As I said when I opened court this afternoon…
Today is the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the American Civil War. We will now have a moment of silence to remember those who fought, struggled and died to uphold the Constitution, to destroy slavery, and to ensure “a new birth of freedom” in this nation, that it might never again be broken in two.
And apparently it’s still being fought.
I was looking at a picture of my father taken 50 years ago today at a Centennial celebration. He’s dressed in 1861 era clothing with a beard/no moustache/top hat/walking stick. For perspective, if you’d said “I have a dream…!” people standing by would have asked “About what?” since that speech wouldn’t be made until that summer.
It’s interesting to contemplate how the war is seen now versus then. Of course there are some who see it exactly the same: the parties in Charleston have been disgusting, and apparently there are some black musicians who need money really bad as they played fiddle/banjo/etc. at one in period costume (evening clothes as opposed to slave wear, but still). Others have flip-flopped to the other extreme in the south and elsewhere and see it as total GOOD v. EVIL, which of course is an equal simplification.
It would be interesting to write a collection of short stories about anniversaries of the war, starting perhaps with a Veterans Reunion ca. 1890, going through the veterans reunions as the number of veterans gets smaller and smaller and the other participants gets larger (which happened), through the Gone With the Wind Era (when larger reunions still managed to truck out one or two ancient guys to sleep upstairs above the parties) to the Civil Rights Era through today, when for some it’s the same as '61 and for others it’s the opposite and for most it’s “meh”.
Should mention that I’m in Montgomery, AL, where the inauguration of Jefferson Davis was reenacted on the same spot where he took the oath of office a couple of months ago. It’s not that I have a problem with the reenactment of a historical event (with the prerequisite 280 pound men in completely authentic gray wool uniforms) but I had major problems with the perceptions of it from the Tea Party and “It was about State’s Rights” crowd on the grounds. 150 years ago yesterday and today the telegraph lines must have electrocuted a few birds between here and Charleston. Today that telegraph office is a Subway sandwich shop, which I find strangely fascinating. It’s also two blocks from where Rosa Parks was arrested and in eyeshot of where the Lehman Brothers had the general store where they decided to trade merchandise credit for percentage of cotton crops and noticed “Hey, I think there’s a market in this future trading”. (They left for NYC at the beginning of the Civil War and over the next century and a half converted their few thousand dollars in profits into 12 figures of debt.)
That war is tailor made for teaching Critical Thinking. It includes primary sources, spin (from the war itself to the present), ethical issues, etc.- I hope it’s used as such.
It’s fascinating stuff all right, each passing generation reinvigorates or discards parts of a nation’s memory. It’s sad that when the generation involved has completely passed that people can create modern bullshit veiled in notions about the past.
I had two great-great grandfathers who fought, on the Union side, during the Civil War. My grandmother, who is one-hundred and six, tells me about her grandfather, one of those two. So a living person can remember someone who fought in that conflict.
He was imprisoned for a time at Andersonville, and told Grandma that, off and on, ever since, he had stomach trouble, from bad food and from physical abuse, kicks, meted out by Confederate guards.
I had two great-great-grandfathers with Wheeler’s Cavalry (CSA) and another with Stonewall Jackson til he was sent home sick and reassigned to the western theater (where he promptly relapsed and died). One of the cavalry men, who was an orphan at the time, joined within two weeks of Fort Sumter, but the other two waited until the last possible minute when they were conscripted and had little choice. It’s one of the great myths that there was a huge outpouring of “Let’s go kill some Yankees!” emotion, especially among the lower classes; most waited until much later to enlist.
Lincoln’s call for 75,000 volunteers resulted in 90,000 overnight however. I think the South grossly underestimated how much firing on Sumter was going to piss off the North (totally understandable- they’d spent (if you count it as a percentage of the annual budget) the equivalent of hundreds of billions of dollars on that monstrosity (which wasn’t even finished yet) over the past 30 years and now were evidently expected to just say “Well, no point getting attached”. If Russia suddenly decided they wanted the space shuttle and skyjacked it there’d probably be no more outcry.
In ways that battle seems almost written by a hack writer. When it was decided to build Fort Sumter the site chosen was a 2 acre sandbar that was frequently completely underwater. An island had to be created using 19th century technology; 30 years of ships unloaded their ballast rocks and bricks onto the sandbar, so at the end there was an island made of New England granite in the middle of South Carolina water, as if to state “We’re in ya but not of ya!”
Then the coincidences. The fort was commanded by Robert Anderson, a man who literally wrote the book on artillery bombardments (i.e. he wrote the textbook used at West Point). His star pupil (some say friend- I think that may be an overstatement) was “The Little Creole” G.T. Beauregard, who graduated number 2 in his class and learned everything he knew about artillery (at least initially) from Anderson and now was commanding the cannons aimed at his old master- a sort of steampunk Jedi-Sith duel perhaps.
And the fact it was a bloodless battle- well, relatively. There were two men killed but it was accidental- a premature cannon fire while shooting a salute (not a shot fired in defense) killed an Irish private and caused the death a few days later of another private; a Confederate official (Roger Pryor) also drank a small bottle of poison thinking it was whiskey at the surrender ceremony, and the fort’s surgeon was good enough to treat him and save his life. But this bloodless pissing contest set off the bloodiest conflict in U.S. history in which 2% of the population and more than 10% of the prime-of-life men of the U.S. would die.
And Edmund Ruffin was interesting. On a scale of fanaticism in which Mr. Rogers is a 1 and Fred Phelps is a 10 and most people are in the 3-5 range, Ruffin was easily an 8, possible a 9 on the subject of secession and the divine institution of slavery. Even most other southerners thought he was an old nut, but at 67 he moved to South Carolina because unlike Virginia they’d seceded and he was by God gonna be there. (Like Phelps a nut, but not an imbecile: he wrote, for example, books on farming in high humidity climates that are still referenced in agricultural textbooks.)
The right to fire the first shot was given to Roger A. Pryor, who had asked for it but then when pull-the-lanyard time came couldn’t go through with it. He had a moment of clarity and realized he was going to start a bloody war and couldn’t do it, to which Ruffin said “I will! Let me!” and did. He went back to his home richer by one First National Flag that had sailed over Sumter.
Later old fart was serving as an enlisted man in the army in his late 60s. At 71 when he had been sent home since he couldn’t physicall soldier anymore he learned that Lee and Johnston had surrendered. He had the livestock and provisions he’d managed to squirrel away brought out, cooked as close to a feast as he could manage given the reduced circumstances, kissed his wife and womenfolk, then went to take a walk, which meant into the barn where he stored that flag. He wrapped himself in the flag (more blunt symbolism) and blew his brains out.
Anyway, interesting characters. Interesting doesn’t mean good or sane of course.
Actually, almost two and a half years later: I Have a Dream - Wikipedia. But I take your point.
My great-great-uncle died in Union blue on May 25, 1864 at the Battle of New Hope Church, as Sherman fought his way closer to Atlanta. I know of no relatives who wore gray or butternut, but it wouldn’t surprise me. I honor the heroism of all who served, on both sides, even though I’m convinced that the world is a better place for the United States having prevailed over the Confederate States.
I think if the Confederacy had won- though I’ve honestly no clue how that would have happened other than the U.S. just deciding not to fight (which I can’t imagine) the result would have been basically the worst parts of Central America and Eastern Europe but with English spoken instead of Spanish or Slavic. It would have been a plutocracy for starters, then there would likely have been further fissions between the regions, and ultimately balkanization rather than confederacy.
Or a zombie attack.
I had three ancestors in the Civil War, all immigrants who enlisted. I often wonder what motivated them to fight, and in one case to die, for their adopted country.
My great-great-grandfather Thomas Coleman was an Irish immigrant who came over in the aftermath of the Potato Famine. He enlisted at the very beginning of the war in the 2nd New York Heavy Artillery and was posted to the forts around Washington, where he mostly had an easy time of it.
He saw his first action at Second Bull Run, where he was in a small company that unexpectedly made the first contact with Stonewall Jackson’s men. They were sent fleeing back to Washington in a rout.
In the summer of '64 Grant called up the men from the forts to replace the huge casualties from the Battle of the Wilderness. The 2nd NYHA came into action at the end of the Battle of Spotsylvania, where they got mixed up in a friendly fire incident with other Union troops.
He was the middle of the charges at Cold Harbor, when Grant threw his army time and again at entrenched Confederate troops in what turned into a bloodbath for the Union.
He was captured in the early stages of the Battle of Petersburg, at Jerusalem Plank Road, when a flanking movement by the Confederates caused the collapse of a Union column.
He was sent to Andersonville Prison Camp. He died of scurvy within a few months - which I thought was terribly ironic for a famine refugee. He left a wife and two small children.
My great-great-great grandfather Martin Buck, from Germany, also enlisted in the first days of the war, in the “5th German Rifles,” aka the 45th New York Infantry. They marched off to Washington DC, where he was captured in his units first skirmish with the enemy at Annandale Church, Virginia. He spent six months in prison camp before being exchanged, by which time he had contracted tuberculosis. He was an invalid the rest of his life.
My great-great grandfather Peter, from Switzerland, enlisted in the 25th NY Calvary in 1864. He had a pretty uneventful time of it, serving in the Shenandoah Valley and seeing only a few skirmishes.
Colibri, before your g-g-grandfather died, maybe he even met mine. Weird. No way of ever knowing of course, but it was possible, seeing as they were both prisoners.
I used to live near Andersonville. The town is roughly the size of a large kitchen, but in the middle there is a marble monumentto the memory of Henry Wirz, the commandant, the only person hanged for war crimes. While I agree with his defenders that there were others on both sides who should have been hanged, he’s definitely not somebody who deserves a monument and I’m surprised it hasn’t been defaced.
Wirz was extremely unpopular with his own men and the people in the town long before he was ever arrested. Among other things he turned away donations of food and clothing from the locals for the prisoners. The monument was completely a revisionist ‘Eff you’ action after the war.
Agreed. My Civil War roundtable once did a simulated retrial of Wirz for war crimes - he was narrowly acquitted by vote of the membership, much to my surprise! And this was in Ohio, too.
Why was he acquited? I assume it wasn’t just the “others committed war crimes as well” thing. As I understand it, the kindest thing one could say for Andersonville was that it was not explicitly a death camp - in principle, prisoners were meant to survive and be released at war’s end. Wirz doesn’t seem to have taken that mandate particularly seriously, though.
To give you some idea of my family’s general sympathies, I am named after a Confederate military figure. Despite that, my sympathies are heavily with Lincoln and abolition, no doubt disappointing my ancestors, although I admire individual bravery and skill on both sides.
Speaking of that, that article has a completely different claim than the Edmund Ruffin tale Sampiro recounted, which is the one I’ve always heard, for who fired the first shot:
Fittingly, our PBS just finished airing Ken Burns’ series. You know, it really wasn’t all that long ago.
There seem to have been a lot of First Shots. I looked this up a few days ago.
Ruffin seems to have fired the signal shot- not an actual shot at the fort but the one that let the other batteries know “It’s on bitches!” James fired the first shot from Fort Johnson, which was the first actual ball shot at Sumter. Ruffin was a civilian and so basically just pulled a lanyard, while James actually was an artillery officer and was shooting.
The Andersonville Trial is available through Netflix streaming. It’s from the early 70s with Richard Basehart as Wirz and pretty accurate (has the fainting couch he lay on during the trial for instance) and uses a lot of the actual testimony for and against him. The camp’s doctor (played by Buddy Ebsen) is among the most damning scenes.
I don’t fault Wirz for most of the starvation other than turning away food as mentioned above. (If he’d allowed it they’d have eaten that and been starving again the next day, wasn’t like it was a steady supply.) What damns him for me is the camp’s hygiene: he DID have a choice about where to build the Confederate latrines for example, and COULD have started some kind of sanitation program- it wouldn’t have been a spotless hospital obviously but could have been improved with better latrines and the like. That area was then surrounded by a million acres of pine- it would have been relatively simple to let PoWs, under guard and even chained if need be, chop down trees (while prisoners with axes may sound crazy they were allowed to chop trees to build the fort’s outbuildings) to build more structures inside the fort’s walls. His sins were more of neglect than commission but they killed thousands no less.
I’m 44. There were two former slaveowners at my parents’ wedding. Admittedly they were both little girls when they owned slaves, but because their father left them slaves in his 1861 will they were technically former slaveowners 91 years later when they were at the wedding.
BTW, wrong end of the war for the Sesquicentennial but The Conspiratoropens Friday. My understanding is that Mary Surratt (Robin Wright) is actually a supporting character.
My father’s family didn’t arrive on these shores until 30 years after the war was over, but Mom’s side was in the thick of it. One of my g-g-grandfathers served in the 3rd South Carolina Volunteer Infantry Battalion for a substantial part of its existance.
Silly bugger.
We all have our excuses for not fighting I guess.
With no disrespect intended to the good people of South Carolina (and remember, I’m from Alabama- we have our disproportionate number of loopies too), what the hell goes on in that state? Fort Sumter was 150 years ago but that was far far far from the first time and far far farther from the last time South Carolina got a wild hair up its ass and decided to start something. They’d discussed secession at least as early as 1820 and their politicians continue to make The Daily Show several times a year- you’d think sooner or later they’d chill.
Again, no flaming please- I’m from Alabama- but it’s just sort of odd how so much of that “We don’t need no stinking logic! En guarde much better armed foe I’ve pissed off!” attitude seems regional to both states, though Arizona is giving both of us a run for our money. And with SC and AL and AZ there are large numbers of intelligent, reasonable people, both liberal and conservative, in all the states but we have really poor PR firms.
