The only political picture I have in my apartment is one of the statue of William Seward in Volunteer Park. Between building the West, and of course his forceful anti-slavery campaign, the man helped shape America, mostly for the good. While the specific cause is, obviously over, there is still much to learn about committing to action from a man who said, “Slavery must be abolished, and we must do it.”
The man is one of my heroes, yet I refer to him as, the original neocon. Early in the Civil War, when there was still a possibility that Maryland and Missouri might leave the Union, a couple confederate diplomats were captured on a British mail packet. The particulars aren’t important except that Seward wanted to use this as a pretext to go to war with Britain, and oh by the way, if you want to have someone in the cabinet run these wars I’ll totally do it.
President Lincoln shot him down saying, “one war at a time, Mr. Seward.” This wasn’t the first time Seward had tried to overstep his authority; he had rather famously tried to keep Chase out of the cabinet. It was the last time, and Seward – realizing that he would only be able to use the power of the Secretary of State – settled down and did an great job: the rest of the world never recognized the Confederacy in large part because of his efforts.
As we have the first official word (and weeks of speculation) that for the first time since then, a president from Illinois is going to nominate a Senator from New York to be his secretary of state, there are some lessons.
– It’s the President’s show. When Obama and Clinton have differences as, any president and secretary of state will, the president will have the last word.
– There’s a good chance that Hillary, or any other cabinet official, will do something that drives you insane. And especially in the wake of President Bush, there will be a lot of time to demand people be fired. I would recommend against that. That isn’t to say we shouldn’t criticize them – in a democracy, of course we should – only that we might want to give them the chance to improve.
Nice insightful post Carl.
Off-topic a bit, here is the latest on the Bush administration and how they let the sub-prime crisis fester. It is an example of putting lobbyists and business before the good of the people. It is an example of a cabinet and president that look out for their rich corporate buddies and not the people. It is the complete opposite of what Obama brings and a good refutation of the wingnut arguments about the lack of regulation NOT being the cause of the economic meltdown:
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.c.....n_rule.php
I’d like to remind everyone that everything about Carl is fake. Check out his bio on this blog. Unless he’s willing to stop hiding behind a fake name, it’s hard to to take him seriously.
Other than that, I congratulate him on admiring a Republican.
Carl, you say you have a lot to learn about committing to action from Seward. Tell me, have you ever questioned Goldy about why there are no blacks with posting privileges on HA, like I have? Or have you remained silent on this issue? Who do you think Seward would admire more, me or you?
Shouldn’t a statue of William Seward be located in Seward Park, which was named for him?
I’m always getting Seward (Secty of State under Lincoln) and Stanton (Secty of War under Lincoln) confused, I have to remind myself every time of who was who.
Seward also pushed through the purchase of Alaska, knowing a good deal when he saw one, despite public opinion to the contrary. At the time, the two-pennies-an-acre purchase was called “Seward’s Folley”. But Seward knew what Will Rogers once said, a few decades later: “Buy land – they aren’t making any more of it”).
I have a hard time thinking of Seward as a neo-con. The Trent Affair (as the capture of the Confederate Diplomates and their removal from a British ship came to be called) was an exception, not the rule. Steward was indeed somewhat flustered by British onstensible neutrality, while they pretended not to notice British shipbuilders building and outfitting ships for use by the Confederacy as raiders. At the time, the British may have indeed backed down if Steward were allowed to bluster a bit more – they were very concerned that Eastern Canada (then called British North America) was virtually defenseless to a determined assault from Union forces. But nobody in the U.S. new the depth of their concerns at the time.
The history of the Confederacy’s attempts to gain recognition from European powers, principally Britain and France (Napoleon III), is an interesting study in statecraft, diplomacy, and chess on a grand scale.
In late 1863 Napolean III’s attempted to break the Monroe Doctrine while the U.S. was preoccupied with the Civil War, and re-establish a French presence in the Western Hemisphere. He enacted a “regime change” in Mexico, replacing Mexican President Juarez with an Australian prince, Maximillian, with the assistance of French troops and Mexican royalists. Secty of State Seward and Secty of War Stanton agreed that this could not go unchallenged, because if France linked up with the Confederacy through Mexico and provided real assistance to the Confederates, it could change the course of the war. So they insisted on a large Union presence somewhere in Texas as a blocking force. The problem was, previous Union attempts to make inroads into Texas had been complete failures (Galviston, Sabine Pass).
So Seward and Stanton prevailed upon Lincoln to order Banks (in New Orleans), supported by Fields (in Little Rock), to seize Shreveport, LA as a stepping-stone to capturing East Texas. Banks was a political general, a former Governor of Massachussetts and U.S. Speaker of the House. His military career to that point hadn’t been stellar, he was known by the Confederates as “Commissary Banks” because he left behind so many supplies when he was pushed out of the Shenandoah Valley by Stonewall Jackson in 1861 – they joked that Banks fed the Confederates there better than their own commissary did. Banks was dissapointed that his seizure of Port Hudson, shortly after Vicksburg surrendered, didn’t get the same level of attention or glory that came to Grant after Vicksburg.
But politicians seldom make good military strategists. One of the more difficult tasks, as Napoleon had written, was to handle the convergence of two widely seperated forces against an enemy in the middle. A competent enemy will concentrate his forces and defeat each one seperately, in detail (as Jackson did to Banks and others in 1861 in the Shenandoah Valley). When U.S. Grant was given command of all Union forces in mid-March of 1864, he believed that operations in the Trans-Mississippi area were a waste of resources. He preferred to concentrate all forces within or supporting two axis of attack, in N. Virginia (Meade & Burnside), and in Georgia (Sherman). He didn’t cancel the Red River expedition, however, because it was about to begin anyway and had been ordered by the President. He did, however, put a strict time limit on the campaign.
To make a long story short (well, I guess it’s too late for that), Banks was defeated and forced to retreat, barely saving Admiral Porter’s fresh-water fleet from capture by the use of dams built by an enterprising former logging engineer named Baily. Fields was likewise defeated, returning to Little Rock with his surviving forces consisting of starving and thirsty men with little more to show for their campaign than a couple of captured cannon.
How Seward statue ended up in Volunteer Park.
http://www.historylink.org/ind.....le_id=8195
Seward Park didn’t come about until 1911.
Correction: Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson’s famed Shenandoah Valley campaign was in the early spring of 1862, not 1861.
WOW
I nominate this post for some sort of award. I am learning a lot.
Mason & Slidell, I presume.
As for what’s-his-name’s folly, go to hulu, locate the search box, and type: Palin turkey.
Then go to the P(ravda)-I(svestiia) for our turkey du jour, Joel Triple Chins Connelly: “A few years back, my sweetie and I hiked several miles along the north end of the trail, lowered ourselves by rope down a muddy slope, and found a sunny, wild ocean coast to ourselves. Mickie spotted a blowhole …”
That would be the blowhole she roped in with.
Then there’s KIRO-AM’s resident blowhole, 9-Noon, graduate of Ted Baxter’s Famous School for Lefty Little Mercer Island Elitists with Big Voices. Today Ted Jr. yammered about Christine “We do not have a deficit” Gregoire’s deficit.
Think of all the cruel cuts, said Jr. Think of the cruel cuts, shrinking government, as a conservative wet dream. Think of teachers displaced, of tiny tots thrown in the snow to die.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to ponder the unsustainable drunken-Democrat spending binge of “Governor” Greg’s first term? And the predictable consequence that she and we would hit a wall?
Letting Ted Baxter Jr. spin Chimpface Christine’s Folly into a Chimpface Bush Bash is sort of like Rush ranting about the Obama Recession after a few down days in November.
Still, Ross today was better than three weeks of Ross donning his gay agenda to whimper and whine about Prop 8.
# 9: Let me know when you graduate to 9th grade. Then perhaps you can comprehend Dave Ross’s comments.
I suspect you like Dori Monson instead????? Maybe you are classmates?
By the way, the drunken-sailor analogy makes more sense when it is applied to the Republican Congress of 2001~2005. They were the ones that cut taxes and then repealed the rule that any new spending had to be self-funded (new taxes or cuts elsewhere). Under that Republican Congress, the federal budget surplus became a record-setting federal deficit in just six years, and the national debt (which took some seventy years to accumulate) tripled again in those same six years.
Obviously, spending during Gregoire’s administration is miserly by comparison.
Carl Goldy
I was serious. I think it might be fun to have some way of recognizing a great post like this. An archive? Free beer?