North Carolina Office of Archives and History

Winfield Scott and the Profession of Arms by Allan PeskinReview by: Kenrick N. SimpsonThe North Carolina Historical Review, Vol. 81, No. 4 (OCTOBER 2004), pp. 468-470Published by: North Carolina Office of Archives and HistoryStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23523221 .

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468 Book Reviews

those personal relationships to further specific political ends. Hamilton's use of the public defense pamphlet underscored his sense that the code of honor (which ultimately led to his

death in a duel) was the proper mode of public discourse. Adams's diary, in which he

excoriates both himself and others, and subjects everyone to the minutest scrutiny, best

exemplifies his belief that the public selves on display were to be viewed with suspicion. Monroe's anonymous essays (in the Federalist Papers) reflect his belief that only an

Olympian and disinterested detachment would create the proper milieu in which to

function as a government. Finally, Weems's nineteenth-century biography reified

Washington's personal character, creating a link between private life and public service, so

that the nature of government, and the results of governance, could be seen to radiate

outward from Washington's own moral conduct.

The wide-ranging nature of Trees's reading and research helps to create a convincing

picture of how, in creating an entirely new polity from the shattered remnants of the old,

the founders of the United States found themselves in a position to create a national

mindset, a way of thinking and behaving as a whole nation based on their own conception

of character. Admittedly, his contention that Jefferson's personal appeal to familial and

affective ties somehow held within it the seeds of disunion remains slightly unconvincing.

Without a thorough study of how Jefferson's conception of government through personal

relationship affected his national policies, Trees's conclusion must remain a tantalizing

possibility. This minor cavil aside, the study is thorough and thought provoking, elegantly written, and provides a wealth of fascinating detail drawn from a huge variety of sources.

Trees has packed some very large ideas into a small volume, with excellent results.

North Carolina State Library

Stephen Case

Winfield Scott and the Profession of Arms. By Allan Peskin. (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press,

2003. Preface, acknowledgments, illustrations, maps, notes, sources cited, index. Pp. xi, 328.

$49.00.)

Winfield Scott was a giant, literally and figuratively, who strode across the military and

political landscape of nineteenth-century America. He entered the nation's consciousness

as one of the youthful heroes of the War of 1812, served as commander in chief of the U.S.

Army for twenty years at mid-century, conceived and implemented the brilliant strategy

that won the War with Mexico, and ran as the last Whig candidate for the presidency in 1852. At six feet four and of massive girth, he dwarfed the majority of his contemporaries. But to the modern generation, Scott is a largely forgotten figure, or at best a dimly recalled

apparition of myth and legend, of whom little has been written since Charles Winslow Elliott's pathbreaking biography in 1937. Allan Peskin, professor emeritus of history at Cleveland State University and the author of an acclaimed biography of James A. Garfield, has recovered "Old Fuss and Feathers" from his relative obscurity with a sympathetic

reappraisal of his life and times. As Peskin notes in the preface to Winfield Scott and the

Profession of Arms: "Although I doubt whether Scott and I would have hit it off had we ever met, I was frequently surprised, and sometimes delighted, by the man I uncovered." Even

THE NORTH CAROLINA HISTORICAL REVIEW

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Book Reviews 469

more remarkable, the reader too is swept along by the author's warm, engaging style and

will likely embrace Scott, copious warts and all.

To his contemporaries, Winfield Scott was difficult to embrace. As a young, vainglorious

officer, anxious for his aged superiors, relics of the Revolutionary War, to stand aside and

allow him to advance, he was "proud to the point of arrogance, contentious, ambitious for

rank, a gossip and a duelist." Throughout his long military career, he would engage in a

succession of bitter quarrels with fellow officers over questions of relative rank that would

"sour relations with colleagues and superiors, including various presidents, detracting from

his considerable accomplishments by making himself appear both selfish and foolish." His

antagonists included James Wilkinson, Edmund P. Gaines, Dewitt Clinton, William L.

Marcy, and, most memorably, Andrew Jackson and Jefferson Davis. These disputations

were largely conducted through official correspondence. Scott had the unfortunate

inability to recognize when to quit writing, and he managed to dilute his strong arguments

with irrelevancies and outright silliness. Describing the feud between Scott and Secretary

of War Davis, Peskin captures the essence of both proud men in a memorable passage: "The

principal antagonists were no longer writing to each other, nor were they even addressing

the public or posterity. They had passed beyond those considerations into that purer realm

where the author writes solely for the joy of seeing his words emerge upon the page. They

were engaged in art for art's sake."

In the political arena, Scott was naïve and oblivious to public opinion. When, in 1852, he was finally selected as the Whig candidate after two narrow misses, he set out on an ill

advised campaign trail, an unusual course for a presidential contender in the mid

nineteenth century. His vacuous speeches were ridiculed for their empty bombast, and his

strained efforts at familiarity were denounced as condescending. Scott and the Whig Party

were overwhelmingly defeated, though it was more a case of the captain going down with a

sinking ship than an incompetent pilot wrecking a sound vessel on the rocks. Even his

unusual marital situation invited the jeers and torments of his critics. In 1817, the youthful

war hero married Maria Mayo, the reigning belle of Richmond. Although they were the

parents of seven children—only five of whom, all girls, survived infancy—the Scotts spent most of their mature years apart, he in the army and she in Europe. Regrettably, we are

shown precious little of Scott's private life in this biography; perhaps there was but little to

see.

Scott burst upon the national scene as the hero of the Niagara frontier in the War of

1812. Even before he attained the rank of commander in chief of the army in 1841, and

insured his lasting fame with the capture of Mexico City in 1847, he had made his

permanent mark as the prophet of the professional army in the United States. The media

for this accomplishment were two textbooks: a manual of infantry tactics and drill, based

upon the French model (Scott's Tactics), and a handbook of general army regulations and

procedures (Scott's Institutes). While his vision of an elite, professional army (he had a

lifelong antipathy for militia and volunteers of any stripe) would not survive the onset of

the age of total warfare, ushered in by the American Civil War, the creation of a

"professional military management structure" would endure as Scott's lasting achievement,

as the title of this study suggests.

The invasion of Mexico was remarkable for the obstacles that Scott had to overcome,

the least of which was Santa Anna and his army. Beleaguered by the impossible demands of

VOLUME LXXXI • NUMBER 4 • OCTOBER 2004

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470 Book Reviews

President James K. Polk and Secretary of War Marcy (a situation Scott referred to as "a fire

upon my rear," an unfortunate choice of words that became instant grist for his critics' mill)

and betrayed by a coterie of scheming junior officers eager for military glory and political advancement, Scott managed an amphibious landing operation and siege at Vera Cruz,

marched 260 miles through hostile country (eventually abandoning his line of supply), and

defeated an army three times the size of his own. Certainly none of his rivals could have

accomplished what Scott did under such circumstances.

In spite of Scott's many faults, the portrait of "Old Fuss and Feathers" as painted by

Peskin is captivating. Even the general's notorious vanity, according to the author, was

regarded by his friends as harmless, indicative of neither selfishness nor malice. Scott's

military career spanned more than half a century, rendering him at last one of those

superannuated war horses he had found so exasperating as a young lieutenant colonel.

Peskin writes with an easy, fluid grace. Fie employs metaphorically a delightful variety of literary allusions, from the Kilkenny cats of nursery rhyme and the Dodo of Alice in

Wonderland, to Inspector Javert of Les Miserables. Scott, he writes, entered the national

spotlight as Hotspur, but finally left the stage as King Lear. The author makes judicious use of

the available primary materials—most of Scott's early personal papers were burned in

1841—and even recovered a few new rare jewels from what he terms the "archival sludge" of

governmental records in the National Archives. There are odd gaps in the narrative, most

noticeably from 1848 to 1852, just as there are aspects of his personal life that remain closed.

Still, Peskin's biography of Scott is a first-rate reappraisal of a heroic figure whose reputation, though still somewhat sullied by his own human foibles, shines with renewed radiance.

Office of Archives and History

Kenrick N. Simpson

The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia. By Claude A. Clegg III. (Chapel Hill:

University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Frontispiece, acknowledgments, introduction,

illustrations, maps, tables, figures, epilogue, notes, bibliography, index. Pp. xii, 330. $19.95, paper;

$55.00, cloth.)

The story of Liberian colonization is a familiar one to students of American and African

American history. American slaveholders intrigued by the success of the British, especially

after the closure of the African slave trade in 1808 in the United States, imitated the British example of settling recaptured Africans in Sierra Leone. Founded in 1817, the American Colonization Society (ACS) acquired land in neighboring Liberia to accomplish a similar task. Composed of some of the most prominent Americans, the ACS seemed

intent on removing much of the nation's free black population from U.S. shores and

resettling them in Liberia. Condemned by prominent free blacks and white abolitionists, so the story goes, the ACS stumbled through the nineteenth century with periodic fits and

starts, depending on the nation's racial climate.

Claude Clegg's The Price of Liberty defies colonization's standard narrative by focusing

on the experiences of 2,032 North Carolina emigrants to Liberia from the 1820s through

century's end. Initially supported by North Carolina Quakers as a means of providing

freedom for enslaved populations, colonization assumed a life of its own as free and enslaved

blacks, masters and abolitionists, and self-interested entrepreneurs entered its ranks.

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