Bibliographic record
Abstract
Author deduces the motives of the war's biggest con artist It was, I believe, Sir Winston Churchill who pronounced the American Civil War the last war between gentlemen.There is truth in that.Many officers, North and South, were professionals who had known and liked one another in the old army (sometimes as West Point classmates).Their code forbade the savageries that have often marked other fratricidal conflicts.And notwithstanding their grim duties, the supreme leaders on both sides, Lincoln and Davis, Lee and Grant, were men of basic humanity and consideration.But however gentlemanly the war may have been, it did throw up the usual cast of scoundrels, none more nefarious than Charles Dunham, the subject of Carman Cumming's Devil's Game, and by all odds one of the most gifted and energetic con men of American history.In propria persona or in one of his many aliases, Dunham was at various times: a failed recruiter of volunteer troops in both New York and Virginia; a propagandizing correspondent under various pen-names for the major New York papers, especially Greeley's Republican Tribune and Bennett's Democratic Herald; a prisoner for a time as an alien enemy in Richmond; a co-conspirator with Confederate plotters in Canada; a cat's paw for Joseph Holt, Judge Advocate General and head of the Bureau of Military Justice and chief prosecutor of the accused conspirators in the Lincoln assassination (Dunham recruited and coached a number of phony witnesses); an agent for congressional Radicals seeking to impeach Andrew Johnson, and then, in a typical turnabout, Johnson's ally in exposing their schemes.And much, much more, always with imagination and panache.A wilderness of mirrors indeed.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".