Dis-raeli Bugs Me

 As we have seen many times, TFSmith has no real liking for British politics. It is not an integral part of his story: it is something that gets in the way of him writing the story of the Union victory. This is why we find such easily avoided errors as Sir George Cornewall Lewis acquiring a double-barelled name as Sir George Cornewall-Lewis. It is also the reason why we get passages like the following:

Eyes on the Prize

TFSmith makes great play of his academic credentials, which makes it all the more enjoyable when he reveals that he's fundamentally misunderstood a particular concept. (For an example of this, take his view of the overall balance of trade between Britain and the Union, where circumstances turned out to be the exact opposite of the way he portrayed it). This kind of revelation often comes in the shortest forms: for instance, a single phrase in chapter 11 part 1 reveals that his whole view of the Union commerce raiding operation is built on a horrendous misunderstanding.

The Price of Entry(port)

TFSmith has his fictitious naval historian Irene Musicant deliver a large fraction of the exposition on the blockade. In spite of the heavy repetition employed in these sections, it is nevertheless clear that he must have written much of it - which opens up interesting questions.

Wrecked with inconsistency

In the timeline Burnished Rows of Steel, a number of ships suffer navigational failures and are lost accidentally. However, essentially all of them are British; this is at odds with the real historical record.

Mississippi Burning (2)

In BROS (chapter 4, part 1), the twenty-year old paddle frigate USS Mississippi encounters a British squadron consisting of the four-year-old screw battleship HMS Edgar (89), the five-year-old screw sloop HMS Racoon (22), and the six-year-old ironclad HMS Terror (16). As we already know, Edgar, Racoon and Terror should not be where they are. However, this is in many respects a minor problem, compared to what we discover when we examine the events of the battle in detail.

Rebel without a corps

With TFSmith having already deleted large numbers of British troops, as well as increasing the number of Union troops over the historical amount, it should not be surprising he also tweaks the numbers of the third major combatant - the Confederacy.

The readers are invited to guess which way this one went.

Nom De Guerre

We have discussed many times before the problems with the author's penultimate "Battle of Berthierville" but here I shall touch on very briefly, why the name itself doesn't actually make any sense.

For starters, think of any civil war battle (for that matter any battle) you know of. The name itself is very descriptive of the location it takes place at, or at the very least describes what and where it is. In the Civil War both sides had different naming conventions. The North usually named battles after the closest town, while the South named them after the local river or landmark. Hence you have the Battle of Antietam also known as the Battle of Sharpsburg, or Bull Run vs Manassas. They at least describe roughly where the battle took place.

The Battle of Berthierville though, seems to take place anywhere but Berthierville.