Incident at an Antique Store

[Wild Bill]

Another Lloyd Lewis contribution. While working on the biography of US Grant as northern general, he noticed that when Civil War battles were short in duration, usually a day or so, the Rebs tended to win. When they lasted for days, the Yanks tended to win. Why? He traced it to what the soldiers ate. The Yanks ate wheat products while the Rebs ate a lot of corn meal. Wheat had certain enzymes that tended to allow for endurance in combat. Corn lacked that benefit.

His article on Lincoln and the possible creation of a different political party structure is very interesting. When I taught Reconstruction 45 years go, I used to go through the various factions in the two parties and show how Reconstruction policy changed depending on who was in charge and what this person wanted to see happen in the political world. I looked at Lincoln, Seward, A. Johnson, and the Radical Republicans and drew up diagrams that showed the left-right movements of each in the then political spectrum. Each change in policy was designed to add to to subtract from what we consider "normal" political divisions of the time. One example of this kind of thing after Lewis' article is in David Donald's Politics of Reconstruction, which I was privileged to hear him deliver at the Fleming Lectures at LSU when I was a student in the 1960s. But Lloyd Lewis is a great read in CW and Recon. He thinks outside the box.