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Pretense of Glory: The Life of General Nathaniel P. Banks

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Chances are if you are a Civil War buff, you have a low opinion of Nathaniel P. Banks. And you should on some levels--he was a lousy general who was in over his head holding important commands. But he was also a fairly solid political leader rising to terms as governor of Massachusetts and almost twenty years in the U.S. House including a stint as Speaker of the House. Rising up from poverty, Banks was an important political leader on a number of issues: slavery, the Alaska purchase, imperialism, woman's suffrage, Reconstruction. This biography by James Hollandsworth is solid on Banks' role as a general. But it glosses over Banks' long political career. Hollandsworth makes the strange contention that Banks was a political failure since he was never president. If that's the case, you may as well call almost every politician a failure--including the likes of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster who came far closer to the White House than Banks ever did. He also said Banks had no core convictions. While Banks was a moderate on the slavery issue (and this is one of the reasons Lincoln kept Banks in the administration, despite his incompetence as a field commander), he had some convictions and while Banks did change parties so did some other political figures of the era--Salmon P. Chase, who was closer to the abolitionist point of view than Banks, comes to mind. Hollandsworth takes Banks to task for inconsistencies. Are these rare in politicians of any era? Especially one like Banks who spent the better part of 40 years on the national political stage. Hollandsworth is stunningly naive when it comes to politics. The fact is Banks was an important figure in some of the most transformative years in American political history when parties came and went in the blink of an eye and the major issues changed almost every year. Hollandsworth is fine as a military historian and gives readers a good look at Banks as a field commander. But just as Banks was out of his arena as a general, Hollandsworth, who spends less than a quarter of the book on Banks' political career, is out of his depth in the turbulent currents of 19th century American politics. Anyone who wants to understand Banks needs to understand politics--and it's a tribute to Hollandsworth's skills as a writer and a military historian that the book is as solid as it is. This is a very good book on Banks' role as a commander but it fails in the claim in its subtitle to be "the life" of Banks.