Book Review: "Death of an Assassin: The True Story of the German Murderer Who Died Defending Robert E. Lee" by Ann Marie Ackermann

A forgotten murder mystery in a small Germanic kingdom and a forgotten war between the U.S. and Mexico intersect to help bring one of the most accomplished military men in American history to prominence. That's the intriguing tale behind Ann Marie Ackermann's "Death of an Assassin," a short but gripping book mixing true crime with history.

Ackermann writes about how a beloved mayor in a small town of what is now the German state of Baden-Württemberg was shot to death in 1835 in the dead of night.  Eduard Hammer is the intrepid police magistrate assigned to the case. He gathers clues along the way of his investigation, extensively interviewing people who heard the shots and were near the location of the shooting at the time it took place. As this is happening, young Army officer Robert E. Lee struggles to balance his military career with the demands of his family. The murderer is on the loose and makes his way to America; as several residents of this small German town remain under suspicion of the yet-unsolved crime, Lee achieves successes in peacetime, such as his direction of the Army Corps of Engineers to open the river harbor in St. Louis. When war is declared against Mexico, Lee sees his chance to prove himself in battle . . . and so does the German murderer, now residing in Philadelphia's German-immigrant community. The murderer will serve in the U.S. Army and defend - and die defending - Lee's division at the siege of the Mexican city of Veracruz.

"Death of an Assassin" brilliantly weaves two diametrically opposed tales with astonishing detail. Magistrate Hammer's investigation reads like a well-paced mystery novel, with dialogue taken from a nineteenth-century scribe's transcription of the interrogations along with minute descriptions of clues and ground-breaking forensic tests. Obscure moments in American history are seen through the eyes of a murder-immigrant directly and indirectly involved in them, and the reader learns a good deal about how America developed in the 1830s and 1840s. The siege of Veracruz is vividly brought to life, as is the heroism of the soldiers and sailors who fought there. In a letter home, Lee's poignant account of a man who died under heavy fire presents him as a multi-dimensional individual of honor and humanity. Little did Lee know that the man he eulogized was the man who shot a public official back in Germany.

Ackermann brings everything full circle by showing how one of the longest cold cases in German history was solved by chance in 1872 - long after Lee's death, the end of the Civil War, and the unification of Germany - and how the assassin was proven to be the same man Lee praised in his correspondence. Without the verification of historical record, Ackermann's book could easily be fiction. The realization that it's all true is one of the many surprises and twists in a book that entertains as well as educates.

Book Review: "The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party" by Michael F. Holt

The short history of the Whig Party in the United States is usually presented as thus: A party is formed in the 1830s to oppose President Andrew Jackson, his Democratic Party, and their policies, but the new party's members have little to unite them other than their opposition to Jackson.  Ironically, their only success in winning the Presidency is to run two old soldiers who remind the voters of Jackson, and when a third old soldier can't defeat an appalling Democratic presidential prospect such as Franklin Pierce, the party, already divided over slavery, rolls over and dies.

Michael Holt's 1999 book "The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party" brilliantly makes it clear, over the course of a thousand pages, that nothing could be farther from the truth.  Holt uses numerous historical sources and exhaustively studies voter turnout in the states that made up the Union between 1834 and 1856 to show how the Whig Party was more than just reflexive opposition to the Democrats.  Holt presents the party, founded largely by Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, as a cohesive political organization intensely devoted to preserving republican self-government and economic vitality and opposing the Democrats' disdain for active government while advocating for a system that provided opportunity to all Americans rather than let the economy sort itself out.  Holt presents a fascinating story of principled Whig politicians in both the North and the South who strove for a strong Union and fought to balance sectional interests to keep the country together.  

Holt doesn't necessarily say that the slavery question could have been settled once and for all without a civil war, but he credits the Whigs for their efforts to avoid such a conflict.  He seems myopic, though, by suggesting that the Whigs might have prevented a war as bad as the one that actually transpired.  Historians have argued whether the United States was destined for Armageddon, as Michael Harwood once put it, in settling the slavery issue, but Holt doesn't seem to probe this question far enough.

The book's most obvious fault - an overemphasis on the inner workings of politics - is also, perversely, one of its biggest strengths.  Holt shows how differently American politics operated in the antebellum years, and the reader comes to understand how the Whigs prospered before they eventually withered.  Their basic program - low tariffs, a national bank, improved infrastructure - sustained them early on.  But Holt demonstrates how numerous issues - the war with Mexico, the struggle to craft the Compromise of 1850 that tried to handle slavery expansion territories ceded by the Mexicans, the undermining of the bonds between northern and southern Whigs over the Kansas-Nebraska Act - caused disagreements within the party.  The party's leading figures - Clay, Daniel Webster,  John Quincy Adams, Thomas Ewing, William Seward - are large players here, of course, but the roles of lesser-known Whigs like Robert Toombs, Truman Smith, and John Bell are also highlighted here.  And the party's two last Presidents - Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore - are reassessed as major figures of their day in their efforts to govern the nation and preserve the Union.  

Holt also describes the efforts at new Union parties and a new party around President Taylor in great detail, with  a dissection of how factors in addition to slavery - the growing irrelevance of old issues such as banking and tariffs, patronage, disputes between conservatives and moderates in state Whig organizations, the divisions caused by the rise of the anti-immigrant Know-Nothing movement - divided the party and set it on a course for extinction.  Despite the academic, dry prose of Holt's text, the central argument of why the Whig Party died - it became too out of step and too slow to realize changes in the American body politic - becomes clearer with each passing chapter.  With the two-party system in America at a greater risk of collapsing than at any time since the 1850s, this book is required reading for anyone who might want to save the dying parties . . . or figure out how to start a new one.    

Poland's Mourning

I would be remiss if I did not comment on the latest tragedy of Poland, a nation so fraught with misfortune in its history. The airplane crash that killed Lech Kacyznski, his wife, 87 other high-ranking Polish officials, and seven crew members has shaken the country to its core, with the elite of the Polish ruling class having been wiped out. Yet the Poles have stood steadfast and unbowed in the wake of this tragedy, adn they, like other eastern Europeans shackled by a sorrowful history, seem to be ready to move forward.

Ironically, the crash occurred because President Kacyznski and the others involved were on their way to Russia to commemorate the Katyn Massacre, a mass killing in the Russian city of Smolensk in which Soviet authorities shot Polish army officers and commanders rounded up in Soviet-occupied eastern Poland during the Second World War. Russia and Poland have been in dispute over the nature of the massacre, but the Russians have at least acknowledged that they, not the Germans, were the perpetrators. (Germany hadn't even invaded the Soviet Union yet.) Poles have shown vigilance over the present to not only avoid repetition of past sins against them, but also to press on for a happier future, like their Lithuanian neighbors. Poland is - and will always be - unbroken.