Day 120. June 28, 1862.

120

proudly celebrating the failure….

You have done your best to sacrifice this Army….

Saturday 28

Cool this morning. I was some-what tired of our long march in Virginia before I started home. Warm this afternoon. R Tussey was here all night

Note: I was some-what tired of our long march in Virginia before I started home warm this afternoon…. Is Ephraim having to justify his state to people? He left the 110th June 13, 16 days back. Why does he refer to his state of tiredness he had weeks ago while still in Virginia before he started back for Pennsylvania? Why would he then not unpack the statement “some what tired?” In a week he is going to ride in a spring wagon home from a summer picnic. Or to the picnic, from the train. It’s 3.9 miles from Birmingham to Sinking Valley, or 6 minutes if you take PA 453-S.

Time passed differently where he’d been before. Ephraim lived weeks in one 24 hour period. That’s a lifetime in war years. Now he’s unstructured. Back to normal. Imagine the transition, the shock of adjustment back to civilian life, the pressure he or others may be placing on himself to return & fight for the Union. Everyone’s asking him what it was like, or sitting back, waiting for him to speak. Wondering if he killed any Rebels. Watching him closely & him feeling the stares.

Lincoln Day by Day: A Chronology 1809-1865 Volume III: 1861-1865 C. Percy Powell P. 124

“June 28, 1862: Lincoln prepares letter addressed to Sec. Seward to be used by him at conference of Union governors in New York prompting them to issue news calls for troops: “I expect to maintain this contest until successful, or till I die, or am conquered, or my term expires, or Congress or the country forsakes me.’”

“June 28, 1862 12:20 a.m.

Savage Station

Edwin Stanton

I now know the full history of the day. On this side of the river (the right bank) we repulsed several strong attacks. On the left bank our men did all that men could do, all that soldiers could accomplish, but they were overwhelmed by vastly superior numbers, even after I brought my last reserves into action. The loss on both sides is terrible. I believe it will prove to be the most desperate battle of the war.

The sad remnants of my men behave as men. Those batallions who fought most bravely and suffered most are still in the best order. My regulars were superb, and I count upon what are left to turn another battle, in company with their gallant comrades of the volunteers. Had I 20,000 or even 10,000 fresh troops to use tomorrow I could take Richmond, but I have not a man in reserve, and shall be glad to cover my retreat and save the material and personnel of the Army.

If we have lost the day we have yet to preserve our honor, and no one need blush for the Army of the Potomac. I have lost this battle because my force was too small.

I again repeat I am not responsible for this, and I say it with the earnestness of a general who feels in his heart the loss of every brave man who has been needlessly sacrificed to-day. I still hope to retrieve our fortunes, but to do this the Government must view the matter in the same earnest light that I do. You must send me very large re-inforcements, and send them at once. I shall draw back to this side of the Chickahominy, and think I can withdraw all our material. Please understand that in this battle we have lost nothing but men, and those the best we have.

In addition to what I have already said, I only wish to say to the President that I think he is wrong in regarding me as ungenerous when I said that my force was too weak. I merely intimated a truth which to-day has been too plainly proved. If, at this instant, I could dispose of 10,000 fresh men, I could gain a victory to-morrow. I know that a few thousand more men would have changed this battle from a defeat to a victory. As it is, the Government must not and cannot hold me responsible for the result.

I feel too earnestly to-night. I have seen too many dead and wounded comrades to feel otherwise than that the Government has not sustained this army. If you do not do so now the game is lost.

If I save this Army now I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you or any other persons in Washington. You have done your best to sacrifice this Army.

G.B. McClellan, Maj. Gen. Commanding”

Note: The Military Supervisor of the Telegraph, Edward Sanford, deleted these last two sentences from the copy of the telegraph he gave to Edwin Stanton. It wasn’t until 1907 that the public knew, when it came out in the book Lincoln in the Telegraph Office, by David H. Bates. Edward Sanford, pushing a button every 108 minutes to save the world.

Terrible Swift Sword Bruce Catton P. 334

“Ordinarily, a field commander who accuses the Secretary of War, to his face, of trying to destroy the country’s most important army can expect nothing less than instant dismissal, and McClellan knew this as well as anyone. He told his wife, not long afterward: “Of course they will never forgive me for that. I knew it when I wrote it, but as I thought it possible that it might be the last I ever wrote it seemed better to have it exactly true. The President, of course, has not replied to my letter and never will. His reply may be, however, to avail himself of the first opportunity to cut my head off.” What McClellan did not know, however, was that his dispatch was expurgated before it reached the President and the Secretary Custodian of military telegrams at the War Department was Major A.E.H. Johnson, and when he read this wire he sent for his superior, Colonel Edward S. Sanford. Properly horrified, Sanford simply lopped off the last two sentences before sending the dispatch on to Mr. Stanton, and that choleric official never saw the final, furious accusation until some time after McClellan had been removed from command. Unaware of this, McClellan naturally assumed that the Secretary of War either felt too guilty or lacked the courage to discipline him: an assumption which could only confirm the low opinion of Mr. Stanton which he already had.”

[Telegram.]

“War Department, June 28, 1862.

Major-General McClellan.

“Save your Army, at all events. Will send reinforcements as fast as we can. Of course they cannot reach you to-day, or to-morrow, or next day. I have not said you were ungenerous in assuming that I did not send them as fast as I could. I feel any misfortune to you and your army quite as keenly as you feel it yourself. If you have had a drawn battle, or a repulse, it is the price we pay for the enemy not being in Washington. We protected Washington and the enemy concentrated on you. Had we stripped Washington, he would have been upon us before the troops could have gotten to you. Less than a week ago you notified us that reinforcements were leaving Richmond to come in front of us. It is the nature of the case, and neither you nor the Government is to blame. Please tell at once the present condition and aspect of all things. A. Lincoln”

Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War Elizabeth R. Varon P. 233 Caption for “The Mower Mows on, Though the Adder May Writhe.”

“This 1863 print contrasts the dignity of free labor—represented by the Lincolnesque farmer in the foreground and free black farmers behind him—with the grim plantation scene to the right. The image takes aim at the Copperhead Democrats, represented by the snakes in the grass and wrapped around the central figure’s scythe.”

The Mind of the South W. J. Cash (1941) P. 97-99

“But turn back now and examine the South in the light of this. Analysis is largely the outcomes of two things: the need to understand a complex environment (a consideration already disposed of) and social dissatisfaction. But, as we are aware, satisfaction was the hallmark of Southern society; masters and masses alike were sunk in the deepest complacency; nowhere was there any palpable irritation, any discontent and conflict, and so nowhere, was there any tendency to question. Again, being static and unchanging, the South was, of course, an inherently conservative society—one which, under any circumstances, would have naturally been cold to new ideas as something for which it had no need or use. As for the grip on reality, we know that story fully already. Imagination there was in plenty in this land with so much of the blood of the dreamy Celt and its warm sun, but it spent itself on puerilities, on cant and twisted logic, in rodomontade and the feckless vaporings of sentimentality. And as for detachment, the South, you will recall, was, before all else, personal, an attitude which is obviously the negation of detachment. Even its love of rhetoric required the immediate and directly observable satisfactions of speech rather than the more remote ones of writing.

There is still more here. As well as having nothing to give rise to a developed intellectual culture, as well as having much that was implicitly hostile, much that served as a negative barrier, the Old South also had much that was explicitly hostile and served as a quite positive barrier. The religious pattern will come to mind at once. Theologians have everywhere been the enemies of analysis and new ideas, and in whatever field they have appeared—feeling, quite correctly, that, once admitted, there is no setting limits to them. And in this country in which the evangelical ministers had already won to unusual sway, in which they had almost complete control of the schools, in which they had virtually no opposition, they established their iron wall with an effectiveness which went well beyond even its American average.

But the greatest force of all was the result of conflict with the Yankee. In Southern unity before the foe lay the final bulwark of every established commonplace. And the defense of slavery not only eventuated, as we have seen, in a taboo on criticism; in the same process it set up a ban on all analysis and inquiry, a terrified truculence toward every new idea, a disposition to reject every innovation out of hand and hug to the whole of the status quo with fanatical resolution. Detachment? In a world in which patriotism to the South was increasingly the first duty of men, in which coolness about slavery was accounted treason, it was next to impossible.

In sum, it was the total effect of Southern conditions, primary and secondary, to preserve—but let Henry Adams tell it, in the pages of the Education, from direct observation of Roony Lee, the son of Robert E. Lee, and other young Southerners he knew at Harvard between 1864 and 1858, who had behind them two hundred years of shaping in the pattern, and who are to be taken, as Adams infers, as the typical flower of the Old South at its highest and best:

“Tall, largely built, handsome, genial, with liberal Virginia openness toward all he liked, he [Lee] had also the Virginian habit of command…. For a year, at least… was the most popular and prominent man in his class, but then seemed slowly to drop into the background. The habit of command was not enough, and the Virginian had little else. He was simple beyond analysis; so simple that even the simple New England student could not realize him. No one knew enough to know how ignorant he was; how child-like; how helpless before the relative complexity of a school. As an animal the Southerner seemed to have every advantage, but even as an animal he steadily lost ground.

“…Strictly, the Southerner had no mind; he had temperament. He was not a scholar; he had no intellectual training; he could not analyze an idea, and he could not even conceive of admitting two….”

There it is, then. We return to the point with which we began. It was the total effect of Southern conditions, primary and secondary, to preserve the Southerner’s original simplicity of character as it were in perpetual suspension. From first to last, and whether he was a Virginian or a nouveau, he did not (typically speaking) think; he felt; and discharging his feelings immediately, he developed no need or desire for intellectual culture in its own right—none, at least, powerful enough to drive him past his taboos to its actual achievement.”

The View from the Ground: Experiences of Civil War Soldiers Edited by Aaron Sheehan-Dean 76-77

“The patriarchy of Southern manhood rested on female submission, land ownership, and racial superiority. The Union war effort challenged all these elements of Southern male identity and could revoke a fourth: political rights. For many Confederate soldiers, losing these pillars of manhood doomed them to slavery or subjugation.”

The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan, Editors (2000) P. 27 “The Anatomy of the Myth.” Alan T. Nolan

“The North went to war to defeat secession. The Civil War, therefore, presented three issues: (1) however flawed the circumstances, human freedom was at stake; (2) the territorial and political integrity of the United States was at stake; and (3) the survival of the democratic process—republican government of, by, and for the people—was at stake. Secession was not therefore heroic—it was mean and narrow and a profound mistake. Its leaders were wrong and authored a major tragedy for the American people. Dismantling the United States in 1861 would not have benefited either the North or the South. On the contrary, it would have led to constant conflict over such things as access to the Mississippi River and the rights of the two nations to the territories, and it would have established the precedent that a loser in a democratic election may successfully resort to warfare, as Lincoln discussed in his Gettysburg Address. The warfare itself, in which African Americans participated in behalf of the North, was cruel and terribly destructive to the people of both sides.”

Terrible Swift Sword Bruce Catton P. 336

“On June 28, the day after the Gaines’ Mill fight, McClellan got his army started on the march to Harrison’s Landing, abandoning the base at White House, sending the transports off, destroying an immense quantity of supplies that could not be moved—a staff officer mentioned the loss of millions of rations and hundreds of tons of ammunition—and breaking the bridges that crossed the Chickahominy. Temporarily, Lee lost contact with him, except for an unsuccessful assault made by some of Magruder’s men on the Golding farm position, and for a time it was not clear whether McClellan was going to try to regain his lost base at White House, march down the Chickahominy to the lower peninsula, or move directly to the James. Altogether, the Army of the Potomac got a twenty-four- hour head start, and it was just enough. Lee’s army was never able to make up for the lost time, and the great battle of annihilation did not take place.

Not quite… the opportunity was there. McClellan’s army had to go along a narrow roadway, and the column was very long, encumbered by a wagon train and a shambling herd of 2500 beef cattle, unable either to retreat with speed or to turn and fight with all its strength. Theoretically, it was possible for part of Lee’s army to circle around south of the Chickahominy and smite the head of the column while another part struck the flank and the remainder assailed the rear, and this is what Lee tried to do. If all had gone as he hoped, the Army of the Potomac would have ceased to exist. But nothing went quite right for him. Magruder proved an inexpert tactician, Huger moved much too slowly, and Jackson, most inexplicably, missed a crucial assignment. Although it had to fight on June 29 at Savage Station and on June 30 at Glendale—the latter engagement was as vicious a battle as either army ever fought, but Lee could not get more than two of his six divisions into action- the Army of the Potomac could not be brought to a stand. By July 1 the head of the column had reached Harrison’s Landing and the protecting gunboats, and McClellan had Porters plant abundant infantry and an overpowering array of guns on high ground at Malvern Hill, overlooking the James, to indicate that the army was ready for one more fight.

One more fight it immediately got. The position at Malvern Hill was really far too strong to attack with any hope of success, but the Federals had been getting whipped and retreating day after day and if Lee suspected that one more battle would finish them it is easy to see why he felt that way. Besides, this would be the last chance to strike a blow, and Lee was a fighter; and that afternoon and evening saw one of the most hopeless attacks of the war, with Magruder’s and D.H. Hill’s divisions and elements from other commands trying heroically to do the impossible. Up the long slope they went, brigade after brigade, and the Federal guns knocked their lines all apart and covered the hillside with broken bodies; this was one of the few battles in the Civil War in which most of the casualties were inflicted by artillery. At Gaine’s Mill an afternoon of failure had been followed by an almost miraculous moment when everything suddenly worked, and a victory had been gained, with the triumphant Rebel yell tingling across the twilight. That did not happen at Malvern Hill. Night came, the killing ended and the Federals were unshaken; and as the crash of the guns stopped the dusk throbbed with the pathetic cries of thousands of wounded men who wanted somebody to come out and help them.”

The Peninsula & Seven Days: A Battlefield Guide Brian K. Burton P. 88-89

“McClellan’s decision deserves consideration from two different points of view. The first is his. He thought Lee outnumbered him nearly two to one. Therefore, if Porter was substantially outnumbered on the north bank, he also was substantially outnumbered on the south bank. He could accomplish nothing by attacking toward Richmond and in fact risked annihilation if he did so, with the Rebel host north of the river ready to pounce on his rear. He couldn’t try to move everyone north of the river– there weren’t enough crossings and nothing could be done against an enemy that had the roads to White House Landing covered. He had to move toward the James, and so he decided to move his base as far forward on the James as possible and race the Confederates there. He would have a head start, and perhaps he could beat the Southern hordes.

The second perspective is that of reality. If Lee did outnumber McClellan, he did so by at most a few thousand men. Porter was outnumbered, but McClellan’s advantage on the south bank was about three to one. A movement toward Richmond would have forced Lee into a very tight spot and perhaps have led to the annihilation, not of the Army of the Potomac, but of the Army of Northern Virginia, if McClellan had been willing to live off the land and as many of his accumulated supplies as his men could carry for a few days.

No simple explanation for McClellan’s belief concerning the relative strengths of the two armies is convincing. It is likely a combination of factors. Whatever its cause, that belief almost certainly prolonged the war and led to its metamorphosis from a conservative restore-the-Union objective to a more revolutionary abolish-slavery mission.”

The Peninsula: McClellan’s Campaign of 1862 Alexander Stewart Webb P. 92-93 (footnotes):

“The proceedings of the McDowell Court of Inquiry in December, 1862, contain important testimony and documents in regard to this period of the campaign. The following is a brief extract in regard from General McClellan’s statements: “I have no doubt said, for it has ever been my opinion, that the Army of the Potomac would have taken Richmond had not the corps of General McDowell been separated from it. It is also my opinion that had the command of General McDowell joined the Army of the Potomac in the month of May by way of Hanover Court House from Fredericksburg, that we would have had Richmond within a week after the junction. I do not hold General McDowell responsible in my own mind for the failure to join me on either occasion.’”

The South in History and Literature: A Hand-book of Southern Authors from the Settlement of Jamestown, 1607, to Living Writers Mildred Rutherford P. 14-16

“The war ended. The South was overpowered by force of arms, but the principle for which she fought was never surrendered, as the changed Constitution testifies. Those were strenuous years that followed the war.

Little could be done in a literary way during the awful Reconstruction Period, for then came a struggle, not only for bread, but for prevention of negro supremacy at the South. Plantations had been desolated, homes had been burned, and inmates left helpless, because the heads of those homes in many instances slept the sleep of the heroic brave. Without money, land-poor, subjected to military rule, having negro equality forced upon them, what could our Southern men do? Some in desperation went to other lands to wait for better times, and some moved North to find a market for their literary work.

Little by little there came life into the Southland, and the North saw there was coming from the pens of the writers here something very original in thought and style, a freshness of subject-matter, and a sparkling humor, where pictures of Southern life were being presented in a very new and surprising way, so they encouraged them to write, offering them inducements that called forth their best work, and an age of romance portraying Southern life sprang into being.

Just as the New England writers can tell us best of New England life and ways, like Mary Wilkins portraying the village life in the New England smaller towns; Lucy Larcom, the factory life, picturing Hannah Binding Shoes; Celia Thaxter the sea-faring life, telling about light-house keepers and their ways, all because these are themes with which they are most familiar, so our writers at the South chose plantation life, the Georgia Cracker, the Tennessee mountaineer, and the Creoles, themes with which they are most at home. We find first Irwin Russell giving us the negro on the Mississippi plantation, and then Joel Chandler Harris catching the inspiration and giving him in his life with his master’s children by the firelight of his own Georgia cabin, and Paul Hamilton Hayne describing him as he was on the South Carolina coast, and Louiza Clarke Pyrnelle giving him as playmate for the white children on the Alabama plantation, and then Thomas Nelson Page and A.C. Gordon portraying him in his life as an attendant upon his young master and mistress in the old Virginia home in the times “befo’ de war.” How lifelike are these stories to those who lived then! Page puts into the mouth of one of the old slaves these words” “Dem wuz good ole times. Marster: de best dat Sam ever did see,” and when the war was over the old darky said again: “Dat wuz de een o’ de ole time.” And it was, for no longer is heard throughout our Southland the bright and happy– hearted laughter of the negro as of yore. The face of the world seems changed for him– his hand seems against every man and every man’s hand seems against him. His unwise friends are still harming him by teaching wrong ideas of education and social position. His true friends’ hands are tied because of this interference on the part of others. When the last of the faithful old slaves and their masters have passed away from earth the bond that existed between master and slave under the old regime will be a thing of the past. The memory of the old slave, as he was in his faithfulness and happiness, will be preserved only in the writings of such faithful portrait-painters as Thomas Nelson Page, Joel Chandler Harris, A.C. Gordon, Irwin Russell and others.”

Note: That was a lot of words mentioning how anyone not White should have nothing in life.

Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the Civil War (1962) Edmund Wilson P. 605

And Page was equally popular in the North. Having devastated the feudal South, the Northerners wanted to be told of its glamor, of its old-time courtesy and grace. That was what they had wanted of Cable. A rush of industrial development had come at the end of the war, and the cities of the North and the West, now the scene of so much energetic enterprise which rendered them uglier and harsher, were losing their old amenities, and the Northerners wanted, besides, a little to make it up to the South for their wartime vituperation. They took over the Southern myth and themselves began to revel in it. This acceptance was to culminate in Gone With the Wind, the enormous success of which novel makes a curious counterbalance to that of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But it began in the Century of the eighties with the stories of Thomas Nelson Page. Though Pope had been only twelve at the end of the Civil War, so had had little firsthand experience of the life of the old regime, he really invented for the popular mind Old Massa and Mistis and Meh Lady, with their dusky-skinned adoring retainers. The Northerners, after the shedding of so much blood, illogically found it soothing to be told that slavery had been not so bad, that the Negroes were a lovable but simple race, whose business was to work for….”

Note: “The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine” debuted in 1881 & ran 230 soldier’s war stories over 3 years, publishing both northern & southern memories. See June 19, Earl J. Hess, for more on veteran writing.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness Michelle Alexander P. 235

“One example of the way in which a well established racial order easily absorbs legal challenges is the infamous aftermath of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. After the Supreme Court declared separate schools inherently unequal in 1954, segregation persisted unabated. One commentator notes: “The statistics from the Southern states are truly amazing. For ten years, 1954-1964, virtually nothing happened. Not a single black child attended an integrated public school in South Carolina, Alabama, or Mississippi as of the 1962-1963 school year. Across the South as a whole, a mere 1 percent of black school children were attending school with whites in 1964—a full decade after Brown was decided. Brown did not end Jim Crow; a mass movement had to emerge first—one that aimed to create a new public consensus opposed to the evils of Jim Crow. This does not mean Brown gave critical legitimacy to the demands of civil rights activists who risked their lives to end Jim Crow, and it helped to inspire the movement (as well as a fierce backlash). But standing alone, Brown accomplished for African Americans little more than Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. A civil war had to be waged to end slavery; a mass movement was necessary to bring a formal end to Jim Crow. Those who imagine that far less is required to dismantle mass incarceration and build a new, egalitarian racial consensus reflecting a compassionate rather than punitive impulse toward poor people of color fail to appreciate the distance between Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream and the ongoing racial nightmare for those locked up and locked out of American society.”

Note: A 1956 Georgia resolution declaring Brown “null, void and of no force and effect” passed the Georgia House 178 to 1 and the Georgia Senate 39 to 0, & right then the state changes its flag and uses the Confederate battle flag & so the Confederate flag officially becomes the White supremacists’ flag & the Dixiecrat party banner.

Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life Barbara J. Fields, Karen Elise Fields P. 96-97

“Starting from “ethnoracial mixture” leads to the great evasion of American historical literature, as of American history itself: the substitution of “race” for “racism.” That substitution, as I have written elsewhere, “transforms the act of a subject into an attribute of the object.” Disguised as race, racism becomes something Afro-Americans are, rather than something racists do. Racists and apologists for racism have long availed themselves of the deception. “Don’t blame me because you’re colored,” a white homeowner in Westchester, New York, told Hugh Mulzac, an Afro-Caribbean, when refusing to sell him a house– as though Mulzac’s ancestry, rather than the homeowner’s refusal, had aborted the sale. Similarly, a Washington Post columnist, during an effort to mitigate the killing of a blameless and unarmed African immigrant by New York City officers, characterized as “race– but not racism” the commonplace refusal of cab drivers to stop for Afro-American passengers. It is as though real estate transactions, the braking of motor vehicles, and the discharge of firearms were controlled– perhaps through telekinesis or some other paranormal or supernatural process– by the victim’s appearance or ancestry, without the aggressor’s will or participation.”

What Caused the Civil War: Reflections on the South and Southern History Edward L. Ayers P. 148

“Reconstruction is the Bermuda Triangle of American history, a place where we lose our bearings, where the usual American stories of progress and success simply do not work.

The struggles of Reconstruction foreshadowed elements of American-led reconstructions throughout the world.

P. 153

When Reconstruction was gone, the white majority rejoiced that finally the day of true law, true justice, had returned. The South, they declared, was “redeemed.” The white South used every means, legal and illegal, over the next ninety years to contain, roll back, nullify, and deny the transformations initiated by Reconstruction. They waged, and won, a war of propaganda. Woodrow Wilson, president of Princeton and soon to be president of the United States, articulated the understanding of Reconstruction many educated white people held at the beginning of the twentieth century. Reconstruction had seen a vast class of people, once slaves, “unpracticed at liberty, unschooled in self-control; never sobered by the discipline of self-support, never established in any habit of prudence; excited by a freedom they did not understand, exalted by false hopes; bewildered and without leaders, and yet insolent and aggressive; sick of work, covetous of pleasure– a host of dusky children untimely put out of school.” Reconstruction failed in America, at heart, because white people could not imagine that black Americans deserved freedom and equality. Moreover, because white Americans denied black Americans what they deserved, white Americans felt obligated to denigrate and abuse black people for generations to come.

P. 156

If the white South could push back African American advances, it could in a real sense still win the war. That struggle was fought in the guerrilla warfare of the chain gang and the lynch mob; it was fought in statehouses where legal segregation and disenfranchisement were inscribed into the law of the land. The men who led the white Southern counterrevolution over Reconstruction, the “redeemers,” claimed to defend the integrity not only of the South but of white people everywhere. They became warriors for their entire race– the proud Aryans, the opening titles in The Birth of a Nation called them– fighting once again on the front lines, this time certain to be victorious.”

I really hesitate to post these photographs. But it’s the historic reality. Please see April 23, 24, 27, June 21 for more history of American lynchings.

The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan, Editors P(2000) 12

“Within a few years of the surrender at Appomattox, former Confederate leaders were serving in high offices in the United States government. According to Morrison, white supremacy continued in a different form, “as numerous lynchings*** in rural districts indicated; and presently ‘Jim Crow’ would emerge” to intimidate and control the Southern Negro.”

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness Michelle Alexander P. 164

“Not surprisingly, for many black men, the hurt and depression gives way to anger. A black minister in Waterloo, Mississippi, explained his outrage at the fate that has befallen African Americans in the post-civil rights era. “It’s a hustle,” he said angrily. “Felony** is the new N-word. They don’t have to call you a nigger anymore. They just say you’re a felon. In every ghetto you see alarming numbers of young men with felony convictions. Once you have that felony stamp, your hope for employment, for any kind of integration into society, it begins to fade out. Today’s lynching is a felony charge. Today’s lynching is incarceration. Today’s lynch mobs are professionals. They have a badge; they have a law degree. A felony is a modern way of saying, ‘I’m going to hang you up and burn you.’ Once you get that F, you’re on fire.’”

Note: At Angola, or, the Alcatraz of the South, America’s largest max-security prison– sitting on grounds of a former plantation– Fair Wayne Bryant was one of 6,300 inmates. Spent 24 years for boosting hedge clippers in 1997; let out in 2020 (would have been 2018, but had one infraction in the 5 years prior: smoking a cigarette). A grossly disproportionate sentence because the cruelty is the point. As W.E.B. DuBois said, “A system cannot fail those it was never meant to protect.” Note too towns like Brookside, Alabama, where you can stop at no traffic light on the way to your complete disenfranchisement because there are none: https://www.al.com/news/2022/01/police-in-this-tiny-alabama-town-suck-drivers-into-legal-black-hole Despicable.

The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties Christopher Caldwell P. I have no page number because I photocopied it sans page number at a corner. This is a prime argument for publishers placing page numbers to the MIDDLE SIDES of book pages, thank you very much, & no, Google Books won’t give it up.

“Despite claims that these radical policy changes were driven by fiscal conservatism– i.e., the desire to end big government and slash budget deficits– the reality is that government was not reducing the amount of money devoted to the management of the urban poor.

It was radically altering what the funds would be used for. The dramatic shift toward punitiveness resulted in a massive reallocation of public resources. By 1996, the penal budget doubled the amount that had been allocated to AFDC or food stamps. Similarly, funding that had once been used for public housing was being redirected to prison construction. During Clinton’s tenure, Washington slashed funding for public housing by $17 billion (a reduction of 61 percent) and boosted corrections by $19 billion (an increase of 171 percent), “effectively making the construction of prisons the nation’s main housing program for the urban poor.

Clinton did not stop there. Determined to prove how “tough” he could be on “them,” Clinton also made it easier for federally assisted public housing projects to exclude anyone with a criminal history– an extraordinarily harsh step in the midst of a drug war aimed at racial and ethnic minorities. In his announcement of the “One Strike and You’re Out” Initiative, Clinton explained: “From now on, the rule for residents who commit crime and peddle drugs should be one strike and you’re out.” The new rule promised to be “the toughest admission and eviction policy that HUD has implemented.” Thus, for countless poor people, particularly racial minorities targeted by the drug war, public housing was no longer available, leaving many of them homeless– locked out not only of mainstream society, but their own homes.” Sidenote: Revelatory experience, as you know, navigating this country’s programs, if you’ve ever been on them. JFC.

Note: Probably not for the Unreconstructed Virginia State Flag, $15.00, saying Sic Semper Tyrannis, or the My Heroes Wore Grey, $20.00, or even the $25 Longstreet & Lee tee shirt but a Black man (Guy Frank, released in 2021 after 2 decades at age 67), for kiping two tee-shirts at a Louisiana Saks got 23 years, a sentence a remnant of the 1870s “Pig Laws,” but the Capitol rioters– with Republicans insisting they were lost tourists looking for the cafeteria– got probation. 5 deaths, 140 law enforcement injuries, 50 congressional subpoenas? “Legitimate political discourse,” the Republican Party breathlessly declared 2/22.

Note: California, since 1980, has built 22 prisons, & 1 university. See the Netflix documentary “13^th: From Slave to Criminal with One Amendment” (named after the 13^th Amendment) for more on the “intersection of race, justice, and mass incarceration in the United States.” We spend spend 70 billion a year on corrections which is about the whole budget of the Department of Education. In the Prison-Industrial Complex, 1 in 7 Black voting age Mississippians have lost the right to vote via felony charge. By 1980, in prison in America were a half million. By 2017? 2.2 million incarcerated. A catastrophe down Louisiana way, 1 in 86 is adults are now behind bars; the state is the planet’s prison capital, & note, “You don’t know what heat is until you cross the border from Texas to Louisiana in the summer. You can’t come up with words that catch it. Trees give up. Turtles cook in their shells. Describe that if you know how.” Toni Morrison, in part three of the novel Home.

Meanwhile, men at places like Lompoc are laying irrigation pipes for farms owned by the Bureau of Prisons, same as slaves, forced labor, always calling it something else. See, for example, see, for instance, Guy Frank,

Point A

Point B

Point C

Point D

It’s all the same American Dream. Yet. Yet. Oh yet. Is law enforcement the largest organized terroristic crime organization in the world today? Do police steal more via civil forfeiture than all other property crimes combined? “Felons” do, however, get awarded taxation without representation because they’re barred from voting. How you see the diameter of this says who you are, who you want to be. Hunter S. Thompson: “We cannot expect people to have respect for law and order until we teach respect to those we have entrusted to enforce those laws.” See: “The Punishment Bureaucracy: How to Think About “Criminal Justice Reform.” REFORM THIS:

https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/the-punishment-bureaucracy

Note: Howard Zinn:

“Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders… and millions have been killed because of this obedience. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves… (and) the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem. Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it.” blogs.umb.edu/joinercenter/2100/02/22/howard_zinn

Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War Elizabeth R. Varon P. 431-432

“The resurgence of the Southern Democrats went hand in hand with the spread of Lost Cause ideology, which idealized the slave system and the Old South; depicted Confederates as united, blameless, and righteous martyrs who were overwhelmed by the ruthless Yankee war machine; and sought to justify vigilante violence as a legitimate means to “redeem” the suffering South from Radical Republican misrule. This myth explicitly repudiated the deluded-masses theory of the rebellion. There were no dupes or dissenters in Lost Cause histories, only diehard Confederates and faithful white women and slaves.”

The Mind of the South W. J. Cash (1941) P. 95-97

“In reality, the reason is immanent, I think, in the whole of Southern life and psychology. Complexity in man is invariably the child of complexity in environment. The desire for knowledge when it passes beyond the stage of being satisfied with the most obvious answer, thought properly so called, and, above all, aesthetic concern, arise only when the surrounding world becomes sufficiently complicated to make it difficult or impossible for human energies to escape on a purely physical plane, or, at any rate, on a plane of direct activity. Always they represent, among other things, a reaching out vicariously for satisfaction of the primitive urge to exercise muscle and nerve, and achievement of the universal will to mastery. And always, too, they feed only upon variety and change. Whence it is, no doubt, that they have never reached any notable development save in towns, and usually in great towns.

But the Southern world, you will remember, was basically an extremely uncomplex, unvaried, and unchanging one. Here economic and political organization was reduced to its simplest elements. Here were no towns to rank as more than trading posts save New Orleans, Charleston, Richmond, and Norfolk; here, perhaps, were no true towns at all, for even these four (three of which were scarcely more than overgrown villages) were rather mere depots on the road to the markets of the world, mere adjuncts to the plantation, then living entities in their own right, after the fashion of Boston and New York and Philadelphia. Here was lacking even that tremendous ferment of immigration which was so important in lending variety to the rest of the American scene. And here everywhere were wide fields and blue woods and flooding yellow sunlight. A world, in fine, in which not a single factor operated to break up the old pattern of outdoor activity laid down on the frontier, in which, on the contrary, everything conspired to perpetuate it; a world in which even the Virginian could and inevitably did discharge his energies on the purely physical plane as fully as his earliest ancestor in the land; a world in which horses, dogs, guns, not books, and ideas and art were his normal and absorbing interest.

And if this was not enough? If his energies and his ambition demanded a wider field of action? He went, in this world at battle, inescapably into politics. To be a captain in the struggle against the Yankee, to be a Calhoun or a Brooks in Congress, or, better still, to be a Yancey or a Rhett ramping through the land with a demand for the sword- this was to be at the very heart of one’s time and place, was, for the plantation youth, full of hot blood, the only desirable career. Beside it the pursuit of knowledge, the writing of books, the painting of pictures, the life of the mind, seemed an anemic and despicable business, fit only for eunuchs.

But it was not only the consumption of available energy in direct action. The development of a considerable intellectual culture requires, in addition to complexity of environment, certain preposing habits of mind on the part of a people, one of these is analysis. “L’etat de dissociation des lieux communs de la morale semble en correlation assez etroite avec le degre de la civilization intellectuelle,” says Remy de Gourmont- and says truly. Another is hospitality to new ideas. Still another is a from grip on reality; and in this connection I am not forgetting the kind of art which is called romantic and the more fanciful varieties of poetry; in so far as they are good, in so far as they are truly art, they also must rise ultimately from the solid earth. And, finally, there is the capacity, at least, for detachment, without which no thinker, no artist, and no scholar can do his work.”

Memory and American History David Thelen P. 36-38

“Frederick Douglass and the Memory of the Civil War.” David W. Blight

“Since its origins as a literary and political device immediately after the war, the Lost Cause has been an enigmatic phrase in American history. Historians have defined the Lost Cause in at least three different ways: as a public memory, shaped by a web of organizations, institutions, and rituals; as a dimension of southern and American civil religion, rooted in churches and sacred rhetoric as well as secular institutions and thought; and as a literary phenomenon, shaped by journalists and fiction writers from the die-hard Confederate apologists of the immediate postwar years through the gentle romanticism of the “local color” writers of the 1880s to the legion of more mature novelists of the 1890s and early twentieth century who appealed to a national audience eager for reconciliation. Dividing the movement into the “inner” and “national” memories is also useful in making sense of the Lost Cause. The “inner” Lost Cause, argue Thomas L. Connelly and Barbara L. Bellows, represents the die-hard generation that fought the war and experienced defeat and dishonor. Led by Jefferson Davis, and especially by the prototypical unreconstructed rebel, Gen. Jubal Early, these former Confederate leaders created veterans’ organizations, wrote partisan confederate histories, built monuments, made Robert E. Lee into a romantic icon, and desperately sought justification for their cause and explanations for their defeat. The Confederacy, argued the diehards, was never defeated; rather, it was overwhelmed by numbers and betrayed by certain generals at pivotal battles (namely James Longstreet at Gettysburg). The activities of the initial Lost Cause advocated have been compared to the Ghost Dance of the Plains Indians of the late nineteenth century. As mystics, they remained “captivated by a dream,” writes Gaines Foster, “a dream of a return to an undefeated confederacy.” The “inner” Lost Cause was not, however, merely a band of bitter aging, mystical soldiers. During the 1870s and 1880s they forged an organized movement in print, oratory, and granite, and their influence persisted until World War I.

The “national” Lost Cause took hold during the 1880s primarily as a literary phenomenon propagated by mass market magazines and welcomed by a burgeoning northern readership. Avoiding the defensive tone and self-pity of earlier Lost Cause writers, successful local colorist John Esten Cooke found a vast and vulnerable audience for his stories of the genteel and romantic heritage of old Virginia. Cooke and other writers such as Thomas Nelson Page and Sara Pryor did not write about a defeated South or the Confederate cause. They wrote about the Old South, about the chivalry and romance of antebellum plantation life, about black “servants” and a happy, loyal slave culture, remembered as a source of laughter and music. They wrote about colonial Virginia—the Old Dominion—as the source of revolutionary heritage and the birthplace of several American presidents. Northern readers were treated to an exotic South, a premodern, preindustrial model of grace. These writers sought, not to vindicate the Confederacy, but to intrigue Yankee readers. Northern readers were not asked to reconcile Jefferson’s Virginia with the rebel yell at the unveiling of a Confederate monument. They were only asked to recognize the South’s place in national heritage.

The conditioning of the northern mind in popular literature had its counterpart in veterans’ reunions, which in the 1880s and 1890s became increasingly intersectional. Celebration of manly valor on both sides and the mutual respect of Union and Confederate soldiers fostered a kind of veteran’s culture that gave the Lost Cause a place in national memory. The war became essentially a conflict between white men; both sides fought well, Americans against Americans, and there was glory enough to go around. Celebrating the soldiers’ experince buttressed the nonideological memory of the war. The great issues of the conflict—slavery, secession, emancipation, black equality, even disloyalty and treason—faded from national consciousness as the nation celebrated reunion and ultimately confronted war with Spain in 1898. Many southerners became pragmatic about the memory of the war; they wanted to remember what was best in their past, but most important, they embraced the reunionism implicit in the concept of a “New South” and demanded respect from northerners. To most southerners, the Lost Cause came to represent this crucial double meaning: reunion and respect.”

America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation David Goldfield P. 404

“The Confederacy died and and the South was reborn, more pure, more chaste, and more obedient to the old values. While northerners looked forward, filed the war away, and relegated religion to a subordinate role, white southerners embraced and sanctified the past. “The present is a very little part of life, sir,” a character in an Ellen Glasgow novel informs us. “It’s the past in which we store our treasures.”Southerners walked backward into the future.”

Note: Allan Gurganus, commenting on the Confederate flag in the New York Times, “The South has a tradition of attempting the impossible at great cost, proudly celebrating the failure, and in gaining admiration for the performance.” Of which Shelby Foote said, “Trying something, failing gloriously at it, and then getting everybody’s admiration. If that’s not a novelist’s description of what a lost cause is I’ve never read one.”

The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism Edward E. Baptist P. 390-391

Ever since the end of the Civil War, Confederate apologists have put out the lie that the southern states seceded and southerners fought to defend an abstract constitutional principle of “states rights.” That falsehood attempts to sanitize the past. Every convention’s participants made it explicit: they were seceding because they thought secession would protect the future of slavery. Lincoln’s victory led the Deep South slaveholders to claim that only secession could save the South from being “stripped,” as one Alabama editor, a former Douglas supporter, said, “of 25 hundred millions of slave property & to have loose among us 4,000,000 of freed blacks.”

From Missouri to Texas, from Wilmot through Kansas-Nebraska and Lecompton, political debates had been about whether or not slavery could expand, not whether or not the federal government would interfere with it in the states where it existed. But secessionists feared that they could not convince the non-slaveholding white southern majority to abandon the Union just to protect entrepreneurs’ access to future cotton frontiers. Instead, they proclaimed that by electing Republicans, the North had declared its commitment to “equality between the white and negro races,” as an emissary sent from the Mississippi convention told his Georgia counterparts. Not only had the Republican party declared its goal to be abolition, but it “now demand[s]… equality in the right of suffrage, equality in the honors and emoluments of office, equality in the social circle, equality in the right of matrimony.” Not only would emancipation mean that non-planters would lose the chance to move up in the world– a chance that ownership of even slave could represent. Worse, the everyday distinctions that gave status to all whites, especially men, would vanish. Lincoln’s victory left only one choice. Secede, or your neighbor’s field “hand” will marry your daughter. Secede, or offer up your “wives and daughters to pollution and violation to gratify the lust of half-civilized Africans.” Republican domination, the emissary concluded, meant a “saturnalia of blood,” “war of extermination” that would lead to the destruction of the white people by “assassinations” and “amalgamation,” or rape.

Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life Barbara J. Fields, Karen Elise Fields P. 117

“Probably a majority of American historians think of slavery in the United States as primarily a system of race relations– as though the chief business of slavery were the production of white supremacy rather than the production of cotton, sugar, rice, and tobacco. One historian has gone so far as to call slavery the “ultimate segregator.” He does not ask why Europeans seeking the “ultimate” method of segregating Africans would go to the trouble and expense of transporting them across the ocean for that purpose, when they could have achieved the same end so much more simply by leaving the Africans in Africa.”

Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era 1829-1877 Walter A. McDougall P. 491

“The Civil War, far from destroying antebellum America, was the completest expression of its political culture, racial fixation, paranoia, industrialism, mysticism, self-delusion, and anger.”

Note: In 1863 Jubal Early takes York, PA. and gets 28k cash. York was the largest town the Rebels took in the war. Some Rebels reached the Susquehanna River, which was as far East in PA. as the Confederacy got.

Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War Elizabeth R. Varon P. 245

(writing of 1863, impending Gettysburg)

“A white inhabitant of Gettysburg recalled seeing blacks flee that town:

They regarded the Rebels as having an especial hatred toward them, and believed that if they fell into their hands annihilation was sure….I can see them yet, men and women with bundles as large as old-fashioned feather ticks slung across their backs, almost bearing them to the ground. Children, also, carrying their bundles and striving to keep up with their seniors. The greatest consternation was depicted on all their countenances as they hurried along, crowding and running against each other in their confusion, children stumbling, falling, and crying.

White Pennsylvanians, too, found themselves in the grip of panic in late June, unsure of Lee’s ultimate intentions. Harrisburg was a “Bedlam,” the journalist Charles Coffin wrote, its railway stations and bridges serving as convergence points for white families arriving from southern Pennsylvania and Harrisburg residents departing for points still farther north. Sallie Broadhead, a Gettysburg schoolteacher, captured the prevailing mood of dread in her diary entry for June 25: “Every one is asking, Where is our army, that they let the enemy scour the country and do as they please?’”

America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation David Goldfield P. 284

Note: Describing Harrisburg at the Army of Northern Virginia’s approach. Can you imagine?

“A journalist in that city reported a “perfect panic” with citizens fleeing northward on packed trains. The state legislature boxed up everything they could and closed shop. The eroding confidence in the Union cause was apparent, as relatively few Pennsylvanians answered the call to enlist and fight the invading army. They demonstrated much more alacrity in running off their livestock out of Confederate reach.”

Causes Won, Lost, & Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know About the Civil War Gary W. Gallagher P. 229

(About the filming of Gettysburg)

“The reenactors playing Confederate soldiers broke into unscripted applause and shouting when Martin Sheen, as Lee, rode by during shooting. Ron Maxwell decided to keep the scene in the film.”

Note: See Wolfgang Hochbruck, Union reenactor & Professor of American Studies at the University of Freiburg, for commentary on German Confederate reenactors.

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our long march in Virginia before I started home….

History will get reconstructed and respun immediately after in time. It will stand still long enough to get groomed to the perfection of madness, a tourist ruin longing to be discovered, but the original will have walked off, leaving the real war to shrink in the space between the four sides of the margins with descriptions that are unknowingly outside the sentences on the plaques. If victors control the narrative, the surrender agreement, the losers wrote the finale, the Lost Cause, much so nonsensical and out of touch with reality as to be nothing more than propaganda. The changing ideas of the war & its cause have been like moving a body several times to conceal a crime, as many times as it takes. Then returning to the dumping site only to find it decomposed beyond any identifying features.

Heat records today, 2022.

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