Author to speak at Sunday meeting

Those who fancy we live in corrupt, venal, decadent days, the worst by far ever seen in the world, would do well to crack a history book.

Almost any serious history book would do, but they could do no better, for a start, than "General James G. Blunt: Tarnished Glory," by Robert Collins.

Better yet, they can attend the Vernon County Historical Society's quarterly meeting, to be held at 2 p.m., Sunday, in the Bushwhacker Museum, 212 W. Walnut. Collins will be the guest speaker at the meeting, and will autograph copies of his book.

Besides being a straightforward biography, the first ever about Kansas's only Civil War major (two-star) general, it's a window on the military manners and mores of its time.

James G. Blunt is perhaps typical of a whole generation of Civil War officers celebrated as heroes in generations of histories of the propagandistic "victory history" school, wreathed in "glory," who on closer examination turn out to have been egotistical self-seekers busy feathering their nests through corrupt procurement contracts or outright plunder, more often of their own army and government than the foe, spending at least as much time fighting their fellow officers as the would-be enemy, spicing up their reports and memoirs by accusing them of being fallingdown drunk on the battlefield ... when they were sober enough themselves to put one word after another! On top of it all, a lot of them just weren't too bright.

James G. Blunt isn't well remembered, maybe just because he's so average, so typical. Typically corrupt, venal, and decadent, if not really outstandingly so.

He suffers from having served in a backwater. He actually won battles (something not all Federal generals managed), but the press and the public, even the government, had eyes mostly only for the Eastern theaters and the heroes, or nonheroes, who performed there.

Robert Collins does his bit to redress the balance, choosing James Blunt as his example of a Western general who's more or less fallen through history's cracks.

For a self-taught warrior, stuck in a backwater, he racked up a respectable military record. Whatever battlefield luster he achieved, however, was obscured by the tarnish of corruption.

Blunt was born in 1826, in Maine, where he spent a few years in a so-called "military academy," really little more than a boys' high school. But there he did pick up the rudiments of drill, which was more military education than many future Civil War generals got.

After a stint at sea on a merchant ship, he moved to Ohio in 1845, studied medicine, and in 1850 began practice as a physician. Always a fanatical abolitionist, he moved to Kansas in 1856 with the deliberate intention of helping win that territory for abolitionism. Almost at once he rose to the top in turbid Kansas politics as a follower of Jim Lane.

Already a member of the legislature's military committee, he had little trouble climbing the rungs of military command. Admittedly he had energy, and alongside the run of untrained and bumbling leaders on both sides he measured up well.

He didn't think much of professional soldiers, and vice versa.

"Unfit in any respect for the command of a division of troops against a disciplined enemy," fellow officer Gen. John Schofield summed him up.

The most famous incident involving Blunt was Quantrill's ambush and massacre of his escort at Baxter Springs, Kansas, in late 1863.

Blunt was traveling in luxurious style with a full military band, and when the attackers approached, he took them for a welcoming party ridden out from the nearby Union picket post to receive him. Blunt "bears some of the blame for allowing the massacre to occur," Collins concludes.

Granting his admitted military achievements, these were "overshadowed by his spectacular failures as a military administrator."

In this capacity he was "part of an epidemic of Union corruption in the transMississippi theater." It was an appalling, almost incredible panorama of skulduggery. Suppliers bought confiscated cattle at 1-1/2 cents per pound and sold the beef to the Army at 5-3/4 cents per pound, the profit being divvied with Army officers who helped swing the deal. Officers sold Confederate or private property to the government, some of it stolen from citizens who had been declared Rebels.

Soldiers used government funds to speculate in cotton, liquor, and horses. In this highrolling climate, such peccadillos as overcharging or bribery scarcely counted.

The army contracted out the work of supplying itself to private firms, a system "ideal for officers and politicians who wanted to get rich at the army's expense." The corruption was never dealt with because this theater was not a high priority to the Lincoln administration.

Blunt was never brought to book for his shady doings.

On top of all else, he was anything but an easy man to like. Not many managed it, and many even gave up trying. A typical puritan, he plumped for liquor prohibition while gaining notoriety for "womanizing." He was given to writing long letters denouncing all and sundry in the most exaggerated and intemperate terms. Lincoln himself wryly rebuked him for filling his official correspondence with scurrilous "grenades."

Robert Collins, a resident of Andover, Kan., has written and published several books on the history and sightseeing possibilities of Kansan railroads, including "A Railfan's Guide to Kansas Attractions" and "Ghost Railroads of Kansas." He also contributes to several historical periodicals, including "Wild West" and "Chronicles of the Old West." "General James G. Blunt: Tarnished Glory," a hardbound work of 240 pages containing previously unpublished photographs, is from Pelican Publishing Co. of Gretna, La.

Gretna lies just across the Mississippi from New Orleans, and during Hurricane Katrina Collins had nightmare visions of his book, the whole production run boxed up in the warehouse awaiting shipment, sitting soaking in several feet of water!