Day 119. June 27, 1862.
119
to lay a familiar hand on his shoulder….
June Friday 27 1862
Quite pleasant this morning. I was at home all day. The men mowing for father today
Note: Today, Ephraim’s handwriting is completely different, & it will stay this way all the way out. It will be especially noticeable on July 2. Larger loopy words, almost twice as large as all that came before in his diary; it almost seems like he’s taking less care, his hand has less control now. These letters & words seem in a different gauge/type ink now, or pen: thicker now, tall words taking up more space than ever before. I feel unwell my bones all was the last line of yesterday’s entry; maybe he’s taking medication, alcohol, or (preferably) both. Could be too he was shaky from working the hay, etc. Or it was something else. He had relaxed. Made his decision, finally, never to go back there. He was done.
The Mind of the South W. J. Cash (1941) P. 38-39
“If the plantation had introduced distinctions of wealth and rank among the men of the old backcountry, and, in doing so, had perhaps offended against the ego of the common white, it had also, you will remember, introduced that other vastly ego-warming and ego-expanding distinction between the white man and the black. Robbing him and degrading him in so many ways, it yet, by singular irony, had simultaneously elevated this common white to a position comparable to that of, say, the Doric knight of ancient Sparta. Not only was he not exploited directly, he was himself made by extension a member of the dominant class—was lodged solidly on a tremendous superiority, which, however much the blacks in the “big house” might sneer at him, and however much their masters might privately agree with them, he could never publicly lose. Come what might, he would always be a white man. And before that vast and capacious distinction, all others were foreshortened, dwarfed, and all but obliterated.
The grand outcome was the almost complete disappearance of economic and social focus on the part of the masses. One simply did not have to get on in this world in order to achieve security, independence, or value in one’s own estimation and in that of one’s fellows.
Hence it happened that pressure never developed within the enclosing walls thrown up by the plantation, that not one in a thousand of the enclosed ever even remotely apprehended the existence of such walls. And so it happened, finally, that the old basic feeling of democracy was preserved practically intact.”
Frederick Douglass: “Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival….”
A Diary From Dixie Mary Boykin Chesnut P. 161
“This race has brains enough, but they are not active-minded like those old Revolutionary characters, the Middletons, Lowndeses, Rutledges, Marions, Sumters. They have come direct from active-minded forefathers, or they would not have been here; but, with two or three generations of gentlemen planters, how changed has the blood become! Of late, all the active-minded men who have sprung to the front in our government were immediate descendants of Scotch, or Scotch-Irish – Calhoun McDuffie, Cheves, and Petigru, who Huguenoted his name but could not tie up his Irish. Our planters are nice fellows, but slow to move; impulsive but hard to keep moving. They are wonderful for a spurt, but with all their strength, they like to rest.”
The Mind of the South W. J. Cash (1941) P. 41
“If the common white was scorned, yet that scorn was so attenuated and softened in its passage down through the universal medium of this manner, struck at last so obliquely upon his ego, that it glanced off harmless. When he frequented public gatherings, what he encountered would seldom be naked hauteur. Rather, there would nearly always be a fine gentleman to lay a familiar hand on his shoulder, to inquire by name after the members of his family, maybe to buy him a drink, certainly to rally him on some boasted weakness or treasured misadventure, and to come around eventually to confiding in a hushed voice that that damned nigger-loving scoundrel Garrison, in Boston—in short, to patronize him in such fashion that to his simple eyes he seemed not to be patronized at all but actually deferred to, to send him home, not sullen and vindictive, but glowing with the sense of participation in the common brotherhood of white men.”
Bloody Engagements: John R. Kelso’s Civil War John R. Kelso Edited by Christopher Grasso P. 205-206
“How blind I was, and yet how honest. How blindly, how piously, how patriotically inhuman even the best of us are capable of being made by superstition, whether with regard to those mythical monsters called gods, or those equally mythical monsters called governments. The people whom we were commanded to butcher and whom, at so fearful a cost to ourselves, to the country, to the whole world, we did butcher, had never done us any harm. They were our brother Christians, our brother Americans, our brother Mason, our brother Odd Fellows, our brother Good Templars, our brothers, many of them, in blood, the sons of our own mothers.
And even if we had waged the war for the abolition of slavery, we would still have been criminals. When we consider the relation to which we stood to the people of the South, in regard to the slaves, what right had we, by force, to compel them, without remuneration, to give up their slaves? We of the North, tore the negroes from their homes in Africa and sold them to the people of the South. In our pockets, we had the price of these slaves. The people of the South had the slaves themselves. And is not he who steals and sells horses, human beings or anything else just as guilty as he who buys them? What right then, I again ask, have we, as thieves, to turn upon the purchasers of our stolen property and force them to give it up to us again while we flaunted the retained price of it in their faces? We should have bought the slaves back and then made them really free.* This we could have done at less than ten percent of what the war has already cost us.** And thus we see that even this seemingly extenuating incident of the war, the pretended freeing of the slaves will not bear fair investigation. So of all the other seemingly fair incidents.
When we consider that the principles upon which all, but purely defensive, wars are waged are those of pure and unmitigated robbery and murder, (Here the author laid down his pen in early January 1891).”***
Note: Nine days after Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation, Lee will write to James Seddon (1/10/63): “In view of the vast increase of the forces of the enemy, of the savage and brutal policy he has proclaimed, which leaves us no alternative but success or degradation worse than death, if we would save the honor of our families from pollution, our social system from destruction, let every effort be made, every means be employed, to fill and maintain the ranks of our armies, until God, in his mercy, shall bless us with the establishment of our independence.”
Note: “oUr SOciaL sYstEm FrOM dEstRuCtIon”
Phillis Wheatley
On Being Brought from Africa to America
“‘Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
“Their colour is a diabolic die.”
Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,
May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.”
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45465/on-being-brought-from-africa-to-americac
*Footnote #4 on page 208 (Kelso): “The proslavery South utterly rejected any interference with what slaveholders considered their inalienable right to slave property, even if compensated. Lincoln’s offer of compensated emancipation was rejected even by the border states in 1862.”
**Footnote #5 on page 208 (Kelso): “Kelso grossly underestimated the value of slave property. Economic historians have estimated it in 1860 as worth $3-6 billion. Even with the lower figure, writes Stephen Deyle, “the value of the southern slave population was still enormous when placed in a comparative perspective. It was roughly three times greater than the total amount of all capital invested in manufacturing in the North and South combined, three times the value of the entire livestock population, twelve times the value of all American farm implements and machinery, twelve times the value of the entire U.S. Cotton crop, and forty-eight times the total expenditures of the federal government that year. The domestic slave trade had made human property one of the most prominent forms of investment in the country, second only to land. In fact, by 1860, in the slaveholding states alone, slave property had surpassed the assessed value of real estate.” Lincoln estimated the cost of the war at $2 million per day, which would add up to about $3.6 billion total.”
***Footnote #6 on page 208 (Kelso): “Kelso was suffering from his final illness when he wrote this last passage (the sentence in parentheses is a notation added by his wife, Etta Dunbar Kelso). He died on Jan. 26, 1891.”
Note: Grant orders the Mississippi River’s course changed. Big fail. “You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. “Floods” is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be.” What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction P. 77 Toni Morrison
June Friday 27 1864
“Having advanced to within thirty miles of Atlanta, but frustrated by Joseph E. Johnston’s reluctance to commit his Confederates to battle, General Sherman assaults the entrenched center of Johnston’s army at the battle of Kennesaw Mountain, Georgia. The battle, fought in 100-degree heat, gains Sherman nothing and provides civilians on the Union homefront only increased frustration. In the South, morale soars. “Everyone feels unbounded confidence in General Johnston,” writes Atlantan Mary Mallard, and an Atlanta paper predicts that Sherman’s army will soon be “cut to pieces.’” (Library of Congress Civil War Desk Reference)
The Blue and Gray in Black and White: A History of Civil War Photography Bob Zeller P. 68
“The Times took note of what is arguably the most important image from the Peninsular Campaign, a stereo photograph taken on June 27, 1862, that shows “groups of wounded, out in the open sun, at Savage’s Station.” The day after the photo was taken, Confederates captured the hospital.
For the first time in American photographic history, the camera captured a glimpse of the human toll. The Savage Station view, taken in stereo, was a candid image of tremendous immediacy, showing a makeshift field hospital with badly wounded soldiers sitting and lying in such a haphazard fashion that it illuminated the chaos of the moment, especially through a 3-D viewer. The wounded lay so thick and close, the ground looked “like a dull, heavy sea of which bodies [were] the waves,” reported Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. “This scene brings the war to those who have not been to it. How patiently and still they lie; these brave men who bleed and are maimed for us! It is a picture which is more eloquent than the sternest speech.’”
National Museum of Civil War Medicine www.civilwarmed.org
Note: This account was published July 12, 1900 in the National Tribune. It is by hospital steward Theo. V. Brown, recalling Gaines’ Mill:
“Being the only hospital corps on the spot, a stream of slightly wounded men, guided by our red flag and stretchers, soon came to us from all sides. Imitating my superior closely, I would say:
“My poor fellow, where are you hurt?”
“Right here in my arm.”
Finding no wound of exit, I would feel for the bullet, compass the surrounding parts with the thumb and forefinger of my left hand, cut down to the bullet, insert the little finger of my right hand under it, yank it out, put a bandage around the arm, and be ready for the next man, full of the feeling that if one of the everzipping bullets should mark me for its own, a reserved seat in the regions of everlasting bliss was at my disposal; such the satisfaction that springs from a sense of duty well performed. How some of the wounds healed that I made by cutting crosswise instead of lengthwise, I never learned.
During this time I noticed our Division Commander Gen. George Sykes, cantering past, followed by one orderly, as cool and unconcerned as though out for a pleasure-ride after dinner. A soldierly man, indeed; sans puer et sans reproche!
I also noticed, soon after the fight began, a cloud of stragglers (to use a mild term) all along the line as far as the eye could reach, going to the rear– removing themselves out of the way of bullets without apparent excuse of any kind; and there seemed to be no one whose duty it was to stop them, and none was afterwards punished. This the more extraordinary when it is borne in mind that these men were Regulars; it must not be forgotten, however, that a majority of the officers of the Regular Army cast their lot with the Rebellion, and most of the loyal minority were appointed to higher commands in the volunteer force, leaving the Regulars rather poorly officered with new men, appointed, for the most part from civil life. In fact, it may be asserted that the Regulars were volunteers at the beginning of the war, and the volunteers Regulars at its close.
Soon after this our line of battle gave way to the victorious rebels, a panic seized the host of stragglers in the rear, and a wild rush for the bridges over the [Chickahominy] began, in which we were forced to participate, leaving our wounded and dead in the hands of the enemy. This was the battle of Gaines’ Mill, fought June 27, 1862.”
Note: Lee ordered upwards of 32k men into battle today, a higher number than the infamous Pickett-Pettigrew assault, which saw ‘just’ 12,500 men. This is what comes with blood for blood. Pickett’s Charge remains foremost in public memory. Some say Lee said Pickett’s Charge never would have happened because Jackson would have taken the ground before Ewell got the chance. Yet another if of the Civil War, an unfalsifiable hypothesis. You can’t prove a negative.
Note: “familiar hand on his shoulder” brings to mind a squeezed-in patronistic small town, a line from a Texas newspaper in 1904: “Every town has a liar. A sponger. A smart alec. A weather prophet. One Jacksonian Democrat. A roaming hog law that is not enforced.”
Note: Speaking of patronistic, today, in 101 years, a man by the name of George “out-niggered” Wallace will “stand in the schoolhouse door” & try to block two Black University of Alabama students (Vivian Malone, James Hood) from entering. His inaugural promise– “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”– many in the South voted in. JFK had to call in the National Guard, after which Wallace stepped away from the door. Note, though, that guard Henry Graham said to Wallace, “Sir, it is my sad duty to ask you to step aside under the orders of the President of the United States” when there are so many other things he should have said instead. Because the KKK was active in that area, JFK had the National Guard remain on campus because Wallace refused to assure JFK his State Troopers would be willing to quell any disturbance these White supremacists caused. Quoted in the LA Times speaking from Montgomery, “George C. Wallace raises his arms, holds an imaginary rifle and tells how to solve the problem of urban violence: “Ban, shoot ’em dead on the spot! Shoot to kill if anyone throws a rock at a policeman or throws a Molotov cocktail. Don’t shoot any children, just shoot that adult standing beside the kid that throws the rock. That may not prevent the burning and looting, but it sure will stop it after it stops.”
Isn’t it interesting how violence of the oppressed is seen as illegitimate by those using violence to enforce their ability to use such to oppress in the first place. P.S.: Wallace will finally get learned, “born again,” another 4 years later when he’s shot in the spinal cord by a janitor in Maryland looking for fame. Some maintained he was just trying to get into heaven after all.
Note: Barbara A. Gannon quotes Robert Penn Warren’s words below (P. 74) in Americans Remember Their Civil War, & she adds, (P. 75) “Warren demonstrated that even when an individual understood slavery’s fundamental importance to Civil War memory, supported integration, or rejected yelling at little girls integrating schools, the Union Cause still came up short because of the reunited nation’s failures.”
The Legacy of the Civil War 1961 Robert Penn Warren P. 57
“Does the man who, in the relative safety of mob anonymity, stands howling vituperation at a little Negro girl being conducted into a school building, feel himself at one with with those gaunt, barefoot, whiskery scarecrows who fought it out, breast to breast, to the death, at Bloody Angle at Spotyslvania, in May, 1864? Can the man howling in the mob imagine General R. E. Lee, CSA, shaking hands with Orval Faubus, Governor of Arkansas?”
How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays Kiese Laymon P. 142
“The worst of white folks, I understood, wasn’t some gang of rabid white people in crisp pillowcases and shaved heads. The worst of white folks was a pathetic, powerful “it.” It conveniently forgot that it came to this country on a boat, then reacted violently when anything or anyone suggested it share. The worst of white folks wanted our mamas and Grandmamas to work themselves sick for a tiny sliver of an American pie it needed to believe it had made from scratch. It was all at once crazy-making and quick to discipline us for acting crazy. It had an insatiable appetite for virtuoso Black performance and routine Black suffering. The worst of white folks really believed that the height of Black and brown aspiration should be emulation of itself. White Americans were wholly responsible for the worst of white folks, though they would make sure it never wholly defined them.”
Note: President Lincoln demands Gen. Frémont resign; Frémont resigns.
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the men mowing for father….
From now on, Ephraim will use a different pen than the one he used all along; it is darker and thicker like he has settled in. Today is the Gaines Mill battle which will save Richmond for the south; today Lee drives McClellan away from Richmond & into retreat down the Virginia peninsula. And this is about the same area the 1864 Battle of Cold Harbor will happen. They just keep circling around. Cold Harbor is the picture O’Sullivan took of the 6 or so horses dead on their sides. And now McClellan will go to the James River. He was going to move on the James anyway but now he totally abandons Richmond. So was he going take Richmond or not originally? The Savage’s Station picture “Wounded at Savage’s Station, after the Battle of 27th June, 1862” was taken in a farmyard at Savage Station, Virginia. They were the 69th New York Regiment waiting for medical treatment after the Gaines Mill battle. They turn heads, stare into the camera. Stare blankly into the middle distance. Two days after the picture was taken, several men in the image were captured by the Confederates. There is only so far you can go within the camera’s range of capture.
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