Day 112. June 20, 1862.
112
the South had become peculiarly the home of lynching….
June Saturday 20 1862
Quite a fine morning. I was at home Sinking Valley Blair Co Pa. Mr James Crawford was here this fore noon. Peter K Harnish* and James Crawford of Canoe Valley were here today for Dinner. After Dinner I went along down to Arch Springs. Found the folks all well. Eat supper at Caldwells. Cool this evenning
*Likely Ephraim’s brother-in-law.
Nature’s Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia Kathryn Shively Meier P. 136
“That June, when Lee assumed command of the soon-to-be christened Army of Northern Virginia, he could scarcely believe its disorder. The Seven Days battles were imperiled by straggling for a number of reasons, only some of which had to do with self-care. Brig. Gen. John B. Magruder could put only 7,100 of his 12,500 infantry and two of his sixteen batteries into battle on July 1 at Malvern Hill. As historian Stephen Sears wrote, “Every road and every grove behind Magruder’s front was filled with his stragglers.” The problem was hardly isolated to Macgruder’s troops. Stationed near Richmond on July 1, the army disintegrated into “hordes of stragglers [turning] the city into a veritable resort town.” Local newspapers lambasted army discipline, calling for the death penalty. Approximately fifty stragglers per day were arrested in Staunton in the month of July as they poured in from the east. The addition of Jackson’s troops from the Valley worsened matters, as his exhausted men refused orders, and Jackson himself fell asleep for a major part of the action. Historian Joseph Harsh has provided detailed evidence that by August and September 1862, Lee became obsessed with identifying and punishing stragglers, rebuking them as the “cowards of the army.” Lee also wrote to President Davis in September of the need for more legislation and punishment regarding the offense.”
AND ON THE UNION SIDE, ABSENTEEISM GROWING June, 1862. CLEVELAND MORNING LEADER reports today:
Same newspaper, same day, an ad promising good pay, 3 months only, & only soldiering in the summer:
The Mind of the South W. J. Cash (1941) P. 43-44
“The Southerner’s fundamental approach carried over into the realm of public offenses as well. What the direct willfulness of his individualism demanded, when confronted by a crime that aroused his anger, was immediate satisfaction for itself—catharsis for personal writhing in the fire—now, within the hour—and not some ponderous abstract justice in a problematic tomorrow. And so, in this world of ineffective social control, the tradition of vigilante action, which normally lives and dies with the frontier, not only survived but grew so steadily that already long before the Civil War and long before hatred for the black man had begun to play any direct part in the pattern (of more than three hundred persons said to have been hanged or burned by mobs between 1840 and 1860, less than ten per cent were Negroes) the South had become peculiarly the home of lynching.
But if I show you Southern individualism as eventuating in violence, if I imply that the pride which was its root was in some sense puerile, I am very far from suggesting that it ought to be held in contempt. For it reached its ultimate incarnation in the Confederate soldier.
To the end of his service this soldier could not be disciplined. He slouched. He would never learn to salute in the brisk fashion so dear to the hearts of the professors of mass murder. His “Cap’n” and his “Gin’ral” were likely to pass his lips with a grin—were charged always with easy, unstudied familiarity. He could and did find it in himself to jeer openly and unabashed in the face of Stonewall Jackson when that austere Presbyterian captain rode along his lines. And down to the final day at Appomattox his officers knew that the way to get him to execute an order without malingering was to flatter and to jest, never to command too brusquely and forthrightly. And yet—and yet—and by virtue of precisely these unsoldierly qualities, he was, as no one will care to deny, one of the world’s very finest fighting men.”
A Stillness at Appomattox Bruce Catton P. 281
“It was noticed, too, that army headquarters was managed without fuss and feathers. Headquarters in the Army of the Potomac had been elaborate and formal—many tents, much pomp and show, honor guards in fussy Zouave uniforms, a gaudy headquarters flag bearing a golden eagle in a silver wreath on a solferino background; the whole having caused U.S. Grant, the first time he saw it, to rein in his horse and inquire if Imperial Caesar lived anywhere near. Sheridan made do with two tents and two tent flies, and he had no honor guard. Instead he had a collection of two-gun scouts dressed in Confederate uniforms, who were probably the toughest daredevils in the army.”
The Confederate War: How Popular Will, Nationalism, and Military Strategy Could Not Stave Off Defeat Gary W. Gallagher P. 120
“….of all Confederate commanders, Lee erred on the side of audacity most often, depleting the magnificent Army of Northern Virginia** and thereby opening the way for Union victory. Even Lee’s most strident critics concede that he won famous battles and earned a towering reputation, but they insist that his triumphs proved fleeting when measured against their dangerous diminution of southern white manpower. Confederate leaders need have looked no further than the American Revolution for proof that a weaker power, which claimed few victories and often retreated rather than confronting superior British forces, could achieve independence by wearing down the enemy’s will.
P. 140
Lee’s bartering thousands of lives for victories during 1862-1863 made the Army of Northern Virginia a highly visible symbol of Confederate nationalism. Civilians and soldiers alike rallied to that symbol, persisting in their struggle for independence long past the point at which a cold calculation of resources and probabilities would have dictated capitulation. Without Lee’s aggressive, forward-moving strategy, a few, if any- and certainly no major- Confederate victories would have been possible. Likewise, no consistently strong and sustained sense of nationalism and determined will on the part of the Confederate people could have been imaginable without at least occasional good news from the battlefield.
P. 137
Lee’s storied battles in 1862-1863 did deplete southern manpower at a rapid rate- cumulative casualties from the Seven Days, Second Manassas, the Antietam campaign, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville approached 65,000, of whom more than 10,000 were killed in action and another several thousand likely died from wounds or were permanently disabled.”
Note: The Allegheny Arsenal Explosion happened at 2pm the same day as Antietam (which began at dawn), in Lawrenceville area of Pittsburgh, 147 miles north of where Ephraim was in Sinking Valley. A horse’s iron hoof on the stone road set off a spark flash that blew up barrels of gunpowder that Colonel Symington neglected to dispose of; instead, he had the wood chips & sawdust swept off the road that covered the black powder (he was so powerful that workers later changed their testimony about his liability). 78 mostly women were blown to pieces or set on fire, & killed outright. 150 was the total injured. It’s said to be the largest civilian disaster during the war, with bits of bones, flesh left & most unidentifiable. A foot or arm here, a scrap of a hoop dress there, where a burnt body was found within. “A sacrifice to freedom and civil liberty, a horrid moment of a most wicked rebellion” is said on the marker to the mass grave at Allegheny Cemetery where 45 victims ‘rest’. It’s not likely Ephraim would have heard the explosion, though he definitely heard of it later. See Rich Condon’s 10/21 piece at battlefields.org, “The Tragedy at Allegheny Arsenal– “A Horrid Moment of a Most Wicked Rebellion.’” As Condon notes, Pittsburgh firefighters from 4 miles off dispatched to the sound, many surmising it might be Rebel artillery fire. Yikes!
Note too: Just after Antietam, Pennsylvania’s coal and anthracite regions in the Wyoming Valley (near Scranton, NE PA), and in Schuylkill County were sites of Irish resistance to the draft September 22, 1862, which was the same day Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Irish mine workers in Schuylkill County, in the weeks post-Antietam, opposed the state draft of men into militias. “…succeeded in making nearly a complete enrollment of every class except the Irish, who resisted and swore no man should be allowed to put their names down on the list.”
Living Hell: The Dark Side of the Civil War Michael C.C. Adams P. 172-173
“The South’s fierce intransigence and the North’s ruthless determination resulted in thousands upon thousands of civilians being beaten, starved, economically ruined, their mental and physical health destroyed. Reports endlessly document the suffering. Thus, the Cincinnati Daily Commercial, July 20, 1864, noted the arrival of homeless Southern refugees: “Four hundred weeping and terrified Ellens, Susans, and Maggies,” deprived of their factory employment by Sherman, driven “away from their lovers and brothers of the sunny South, and all for the offense of weaving tent-cloth and spinning stocking yarn!” John H. Hight, unit historian of the 58th Indiana, described civilians huddling together as Sherman’s soldiers prepared to burn their homes: “Some of the women are crying, some wringing their hands in agony, some praying to the Almighty.”
In the wake of Sheridan’s torching of the Valley, Confederate Major Henry Kyd Douglas witnessed the misery of the refugees there: “I saw mothers and maidens tearing their hair and shrieking to Heaven in their fright and despair,” while a beautiful girl was “shrieking with wild laughter, for the horrors of the night had driven her mad.” Terrified out of their wits by the invasive behavior of soldiers from both armies, pregnant women miscarried. “Poor Aunt Sallie suffered dreadfully, and her babe was born dead,” wrote Emma LeConte, January 1865, “the result of the fright she experienced when the enemy passed through [Columbia, South Carolina].” Older people succumbed to shock. Virginian Cornelia McVeigh described how her mother died in 1864 when Yankee troopers “destroyed everything we had.” After their raid, “She lived only one week.” Lucy Buck recorded in her diary on November 15, 1864, that her Aunt Lizzie had died after bluecoats burned their Front Royal farm in the Shenandoah and destroyed the livestock. Lucy stopped writing, too numb for words. “My diary was laid by. Those sad autumn days my heart was too sad.”
Bad as conditions might be in the major theaters of war, none suffered more than the people caught between contending parties in the contested borderlands of the conflict, unstable zones where guerrilla warfare predominated: the mountains of eastern Kentucky and western Virginia, the ravaged communities of Kansas and Missouri, where violence had raged for most of a decade. One historian of border warfare notes that grand strategies and notions of limited engagement never drove the fighting there. The struggle “was instead a very personal war, a war among neighbors, a war of theft and arson, a war of midnight murder and torture– a vendetta.”
The bitter personal hatreds between contending parties in border badlands, where divisions thrived, produced special cruelties, such as the burning alive of enemy civilians thrown into flaming buildings, as well as random torturing and killings accompanied by taking grisly trophies, including ears, genitals, scalps. In exasperation at their inability to prevent such atrocities and massacres, perpetrated by guerrillas sheltered by proslavery settlers, Federal authorities resorted to creating free-fire zones, necessitating forced population removal and relocation, sometimes to unhygienic and crowded refugee camps where hungry people quickly sickened. After guerrillas massacred the free-soil citizens of Lawrence, Kansas,** Federal forces cleared the border counties, driving the people away and destroying crops that sustained irregulars.”
Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era James McPherson P. 784
“The guerrilla fighting in Missouri produced a form of terrorism that exceeded anything else in the war. Jayhawking Kansans and bushwhacking Missourians took no prisoners, killed in cold blood, plundered and pillaged and burned (but almost never raped) without stint. Jayhawkers initiated a scorched-earth policy against rebel sympathizers three years before Sheridan practiced it in the Shenandoah Valley.
P. 786
Inflamed by a passion for revenge, the raiders combined in one large band of 450 men under Quantrill* (including the Younger brothers and Frank James) and headed for Lawrence, Kansas, the hated center of free soilism since Bleeding Kansas days. After crossing the Kansas line they kidnapped ten farmers to guide them toward Lawrence and murdered each one after his usefulness was over. Approaching the town at dawn on August 21, Quantrill ordered his followers: “Kill every male and burn every house.” They almost did. The first to die was a United Brethren clergyman, shot through the head while he sat milking his cow. During the next three hours Quantrill’s band murdered another 182 men and boys and burned 185 buildings in Lawrence. They rode out of town ahead of pursuing Union cavalry and after a harrowing chase made it back to their Missouri sanctuary, where they scattered to the woods.
The shocking act roused the whole country. A manhunt for Quantrill’s outlaws netted a few of them, who were promptly hanged or shot. An enraged General Ewing. Issued his famous Order No. 11 for the forcible removal of civilians from large parts of four Missouri counties bordering Kansas. Union soldiers ruthlessly enforced this banishment of ten thousand people, leaving these counties a wasteland for years. None of this stopped the guerrillas, however. Quite the contrary, their raids became more daring and destructive during the following year.
P. 787
The most effective partisan was “Bloody Bill” Anderson, who had split from Quantrill with about fifty followers–all of them pathological killers like their leader. Through August and September, Anderson’s band struck isolated garrisons and posts, murdering and scalping teamsters, cooks, and other unarmed personnel as well as soldiers. The climax of this saturnalia came at Centralia on September 27. With thirty men including Frank and Jesse James, Bloody Bill rode into town, burned a train and robbed its passengers, and murdered twenty-four unarmed northern soldiers traveling home on furlough. Chased out of town by three companies of militia, the guerrillas picked up 175 allies from other bands, turned on their pursuers, and slaughtered 124 of the 147 men, including the wounded, whom they shot in the head.
Raising the White Flag: How Surrender Defined the American Civil War David Silkenat P. 182-183
The murder of twenty-six unarmed Union soldiers in Centralia* provided the capstone to Anderson’s black flag campaign. On the morning of September 27, 1864, Anderson’s band rode into Centralia, robbed a passing stagecoach, and stopped a northbound train by piling wood on the tracks. Some eighty strong (including not-yet notorious Frank and Jesse James), Anderson’s men swarmed onboard, yelling “Surrender! Surrender!” They frantically searched the passengers, pocketing their spoils and killing those who offered resistance or attempted to conceal valuables, before setting the train on fire. Among the passengers were Union soldiers on furlough from Sherman’s army after the siege of Atlanta. “Surrender quietly, and you shall be treated as prisoners of war,” one of Anderson’s men told the soldiers. “We can only surrender,” came the reply, “as we are totally unarmed.” Separated from the rest of the passengers, the Union soldiers were ordered to remove their uniforms, “stripped of all save their under-clothing.” Only then did Anderson identify himself, asking if the party included an officer. No sooner had Sgt. Thomas Goodman stepped forward than Anderson’s men fired their revolvers at the rest of the men in line. The sole survivor, Goodman could hear the guerillas’ “demonic yell” over the sounds of gunfire.
Held as a hostage rather than a prisoner of war, Goodman received regular verbal abuse and physical threats from Anderson’s men, many of whom expressed surprise Anderson had let him live. Shortly thereafter, Union cavalry militia tracked down Anderson’s band, only to be overwhelmed when the guerillas charged headlong into the dismounted Union line, who found themselves “surrounded before they could have possibly found time to reload their emptied pieces.” To Goodman’s horror, the Union militia surrendered, “surrendered as we did at Centralia, with assurances of humane treatment.” Shutting his eyes to avoid seeing the “carnival of blood,” Goodman reopened them after the executions stopped to see that Anderson’s guerillas had not only killed the surrendered Union militiamen but had decapitated many of the dead, arranging the heads in a macabre tableau. Some were “stuck up upon carbine points”; others were mounted on “the tops of fence stakes and stumps around the scene.” A Union officer who discovered the scene the following day noted, “Most of them were shot through the head, then scalped, bayonets thrust through them, ears and noses cut off, and privates torn off and thrust in the mouths of the dying.”
General Fisk, in a September 28, 1864 letter about the massacre to General Rosecrans:The capture of the railway train, the inhuman slaughter of the defenseless soldiers thereon, the robbery of the passengers, the burning of the moving train, and the indignities visited upon helpless women must be regarded as one of the chief barbarisms of the war…. We have in these counties not only the resident rebels, but in addition a large proportion of those who, by Gen. Ewing’s order, were last year expelled from Johnson, Jackson, and other border counties. Depopulation and devastation are extreme measures, but if this infernal warfare continues it will be humane and economic of human life to adopt and vigorously enforce such measures wherever the bushwhackers have more friends than the government.’”
America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation David Goldfield P. 519
“Sheridan pursued the Sioux and their Cheyenne allies through the winter, the most serious blow being inflicted on a Cheyenne village where American soldiers burned two hundred tepees, destroyed all food stores, buffalo robes, and ponies, and made a bonfire of blankets and sacred objects. That night, the temperature fell to thirty below zero. A dozen babies froze to death, and the Cheyenne killed the few horses they had saved so the elderly could place their hands and feet into the warm entrails of the dead horses.”
Note: Cheyenne, Arapahoe, Sioux nations’ 5 million buffalo were killed with leftover Civil War cartridges in just 1873. The scale of this, it’s ridiculous, can you even vaguely keep up with this, do the numbers swim in & out of your eyes, the tinny smell of blood right out of the books & really it wasn’t even that long ago was it, nope.
Note: My grandmother— mother’s mother— called us her “pickaninnies” (pickaninny” originated in the West Indies, now, & really always, “dated and offensive”) and would tell us to get our “cotton-picking hands” off whatever she didn’t want us touching. These were words she probably learned from her mother Chloe.
And if things went missing, it was “the loolies” who took them, a term which I believe originated in Ireland (she had half Irish or so). My grandmother never talked about her side going back, except to call them “a bunch of horse thieves.” She seemed embarrassed, as if in her view they never amounted to anything compared to both lines of my father’s side. I believe my grandmother knew about her grandfather’s life, and his Cherokee ancestry, but chose not reveal it, so took that, and whatever other secrets, to the grave. She only ever admitted to being Irish, which she was proud of, often baking us Irish Soda Bread. My mother always used the same horse thieves description, but when pressed, decades later, she told me her mother’s side– surname Tuggle– left Arkansas due to slavery. Then in April, 2022, she said Chloe’s grandparents were huge slaveholders in Arkansas, after having always denied it. I had mentioned again that “Tuggle” is a fairly common Black name, & I finally located slave owners in my grandmother’s tree in 2022 while putting this project online. Also an aside: one of my father’s (who looked alarmingly like Lincoln) frequent expressions, “No skin off my back,” is one I never thought about the meaning of until I researched for this book. Other useless personal factoids: hearing incessantly about the Donner Party, the Hatfields & McCoys, & how Mormons were all hypocrites. Not far off.
Note: See: https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/antiblack/picaninny at Ferris State University Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia.
Note: “By 1835 the Cherokee were divided and despondent.” Vanished council fires. Be on your way now, shoo. Like an uninvited species. God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen. Give it a Rest Ye Genocidal Gentlemen. By 1861, 4,000 slaves were theirs, & division re which side they owed loyalty, if any, in the war. Later, of course, were disputes about who constituted a Cherokee, or citizen in their nation. It’s ongoing. One drop Cherokee? Good enough? Who exactly is Cherokee? Only those whose ancestors got on the Dawes Rolls? The so-called “Final Rolls” of names eligible for tribal affiliation? What about those who refused to sign? There were Cherokee Confederate regiments…. General Stand Watie’s First Regiment of Cherokee Mounted Volunteers, etc. history.com says about 20k Cherokee fought in the war. How many were bribed with what land, food, etc.? A third group, led by Creek Chief Opothleyoholo, went to Kansas in late 1861, along with runaway slaves & freedmen. Watie’s regiment attacked them.
Note: To the left of Arkansas there was a state (now Oklahoma) called “Indian Territory” where tribes were forced to relocate after the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Roughly 7,860 Native Americans from the territory fought for the Confederacy. They were members of what was referred to as the “Five Civilized Tribes” (actually nations): Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, & Seminole.
Note: Secession was opposed by 70% of eastern Tennessee voters. Few slaveholders lived in this mountainous region. More than in any other Southern state, 30k took up arms for the Union.
Note: According to James McPherson (P. 292), “More than any other state, Missouri suffered the horrors of internecine warfare and the resulting hatreds which persisted for decades after Appomattox.” Yet 3/4th of White Missourians who fought were Unionists.
*At the time of the Civil War, the Cherokee held around 4,000 black slaves. The Cherokee were divided in loyalties to the Union cause. My 4th grandmother’s father was born in 1704, the same year of the infamous Deerfield (Massachusetts) Massacre during Queen Anne’s War. My father’s mother’s side lost the most– eleven, with two captured the year before– members of any family living in Deerfield in that middle of the night French-Indian raid February 29, 1704. 48 colonists were put in a mass grave after, and my grandfather died of a broken heart early the next year. Three White captives were marched to Canada, including Abigail Nims, age 4. Attempts were made through the years to ransom them back, but eventually the captives decide to remain among the Iroquois. See May 25 for more on Nims family history.
**A cemetery in disrepair, as I discovered in a recent visit. In 2012, a 4-year-old was killed when he climbed a six-foot-tall 1800s tombstone. The cemetery won the lawsuit. This was years after Mel Fletcher’s death, the cemetery caretaker for many years. “The man who cared for the cemetery for 50 years died a few years ago and no one has replaced his dedication. He was a wonderful man and when I was a kid I had a crush on him. As an adult I finally told him and he laughed.” 11/12/21 email from my mother. My mother had a crush on him growing up, which she mentioned to him one time as an adult when visiting graves there, & he was tickled.
*Imagine Quantrill’s Raiders, Missouri. Jesse James, Kansas. Hard to repel cavalry that keeps swinging around your town. You stand & watch the trail dust in a line straight up to the sky & you know they’re coming for you, the sound of drums coming from a long, long way off and it’s only a matter of time, & who’s it going to be today they execute, sticking their severed dick in their own mouth. The Centralia Massacre, led by William (Bloody Bill) Anderson & his posse of Rebs dressed in blue uniforms. They savage-shot all them men. Jesse James ambushed 150 pursuing federal troops, killing all who surrendered then scalped the rest on 9/27/1864. Centralia, just a dozen houses surrounded by miles of open prairie but 80 raiders closing in, entering homes, interrogating residents which side of the war their loyalties were with. The entire town was robbed, & whiskey discovered, plus several cases of new boots in a freight house, which the men drank the whiskey out of. Shortly after, a stagecoach passed through town, & all aboard were robbed. The next train on the tracks, this carrying mail, was 11:30; at the last minute the conductor noticed the raiders so attempted to– with 125 passengers, 26 of whom were soldiers on leave after the Battle of Atlanta– run full steam past the station. Rebels had thrown obstructions on the rails, including railroad ties placed haphazardly. The Rebs made men strip off their clothes then shot them down, 146 Union soldiers in all mutilated. Missouri itself had more lawlessness, than any other border state. Confederate guerrillas roamed free & the Missouri “border ruffians” versus Kansas “free-staters” border hostilities sporadically broke out. Blackflag on a wholesale basis but note, too, how lawlessness radiated out into new versions across the country during the war, was carried too far, was carried to fever. Acrimony, to put it slightly, & outright anarchy could be found at the highest levels of leadership. Just one instance was the unpunished murder of General William “Bull” Nelson by General Jefferson C. Davis in 1862. It had come to that. This, this nihilism, a bad streak of blood, all of those traits of 1860s film noir.
Note: Correct number of Centralia train soldiers murdered is still elusive. I use David Silkenat’s number of 26 here.
Lincoln’s Spies: Their Secret War to Save a Nation Douglas Waller P. 186
“By the third week of June, Lee had assembled the largest army he would ever command– as many as 94,000 combat-ready men– coming the closest he ever would to matching McClellan’s force of about 115,000. Jefferson Davis was confident of success. “A total defeat for McClellan,” he wrote his wife on June 21, “will relieve the Confederacy of its embarrassments in the East.’”
Note: West Virginia breaks with Virginia a year from today, with the motto “Mountaineers Are Always Free.” 159th anniversary in 2022 & Mothman’s hovering near the bridge swigging a Mountain Dew Code Red.
found the folks all well….
The destiny of hundreds of thousands of men were controlled by a handful of men at Shiloh (you could fit ’em all in a small room), the same few who directed all other “engagements.” Hundreds of thousands of already marked bodies, just a prop in a general’s vision when to bury them will run half what they’d pay for an $13.93 Enfield musket, or a Springfield, weapons that caused more death than any other. To walk into the woods then never return, cut down by a gun that fetches minimum 3k at auction next century. They go in the ground right where they fell. Someone might take a knife & carve the dead name, regiment, company, maybe a hometown on whichever ammunition lids or boxes are in the vicinity, but if nothing else, into a tree or rock. And if not then– which was most often– then nothing.
They drew straws against the sky; they were a long row of stick figures spec’d up for death, they were bodies walking between the worlds at Kernstown, Seven Pines, Cross Keys, Port Republic. It was as if they were subjects of the Crown, bit pieces on a board game, cavalry pieces from Risk. Shenandoah Valley Triple AAA map shows where the regiments stood waiting to die. In acting it’s called the dead man’s fall when they land with one foot crossed in front of the other [applause]. They smash like colliding continents that will tear apart then rearrange as if bending to touch something. They fire cannons one by one on down the line. They cause changes in the Earth’s tilt in space. Tectonic motion. Earth plates. The plates.
‘Till the South rose again in the 1870s to define what just happened not only for the South, the North, but for the whole world when the Faith & Flag Conservatives, the Populist Right, the White Evangelical Protestants came out with the propaganda reels & the masses get word they were reincarnations of 1776 soldiers clutching Bible pages & a thousand paper cuts for those fine Northern aggressors, then later, the Jubal Early version, the man who wrapped himself in the Stars & Bars & blew his head clear off. Well, now we know what happened in season two, that at least they waited for the ink to dry at Appomattox until they got back at it, James Ford Rhodes & the “Southern Vindicationists,” to use Blight’s term. Their Marse Robert and cracked White nationalism Soldier of Fortune style, a side of pork ribs with some kitchip, the feudal fish fry pride & who today flies the flag of the ideal traitor & other such souvenirs of the Old South. So you have to ask, how long would you let a witness live? Subsequent generations sold off the original script, not the Real War. They shinnied into the lie it was the numbers that defeated their valor, but let’s face it, Early’s troops came within five miles of the White House, yes they did. Sat & parked there, they did, & all that’s left now is to step up for States’ Rights because the rest dulls their shiny buttons, their newly sewn reenactor garb, the flags that suddenly went up but back down (sort of), all of it. The cavalry drills, the swords, the bugles, the war-beat drums, cavaliers on horses gliding by. Hard evidence now, a 1960s The Golden Book of the Civil War (Amazon, $1,036, seller Cost-Cutters-R-US, & I am not making that up, Bruce Catton editor). And after all that they still call after dead Confederate general’s names. You know by the Velvet Lee in a Highway 31 truckstop back wall, how they’re plaque-nailed to the sky next to the 2.99 tall Olde English 24 pack cans. It makes more & less sense; it gets worse and something far more compelling than reality until it is only this: the area to be starred later on the map, a tourist ruin longing to be discovered, relitigated, stuck on a low stage, but now it brings up too much of the soil with it because there’s the swag of memory on the line now. Antlers loosen & fall off. A fever dream like a film that changes in the middle, becomes something it couldn’t otherwise have been had the fever not been loosened. It’s all highly suspicious. Like standing water.
Veterans meet here after the war, & you see it: it’s in a flash frame there beneath the face, barely perceptible on the film, a micro expression like stitches being ripped out, & it’s breaking a pat story if you slow the speed back down & look hard, it’s like stitches being ripped out & it becomes apparent what they had to stitch up to be fine with, make acceptable to show to the other side, the startled expression running down the center of the face’s outline like a star empty of light when, 20 years later, langoring along, they pass a peace cigar back & forth at the 1913 reunion, 50th, & then the 75th, 1938 (average age 94), & a Colonel from the enemy side is guest speaker, lips crookedly aligned, an asymmetrical manufactured smile, an off-smile, switches on & off, & they sit at a table on those grounds & eat those corn cobs & those pork chops and they drink that fine whiskey &c.&c.&c. Eventually the face is going to slide off.
They’re beginning to stand & applaud, & it’s the extreme point at which a thing turns into its opposite. What are we even holding onto at this point? Then they sing the national anthem. Something about This Land is Your Land, or someone else’s land.
.
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