Day 121. June 29, 1862.
121
Note: The 110th will muster out on this day, 1865.
a hard thing to live haunted by the ghost of an untrue dream….
Sunday 29
Pleasant this morning. Mr Robert & Mrs Tussey were here all night. Quite warm. It clowded up this afternoon. Rained some towards evenning
Civil War Weather in Virginia Robert K. Krick P. 62
“7a.m. 74; 2p.m. 83; 9p.m. 76. Shower at 4:30p.m.”
The Civil War: The Story of the War With Maps M. David Detweiler P. 36
“Lee goes on attacking. At Savage’s Station, June 29th, and Glendale, June 30, it’s the same story. Poor staff work and Lee’s inability to get his generals to execute his sometimes quite complicated battle plans combine with Jackson’s trance to frustrate their repeated attempts to destroy McClellan’s invaders. Lee keeps attcking, his attacks keep misfiring bloodily, McClellan keeps fending Lee off, inflicting casualties Lee can’t afford, and McClellan keeps retreating. McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign has slipped away from him.”
Living Hell: The Dark Side of the Civil War Michael C.C. Adams P. 122
“George B. McClellan’s chronic over-caution and habitual overestimation of the odds against him to excuse inaction have been well documented. Even though we cannotprecisely gauge how far these traits constituted defense mechanisms against committing troops to the slaughter, command stress appears in the mix: “I am tired of the sickening sight of the battlefield, with its mangled corpses & poor suffering wounded!” McClellan wrote to his wife, Ellen, during heavy Peninsula fighting, June 1862. “Victory has no charms for me when purchased at such a cost.” In a later letter he declared: “Every poor fellow that is killed or wounded almost haunts me.” The stress became so unbearable that he apparently retreated into dissociation. On June 30, as Lee launched an all-out attack at Glendale Crossroads to crack the Union army, McClellan and his staff boarded the gunboat Galena and sailed up the James. They stayed away all day, inspecting river defenses, no job for the commanding general. In the Fall campaign, McClellan suffered painful neuralgia attacks from South Mountain through Antietam. He wrote Ellen that “the want of rest and anxiety” wore him down. On the key morning of battle, September 17, he kept to his tent until 7 a.m., leaving his generals to pace. Suffering severe neuralgia, he failed to renew hostilities on the 18th. Lincoln’s removal of McClellan may have precluded a breakdown.”
Note: You’ve seen the photograph of Lincoln & McClellan sitting across a table from each other at Antietam, 10/3/62, staring (& falls out of frame, undercurrents, endless gravities). In strained equipoise, side-eyed, deciding who out-flanked who: https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/36426
Hearts Touched by Fire: The Best of Battles and Leaders of the Civil War Edited by Harold Holzer P. 364
THE PENINSULAR CAMPAIGN.
George B. McClellan, Major-General, U.S.A. (excerpt)
“No praise can be too great for the officers and men who passed through these seven days of battle, enduring fatigue without a murmur, successfully meeting and repelling every attack made upon them, always in the right place at the right time, and emerging from the fiery ordeal a compact army of veterans, equal to any task that brave and disciplined men can be called upon to undertake. They needed now only a few days of well-earned repose, a renewal of ammunition and supplies, and reënforcements to fill the gaps made in their ranks by so many desperate encounters, to be prepared to advance again, with entire confidence, to meet their worthy antagonists in other battles. It was, however, decided by the authorities at Washington, against my earnest remonstrances, to abandon the position on the James, and the campaign. The Army of the Potomac was accordingly withdrawn, and it was not until two years later that it again found itself under its last commander at substantially the same point on the bank of the James. It was as evident in 1862 as in 1865 that there was the true defense of Washington, and that it was on the banks of the James that the fate of the Union was to be decided.”
Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life Barbara J. Fields, Karen Elise Fields P. 146-147
“Those who create and re-create race today are not just the mob that killed a young Afro-American man on a street in Brooklyn or the people who join the Klan and the White Order. They are also those academic writers whose invocation of self-propelling “attitudes” and tragic flaws assigns Africans and their descendants a special category, placing them in a world exclusively theirs and outside history– a form of intellectual apartheid no less ugly or oppressive, despite its righteous (not to say self-righteous) trappings, than that practiced by the bio-and theo-racists; and for which the victims, like slaves of old, are expected to be grateful. They are the academic “liberals” and “progressives” in whose version of race the neutral shibboleths difference and diversity replace words like slavery, injustice, oppression, and exploitation, diverting attention from the anything-but-neutral history these words denote. They are also the Supreme Court and spokesmen for affirmative action, unable to promote or even define justice except by enhancing the authority and prestige of race; which they will continue to do forever so long as the most radical goal of the political opposition remains the reallocation of unemployment, poverty, and injustice rather than their abolition.”
What Caused the Civil War: Reflections on the South and Southern History Edward L. Ayers P. 194 Footnote 4
“As Ellison wrote, “’In relation to their Southern background, the cultural history of Negroes in the North reads like the legend of some tragic people out of mythology, a people which aspired to escape from its own unhappy homeland to the apparent peace of a distant mountain; but, in migrating, made some fatal error of judgment and fell into a great chasm of mazelike passages that promise ever to lead to the mountain but end ever against a wall.’”
The Southern Tradition: The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism Eugene D. Genovese P. xi-xiii
“The northern victory in 1865 silenced a discretely southern interpretation of American history and national identity, and it promoted a contemptuous dismissal of all things southern as nasty, racist, immoral, and intellectually inferior. The northern victory did carry out a much too belated abolition of slavery. But it also sanctified northern institutions and intentions, which included the unfettered expansion of a bourgeois world view and the suppression of alternate visions of social order. In consequence, from that day to this, the southern-conservative critique of modern gnosticism has been wrongly equated with racism and white supremacy.
Rarely these days, even on southern campuses, is it possible to acknowledge the achievements of the white people of the South. The history of the Old South is now often taught at leading universities, when it is taught at all, as a prolonged guilt-trip, not to say a prologue to the history of Nazi Germany. Courses on the history of the modern South ignore an array of movements and individuals, including the Fugitive poets, the Agrarians, Richard Weaver, and such intellectually impressive successors as the late M.E. Bradford and those engaged in today’s political and ideological wars. These nonpersons have nevertheless constituted a movement that, by any reasonable standard, ought to be acknowledged for its outstanding contributions to American social, political, and cultural thought.
To speak positively about any part of this southern tradition is to invite charges of being racist and an apologist for slavery and segregation. We are witnessing a cultural and political atrocity– an increasingly successful campaign by the media and an academic elite to strip young white southerners, and arguably black southerners as well, of their heritage, and, therefore, their identity. They are being taught to forget their forebears or to remember them with shame. Still, we may doubt that many young southerners to believe that Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens, John C. Calhoun and James Henley Thornwell, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson were other than admirable men. It is one thing to silence people, another to convince them. And to silence them on matters central to their self-respect and dignity is to play a dangerous game– to build up in them harsh resentments that, sooner or later, are likely to explode and bring out their worst.
Recall that great speech by Martin Luther King in which he evoked a vision of the descendants of slaves and of slaveholders, sitting together on the hills of Georgia as southern brothers. That vision will be realized when, and only when, those descendants, black and white, can meet with mutual respect and appreciation for the greatness, as well as the evil, that has gone into the making of the South. Black Americans have good reason to protest vehemently against the disgraceful way in which their history has been taught or, worse, ignored, and to demand a record of the nobility and heroism of the black struggle for freedom and justice. But that record dare not include the falsification or obliteration of the noble and heroic features of the white South. To teach the one without the other is to invite deepening racial animosity and murderous conflict, not merely or even primarily in the South but in the North. For it is worth noting that our most vicious urban explosions are occurring in the “progressive” North and on the West Coast, not in the “bigoted” and “reactionary” South.
It is one thing to demand– and it must be demanded– that white southerners repudiate white supremacy. It is quite another to demand that they deny the achievements of their own people in a no less heroic struggle to build a civilization in a wilderness and to create the modern world’s first great republic– to demand that they repent in sackcloth and ashes not only for undeniable enormities, but for the finest and most generous features of southern life. Recall the words of W.E.B. DuBois “Of the Wings of Atlanta” in The Souls of Black Folk:
Once, they say, even Atlanta slept dull and drowsy at the foothills of the Alleghenies, until the iron baptism of war awakened her with its sullen waters, aroused and maddened her, and left her listening to the sea. . . .
It is a hard thing to live haunted by the ghost of an untrue dream; to see the wide vision of empire fade into real ashes and dirt; to feel the pang of the conquered, and yet know that with all the Bad that fell on one black day, something was vanquished that deserved to live, something killed that in justice had not dared to die; to know that with the Right that triumphed, triumphed something of Wrong, something sordid and mean, something less than the broadest and best. All this is bitter hard. . . . “
Note: Elie Wiesel: “To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.”
Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the Civil War (1962) Edmund Wilson P. 575
“….evidently in this stubbornness of the Southerner in sticking to an official position even when it must lead to a conscious falsity an element of the strategy for which George Orwell, in writing of the modern dictatorships, has coined the term “doublethink.’”
P. 576
“The fierce patriotism and pride of defeat override all mercy and reason. We have seen it in Hitler’s Germany.”
Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory David W. Blight P. 220
“The man who fights and wins is only common in human esteem. The downfall of an empire is always the epoch of romance.”
Mrs. Eron Opha Gregory
The Returned Battle Flags
“Oh not with gayly spreading folds,
And colors fresh and bright,
They fling their gleaming stars and bars,
Triumphant to the light;
But sadly ’round their broken staffs,
They drop in faded folds,
Their service o’er, their duty done,
Their wondrous story told.”
The View from the Ground: Experiences of Civil War Soldiers Edited by Aaron Sheehan-Dean P. 51
“Letters and diaries offer insight into a broad cross section of typical soldiers, not just a privileged few, because more than 90 percent of white Union troops were literate.
P. 1
For many years, scholars of the Civil War paid little attention to soldiers as individuals. Historians mined diaries and letters, but that material was rarely used to frame explanations of the war that soldiers would have recognized. Over the last twenty years, however, scholars have rediscovered the trials of soldiers. They have sought to understand both the “deeds” and “passions” (to quote Walt Whitman) of the men who fought the war. What did they believe about the conflict? Did those beliefs change over the course of the war? What actions did they take as a result of those beliefs? How did prewar attitudes shape wartime behavior? And, conversely, did wartime experiences fundamentally alter soldiers’ views of the world?
“….there is a whole subfield of scholarship in soldier studies today…”
P. 27
Autobiographies and revised diaries published by soldiers present an attractive source for historians, but far too often the political and social changes wrought by the war color the material, making diaries and letters written during the war- which are also accessible in huge numbers- a more reliable source for historians seeking to capture wartime opinions.
P. 2
Historians of soldiers begin from the assumption that soldiers are real historical actors who have the potential to shape, not simply respond to, their environment. This is an important point in a field that frequently mobilizes abstract ideas- liberty and slavery, federalism and states’ rights, or simply the force of war- to explain historical change. They typically share a common body of sources as well: the tens of thousands of diaries and letters written by soldiers and their families during the war.
P. 10
What was missing until the mid-1980s was an exploration of soldiers’ accounts that treated them as autonomous and important historical actors. How did soldiers understand the purpose of the war? How did they perceive the shift to emancipation and hard war? How did they conceptualize victory or defeat? The subfield of soldier studies within Civil War history developed rapidly in the 1980s and 1990s. Historians effectively addressed the questions just posed, and others, by turning their attention to the people who actually fought the war. Researchers also discovered that the utility of soldier’s records goes well beyond questions regarding the war itself and its outcome. In the last few years, historians have also begun reading the accounts of soldiers to address larger questions about the American past.
The study of soldiers, along with the study of battles, defined the earliest attempts to gain historical perspective on the Civil War. In the decades after the conflict, veterans, their relatives, and their admirers began this effort by composing thousands of regimental histories. This writing reflected all the strengths and weaknesses of history as it was practiced in the mid-nineteenth century. Simultaneously antiquarian and heroic, these accounts served more a memorial purpose than a historical one. The authors of regimental histories usually described the process of enlistment, tracked the movement of the unit, and explained the military engagements in which the soldiers were involved. Regimental histories included extensive detail regarding soldiers’ lives, but they tended to be mostly institutional in their focus. The units were treated as representative of the communities within which they were organized, and their performance, usually on the battlefield, was analyzed as a means of accessing the virtue of those citizens. This tradition of writing continues today, with regimental histories that often include substantial information about soldiers but rarely analyze that material in historically useful ways. Although this approach to the study of soldiers is the chronological antecedent of current writing, the narrow focus and celebratory tone of most regimental histories ensured that isolation from the more analytical studies of soldiers that have emerged in the last two decades.
P. 11
Alongside regimental histories, the narratives written for several decades after the conflict focused mostly on the actions of generals and politicians. Description trumped explanation, and authors spent much of their energy showing how particular battles or campaigns unfolded. Ascertaining the correct sequence of events in a war is certainly essential to understand how the final outcome was reached, but a fascination with Lee and Lincoln often replaced a deeper explanation of the meaning of the events under review. For writers operating in this mode, the diaries and letters of soldiers helped explain particular decisions or events. Little consideration was given to thinking about the war from the perspective of those who fought it; instead, their testimony was used to corroborate or explain the story of the war written from the headquarters tent or the White House.
Over the past two decades, the field has moved toward increasingly analytical and historical studies that allow scholars to answer questions about the experience and outcome of the war as well as the course of American history in the nineteenth century. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that the Civil War has been exhausted as a field of productive research, the growth and continuing development of soldier studies reveal historians’ ability to enrich well-established topics with new questions and new modes of analysis.”
The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory Adam H. Domby P. 71
“In retrospect, the fact that it took the United States just four years to crush a rebellion that spanned nearly half a continent seems remarkably quick. It took time to bring the North’s demographic and industrial superiority to bear. Although the U.S. military grew to outnumber the Confederacy’s, the U.S. Army numbered just 16,367 in December 1860. Efforts to expand the military were hampered by a variety of factors, including incompetence, corruption, logistics, and an untrained citizenry. During the American Revolution, George Washington’s Continental army, facing an enemy with more resources and experience, fought for eight years and won. In modern times, ISIS, Al-Qaida, and the Taliban, facing aircraft carriers, precision bombs, drones, and the most capable professional army on earth, have all lasted longer than the Confederacy. While perhaps not a fair comparison– the Revolution occurred before before armies massively expanded in scale during the nineteenth century, and modern insurgents have embraced asymmetrical strategies designed to protract conflicts– the idea that the Confederacy was somehow more successful than reasonably expected may partially originate from a distorted view of the Confederate soldier. The reality is that the Confederate army was ultimately strategically unsuccessful and had problems with desertion.”
Note: George Henry Thomas, the Rock of Chickamauga, disowned by his family, none of whom attend his 1870 funeral (Grant & Sherman do), wrote to Grant in 1868:
“The greatest efforts made by the defeated insurgents since the close of the war have been to promulgate the idea that the cause of liberty, justice, humanity, equality, and all the calendar of the virtues of freedom, suffered violence and wrong when the effort for southern independence failed. This is, of course, intended as a species of political cant, whereby the crime of treason might be covered with a counterfeit varnish of patriotism, so that the precipitators of the rebellion might go down in history hand in hand with the defenders of the government, thus wiping out with their own hands their own stains; a species of self-forgiveness amazing in its effrontery, when it is considered that life and property– justly forfeited by the laws of the country, of war, and of nations, through the magnanimity of the government and people– was not exacted from them.”
Note: Southern commanders besides George Henry Thomas who stayed loyal to the United States, partial list:
Winfield Scott, David Birney, William Birney, Solomon Meredith, Montgomery Meigs, John Gibbon, John C. Frémont, Frederick Tracy Dent, David Farragut, Stephen Hurlbut, John Buford, Joseph Holt, John Ancrum Winslow, Samuel Phillips Lee, John Fitzgerald Lee, Louis Henry Marshall, Philip St. George Cooke, John Davidson, Alexander Dyer, Alvan C. Gillem, John Newton, Jesse Reno, Edmund J. Davis, George D. Ramsay, William R. Terrill, John C. Black, John B. McIntosh, John P. Bankhead, William T. Ward, Napoleon Bonaparte Buford. So you see Lee being there wasn’t alright. It wasn’t then & it isn’t now. More:
Note: Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause Ty Seidule P. 200
“Many Virginians and other southerners did not decamp to the South. The list of 162 officers who remained loyal to the Union includes the famous– Winfield Scott, George Thomas, and Dennis Hart Mahan– as well as the forgotten such as John Newton and William Hays, both buried in the West Point Cemetery.”
P. 223
In May 1861, eight West Point graduates from Virginia had a colonelcy in the U.S. Army. It took an average of thirty years for those eight to reach colonel after graduating from the U.S. Military Academy. The Virginian René De Russy, class of 1812, waited forty-six years to pin on that rank.
Looking carefully at those eight U.S. Army colonels from Virginia confirms that Lee’s decision was abnormal. Of those eight, seven remained loyal to their solemn oath to the U.S. Constitution. Only one colonel resigned to fight against the United States. Robert E. Lee. Put another way, 88 percent of long-serving Regular Army colonels from Virginia stayed with the United States. If we expand the scope to include all slave state U.S. Army colonels who graduated from West Point the total number jumps to fifteen. Of those fifteen, twelve remained loyal, or 80 percent. Lee was an outlier. Most officers of his experience and rank remained with the United States. Growing up in Virginia, I saw no monument to those brave and loyal men. I still don‘t.”
The more I learned about Lee’s decision, the more I realized that he did not have to leave the U.S. Army. Freeman’s admonition that joining the Confederacy was “the answer he was born to make” is another lie from the Lost Cause myth. Lee chose to renounce his oath. I’m not making a presentist argument in thinking Lee’s decision was wrong. Plenty of other senior southern army officers agreed with the Constitution’s definition of treason, agreed that Lee dishonored thirty years of service.
When a senior officer, a colonel, is asked to fight for his country, he or she fights unless given an unlawful order. Fighting a rebellion was and remains a lawful order. In fact, one of the reasons for the creation of the U.S. Constitution was the inability to suppress rebellions, like Shays’s Rebellion in Massachusetts. The U.S. Army has crushed rebellions throughout its long history. Disagreement with policy is no excuse to make up arms against the government. Other Regular Army Officers fought in Mexico, even though they felt the war unjust. Officers fought against Native Americans when that cause was unpopular and seen by some as morally unacceptable and even reprehensible. The military doesn’t practice democracy; the military enforces democracy.
One cousin, after hearing of Lee’s decision made after praying for guidance, coldly replied, “I wish he had read over his commission as well as his prayers.” Another West Point graduate, Henry Coppée, criticized Lee in print in 1864. “Treason is treason,” he said. Lee “flung away his loyalty for no better reason than a mistaken interpretation of noblesse oblige.” Another former army colleague quoted the book of Isaiah: “Robert Lee is a commander in chief of the Commonwealth– ‘O Lucifer son of morning star how art thou fallen.’”
The reference to Lucifer, or the devil, was not new. The great hero of the American Revolution Nathanael Greene referenced the same biblical passage to describe Benedict Arnold: “Never since the fall of Lucifer has a fall equaled his.” Should we view Lee similarly to Arnold? In 1865, a famous political cartoon in the North compared Jefferson Davis to Arnold with the devil introducing them.
Lee could have chosen differently. Like Scott and Thomas, he could have fought for the united States. Or he could have sat out the war. Lee was fifty-four and older than most of the battlefield commanders. Alfred Mordecai, West Point class of 1923, was the leading expert on ordnance in the country. A North Carolinian by birth, Mordecai rejecetd an offer to serve in the Confederacy but still resigned his U.S. Army commission and sat out the war teaching mathematics in Philadelphia. Nor did Lee try to use his influence to stop Virginia from seceding.
P. 225
The consequences of Lee’s betrayal led many others on the path to treason. Lee’s decision was momentous because of his status: son of an American Revolution war hero, Mexican-American War hero, army colonel, son-in-law of George Washington’s adopted son, and suppressor of John Brown’s raid.
Lee’s action carried great weight in Virginia and among army officers. One person who lived near Arlington noticed that “none of them wanted secession, and were waiting to see what Colonel Robert Lee would do.” A relative noted, “For some the question ‘What will Colonel Lee do?’ was only second in interest to ‘What will Virginia do?’” Lieutenant Orton Williams, Mary Lee’s cousin, was aide-de-camp to Winfield Scott. When Williams heard the news, he said, “Now that ‘Cousin Robert’ has resigned everyone seemed to be doing so.’”
Note: In Mexico, & with Native Americans here, “that cause was unpopular and seen by some as morally unacceptable and even reprehensible” are both clues that “democracy” was not the foremost goal.
Note: The 1865 cartoon “A Proper Family Re-Union” shows the Arnold, plus Davis (in a dress, bonnet, & shawl), both stirring what resembles a large witches cauldron labeled “Treason Toddy” with two skulls at the base labeled “Andersonville” & “Libby”as the Devil stands between, saying “I feel proud of my American sons—Benedict and Jeff” by Oscar H. Harpel is at https://bit.ly/3AQvtKF
*Some say Lee lost it for the South by refusing to give up Petersburg. He stayed in front of it like an obstinate, ornery donkey.
clowded up this afternoon….
In the PBS documentary Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, at minute 100, a reporter recounts that night at the pavilion when everyone claps after the reporter praises Jones: “never felt anything like this before,” he says. At minute 1:03, he recounts “it was a bright but dark day and it just didn’t feel right.” At 1:04, more about the weather, and how “evil itself blew into Jonestown….” There’s footage of the reporter talking before several hundred Jim Jones followers hours before they all take– or were injected with or otherwise forced at gunpoint to swallow– the FlavorAide. It’s night, in a thick humidity in the hall, and everyone’s packed in, raptly eyeing this reporter. After he says something that affirms their mission there in that Guyana jungle, they clap, and clap, and clap, and. And it is this adulation the reporter found irresistible as he stood at the front of all of them. It is this specific trickery that the Civil War encompassed, that all war is. Death means life; war means peace; freedom means slavery. It’s the trick of forcing each word into the shadow of its opposite, then agreeing to live by it blindfolded. It’s all the deepest mistake invented by, and known to, humankind. It’s where we all go wrong again, again, & again.
There is a deep fog when Guyanese soldiers make it to camp the next morning. Like smoke in the Civil War they couldn’t even see more than a few feet in front of them, & some couldn’t even see their own feet. The Dixie cups askew all over the ground. Nothing more or less than the fog of war. 909 dead.
Approaching PA. this day 1863 the same darkness moves in a northwesterly direction; Rebels head for south-central PA., close to where Ephraim is at his farm today. They’re averaging 3 mph up to Gettysburg. Horses gait at 4mph, so the contingent could have been approaching faster. A mile could hold 10k men. 10 miles, a 100k. Rebels snatch PA.’s free black citizens as they get closer, then as they exit. As many as 10k VA. slaves are forced to march with the Army of Northern Virginia to Gettysburg. They’re going North, you can be assured of that.
Imagine being transported there right now, being snatched while standing close by, & taking all that in. Imagine the sights, sounds, the expressions on their faces, the dusty clothes, the loaded-down wagons, the weapons, the cows and horses and chickens, how the air shifts, the squawking, the breezes coming at you of smells but most of all the ones praying out loud to die on the way back. These men passing, these men passing by on their way to holding it all together or losing an entire new country, imagine it.
And in today’s 2022 news:
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