Writing books about history means trying to find out secrets that once were not secrets.  In my current project about Aaron Burr and his dream of creating an American empire, I am feverishly trying to track down three maps that Burr was using when he was arrested for treason in Mississippi, which supposedly provide insight into what Burr was really up to.

Burr left the maps with Dr. John Cummins of Bayou Pierre, and in 1903 they were held by Cummins' granddaughter, Mrs. Thomas C. Wordin of Bridgeport, CT.  In that year, the maps were lovingly described by Walter Flavius McCaleb in his book, The Aaron Burr Conspiracy.

 
According to McCaleb, the maps are "of preeminent significance, illustrating, as they undoubtedly do, the outlines of Burr's project."  One "shows the lower region of the Mississippi River with Natchez, New Orleans, and the [Ouachita] lands, also New Mexico down to Yucutan." 

The second is really a nautical chart, showing with "astonishing minuteness a survey of the Gulf Coast from New Orleans to Campeche.  Island, bars, and inlets are recorded, and soundings are given.  The chart is beautifully executed on paper bearing the watermark of 1801."

The third one covers "that section of Mexico lying between Vera Cruz on the east and Mexico City on the west."

But where are they?  Subsequent books do not refer to these maps, even though McCaleb claims that he reproduced one of them in the 1903 edition of his book (the version scanned and posted at Google Books does not have a map in it).

So, where are the maps?  I am consulting with the Map Room at the Library of Congress, and the History Museum in Bridgeport, CT.  Any other ideas?  I'd love to track these down.

On Bastille Day (that's Wednesday, July 14), the newest Stewart literary triumph takes to the bookshelves -- Matt Stewart's debut novel, The French Revolution, will officially launch.  OK, I'm only slightly biased, since he is my son, but it's a terrific read, and I hope you will check it out.  I stress, however, that although I write history, Matt's book is fiction, and has only a notional connection to the actual French Revolution of 1789.

It's the story of an over-the-top family in San Francisco and its struggles with fate and each other.  Remember, now, it's fiction:  not about our family. 

The reviews have been great so far, and have been coming from all over the country.  A quick sampling:

San Francisco Chronicle:  "Stewart writes the sort of sentences that punch holes in a 140-character ceiling and sail out corkscrewing across the bay. From its first pages, which describe the laborious morning ritual of Esmeralda Van Twinkle - a persnickety, ravenous and extremely large cashier in a copy shop - the novel fondly recalls John Kennedy Toole's 1980 classic 'A Confederacy of Dunces.'"

[Like "A Confederacy of Dunces"!  Pretty cool!]

Kirkus Reviews:  "Best of all, Stewart's language sparkles, sometimes riffing like Bob Dylan, always moving the narrative forward....easy entertainment in book form."

[Dylan!]

SF Weekly:  "Stewart's command of rhythm and descriptive detail sometimes astounds. His handling of character and tone [is] a cocktail of absurdity, whimsy, and occasional brutality."

Boston Globe:  "Whimsically allegorical...amusing and quite clever."

Not only does he write better than his old man, he's the good-looking one. 

I married well.

So buy it!  Buy a bunch of them!  Give them to your friends!

 

I treasure books that help me look at familiar things in a new way, and have just finished two that do that:  Ned Sublette's The World the Made New Orleans, and Roger Kennedy's Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause.  Though neither book is quite new, they were new to me.

Sublette is one of those appalling people with way too much talent in far too many areas.  As a musician, his achievements include a wild merengue version of Ghost Riders in the Sky, the cowboy classic, and bunches of other recordings.  But he's also a very fine writer who's curious about history.  What better topic than New Orleans for a musician who is curious about history?

Sublette starts from The Beginning, exploring the French political and social forces that led to the founding of New Orleans, which was something of a penal colony and a dread destination in its early days.  His take on the Spanish era of control (1763 to 1803) is fascinating.  Though the Spaniards did little to change the dominant French culture, he credits them with implementing a relaxed form of slavery (if that's a term that can be used) which allowed the a vibrant community of free blacks and mestizos to develop.

As a musician, Sublette is also particularly sensitive to the musical traditions that grew from the colony's earliest days, tracing them back to hymn-singing Ursuline sisters and waves of African slaves.  If you love New Orleans -- and I think that's everyone I've ever met -- this book will make you think about it in many different ways.

Roger Kennedy is another man with so many talents that he makes the rest of us feel bad.  He was chairman of a bank in Minneapolis, head of the Smithsonian's Museum of American History, and director of the National Park Service.  Oh, and he has written a number of fascinating books about architecture and history.  Fourteen of them, by my count.

His book on Jefferson is a sprawling, iconoclastic rampage through some of our hoariest myths about the third president.  His immediate target is the Jeffersonian ideal of a nation filled with yeoman farmers.  That's what Jefferson was all about, right?  Isn't that why he fought the duel with Hamilton?  (Wait, that was Aaron Burr who fought Hamilton, and I'm writing a book about that.  I digress.) 

Kennedy peels away Jefferson's always-charming rhetoric to the beating heart of what the man actually did as a public official for thirty years.  He concludes -- and demonstrates to my satisfaction -- that Jefferson had no interest whatever in assisting the growth of small farms whose yeoman proprietors would be the backbone of our democracy.  No, sirree, Kennedy's Tom Jefferson was a gentleman planter and slave master, and his policies were all designed to help other gentlemen planters and slave masters spread their unique contagion -- large plantations raising cash crops that ruined the soil -- across the Western Hemisphere.

Kennedy is not interested only in trashing Jefferson's historical standing, though that is certainly part of his mission.  He also writes as an ecologist, dismayed at the wasting agricultural practices that Jefferson helped spread through the South.  Because cotton and tobacco cultivation ruined the soil of Virginia and the Carolinas, and then Tennessee and Georgia and Alabama, the plantation owners and their slaves had to move every generation to new lands.  And that meant that the corrosive issue of slavery was renewed over and over and over again, until Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party finally said, "no more."

Though Kennedy's narrative can be circuitous -- almost everything interests him, and he turns up some odd and intriguing factoids -- the thesis is persuasive.  The Civil War was brought on by the constant need to expand slave lands; that need grew from the ruined soils that plantation agriculture produced every generation; and plantation agriculture was supported by government land policies (principally, stealing land from Indians) that profoundly favored plantation owners; and Jefferson started it all.

Check them both out. 

The current issue of Reviews in American History includes a review by R. Owen Williams of my book about the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson, Impeached.  I hasten to note that I have no recollection of ever meeting Mr. Williams, a Yale history Ph.D. and the new president of Transylvania University (no, that's not where Dracula matriculated; I imagine President Williams will tire of that line pretty fast). 

It turns out, however, that President Williams really liked the book, and was so generous as to say so in phrases that include:

• "David O. Stewart has elegantly and engagingly recounted the saga of Johnson's impeachment trial."
• "Stewart's version of the impeachment surpasses all the rest; intended for an intelligent lay audience, it is a superb synthesis of existing scholarship and an insightful depiction of the Reconstruction's frailties." 
• "Stewart is best, not surprisingly, when parsing Reconstruction's legal conundrums, something he does in an unintimidating yet pedagogically forceful manner."
• "Stewart is always crisply informative."
• "As with every other aspect of the impeachment, Stewart is as cogent as he is compelling."
• "In all respects, this is a great story and Stewart is a masterful storyteller."

Don't you love this guy?  I sure do. 

BFF, dude.

 

 

On Tuesday, May 15, Simon & Schuster will officially release the paperback edition of Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln's Legacy.  Although Amazon has been selling the paperback version for several days, with any luck the new release will be available in stores soonest.

    At this point in the life of the publishing industry, the pattern of product rollout is getting tricky (hardcover, paperback, e-book, twitter . . . ), but it's still a hoot to see the book come out in a new format that will appeal to some new readers. 

 E-books seem finally to be catching on, sort of, though the statistics are hard to come by. One measure shows e-book sales gaining a good deal over the last two years:

Q1 2010: $90 million

Q1 2009: $25 million

Q1 2008:  <$10 million

My uniformed guess is that the iPhone and iPad account for a lot of the improvement, and they are still a small share of the market, but the times they finally seem to be a-changin'.

For authors, of course, all statistics are hard to come by; publishers' royalty statements come twice a year, and cover the period 6 to 12 months before the date of the statement.  

I digress.  For now, it's a treat to see the paperback break out!

 

With the Senate impeachment trial of Judge G. Thomas Porteous of New Orleans coming up in August, I took a swing at the impeachment articles against Porteous in an item on Huffington Post.  Although Judge Porteous has a lot of conduct to explain, there are some constitutional issues surrounding the articles against him, including:

• Whether a federal office-holder can be removed for actions undertaken before he took the federal office?
• Whether impeachment and removal can be based on largely private offenses (such as President Clinton's false testimony about Monica Lewinsky)?
• Whether an article of impeachment should include a number of allegations in an attempt to secure the needed two-thirds majority of the Senate, a practice that places the accused at a distinct disadvantage, and which was rejected by the Senate in the last judicial impeachment trial in 1989 (in which I was defense counsel for Walter Nixon)?

Judge Portesou seems committed to carrying his case through the entire Senate process, having just added lawyers to his defense team.

For the next two months, I will be in Chestertown on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, as part of the Hodson Trust-John Carter Brown Fellowship.  The deal involves living in a 1730s-era home (restored, of course), access to the resources of Washington College, a stipend, and . . . finishing my book on the Western conspiracy of Aaron Burr. 

Even the Chestertown Spy ran a story on it.  They know news!

It's a terrific opportunity, after the fellowship supported two months this winter at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence.  I'm hoping to have some time for (relatively flat) Eastern Shore cycling, and also hope some friends happen by.

As for finishing the book, this significantly scales back on the available alibis if I don't make my delivery deadline in September.  Think positive thoughts. 

With the anniversary of the beginning of the Constitutional Convention drawing nigh (May 25), I started thinking about ways in which we should be changing the Constitution.  I posted a first cut on that today at Huffington Post.

My question is prompted by a recent book out about General James Wilkinson -- An Artist in Treason, by Andro Linklater.  It just received a respectful review from NPR, which absolutely baffles me.

Wilkinson is a worthy subject for a book.  He was the general-in-chief of the U.S. Army from 1797 (or so) to about 1808.  He was a remarkable scoundrel, on the payroll of the King of Spain as a double agent and intimately involved in Aaron Burr's Western expedition.

The book, however, includes some astonishing factual mistakes.  On two consecutive pages (pp. 215-16), it includes the following errors:

• It describes Burr as "tall, elegantly dressed. . . "  Though Burr's story is often shrouded in mystery, the ONE thing we know about him is that he was SHORT.  All his life, he was called "little Burr."  This error alone is enough to cause a reader to lose all confidence in the book.
• It describes Wilkinson as sending Burr a note in May 1804 "immediately after landing in Charleston," that Wilkinson wanted to spend the night with Burr.  Well, Wilkinson and Burr were New York City then, not Charleston.  Burr never lived in Charleston.
• It states that Burr's house in Richmond Hill "lay on the road from Charleston to Washington."  Burr's Richmond Hill estate was in Manhattan, which is hardly on that particular road.
• It states that Burr challenged Alexander Hamilton to a duel because Hamilton stated that Burr was "a dangerous man unfit to be entrusted with the reins of power."  Burr challenged Hamilton because Hamilton said he held an opinion of Burr "yet more despicable." That term, in their time, implied sexual depravity.  For 15 years, Hamilton had been saying that Burr was unfit for power without drawing a challenge from Burr. 

And those are only the mistakes I happened to pick up in this two-page passage. 

Do these mistakes matter?  Only if you want to know what actually happened, why, and what it meant.

Why don't book reviewers catch such howlers?  Laziness?  Ignorance?  You tell me..

 

As an avid follower of the current impeachment proceedings against Judge G. Thomas Porteous of New Orleans, I have been delighed to discover that another judge from New Orleans was impeached by the House of Representatives -- in 1874.  Judge Edward Durell, a transplant to the Crescent City from New Hampshire, was impeached as part of the tortured politics of Reconstruction.

The story, told by Charles Lane in a recent issue of The Green Bag, is a cautionary tale of politics overtaking the Constitution.  Judge Durell, a Unionist Democrat before the Civil War, became a Republican during the war and was rewarded with a seat on the federal bench.  That job, however, placed him in the middle of a violent controversy over the 1872 election for Louisiana's governor.

In short -- and please do yourself a favor and read the excellent Lane article -- the old Democratic/secessionist power structure tried to steal the election for Henry Clay Warmoth (photo below), but Judge Durell stood firm and resolutely blocked that effort.  For his troubles, Durell became a whipping boy for the Democratic Party nationwide.  As the electoral tide began to flow against the Republican Party, the anti-Durell campaign managed to get an impeachment resolution through the House.  The principal accusation was that the judge overstepped his powers in dealing with the disputed 1872 election for governor.  When the Democratic Party won a majority in the House in the 1874 elections, Durell chose to resign his office rather than face trial in the Senate.

Ironies abound in the Durell saga.  The Democratic Party had stridently opposed the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson in 1868 as a purely political exercise.  Six years later, the Democrats suddenly saw the virtue of politically-based impeachments.

But at least the Johnson case involved the president, and presidential impeachments are obviously political acts. Judicial impeachments were supposed to be different.

Seventy years before the Durell case the Senate had rejected the attempt to remove Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase from office based on the substance of his judicial rulings.  The Chase precedent was thought to establish the principle that no impeachment should proceed because of disagreement with a judicial ruling, certainly not one that was subject to review by an appellate court.  Nevertheless, Judge Durell faced removal largely because the Democrats detested his actions in the case over the election for governor.

If stories of Reconstruction get your blood racing, you might also look into Lane's recent book on the Colfax Massacre in Louisiana, The Day Freedom Died.  It's excellent (and also explained to me how Louisiana ended up with a parish named for Ulysses S. Grant).

Judge Porteous, I fear, can take little solace from the Durell saga.  Not only did it end badly for the judge, but the issues in that case -- freedom to vote, equal rights for the freed slaves, fair elections -- were considerably more elevated than the bankruptcy fraud and corruption at the core of the Porteous prosecution.