Day 48. April 17, 1862.
48
no one in Washington knew where the army was….
April Thursday 17
It very fine this morning and is quite warm and the grain and clover and vegetation is putting fourth. The sun was very warm all day. I sent my likeness* to Mrs MM Burket and a newspaper the charge at the battle of Winchester and I hope the time may soon come when all the nations may serve their god
*His daguerrotype, or photograph.“Likeness” was a common term, which became “picture” at some point. At the time, there were three processes to create a photograph. Daguerreotypes were printed on silver-plated metallic sheets. Tintypes were made on thin pieces of iron. Ambrotypes were made on chemical-coated glass. You had to sit still 15-30 seconds for tintypes; 60-90 for daguerrotypes. We have to sit still now as then, just not as long. And waiting: this is Ephraim’s fourth time to use his expression “I hope the time may soon come.”
Note: Below, Strother describes the same railroad and train car damage that Ephraim will write of April 30th:
A Virginia Yankee in the Civil War: The Diaries of David Hunter Strother David Hunter Strother P. 29
“APRIL 17, THURSDAY.—Bright. The captain of the bodyguard rode up and informed me that our staff had gone this morning at five o’clock. I got breakfast and rode forward at a trot. The columns of smoke in our front showed the Rebels were alert and at their usual work, bridge-burning. At Mt. Jackson were the charred and smoking ruins of the railroad cars and stock.”
Make Me a Map of the Valley: The Civil War Journal of Stonewall Jackson’s Topographer Jedediah Hotchkiss P. 24
“Thursday, April 17th. After our men were all over the river, Ashby, in person, attempted to burn the North River bridge, but his combustibles ignited slowly, and the enemy’s cavalry coming on rapidly, forced him to retire. They followed him a short distance and gave his splendid white horse a mortal wound.
The people here are very much disturbed by our falling back.
A number of shots were fired from both sides, but at a distance of two miles, and, of course, no body was hurt by that.”
Note: Colonel William Delaware Lewis, of the 110th, on April 17, 1862, issues a proclamation notifying the citizens of Winchester that he will not permit “lying reports and insulting remarks.” The original document is at the Library of Congress Manuscript Division & listed #543 in the index of the collection of personal papers. An index to the large collection of a variety of war documents, diaries, letters, etc. can be downloaded at www.loc.gov.
His proclamation is here, & looks like something tacked up on a tree in an old Western:
https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbpe.18701700/
Typing this up very much gave me a feeling of being in the town & what Lewis was trying to get across to those with anti-Union sentiments. The italics, bolded words, capitalizations, repetitions drove his points home. Also to note the term “Rebels” used in 1862, & sarcastically placed within quotation marks:
“HEAD QUARTERS.
Commander of the Post.
Winchester, Va., April 17th, 1862.
Citizens of Winchester:
Upon me has devolved the duty of commanding this Post. My wish and my duty is to afford you all the liberty and protection, due to fellow citizens. The Government I represent, is the same our forefathers established, to form a more perfect Union —provide for the common defence —promote the general welfare, and to secure to us and our posterity the blessings of Liberty. We mean truly to represent its Impartial Justice.
But no one can expect the privileges of a citizen and behave as an enemy. No one can expect kindness or courtesy who does not extend it to others.
Citizens are reminded that the troops now stationed here are those of their own Government, and are lawfully here on their country’s soil —common to all citizens, and that they are here for the protection of their fellow citizens —and for the prosecution of their Country’s Enemies the “Rebels.” Those persons Male or Female engaged in circulating flying rumors and creating false excitements are particularly warned.
Our soldiers are to support the Rights of all, and were I to permit flying reports and insulting remarks to be made the means of mischief, annoyance, and insult to the service or its servants, they would provoke retaliations and lead to much useless suffering.
I trust, Fellow Citizens, you will understand and appreciate the justice of these principles, and by your conduct obviate the necessity for harsh measures.
WM. D. LEWIS, Jr., Col. 110th Reg’t. P.V.
Commanding Post.”
Note: Skipping ahead to November, 1864:
Hearts Touched by Fire: The Best of Battles and Leaders of the Civil War Edited by Harold Holzer P. 1060-1061
INTRODUCTION James I. Robertson, Jr.
“The South was still reeling from the loss of Wilmington when Sherman and his hardened Union soldiers left Savannah and marched toward South Carolina, the “seedbed of secession.” Stern, red-haired “Cump” Sherman openly declared his intention to destroy everything in his path, spread demoralization afar, and then join Grant in Virginia in a final showdown with Lee.
Sherman feinted one wing of his army toward the industrial city of Augusta, Georgia, and the other wing toward the port of Charleston. The Confederates rushed all available troops to both cities. The Federal army pushed straight northward in between the two, cutting railroad and communication lines, Augusta and Charleston, isolated and helpless, surrendered to delegations sent by Sherman.
Commanding one of the Union wings was General Henry Warner Slocum. A quiet, dependable soldier, Slocum did his duty without fanfare or ambition. His only published military accounts are the narratives of the Carolina campaign reprinted here. Written with the twenty-twenty perspective of hindsight and without the heated emotions of wartime, the Slocum narratives are calm and measured. Indeed, the first essay understates both the vigor of Sherman’s soldiers on the northward march and the vengeance they unleashed on South Carolinians.
Opposition was all but nonexistent. Joseph E. Johnston had come out of retirement to take command of a hodgepodge force of second-class Confederate soldiers barely equal in number to Sherman’s cavalry. “I can do no more than annoy him,” Johnston wrote of Sherman, but he hoped that weather and swampy lowlands would impede the Union advance.
It did not. Most of Sherman’s men were Midwestern frontiersmen accustomed to the challenges of nature. With ax and spade, they corduroyed roads, built bridges, forded icy rivers, and sometimes roosted in trees to escape the flooded ground. Johnston lated remarked that no such army had existed since the legions of Julius Caesar.
A personal fury permeated the ranks as Union soldiers entered South Carolina. One Billy Yank put it succinctly: “Here is where treason began, and, by God, here is where it shall end!”
Marking the army’s forty-five-mile-wide path were pillars of smoke by day and pillars of fire by night. Commercial buildings were leveled; homes were sacked and set afire; livestock were butchered; slaves were sent running, partly for freedom and partly from fear. One soldier wrote of the Savannah-Columbia march: “The country behind us is left a howling wilderness, in utter desolation.”
Columbia, the state capital, caught the worst of the Union storm. Sherman’s forces marched into the city on February 17, and by the next morning a third of Columbia was in ashes. Although the burning may have been accidental—a point still in dispute today—soldiers in the ranks asserted that if the accident had not taken place, they themselves would have burned the place.’”
Note: 2/17/65: https://www.loc.gov/item/2003668338/
Note: Skipping ahead to December, 1864:
Marching with Sherman: Passages from the Letters and Campaign Diaries of Henry Hitchcock, Major and Assistant Adjutant General of Volunteers, November 1864–May 1865 Major Henry Hitchcock P. 167-168 (excerpt)
CAMP ON “MILLEN (DIRT) ROAD” (OR “LOUISVILLE ROAD”) ABOUT 5 ½ miles from Savannah. Sat. December 10/64. 167-168
Twenty-fifth day out
“I do not forget, and God knows I am sorry for the people of the regions we have traversed. But I have already noted day by day all that is worth while as to this. Their losses, their terrors (many of which they find and acknowledge to be groundless) their sufferings, all are implied in and inevitable with war—and for this war, not we but their “leaders” and their own moral and physical cowardice three years ago are responsible. This Union and its Government must be sustained, at any and every cost; to sustain it, we must war upon and destroy the organized rebel forces,—must cut off their supplies, destroy their communications, and show their white slaves (these people say themselves that they are so) their utter inability to resist the power of the U.S. To do this implies and requires these very sufferings, and having thus only the choice of evils—war now so terrible and successful that none can dream of rebellion hereafter, or everlasting war with all these evils magnified a hundred fold hereafter,—we have no other course to take. At least I am glad to remember that I have not only not abused nor insulted a single person, but have repeatedly stopped the depredations of soldiers….”
The Civil War The Final Year Told by Those Who Lived It Edited by Aaron Sheehan-Dean P. 626-627
MARCHING THROUGH THE CAROLINAS: NORTH CAROLINA, MARCH 1865 Fayetteville, North Carolina, Mar. 12, 1865
Alpheus S. Williams to His Daughter: (Excerpt)
“We swept through South Carolina, the fountain-head of rebellion, in a broad, semi-circular belt, sixty miles wide, the arch oft houses which was the capital of the state, Columbia. Our people, impressed with the idea that every South Carolinian was an arrant Rebel, spared nothing but the old men, women, and children. All materials, all vacant houses, factories, cotton-gins and presses, everything that makes the wealth of the people, everything edible and wearable, was swept away. The soldiers quietly took the matter into their own hands. Orders to respect houses and private property not necessary for the subsistence of the army were not greatly heeded. Indeed, not heeded at all. Our “bummers,” the dare-devils and reckless of the army, put the flames to everything and we marched with thousands of columns of smoke marking the line of each corps. the sights at times, as seen from elevated ground, were often terribly sublime and grand; often intensely painful from the distressed and frightened condition of the old men and women and children left behind.
We saw no young men, save the deformed, the sick or wounded. And deserters (pretty numerous). Everybody else had been forced into the service, even to decrepit old men of sixty and upwards, lots of whom came to us to be paroled or to be sent home. Boys deserted to us, not over thirteen years ols. The “Confederacy” has literally gathered its infancy and aged, its first and second childhood. If it fails now, all material for reinforcing its armies is gone, unless, indeed, they can make fighting men out of the Negroes.
The country was much poorer than I expected to find. Even respectable houses are very rare, and superior ones rarer. The soil, never very fertile, is worn out. The people left at home, mainly sickly-looking and grossly ignorant. How even the politicians of South Carolina can boast a superiority over our hardy and industrious Northern people is more than I can imagine. Everything in that state presents evidence of decay and retrogradation. There is nothing new, nothing that looks flourishing, and the people look like “fossil remains.’”
For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War James M. McPherson P. 155
Note: James M. McPherson, writing about revenge:
“This feeling underlay the well-advertised resolve of Sherman’s soldiers to take South Carolina apart. “No man ever looked forward to any event with more joy,” wrote an Ohio soldier, “than did our boys to have a chance to meet the sons of the mother of traitors, ‘South Carolina.’” After leaving a fiery trail through the state, another Ohio infantryman wrote to his brother that “her black ruins will stand as a warning of more terrible things to come” if the inhabitants persisted in treason. This soldier was particularly contemptuous of the self-styled Carolina aristocracy that “can talk of nothing but the purity of blood of themselves & their ancestors…. Their cant about aristocracy is perfectly sickening…. If you hear any condemning us for what we have done, tell them for me and for Sherman’s Army, that ‘we found here the authors of all the calamities that have befallen this nation… and that their punishment is light when compared with what justice demanded.’”
Note: The actual proceeding that separated South Carolina from the Union below. Auld Lang Syne, on 12/20/60, plays as the men leave for a break in the proceedings, then later sign walk back in to sign the Ordinance of Secession. Every New Year’s Eve in America, still, this is the song.
The Most Fearful Ordeal: Original Coverage of the Civil War by Writers and Reporters of the New York Times Introduction and Notes by James McPherson P. 43-44
“THURSDAY’S PROCEEDINGS.
CHARLESTON, THURSDAY, DEC. 20.
Prayer was offered, the roll called and the journal read.
A resolution was offered to invite the Mayor of Charleston to a seat on the floor of the Convention. It was amended by inserting the Governor of the State, the President of the Senate and Speaker of the House, and passed.
The chair announced the appointment of the Committee to draft a summary of the cause of the Secession of South Carolina; also of four standing Committees.
Mr. RHETT’S resolution to appoint a Committee of Thirteen for the purpose of providing for the assemblage of a Convention of the seceding States, and to form a Constitution, was adopted.
Mr. INGLIS made a report from the Committee to prepare and draft an ordinance proper to be adopted by the Convention.
An Ordinance to Dissolve the Union between the State of South Carolina and other States united with her under the compact entitled the Constitution of the United States of America.
We, the people of the State of South Carolina, in Convention assembled, do declare and ordain, and it is hereby declared and ordained, that the ordinance adopted by us in Convention, on the 22d day of May, in the year of our Lord 1788, whereby the Constitution of the United States of American [sic] was ratified, and also all Acts and ports of Acts of the General Assembly of this State ratifying the amendments of the said Constitution are hereby repealed, and that the union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States under the name of the United States of America is hereby dissolved.
The ordinance was taken up and passed by an unanimous vote of 109 members at 1¼ o’clock.
As soon as its passage was known without the doors of the Convention, it rapidly spread on the street, a crowd collected, and there was immense cheering.
Mr. MILES moved that the Clerk telegraph to the members at Washington. Carried unanimously.
Mr. DESAUSSURE moved that the ordinance be engrossed on parchment, under the direction of the Attorney-General, and signed by the President and members, this evening, at Institute Hall, and that it be placed in the archives of the State.
Six and a half o’clock was agreed upon as the hour to proceed to Institute Hall, for the purpose of signing it.”
White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide Carol Anderson P. 10
“In fact, two-thirds of the wealthiest Americans at the time “lived in the slaveholding South.” Eighty-one percent of South Carolina’s*** wealth was directly tied to owning human beings. It is no wonder, then, that South Carolina was willing to do whatever it took, including firing the first shot in the bloodiest war in U.S. History, to be free from Washington, which had stopped the spread of slavery to the West, refused to enforce the Fugitive Slave** Act, and, with the admission of new free-soil states to the Union prior to 1861, set up the numerical domination of the South in Congress. When the Confederacy declared that the “first duty of the Southern states” was “self-preservation,” what it meant was the preservation of slavery.”
Note: Ah yes, South Carolina, home to Strom Thurmond, segregationist Senator who spoke 24 hours & 18 minutes against the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the longest filibuster on American record. Oh, & he raped his maid, a 15 year old Black girl who bore his child. Her name was Essie Mae Washington, whom he never publicly acknowledged. She was 78 when she revealed it. MLK: “I think the tragedy is that we have a Congress with a Senate that has a minority of misguided senators who will use the filibuster to keep the majority of people from even voting.” That was 1963. ’63, when some hold the CIA “delegitimized” the U.S. government. You didn’t hear it from me.
Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made Eugene D. Genovese P. 37
“In 1821, South Carolina became the last of the slave states to declare itself clearly in protection of slave life.
P. 65
On some Sea Island plantations every slave’s back had scars, and the narratives of ex-slaves reveal many stories of slaves whipped to death.”
Touched by Fire: The Best of Battles and Leaders of the Civil War Edited by Harold Holzer P. 1053-1054 (selections)
MARCHING THROUGH GEORGIA AND THE CAROLINAS.
Daniel Oakey, Captain, 2nd Massachusetts Volunteers.
“As my regiment was the rear-guard for the day, we had various offices to perform for the train, and it was midnight before we saw the last wagon over the bridge by the light of our pine torches. It seemed as if that last wagon was never to be got over. It came bouncing and bumping along, its six mules smoking and blowing in the black, misty air. The teamster, mounted on one of the wheelers, guided his team with a single rein and addressed each mule by name, reminding the animal of his faults, and accusing him of having, among other peculiarities, “a black military heart.” Every sentence of his oath-adorned rhetoric was punctuated with a dexterous whip-lash. At last, drenched to the skin and covered with mud, I took my position on the bridge, seated in a chair which one of my men had presented to me, and waited for the command to “close up.”
As we passed the wagon camp, there was the deafening, indescribable chorus of mules and teamsters, besides the hoarse shouting of quartermasters and wagonmasters plunging about on horseback through the mud, to direct the arriving teams into their places. But it all died away in the distance as we marched on to find the oozy resting-place of the brigade. The army had been in bivouac some hours, and countless camp-fires formed a vast belt of fire that spread out into the black night.
As we advanced into the wild pine regions of North Carolina the natives seemed wonderfully impressed at seeing every road filled with marching troops, artillery, and wagon trains. They looked destitute enough as they stood in blank amazement gazing upon the “Yanks” marching by. The scene before us was very striking; the resin pits were on fire, and great columns of black smoke rose high into the air, spreading and mingling together into gray clouds, and suggesting the roof and pillars of a vast temple. All traces of habitation were left behind, as we marched into that grand forest with its beautiful carpet of pine needles. The straight trunks of the pine-tree shot up to a great height, and then spread out into a green roof, which kept us in perpetual shade. As night came on, we found that the resinous sap in the cavities cut in the trees to receive it, had been lighted by “bummers” in our advance. The effect of these peculiar watch-fires on every side, several feet above the ground, with flames licking their way up the tall trunks, was peculiarly striking and beautiful. But it was sad to see this wanton destruction of property, which, like the firing of the resin pits, was the work of “bummers,” who were marauding through the country committing every sort of outrage. There was no restraint except with the column or the regular foraging parties. We had no communications, and could have no safeguards. The country was necessarily left to take care of itself, and became a “howling waste.” The “coffee-coolers” of the Army of the Potomac were archangels compared to our “bummers,” who often fell to the tender mercies of Wheeler’s cavalry, and were never heard of again, earning a fate richly deserved.
Hardee retired to a good position at Averysboro’, where Kilpatrick found him intrenched and too strong for the cavalry to handle unassisted. It was the turn of our brigade to do special duty, ao at about eight o’clock in the evening we were ordered to join the cavalry. We were not quite sure it rained, but everything was dripping. The men furnished themselves with pine-knots, and our weapons glistened in the torch-light, a cloud of black smoke from the torches floating black over our heads. The regimental wits were as ready as ever, and amid a flow of lively bandinage we toiled on through the mud.
P. 1042
On December 23d the campaign culminated as Sherman entered Savannah. He sent the following dispatch to President Lincoln, which he received Christmas Eve: “’I beg to present to you, as a Christmas gift, the city of Savannah, with one hundred and fifty heavy guns and plenty of ammunition, and also about twenty-five thousand bales of cotton.’”
The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and its Legacies Victoria E. Bynum P. 33
“Indicative of the tendency of Northern whites to view all Southern white men as slaveholders, one Yankee sergeant stationed at the Camp Morton prison reportedly beat Confederate prisoners about the head and body with a heavy stick while crying out, “This is the way you whip your Negroes.” Such treatment was cruel irony for men who had never owned slaves and who had supported neither secession nor the Confederacy.”
Note: And where in tarnation is that army? Meanwhile, back at the ranch, all the COMMS gone dark. Imagine it.
This Hallowed Ground: The Story of the Union Side of the Civil War Bruce Catton P. 360-361
“President Lincoln may have had a few uneasy moments while the march was going on. Shortly after it left Atlanta the army was completely lost to sight, as far as the North was concerned. It had no communications whatever, no message of any kind came from it, and the only news was what could be learned from Southern papers. This news was worthless, and much of it consisted of hopeful reports that Sherman was being cut off and surrounded by Confederate troops and that his entire army would presently be wiped out. As November came to an end no one in Washington knew where the army was or what had happened to it. Lincoln confessed that “we know where he went in at, but I can’t tell where he will come out.”
Sherman would come out where he intended to, at Savannah. The soldiers, nearing the seacoast in early December, found that they had marched out of the rich land of plenty. This was rice country, and although the foragers could load the wagons with plenty of rice they could not seem to find much else. Soldiers learned to hull the rice by putting it in haversacks and pounding it with musket butts, and to winnow it by pouring the pounded grain from hand to hand, and they speedily got sick both of preparing it and of eating it. The country was flat and a good deal of it was under water, and the campaign’s picnic aspects abruptly disappeared.
The army came up to Savannah on December 10. Sherman led it around to the right, striking for the Ogeechee River and Ossabaw Sound, where he could get in touch with the navy, receive the supplies, and regain contact with Grant and with Washington. The XV Corps found itself making a night march along the bank of a canal; there was a moon, the evening was warm, and the swamp beside the canal looked strange, haunting, and mysterious, all silver and green and black, with dim vistas trailing off into shadowland. The men had been ordered to march quietly, but suddenly they began to sing – “Swanee River,” “Old Kentucky Home,” “John Brown’s Body,” and the like, moving on toward journey’s end in an unreal night. An Iowa soldier remembered how “the great spreading live-oaks and the tall spectre-like pines, fringing the banks of the narrow and straight canal, formed an arch over it through which the shimmering rays of the full moon cast streaks of mellow light,” and the picture stayed with him to old age.”
Note: See page 1041 in Hearts Touched by Fire (above, middle) for a sketch made at the time: “General Sherman sending his last telegram before cutting the wires and abandoning all communication with the North.” The lines snake around & sink down a tall pole at the center of the image while men dressed warmly mill about. Lincoln is said to have told Sherman’s brother something along the lines of, “I know what hole he went in at but I can’t tell what hole he will come out of,” comparing him to a burrowing rabbit. This, though. The cutting of the lines is the one that gets to me, the ghostliest of the war, maybe due to my era, where everyone is in constant contact. Just think of the fate of the nation in the balance, & Lincoln now can’t get news after Sherman crosses his fingers & sends that final communiqué. Here & now. Because that’s what they were carrying to the sky, & those were the last words they screamed at it. Now millions can sit at once on a Kyiv livestream, stare into their tiny rectangles, watch “Russian Forces Press Closer to Ukraine Capital” & see President Zelensky tell the world “until we have last bullet,” & “this might be the last time you see me alive.” Until the internet blacks out. “Hell is truth seen too late.” Thomas Hobbes
Hearts Touched by Fire: The Best of Battles and Leaders of the Civil War Edited by Harold Holzer P. 1157-1158
FINAL OPERATIONS OF SHERMAN’S ARMY.
H.W. Slocum, Major-General, U.S.V.
“Both Grant and Sherman expressed to Mr. Lincoln their firm conviction that the end was near at hand. During the conversation something was said about the disposition to be made of the rebel leaders, particularly Mr. Davis. Sherman made no secret of the fact that he wished to have Davis escape arrest, get out of the country, and thus save our Government all embarrassment as to his case. Mr. Lincoln said that, occupying the position he did, he could not say that he hoped the leader of the great rebellion, which had beought so much misery upon the land, would escape, but that the situation reminded him of an anecdote. He said a man who had recently taken the temperance pledge was once invited to take a drink of spirits. He said, “No, I can’t do it; I will take a glass of lemonade.” When the lemonade was prepared, his friend suggested that its flavor would be improved by pouring in a little brandy. The man said, “If you could pour in a little of that stuff unbeknownst to me, I shouldn’t get made about it.” If Mr. David had escaped from the country “unbeknownst to Mr. Lincoln, he would not have grieved over it.’”
Note: Good Night Irene.
P. 1160
“As Sherman was entering a car on the morning of the 17th to attend this meeting, the telegraph operator stopped him and requested him to wait a few minutes, as he was just receiving an important dispatch, which he ought to see before he left. The dispatch was from Mr. Stanton announcing the assassination of Mr. Lincoln, and the attempt on the life of Mr. Seward and his son. General Sherman asked the operator if he had divulged the contents of the dispatch to any one, and being answered in the negative, he ordered him to keep it a secret until his return. Sherman and his staff met Johnston and Wade Hampton with a number of staff-officers at the house of Mrs. Bennett. None of the Confederate officers had heard of the assassination of Lincoln, and Sherman first made the fact known to them. They were much affected by the news, and apparently regretted it as much as did our own officers.”
A Diary From Dixie Mary Boykin Chesnut P. 149
Note: excerpt from entry May 6, 1862:
“Hampton estate has fifteen hundred negroes on Lake Washington, Mississippi. Hampton girls talking in the language of James’s novels: “Neither Wade nor Preston—that splendid boy!—would lay a lance in rest—or couch it, which is the right phrase for fighting, to preserve slavery. They hate it as we do.” ‘What are they fighting for?” “Southern rights—
whatever that is. And they do not want to be understrappers forever to the Yankees. They talk well enough about it, but I forget what they say.” Johnny Chesnut says: “No use to give a reason—a fellow could not stay away from the fight—not well.” It takes four negroes to wait on Johnny satisfactorily.’”
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness Michelle Alexander P. 22-23
“Back there, before Jim Crow, before the invention of the Negro or the white man or the words and concepts to describe them, the Colonial population consisted largely of a great mass of white and black bondsmen, who occupied roughly the same economic category and were treated with equal contempt by the lords of the plantation and legislatures. Curiously unconcerned about their color, these people worked together and relaxed together.” –Lerone Bennett Jr.
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I hope the time may soon come when all the nations may serve their god….
Voltaire, 1756: A torch lighted in the forests of America set all Europe in conflagration.
The landed Gentry; imagine it– the ones who deem themselves the closest ghost of Washington– waiting for Sherman, 63k right behind him & the sound of a match going lit, the strange pointed flame. And that sulphur haze. Waiting for Sherman on the mint julip veranda, the sky falling backward with whatever is over. But the snake still coils upright, its slit eye on that flag, the same flag they carried into the Capitol Building 1/6/21. Also imagine it. Per Bailyn’s The Barbarous Years: “Of the 8000 colonists that arrived in VA. between 1607-1625, only 1,218 were still alive in 1625. In 1622 alone, nearly 1,000 colonists died, 350 were killed in the Indian massacres, & double that number died of starvation & disease.” @Hilltopswamp 6/22/21
Note: “Indian massacres” is problematic all the way through. I’ve quoted this for the number.
At 17,574 concertgoers, Metallica at Vivant Arena on 11/30/18 set an attendance record; a few thousand less than the potential New Englanders among those 200,000 forking over a few pounds’ steerage from 1610-1660 to cross over to the Colonies. Of those 200k, just 20-22k landed in New England, mainly to Massachusetts for religious freedom (churches often the first buildings to go up in a new area). That’s only about 4,500 more at most I’m seeing right in front me, I thought, as I stood looking around at the curved upward stadium rows full of waving lit cellphones, people shouting we’re off to never-never land. I was seeing at most a scant 4,500 fewer than bodies on those ships. And as I looked around the stadium at the firefly lighters out during encores, I thought of ancestors on those ships. Thomas Call (1597-1676), my 11x grandfather (Ephraim’s side), age 39, who left Kent, then Sandwich, England, on the Hercules, landing in 1636 Massachusetts. He was now with a stock of people outside the jurisdiction of the Church of England as a Puritan or Separatist fugitive dissident, yearning for something better than what he had, worth trying, anyway. He sailed with wife & 3 children in the “Puritan Great Migration,” which took place from 1620-1640. Settled 2 miles from Bunker Hill, bought the first license to sell alcohol there, & in 1645 opened the first “victual house” on the Mystic Side in Massachusetts. He was related to Walt Disney (Disney & I share the same grandparents going back 6 generations for me, 4 for Disney. No, this is nothing to brag about.). Amazingly, Call’s headstone still stands: crisp letters, an hourglass, crossbones, a shovel, a casket, a pickaxe, & a gorgeous skull with wings atop with an hourglass sandwiched between. FUGIT HORA. MEMENTO T. ESSE MORTALEM. Call left behind a 150 pound estate, various land, & a pair of black oxen. Picture 1 & 2: The Guardian. Picture 3: B. Mercer.
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