroying a rival refining com- pany. He removed Warren from command of his corps on the field, snubbed Meade, jumped his charger, Rienzi, over the Confederate lines and, to use his own famous phrase, saw 'that the thing was pushed.'
The story Mr. Swanberg tells has often been told before, and told better. For Jim Fisk is a dis- appointing book especially for those who have read Mr. Swanberg's far superior study of another rogue, Dan Sickles. No doubt one reason is that Sickles had a fuller and more interesting life than had Fisk. Fisk was an amorist who was shot by his mistress's lover, whereas Sickles killed his wife's lover, as well as rivalling Don Giovanni in America, Spain, etc. But it was not merely the 'milk tre' aspect of the case that made Sickles a better subject. The manoeuvres of Fisk and his drab and ruthless partner, Jay Gould. the
combination of Blifil and Black George, were more scandalous than amusing. There were genuine comic episodes--there was that canting Methodist hypocrite, Drew, as mean as he was pious; there was that incompetent Methodist rascal, Mrs. Grant's brother-in-law, Corbin;
there was the crooked judge, Barnard (tnirabile dictu, a Yale Man); there was Boss Tweed and
Commodore Vanderbilt; there was the great era of the takeover bids, culminating in the attempt to corner gold. It ought to be very dramatic and occasionally is. but I rather think that the censor- ious account by Charles Francis Adams 11 and Henry Adams is actually more vivid reading.
But there is one side of the age of graft that Mr. Swanberg treats more fully than the Adams brothers did. For Jim Fisk was long remembered more for his gaudy private life than for his
piratical dealings in Wall Street. There was his Opera House which was an office, etc., as well. There were his uniforms; his rank as a self-made admiral; as a colonel who bought command of his regiment of militia as if he had been an English gentleman before the abolition of purchase. There were the hundreds of canarY birds on his pleasure steamers and there was Miss (Josie) Mansfield. Miss Mansfield was an `actress,' although there were enemies who in- sisted that she got on her feet, so to speak, in a famous New York brothel. (She had been `ruined' in California.) On this lady, Jim Fisk lavished money, diamonds, attention and love letters. On her, it was widely believed, was spent a lot of the money that ought to have gone to keep the Erie Railroad in repair. And, alas, it was Miss Mansfield who was the main cause of Mr. Stokes killing Fisk in his own Opera,House- cum-Love Nest. This was one side—and an en- tertaining side—of the New York of young Henry James and of Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence. If his assassinatioh did not quite make Jim Fisk a martyr, it at any rate saved him Iron) the contagion of the world's slow stain,' which bankrupted Drew and dried up Jay Gould. Miss Mansfield was, in a strict sense of the term, a femme fatale. We are given a photograph of her from which it is not only visible that she was what Hollywood used to call 'talented,' but, what Hollywood would not tolerate today, double- chinned. She died in her bed in 1931—poor, or so it is said. She had probably played the market too boldly in the Twenties.
D. W. BROGAN
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