Author: Fuckbots

127

reference to overwhelming numbers was a kind of code….

Saturday 5

Very warm last night and this morning and to day we came down in the accommodation train to Birmingham.* Stoped at Crist. There to evenning. Spent a pleasant afternoon but a very warm one. Rev Crist brot us over in the spring waggon

Anyway, to view an animated version of Ephraim looking about & smiling, try: https://myhr.tg/1WB0K3h8    WILD:

*Ephraim’s Huntingdon Station is 95 miles northwest of Harrisburg. The Lincoln Special stopped on the Northern Central Railway at Harrisburg at 8:00pm April 21, 1865. It’s probable that Ephraim & his family stood in black with thousands of others in silence, in the rain, an hour after the sun set there. Governor Curtain was aboard the train. Lincoln’s body was taken to the Capitol, where he lay overnight in the house chamber.

Note: There will be a July 6 Postscript.

Today, at last, Ephraim is home free, lifted & passed along over a road in a spring wagon piloted by his Lutheran reverend. Nearly 4 decades is the time he gave back to himself to live on his farm. Thank you for reading my grandfather’s diary as we’ve gone day-to-day, month-to-month. I think 1 person did, which helped me keep going, so thank you, stranger out there. I hope you found something here worthwhile about America, this campaign, this war. What was fought about, what was gained, what was lost somewhere along the centuries. I still have to do the introduction (incl. the process of writing & org. this), & will return to this site & manuscript & revise, plus I’m still daily adding pictures throughout. It’s a bittersweet feeling to finally arrive at July five. This project was conceived, then completed, & kept online throughout against all odds. I hope to God I got more history right than wrong, something that runs my blood cold in the middle of the night. This is the time to also thank everyone who put words on paper (& photographs, art, sketches) I quoted or otherwise reproduced or repurposed here, many dead, many soldiers, many very alive for now contemporary writers. This was possible due to your time & energy & 💓 in writing what you did. This been the project of a lifetime & I hope to never subject myself to anything remotely resembling this again, for the next several lifetimes. If you like, follow me on twitter at @GrateUp, not that I post much, or even have followers. Take care. Yours in the Union, Cheyenne  7/5/22

Btw, got the diary bug now? Try here: https://www.civilwardigital.com/html/civil_war_diaries.html

Lincoln Day by Day: A Chronology 1809-1865 Volume III: 1861-1865 C. Percy Powell P. 126

“July 5, 1862: Lincoln retires early, too exhausted to keep any appointments. Mrs. Lincoln in carriage on way to Soldiers’ Home tells Comdr. Dahlgren that President frequently passes sleepless nights.”

The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan, Editors (2000) P. 28 “The Anatomy of the Myth.” Alan T. Nolan

“Confederate sympathizers today contend that the secessionists acted in good faith; this presumably means that they thought that they were doing thr right thing. It would seem that this is neither here nor there in a historical sense. Leaders of all kinds of destructive causes—causes with wholly negative values—have thought they were right. It would be inflammatory to identify examples of this in modern times, but surely they occur to us. The historical question is whether, in good faith or bad, the movement that was led was positive or negative, humane or inhumane?”

Ringo, in The Unvanquished William Faulkner (1938) P. 229 “This war aint over. Hit just started good.” 

The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism Edward E. Baptist P. 409-410

“Southern whites built monuments to the defeated generals of their war for slavery, memorialized the old days of the plantation and wrote histories that insisted that the purpose of the war had been to defend their political rights against an oppressive state. They were so successful at the last goal that they eventually convinced a majority of white Americans, including most historians, that slavery had been benign and that “states rights” had been the cause of the Civil War. Yet the kingdom that the South’s white lords had regained was a starved one. They themselves were much poorer than they had once been. Their violence was more self-destructive, and less profitable.

Even the new story about the old past was a kind of fool’s gold. The valoriztion of causes lost, the delusional praising of fathers’ treason— these things did not make one better adapted to the modern world. The white entrepreneurs vigorously promoted a “New South.” But the region’s economic decisionmakers struggled to adapt to two postslavery realities. First, neither African Americans nor anyone else would do hand labor at the breakneck, soul-scarring pace of the whipping-machine. Many white yeoman farmers, impoverished by war and unable to pay debts or taxes, lost their land and became tenants and sharecroppers themselves. The total number of bales produced in the United States didn’t didn’t surpass 1859’s peak until 1875, despite a significant increase in the number of people making cotton in the South after Emancipation. Cotton productivity dropped significantly. Many enslaved cotton pickers in the late 1850s had peaked at well over 200 pounds per day. In the 1930s, after a half-century of massive scientific experimentation, all to make the cotton boll more pickable, the great-grandchildren of the enslaved often picked only 100 to 120 pounds per day.

Second, both because productivity was now declining instead of rising, and because of the political-economic isolation that the South’s white rulers inflicted upon their region in order to protect white power, the South sank into subordinate, colonial status within the national economy. Although many southerners wanted to develop a more diverse modern economy that went beyond cotton, for nearly a century after emancipation they failed to do so. Despite constant attempts to industrialize, the South could only offer natural resources and poverty-stricken laborers. It did not have enough local capital, whether of the financial or the well-educated human kind, and it could not develop it. Although a textile industry sprang up in the piedmont of the Carolinas and Virginia, and an iron and coal industry in Alabama, they offered mostly low-wage jobs. Non-textile industries suffered in the competition with more heavily capitalized northern industries, which literally rigged the rules—such as the price structures that corporations used to ensure that Pittsburgh’s steel would cost less than Birmingham’s. Extractive industries, including coal mining and timber, devastated the landscape and depended on workforces oppressed with shocking violence. The continued small size and poverty of the nonagricultural working class also limited urban and middle-class development. Thus, in the 1930s, a lifetime after the Civil War, the majority of both black and white southerners were poor and worked on farms—often farms that they did not own.”