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WORK TITLE: Against the Grain
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1944
WEBSITE:
CITY: Vienna
STATE: VA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://untpress.unt.edu/node/3666 * http://www.thecompassnews.org/2016/05/author-finds-controversy-life-great-grandfather-saw-heroic/ *
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1944; son of Barbara Lazelle.
EDUCATION:George Washington University, M.A.; graduated from Army Command and Staff College.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Military intelligence analyst and educator. Former research analyst for Central Intelligence Agency.
MIILITARY:U.S. Army Reserve; became lieutenant colonel (retired).
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
After his retirement from the Central Intelligence Agency, where he worked as a research analyst, James O. Carson began work on Against the Grain: Colonel Henry M. Lazelle and the U.S. Army, the story of his maternal great-grandfather’s life and career. “Carson grew up hearing stories about Lazelle from his mother, who was only 10 years old when the colonel died,” wrote Mary Stachyra Lopez in the Compass. “In her eyes, Lazelle was a heroic figure who scouted across the Wild West with Kit Carson, fought for the Union during the Civil War and retired after nearly four decades in the military. It turned out that the story wasn’t quite that clear-cut.” While it was true that Lazelle worked with Kit Carson in the 1950s, his part in the story was less than heroic. When jaguars and a bear approached their camp at night, intent on feeding on the carcass of an antelope the two had shot earlier, Lazelle fled to the shelter of the nearest cactus. It was left up to Carson to scare the cats away and shoot the bear.
Carson also found out, according to a contributor to the University of North Texas Press, that “Lazelle’s service as a commander and senior staff officer was punctuated at times with contention and controversy.” His service in the Civil War was marked by failure; his attempts to win a victory over John Singleton Moseby’s battalion, known as “Moseby’s Raiders,” were continually frustrated. “Lazelle’s two greatest shortcomings were his inability to get along with his superiors and his incredible knack for courting controversy wherever he went,” explained William B. Kurtz in the Journal of Southern History. “These faults were readily apparent in his two most important postwar appointments in the East, his time as commandant of the corps of cadets at West Point” and his oversight of the war’s official collection of records. During his time at West Point, Lazelle was responsible for the expulsion of an African American cadet who had been severely hazed by fellow students. When he was in charge of collecting the Civil War archives, accusations were leveled that he had changed some of the records. “A model of an exceptionally well researched and written military biography from beginning to end,” declared Micah Andrew in MBR Bookwatch, Against the Grain is “especially commended to the attention of non-specialist general readers … in the American Civil War.” “Anyone interested in the post-Civil War U.S. Army would find this book valuable,” concluded Nathan Marzoli in America’s Civil War.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
America’s Civil War, July, 2016, Nathan Marzoli, review of Against the Grain: Colonel Henry M. Lazelle and the U.S. Army, p. 60.
MBR Bookwatch, January, 2016, Micah Andrew, review of Against the Grain.
Journal of Southern History, February, 2017, William B. Kurtz, review of Against the Grain, p. 178.
ONLINE
Compass, http://www.thecompassnews.org/ (May 13, 2016), Mary Stachyra Lopez, “Author Finds Controversy in Life of Great-Grandfather Most Saw as Heroic.”
University of North Texas Press Web site, http://untpress.unt.edu/ (July 26, 2017), review of Against the Grain.*
Author finds controversy in life of great-grandfather most saw as heroic
By Mary Stachyra Lopez | Catholic New Service
May 13, 2016
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As a retired research analyst for the CIA, James Carson knows how to dig up secrets. But even Carson was surprised by some of the facts that turned up when he decided to research and write a book about the life of his great-grandfather, U.S. Army Col. Henry Lazelle.
"Against the Grain: Colonel Henry M. Lazelle and the U.S. Army" by James Carson. University of North Texas Press (Denton, Texas, 2015). 432 pp., $32.95.
“Against the Grain: Colonel Henry M. Lazelle and the U.S. Army” by James Carson. University of North Texas Press (Denton, Texas, 2015). 432 pp., $32.95.
Carson grew up hearing stories about Lazelle from his mother, who was only 10 years old when the colonel died. In her eyes, Lazelle was a heroic figure who scouted across the Wild West with Kit Carson, fought for the Union during the Civil War and retired after nearly four decades in the military.
It turned out that the story wasn’t quite that clear-cut. While Lazelle had a formidable intellect, wrote articles on military strategy and served as commandant of cadets at West Point, he was known for overstepping boundaries and had a hand in several notorious incidents in Army history.
“Delving into his story, he was not a hero. He had very little respect for his superiors and challenged the system,” said Carson, who served in the Army Reserve for 20 years and retired as a lieutenant colonel. He is a longtime parishioner of St. Mark Catholic Church in Vienna, Virginia, in the Diocese of Arlington.
Carson’s book, “Against the Grain: Colonel Henry M. Lazelle and the U.S. Army,” is written with the detail and discipline of a scholar. The book examines Lazelle’s exploits chasing Mosby’s Rangers throughout northern Virginia, brutal operations against the Apaches in the Southwest and the infamous court-martial of an African-American cadet at West Point.
One of Lazelle’s early missions was chasing a band of Apaches with the legendary scout Carson in “desolate and inhospitable parts” outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico. After dining on an antelope they shot near a small spring, the two agreed to alternate standing guard every two hours throughout the night. Lazelle took first watch to be on the lookout for the dangerous animals that would surely be attracted by the smell of the leftover meat.
He promptly fell asleep. The two men were awakened by a band of hungry jaguars and a grizzly bear approaching the camp. Carson took the lead by firing his gun to scare off the cats and shoot the bear — and Lazelle scampered up a tall cactus to take cover.
Other stories are not so lighthearted. Lazelle’s journal in New Mexico revealed an anti-Catholic prejudice common among many people in his day. He wrote in his journal, “God forbid that those whom I love should be Roman-Catholics.” Carson wryly writes in a footnote, “Lazelle’s great-grandson, the author, married one of those hated Roman Catholics and became one himself.”
And while Lazelle personally viewed slavery as morally repugnant, his racist opinions influenced his professional judgment in an ugly way after a former slave, Johnson Whittaker, was viciously attacked at West Point. As commandant of cadets, Lazelle’s job was to investigate the affair. All the cadets claimed to be innocent. Lazelle found it “utterly improbable” that civilians would have attacked Whittaker — so his formal conclusion was that the cadet had self-inflicted his own bloody wounds. Whittaker was court-martialed, and though eventually exonerated, had to leave the academy.
The incident has been examined at length in many scholarly works, but Carson’s book is the first to look at the incident from Lazelle’s point of view. The book “doesn’t attempt to whitewash it,” Carson said. “It was a huge travesty. All of the typical attitudes of the white establishment came out in this particular case.”
Finding out the role Lazelle played in Whittaker’s mistreatment by the Army was difficult, Carson said.
“I had to put my own personal feelings aside and provide an objective portrayal about him without being subjective,” he said. “That was hard because I had to accept in my own mind that this was a very different individual than what I had pictured.”
– – –
Stachyra Lopez is social media coordinator at the Arlington Catholic Herald, newspaper of the Diocese of Arlington.
Against the Grain: Colonel Henry M. Lazelle and the U.S. Army
Carson, James
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Hardcover Price: $32.95 Buy
Hardcover ISBN-13: 9781574416114
Physical Description: 6x9. 432 pp. 36 b&w photos. Notes. Biblio. Index.
Publication Date: December 2015
Series: North Texas Military Biography and Memoir Series | Volume: 9
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Annotation:
Listen to James Carson's Against the Grain interview on The Jim Bohannan Show. The 20-minute interview aired on May 18, 2016 and begins at 1:38.
Henry Martyn Lazelle (1832-1917) was the only cadet in the history of the U.S. Military Academy to be suspended and sent back a year (for poor grades and bad behavior) and eventually return as Commandant of the Corps of Cadets. After graduating from West Point in 1855, he scouted with Kit Carson, was wounded by Apaches, and spent nearly a year as a “paroled” prisoner-of-war at the outbreak of the Civil War. Exchanged for a Confederate officer, he took command of a Union cavalry regiment, chasing Mosby's Rangers throughout northern Virginia.
Due in part to an ingrained disposition to question the status quo, Lazelle’s service as a commander and senior staff officer was punctuated at times with contention and controversy. In charge of the official records of the Civil War in Washington, he was accused of falsifying records, exonerated, but dismissed short of tour. As Commandant of Cadets at West Point, he was a key figure during the infamous court martial of Johnson Whittaker, one of West Point's first African American cadets. Again, he was relieved of duty after a bureaucratic battle with the Academy’s Superintendent.
About Author:
JAMES CARSON, who is Henry Lazelle’s great-grandson, has more than thirty years of experience as a military intelligence analyst, manager, and educator. He received his MA in International Studies from George Washington University and is a graduate of the Army Command and Staff College. He lives in Vienna, Virginia.
Against the Grain: Colonel Henry M. Lazelle and the U.S. Army
Nathan Marzoli
America's Civil War. 29.3 (July 2016): p60.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 World History Group, LLC
http://www.historynet.com/magazines/americas_civil_war
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Against the Grain: Colonel Henry M. Lazelle and the U.S. Army
By James Carson
University of North Texas
Press, 2015. $32.95
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Orphaned at age 4 and raised by friends and relatives, Henry Martyn Lazelle somehow managed to secure an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy, but his performance there was anything but satisfactory. He was suspended for a year due to demerits, graduating 30th in 1855 out of a class of 34. This type of trouble with authority was a precursor to Lazelle's career as a U.S. Army officer, chronicled in Against the Grain by retired CIA officer (and his great-grandson) James Carson.
After fighting Apaches on the frontier and commanding a Union cavalry regiment chasing Mosby's Rangers in Virginia, Lazelle served as a senior staff officer. He was involved in two significant incidents in the postwar U.S. Army: the court-martial of Johnson Whittaker, a black cadet at West Point, and the political maneuvering involved with publishing the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion.
The overall depiction of Lazelle leaves much to be desired. The copious information the author has compiled is presented piecemeal rather than woven into a tight narrative, and includes extraneous details and speculation. Despite those flaws, anyone interested in the post-Civil War U.S. Army would find this book valuable. But as a stand-alone narrative, Against the Grain falls short of the mark.
--Nathan Marzoli
Against the Grain
Micah Andrew
MBR Bookwatch. (Jan. 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
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Against the Grain
James Carson
University of North Texas Press
PO Box 311336, Denton, TX 76203-1336
www.unt.edu/untpress
9781574416114, $32.95, HC, 432pp, www.amazon.com
Synopsis: Henry Martyn Lazelle (1832-1917) was the only cadet in the history of the US Military Academy to be suspended and sent back a year (for poor grades and bad behavior) and eventually return as Commandant of the Corps of Cadets. After graduating from West Point in 1855, he scouted with Kit Carson, was wounded by Apaches, and spent nearly a year as a "paroled" prisoner-of-war at the outbreak of the Civil War. Exchanged for a Confederate officer, he took command of a Union cavalry regiment, chasing Mosby's Rangers throughout northern Virginia. Lazelle's service was punctuated at times with contention and controversy. In charge of the official records of the Civil War in Washington, he was accused of falsifying records, exonerated, but dismissed short of tour. As Commandant of Cadets at West Point, he was a key figure during the infamous court martial of Johnson Whittaker, one of West Point's first African American cadets. Again, he was relieved of duty after a bureaucratic battle with the Academy's Superintendent.
Critique: A model of an exceptionally well researched and written military biography from beginning to end, "Against the Grain: Colonel Henry M. Lazelle and the U.S. Army" by James Carson is the ninth and newest addition to the outstanding 'North Texas Military Biography and Memoir Series' published by the University of North Texas Press. Informed and informative, "Against the Grain" is enhanced with the inclusion of maps, photos, forty-eight pages of Notes, an eighteen page Bibliography, and a thirty-seven page Index, making it a valued and highly recommended addition to community and academic library American Civil War reference collections and supplemental studies lists. Especially commended to the attention of non-specialist general readers with an interest in the American Civil War, it should be noted that "Against the Grain" is also available in a Kindle edition ($24.25).
Against the Grain: Colonel Henry M. Lazelle and the U.S. Army
William B. Kurtz
Journal of Southern History. 83.1 (Feb. 2017): p178.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
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Against the Grain: Colonel Henry M. Lazelle and the U.S. Army. By James Carson. North Texas Military Biography and Memoir Series. (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2015. Pp. xxviii, 399. $32.95, ISBN 978-1-57441-611-4.)
There is no shortage of biographies about successful Civil War generals. When it comes to writing about an officer whose career before, during, and after the conflict was often marked by failure, however, one might legitimately question the need for a biographical treatment. James Carson's Against the Grain: Colonel Henry M. Lazelle and the U.S. Army shows that even largely unsuccessful army officers can sometimes merit their own study. Carson demonstrates that Henry M. Lazelle, even in his constant setbacks, played a small but important role in westward expansion, the nineteenth-century U.S. Army, postwar race relations, and Civil War memory.
Born in Enfield, Massachusetts, in 1832, Lazelle attended West Point in the early 1850s. At the academy he quickly demonstrated his problems with authority and was suspended for a year by Superintendent Robert E. Lee. Finally graduating in 1855 near the bottom of his class, Lazelle was assigned to the Eighth Infantry Regiment at Fort Bliss, Texas. In 1861, Texas authorities imprisoned and paroled Lazelle and his unit. Because he was not exchanged until April 1862, Lazelle was assigned to work for William Hoffman, the Union's commissary general of prisoners. Disliking both Hoffman and his work reporting on conditions in Union prisons, Lazelle took command of the Sixteenth New York Cavalry Regiment in October 1863. As was the case in prewar Texas where his regiment failed to defeat the Apaches' unconventional tactics, Lazelle failed to stop Confederate colonel John Singleton Mosby's irregular forces in northern Virginia. Resigning his volunteer commission in 1864, Lazelle returned to his old regular army regiment. After the war, Lazelle and his family spent most of his career living in various army outposts in the West.
Lazelle's two greatest shortcomings were his inability to get along with his superiors and his incredible knack for courting controversy wherever he went. These faults were readily apparent in his two most important postwar appointments in the East, his time as commandant of the corps of cadets at West Point from 1879 to 1882 and his overseeing of the publication of the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion from 1887 to 1889. Unlike during his cadet days at West Point, Commandant Lazelle was a strict disciplinarian. He gained national notoriety for arguing that an attack on a black cadet, Johnson Chestnut Whittaker, was a hoax and was ultimately dismissed early from his position for constantly quarreling with the school's superintendent, General Oliver Otis Howard. Later, during his time at the War Records Office, some Republican editors and politicians falsely accused Lazelle of destroying Civil War records and including false documents as part of the Official Records. Although Lazelle was exonerated of both charges and even secured additional congressional funding for the Official Records, he was again dismissed early from this assignment. After each dismissal, Lazelle was assigned to posts back in the West. He finally retired in 1894 and died in Canada in 1917.
The author, a retired CIA and army officer, inherited this biographical project about his great-grandfather from his mother, Barbara Lazelle. Carson supplemented her work with his own archival research. As one might expect from a family history project, Carson strenuously defends his ancestor--for example, lauding him for courageously criticizing problems with General Emory Upton's famous tactical manuals. But Carson is also not afraid to criticize Lazelle, noting his frequent problems with superiors, his failure to defeat Mosby, and his racism. Full of interesting photographs and drawing on family papers and records not previously available to historians, Carson's thorough biography is a worthwhile read for both Civil War and nineteenth-century military historians.
William B. Kurtz
University of Virginia