Tag Archives: Civil War

America’s Second Original Sin

24 Monday Aug 2015

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Civil War

“This country has two great sins on its very soul. One is slavery, which we’ll never get out of our history and our conscience… the marrow of our bones. The other one is emancipation.

They told four million people, ‘You are free. Hit the road.’ Two-thirds of them couldn’t read or write. Very few of them had any trade except farming, and they went back into a sharecropper system that closely resembled peonage. I’m not saying emancipation is a sin, for God’s sake… but it should have been an emancipation that brought those people into society without all these handicaps on their head. And now, my black friends, they are tremendously protective about slavery. They don’t want to hear the word. The opposite of the Jews, who are very proud of coming out of Egypt. And it was this short-circuiting, this instant emancipation… it had a very bad effect on them.

I don’t know whether it’s a lesson or not, but I think it needs to be looked at as if you were in that time and place. A lot of things change when you move back to being a part of it…

Go back to the time. Muzzle-loading weapons sound awful primitive. They didn’t seem primitive to them. They were a new kind of infantry rifle that was deadly at 200 yards. That was a tremendous step forward. And the tactics were based on the old musket, which was accurate at about 60 feet. They mostly lined up shoulder to shoulder and moved against a position, and got blown down because they were using tactics with these very modern weapons. They were using the old-style tactics with very modern weapons. A few of the men realized that, Bedford Forrest for instance. He would never make a frontal attack on anything with this new weapon in their hands. But too many of them, including Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant, followed the old tactics against these modern weapons. That’s why the casualties — there were 1,095,000 casualties in the Civil War. If today you had that same ratio, you’d have something like 10 million casualties, to give you some idea of what happened.

It was far worse in the South than it was in the North. One out of four southerners of conscriptable age was a casualty in that war. In the year after the war, the state of Mississippi spent one-fifth of its income on artificial arms and legs for the veterans. Very few people today realize how devastating that war was, especially to the South, but to the North too. A lot of fine men went into graves in that thing. There’s no telling how many Miltons or John Keatses got buried.”

Slaves

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From Shelby Foote’s June 1999 interview with the Academy of Achievement. You’ll find similar and extended reflections in his three-part opus The Civil War and in William C. Carter’s catalog of Conversations with Shelby Foote.

Later in their conversation, the historian is asked to entertain the counterfactual and assess whether the Civil War — with its million-plus casualties — can be rightfully called “inevitable.”

Interviewer: Now that we have 130 years of hindsight, did the Civil War have to be fought?

Foote: There’s a lot of argument about that.

The fact that it was fought seems to me to prove it had to be fought, but even at the time, Seward, Lincoln’s Secretary of State, called it “an irrepressible conflict.” And indeed, the differences were so sharp, especially by the extremists on both sides: the Abolitionists in the North and the Fire-eaters in the South… there was scarcely any way to settle it except fighting. Just as two men can get so angry at each other, the only way to settle a thing is to step out in the alley and have a fistfight. People don’t do that much any more. They’re more apt to take some blind-side swing at somebody instead of a real fight. But I think there probably wasn’t any other way to settle it. Now if we were the superior creatures we claim to be as Americans, we would not have fought that war, but we’re not that superior by a long shot.

These remarks are basically longer forms of a point made several times in Ken Burns’s documentary Civil War: A Film. In it, Foote reiterates the above theme (and can’t help again nodding to his penchant for throwing fists):

Right now I’m thinking a good deal about emancipation. One of our sins was slavery. Another was emancipation. It’s a paradox. In theory, emancipation was one of the glories of our democracy — and it was. But the way it was done led to tragedy. Turning four million people loose with no jobs or trades or learning. And then, in 1877, for a few electoral votes, just abandoning them entirely. A huge amount of pain and trouble resulted. Everybody in America is still paying for it…

People want to know why the South is so interested in the Civil War. I had maybe, it’s a rough guess, about fifty fistfights in my life. Out of those fifty fistfights, the ones that I had the most vivid memory of were the ones I lost. I think that’s one reason why the South remembers the war more than the North does.

The top photograph, taken in 1862, shows the staff of Brigadier General Andrew Porter. Lying next to the dog in the bottom right of the shot is George Custer, who would later on go to fight and die along with his men in the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876.

Below it: figures whose names and dates are unknown. If you have a clue, send it my way.

Read on:

Shelby Foote

Shelby Foote: Why Some Who Opposed Slavery Fought for the South

01 Wednesday Apr 2015

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Confederate Soldiers 3

“Foote gestured toward a framed certificate on the wall from the United Confederate Veterans. It was dated 1892 and honored his great-great-grandfather, Colonel Hezekiah William Foote. Before the war, Hezekiah owned five plantations and over one hundred slaves. ‘I was given clearly to understand as a child that I was a Southern aristocrat,’ Foote said.

His great-grandfather had opposed secession but fought without hesitation for the South. ‘Just as I would have,’ Foote said. ‘I’d be with my people, right or wrong. If I was against slavery, I’d still be with the South. I’m a man, my society needs me, here I am. The difference between the North and the South in the war is that there was no stigma attached to the Northern man who paid two hundred dollars to not go to war, or who hired a German replacement. In the South you could have done that, but no one would. You’d have been scorned.’

Foote’s retroactive allegiance to the Confederacy surprised me. It was the honor-bound code of the Old South. One’s people before one’s principles. The straitjacket of scorn and stigma. ‘It’s a bunch of shit really,’ Foote conceded. ‘But all Southerners subscribe to this code to some degree, at least male Southerners of my generation.’ In Foote’s view, this same stubborn pride had sustained Southerners during the Civil War. ‘It’s what kept them going through Appomattox, that attitude of “I won’t give up, I won’t be insulted.”’

It took almost a century after Appomattox for Confederate blood to cool. Southerners’ ‘abiding love’ for Franklin Delano Roosevelt tempered their prideful regionalism, Foote said; so, too, did the patriotic fervor surrounding World War II. It was in 1945 that Mississippians finally dropped their eighty-year ban on celebrating Independence Day. This was also when many Southerners stopped referring to the Civil War as the War Between the States. ‘It was a big admission, if you think about it,’ Foote said. ‘A Civil war is a struggle between two parts of one nation, which implies that the South was never really separate or independent.'”

Shelby Foote 2

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Excerpted from Tony Horwitz’s chronicle of the south’s Lost Cause nearly a century and a half later Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War.

More warfare:

What the Civil War Sounded Like

05 Thursday Mar 2015

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Civil War Soldiers

“They both had a particular way of yelling. The Northern troops made a sort of hurrah — it was called by one soldier ‘the deep, generous, manly shout of the Northern soldier.’ The Confederates of course had what was called the Rebel Yell.

We don’t really know what that sounded like. One Northerner described it by describing the peculiar corkscrew sensation that goes up your backbone when you hear it. And he said, ‘If you claimed you’ve heard it and weren’t scared, that means you’ve never heard it.’

It was basically, I think, a sort of fox-hunt yip mixed up with a banshee squall, and it was used on the attack. An old Confederate veteran after the war was asked at a UDC meeting somewhere in Tennessee to give the Rebel Yell. The ladies had never heard it. And he said, ‘It can’t be done, except at a run, and I couldn’t do it anyhow with a mouthful of false teeth and a stomach full of food!'”

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Shelby Foote riffing in Ken Burns’s seminal documentary The Civil War.

Lincoln’s Second Inaugural

04 Wednesday Mar 2015

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Abraham Lincoln 342

“Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged.

The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. ‘Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.’ If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Abraham Lincoln second inauguration

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387 of the 700 total words in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, delivered 150 years ago today. Above is the only known photograph of the event.

Months of sleet had made Pennsylvania Avenue look like a muddy riverbed by the first week of March in 1865. On the 4th, thousands of spectators stood in the inch-thick runoff at the Capitol grounds to hear what was one of the shortest, and undoubtedly one of the finest, inaugural speeches by an American president. Standing under a recently finished East Portico, Lincoln was sworn in by Chief Justice Salmon Chase. Lee would surrender to Grant at Appomattox 33 days later. Lincoln was assassinated 6 days after that.

Christopher Buckley, a former speechwriter for George H. W. Bush, calls the Second Inaugural the greatest speech in American history, surpassing Lincoln’s address at Gettysburg as well as the thunderclap from Martin Luther King, Jr. on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. Entering that monument, Buckley reflects,

Inside the memorial, graven on the walls, are the two speeches in American history that surpass Dr. King’s: the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural. I read the latter aloud to myself, quietly, so as not to alarm anyone. It clocks in at under five minutes, bringing the total of those two orations to about seven minutes. Edward Everett, who also spoke at Gettysburg, wrote Lincoln afterward to say, “I should flatter myself if I could come to the heart of the occasion in two hours in what you did in two minutes.”

Daniel Chester French, who sculpted the statue of Lincoln that stares out on the Reflecting Pool, studied a cast of Lincoln’s life mask. You can see a cast in the basement of the memorial, and it is hard to look upon the noble serenity of that plaster without being moved. Embarking from Springfield, Illinois, in 1861 to begin his first term as president, Lincoln said, “I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington.” When I first read that speech as a schoolboy, I thought the line sounded immodest. Harder than what Washington faced? Come on! Only years later when I saw again the look on Lincoln’s face that French had captured did I understand.

More from the man:

Glory’s Moonshine

18 Sunday Jan 2015

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William Tecumseh Sherman 2

“No one can deny I have done the State some service in the field, but I have always desired that strife should cease at the earliest possible moment.

I confess, without shame, I am sick and tired of fighting—its glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentations of distant families, appealing to me for sons, husbands, and fathers. You, too, have seen these things, and I know you also are tired of the war, and are willing to let the civil tribunals resume their place. And, so far as I know, all the fighting men of our army want peace; and it is only those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded and lacerated (friend or foe), that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation. I know the rebels are whipped to death, and I declare before God, as a man and a soldier, I will not strike a foe who stands unarmed and submissive before me, but would rather say—”‘Go, and sin no more.'”

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William Tecumseh Sherman, writing in a letter to James E. Yeatman, May 21, 1865.

William Tecumseh Sherman and staff

How George Washington Led

01 Monday Dec 2014

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George Washington

“Financial support from France and the Netherlands, and military support from the French army and navy, would play a large part in the outcome. But in the last analysis it was Washington and the army that won the war for American independence. The fate of the war and the revolution rested on the army. The Continental Army — not the Hudson River or the possession of New York or Philadelphia — was the key to victory. And it was Washington who held the army together and gave it ‘spirit’ through the most desperate of times.

He was not a brilliant strategist or tactician, not a gifted orator, not an intellectual. At several crucial moments he had shown marked indecisiveness. He had made serious mistakes in judgment. But experience had been his great teacher from boyhood, and in this his greatest test, he learned steadily from experience. Above all, Washington never forgot what was at stake and he never gave up.

Again and again, in letters to Congress and to his officers, and in his general orders, he had called for perseverance — for ‘perseverance and spirit,’ for ‘patience and perseverance,’ for ‘unremitting courage and perseverance.’ Soon after the victories of Trenton and Princeton, he had written: ‘A people unused to restraint must be led, they will not be drove.’ Without Washington’s leadership and unrelenting perseverance, the revolution almost certainly would have failed. As Nathanael Greene foresaw as the war went on, ‘He will be the deliverer of his own country.’

American Revolution.png

The war was a longer, far more arduous, and more painful struggle than later generations would understand or sufficiently appreciate. By the time it ended, it had taken the lives of an estimated 25,000 Americans, or roughly 1 percent of the population. In percentage of lives lost, it was the most costly war in American history, except for the Civil War.

The year 1776, celebrated as the birth year of the nation and for the signing of the Declaration of Independence, was for those who carried the fight for independence forward a year of all-too-few victories, of sustained suffering, disease, hunger, desertion, cowardice, disillusionment, defeat, terrible discouragement, and fear, as they would never forget, but also of phenomenal courage and bedrock devotion to country, and that, too, they would never forget.

Especially for those who had been with Washington and who knew what a close call it was at the beginning — how often circumstance, storms, contrary winds, the oddities or strengths of individual character had made the difference — the outcome seemed little short of a miracle.”

George Washington at Yorktown

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The final page of 1776by David McCullough.

Press onward:

Would Jesus Be a Republican or a Democrat?

01 Saturday Mar 2014

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Eric Metaxas

Do you think Jesus would have been a Republican or a Democrat?

Panelist 1: My take on Jesus is he would be both.

Panelist 2: No, he wouldn’t. He’d be an independent. He would be a cafeteria politician.

Panelist 1: Well, first of all he wouldn’t be a politician.

Eric Metaxas: No, he would be an itinerant rabbi. By the way, he actually was an itinerant rabbi. I think we can move on.

Panelist 2: Whoa, whoa, well tell us how you really feel about our answers.

Eric Metaxas: No I couldn’t possibly, because this is being recorded.

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Eric Metaxas, commenting on the issue of Jesus’s political affiliations (or lack thereof) during a recent panel discussion.

Well, I guess that’s settled. My attitude towards the question is precisely that of Metaxas. In fact, his answer is probably a sentence too long. Jesus was an itinerant rabbi.

A red flag reading “INTELLECTUALLY BANKRUPT” should shoot up in your mind anytime an interlocutor cites a first century carpenter to defend his twenty-first century political ideology. It’s a sham trump card for them, first; and second – if the assertion is being made by a Christian – it’s a painfully unflattering and parochial association for the divine. During the most grim period of the Civil War, a beleaguered Abraham Lincoln was asked whether he believed God was on the Union’s side. Lincoln responded with typical prudence, putting the question to rest in one sentence, “Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is whether we are on God’s side, for God is always right.”

And while we’re at it, can we also stop equating the other guys with Hitler. That’s almost as idiotic.

Watch Metaxas in this short clip:

The Bixby Letter

26 Sunday May 2013

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Abraham Lincoln

Executive Mansion,
Washington, Nov. 21, 1864.

Dear Madam,

I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save. I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.

Yours, very sincerely and respectfully,

A. Lincoln

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Abraham Lincoln’s celebrated Bixby letter, sent to Lydia Bixby of Boston, Massachusetts, a widow who had apparently lost five sons in the course of the Civil War. Put it on your shelf in the form of Abraham Lincoln: Great Speeches.

While there is controversy about the letter’s authorship (some historians believe Lincoln’s secretary John Hay wrote it) as well as it’s recipient (and whether Ms. Bixby’s boys truly died in combat), the Bixby letter is more than just an individual tribute in the hearts and minds of those for whom Memorial Day is more than just a Monday off work.

This letter also inspired the narrative of Robert Rodat’s screenplay for Saving Private Ryan, and is read during the film in the scene below:

Alletta Sullivan of Waterloo, Iowa was also robbed five sons, albeit a century later during World War Two, when a Nazi gunboat torpedoed the USS Juneau on which all five of the brothers were serving. This event prompted the United States military to enact the Sole Survivor Policy as well as christen a new destroyer, USS The Sullivans.