The Germans didn’t bomb Pearl Harbor, regardless of what Blutarsky thinks.
America’s history didn’t start with those Johnny-come-lately Pilgrims, despite what decades of Thanksgiving-themed propaganda would have us believe.
And American democracy did not begin with the Mayflower Compact.
And even the Pilgrims didn’t land on Plymouth Rock at Plymouth – they originally landed at present-day Provincetown on Cape Cod – and not for a bathroom break. They were starting to settle there at first, but nobody not on the Cape seems to know that. There’s a museum to them on Cape Code telling the story.
My apologies if this is a hijack, but I’ve got a question about Ulysses S. Grant’s reputation as a drunk during the Civil War. I read Bruce Catton’s books about Grant (Grant Moves South and Grant Takes Command), and he essentially asserted that he had the occasional drink, but wasn’t a drunk. As I remember it, as evidence he relies heavily on the testimony of a man who was Grant’s secretary or ADC or something (sorry, it’s been a while since I read the books), who was around Grant constantly, and was himself a teetotaler.
Anyone know how Catton’s analysis stands up in the face of other assertions or evidence?
Here is a rather exhaustive article on Grant and his drinking.
And here is James Thurber’s “If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox,” part of A Thurber Carnival first appearing as a short story in The New Yorker in December 1930.
Bottom line is it’s a myth, possibly spread by jealous northern generals.
What did Sherman mean when he famously said “Grant stood by me when I was crazy and I stood by him when he was drunk and now we stand by each other always.”?
I suppose he could have been speaking ironically…
And by Shelby Foote, who in the PBS Ken Burns miniseries refers to Grant going on a bender just after Vicksburg. And the Sherman quote above. (Especially because of the Sherman quote, I think there was probably some truth to it, but very exaggerated; if he was an alcoholic he was a very functional one.)
Grant’s slaves have been mentioned on the boards several times, but as a recap for those who haven’t read those, one of the ironies of U.S. (A. or Grant) history is that Grant was a slaveowner far more recently than Lee was. At the time of his wedding he was given either the ownership or the use (the records are unclear) of three slaves by his father-in-law, Frederick Dent. The slaves (a married couple and one of their children- continued to live on the Dent plantation, which was ironically named White Haven, leading to the notion that they were probably “loaner slaves”, though the Grants most certainly used their labor. (Ulysses’ family were abolitionists and boycotted the wedding because he was marrying the daughter of a slaveowner.)
Grant himself bought at least one slave, William Jones, from his father-in-law, and this was the only slave he was known to have owned outright. He most definitely had issues with slavery however; shortly before the Civil War (1859 to be precise), not long before the Christmas when he was so broke he famously pawned his heirloom watch to buy presents for his wife and children, he considered selling Jones to get money he desperately needed. Instead of selling him he manumitted him (the only record of his ownership of the man), later stating that he freed him so that he could never sell him as he was ashamed the notion of treating a human being as property crossed his mind.
Flip side
Robert E. Lee was of course a Virginia aristocrate, but a penniless one. His father had lost his share of a fortune and his first wife’s fortune through bad investments, high living, inherited debt, and gambling, and actually abandoned his family to avoid debtor’s prison. Lee’s mother, Ann Carter, was the daughter of Charles Carter, possibly the richest man in Virginia, but there were two problems that stopped this from helping her much:
1- like most rich southerners, Carter’s wealth was in land, slaves, and property and not in cash
2- Ann was not his only child- she was in fact one of about 25 children born to him by his two wives, most of whom survived to adulthood, and a daughter at that- thus her inheritance was smaller
Still, Ann did have a small income from her father, the use of a house (that was much smaller in his boyhood than it is now), and about 15 slaves willed to her by him and by other relatives. The income was not enough to support herself and her children in her husband’s absence (hard to translate 1810s currency to today, but figure a woman inherits perhaps $1,000 per month from her father- that’s nothing to sneeze at but even with the use of a house you’re not going to be champagne and caviaring it) plus some of the slaves had mortgages, so she kept some slaves for the household (cook, maid, etc.- Robert’s mother, like his wife, was an invalid by middle age incidentally) and the rest she leased. The money cleared by the leasing of the slaves (after mortgage payments) was added to/an essential part of the family’s income.
Thus, Robert E. Lee grew up a poor relation of two of the oldest and wealthiest families in Virginia, and living basically on a pittance from the labor of slaves. He attended West Point not because of any real interest in the military- he wanted to be an Episcopal priest in fact- but because his family could not afford tuition. It is probably not coincidental that when he married it was to one of the wealthiest heiresses in America, the only legitimate daughter of George Washington’s adopted son/step-grandson, G.W. Parke Custis.
When Lee’s mother died the bulk of her estate was formed by her 30 or so slaves. They were divided between her children. Lee is known to have manumitted one of those left to him and given two more to sisters; it’s unknown what became of the others (he either sold or gave them away) but he owned no slaves by 1850.
When Custis died he left his enormous estate (several plantations, about 30,000 acres in all) to Lee’s children. He also decreed that, like his foster-father before him, his slaves be manumitted within 7 years. Unfortunately he left an estate that was a complete and total mess financially due to debt and bad crops, and Lee had to take a leave of absence to settle the estate. He could easily have challenged the will to overturn the manumission clause but he honored it, finally moving the estate (Arlington) into a position that the last slaves could be freed by Christmas 1862, a week before the Emancipation Proclamation.
Lee was only very briefly a slaveowner, that for a time after his mother’s death, and had not been one for years by the time Grant manumitted Jones. He in fact abhorred slavery as a moral and social evil, though at the same time he was definitely (like most men of his time) a white supremacist who did not believe blacks were equal to white men or should be allowed to have voices in government. He is also known to have ordered the whippings of runaway slaves while administering Arlington.
Thanks - that first article meshes with what I remember from a few other books. When I had read Catton’s books I was pretty new to the Civil War (beyond what little I was taught in school, and a family trip to Gettysburg), so I was never sure if Catton’s portrayal was accurate, or whether he was particularly fond of Grant, and trying too hard to rehabilitate his image. Looks like it was probably pretty accurate.
From a page that does not appear to shift around from day to day:
(bolding mine)
I have no desire to discredit Davis on his courage or personal traits (aside from his deep desire to protect slavery so much that he would divide the nation for that purpose). However, the fact that he was wearing his wife’s shawl and housecoat and that she initially identified him as her mother to the approaching Federal forces certainly provides a grain that could grow into the malicious lies that were repeated later.
I can definitely see that. I’d heard about the unisex overcoat and shawl before but not about his wife claiming he was her mother- thanks for the link. (I still say that with beard, no curves, and at >6’0 tall he’d have made one really to’ up from the flo’ up woman 
.)
Nor did Roosevelt learn of the attack plans beforehand and let it happen so as to fan public opinion into supporting entering the war.
Another one is that Julius Caesar was gay. Richard Zacks, in History Laid Bare, writes: "The only specific charge of unnatural practices ever brought against [Caesar] was that he had been King Nicomedes’ bedfellow – always a dark stain on his reputation and frequently quoted by his enemies … Dolabella called him ‘the Queen’s rival and inner partner of the royal bed.’
"And Marcus Brutus recorded that, at about the same time, one Octavius, a scatterbrained creature who would say the first thing that popped into his head, walked into a packed assembly where he saluted Pompey as ‘King’ and Caesar as ‘Queen’.
"Despite this one charge, Caesar was generally pegged as an almost insatiable heterosexual. Near the end of the Gallic Wars, his soldiers made up a little song about him:
“Home we bring our bald whoremonger;
Romans, lock your wives away!
All the bags of gold you lent him
Went his Gallic tarts to pay.”
That said, I have noted some errors elsewhere in Zacks’ book, so maybe this is another one.
Comparing modern day takes on sexuality to previous eras is always a bit tricky, given that they tended not to define themselves as we did in that respect. Pre-Christian Rome really didn’t make the noise about who you put your dick into that we do, so men were far more likely to do it whilst still tending towards marriage and children etc.
Nothing to add to the topic, but as soon as I read that song I heard it in my head to the tune of the Chorale movement of Beethoven’s Ninth.
I heard it to the tune of Gilligan’s Island.
In the ancient world having relations with other men wasn’t always looked down on, but playing a passive role (being “the bottom” as it would be called today) was a definite NO-NO, so I always thought the “Queen of Bithynia” was a swiftboating- he was being cast in the passive-female role. To my knowledge there was never any other even rumor about same sex inclinations, plus even if he had been “the woman” for the K of Bithynia he hardly would have told anybody about it.
In HBO’s Rome there was a rephrasing of one of Cicero’s actual orations against Mark Antony was phrased thusly:
At which point Antony kills the clerk. The actual oration doesn’t have that wording but it does call him Helen of Troy and it does make mention to him assuming manly gowns to play a woman’s role. Does anybody know if this was accusing him of bisexuality with Caesar? Or having been a gigolo for older men in his young and broke and deeply in debt days? The reason I wonder is he seems from all accounts to have been one of the most raging hetero horndogs in the Roman world.
Sounds like one of our P.M. Gordon Browns policies though he would probably add An execution tax for the victims family and a cessation of breathing privileges tax aswell just in case they still had any money left.
In addition, the verdict got overturned, but on a technicality.
Cite
Actually, the prize he won was for being the first to fly nonstop from New York to Paris. Solo had nothing to do with it, and several other teams who didn’t make it were not flying solo. Alcock et al. did cross the Atlantic, but did so using a much shoter route, beginning in Newfoundland, IIRC.
That machine guns were mainly responsible for the carnage on the battlefields in the Great War.
It was artillery.
Well… not exactly. It’s true that more people died from artillary shells in their trenches than from anything else. But the reason they stayed in those trenches for so long was machine guns - they forced the armies to employ a largely defensive strategy, which made all sides more vulnerable, in the long run, to artillary.
Compare that to WW2 a couple of decades later. They had artillary then, too, and better guns- but they also had tanks, which helped neutralize the machine gun advantage, which meant that troops were moving around a lot more and were less exposed to artillary.
Not that artillary didn’t kill a lot of people in WW2, of course.
Artillery kills more soldiers than machine guns and rifles in MOST modern wars; there was nothing unique about WWI in this respect. Artillery is the god of the modern battlefield.