Day 13. March 13, 1862.
13
I’d go next door and kill….
March Thursday 13 1862
Quite frosty this morning. It was cloudy. I feel somewhat sore sleeping on a oak boards out in the open field all night. It was cloudy but clerd off. We are in Frederick County Va. It looks as if we would have some good weather so we can march on. We are 3 ½ miles from Winchester. There are a grate many troops here now and Jackson is on the retreat. Our forces are following up. We are camped where the armys were drawen up in line of battle. On Tuesday last** there was a few shots and they retreated* back towards Winchester. Our wagons*** have not come on and we have not very much provisions. We was camped out in the open fields and it rained some little and began to get somewhat cold. The teams are passing all day wagon after wagon and soldiers and cavalry. There are a grate many Secesh in this parts
*Retreat: That’s where you get & stay gone, hoping they don’t chase you, & if they do, that they don’t catch up to you. In most battles the defeated were not chased as they retreated. They run the same distance in the same direction if they are chased, then resume battle. It was considered bad form– cowardly even– to retreat, or “retire” in a panicked manner.
**Ephraim means March 4.
***Wagons: https://www.pinterest.com/stevegettysburg53/civil-war-wagons/
Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the Civil War Edmund Wilson P. 112-113
Note: A great long sentence at the end of this excerpt from (then) NY Senator Seward’s speech, October 25, 1858. Lincoln will promote him to Secretary of State in 1861 (a position he holds until 1869):
“Shall I tell you what this collision means? They who think that it is accidental, unnecessary, the work of interested or fanatical agitators, and therefore ephemeral, mistake the case altogether. It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slaveholding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation. Either the cotton and rice-fields of South Carolina and the sugar plantations of Louisiana will ultimately be tilled by free labor, and Charleston and New Orleans become marts for legitimate merchandise alone, or else the rye-fields and wheat-fields of Massachusetts and New York must again be surrendered by their farmers to slave culture and to the production of slaves, and Boston and New York become once more markets for trade in the bodies and souls of men.’”
P. 408 Wilson notes:
“(It was true that, as Jefferson Davis insists in The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, Virginia had done her best as early as 1761 to prevent to importation of slaves but had been overruled by the Crown, and that South Carolina and Georgia had made similar unsuccessful attempts to avoid being inundated with Africans.)”
The Internal Enemy Alan Taylor P. 412
“The Virginians had woven themselves into a total system of beliefs and behavior enforced by their cultural convictions and material interests. That system sentences them to a terrible and recurrent fear.
Despite pretenses that miscegenation* occurred primarily between lower-class whites and slaves, many slaveholders and their growing slaves took slave mistresses or forced reluctant women and fathered mulatto children. Some of the black people interviewed in the 1930s traced their ancestry to a former master or related incidents from their own plantations with a ring of authenticity. Some reports from ex-slaves refer to the reaction of the slaveholder and his wife to the presence of her husband’s mulatto children. No pattern emerges. Many masters disposed of their own children in the slave trade, but others sold them to a friend who offered protection and kindness or looked after them on their own plantation. Many wives forced the sale of their husband’s children or treated them cruelly, but a surprising number showed them tenderness and played the kind of stepmother. Southern court records containing divorce suits in which slaves are mentioned, in effect, as corespondents suggest that meaningful affairs, if not common, were not rare.
P. 107
This ambivalence in the Big House often broke into its antagonistic components, with some white families experiencing only the slaves’ “loyalty” and others only their “desertion.” And for many whites the fact of freedom itself constituted a desertion. One planter in Georgia burned his slave cabins to the ground and expelled his people. He had no use for them any longer, he said, nor they for him. In 1871 a hysterical old white man “denounced, with bitter curses, his negroes, saying that they had abandoned him when set free and left him to starve in his old age, knowing as they did what he had intended to do for them [that is, to care for them] if he could have had his own way.”
P. 107-108
The “ingratitude” of the blacks. But then, we must try to understand that their condition opens them to temptation and error. Still, how could they do this to us? What about Cato—a favorite, wonderful at ingratiating himself? Why was he the one to stir up trouble among the slaves so much earlier than the bad characters among them? They are hateful. But we cannot hate them, for we are good Christians. And, they really still do love us. Of course they do—some of them. They must. They are confused. They will come to their senses. Some of the old affection remians. How are we supposed to live without it? They do love us, in their own irritating, childish, perverse way. The ungrateful wretches. What can they be thinking of? What is in their enigmatic heads? They should talk to us. We would understand. We have always understood them. Why not just talk to us? Just talk. Say something.
P. 154
The slaves disgust at the Yankees had another root. They did not only react to the abuses heaped upon themselves; they also reacted against the destruction of the plantations, which, however necessary as a war measure, often seemed to them wanton cruelty and evil. One ex-slave after another recalled with disgust the devastation wrought by Union troops, especially the burning of homes and the seizing of food supplies. Those plantations that the Union troops were burning happened to be their homes and those crops their food supply. The harsh measures applied by Sherman’s troops on their way to the sea and then north toward Virginia may be defende as necessary war measures, but the slaves found it difficult to perceive any connection between this destruction, no matter how necessary to the Union cause, and their own hopes for freedom and for land. They increasingly saw the plantations as their own property, and they took their razing personally. “Our Darkies,” said George Briggs, and ex-slave from South Carolina, “tried hard to be obedient to our master so dat we might obtain [keep] our pleasant home.’”
Note: General—should I become convinced the object of the government is to execute the wishes of the abolitionists, I pledge you my honor as a man and a soldier I would resign my commission and carry my sword to the other side—Ulysses S. Grant.
Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made Eugene D. Genovese P. 136-138
“The white trauma over the defection of favorite slaves and freedmen needs reconsideration in light of these expressions, for the self-deception had arisen less from fantasy than from an erroneous perception of something real. William Henry Holcombe of Natchez chatted with a group of slaves who were moving from Alabama to Texas; they had belonged to his cousin. “Some of the older Negroes,” he beamed, “remembered my father and mother and their six little boys and crowded up to shake hands with me.” Frank E. Steel wrote his family in Ohio from Mississippi: “I have never seen a family show more pleasure at the return of a long-absent parent than Major Redd’s servants did at his. Indeed he was obliged to keep ‘open house’ for two days after his arrival to allow the negroes an opportunity of ‘paying their devoirs’ to the family.”
The blacks’ sense of having white folks—of being part of a family, white and black—differed from that of the whites in emphasis, but the emphasis meant everything. Sir Charles Lyell asked a black woman in Georgia if she belonged to a white family of his acquaintance, and she replied “merrily.” “Yes, I belong to them, and they belong to me.” J.W. DuBose recalled after the war the attitude of the typical slave on his Alabama plantation: “He was proud of the beautiful cotton growing under his toil, proud of the majestic corn he cultivated, proud of the colts he broke to the bridle, of the fat hogs he slaughtered for ‘our’ people….It was to him, all ‘ours.’” During and after the war the children in the Sea Islands vied with each other for the privilege of calling the Yankee schoolteachers “my missus.” Willie Lee Rose, the distinguished historian, has put their attitude in perspective for us: “Seemingly the possessive pronoun worked both ways.” Thus, the freedmen sometimes genuinely welcomed their old masters back and offered every courtesy, but when they did, they expected strict respect for their newly acquired rights, especially to the land. All that had changed were the specifics of a system of reciprocal rights. But that was quite enough. And lest we conclude that their vision of an organic society precluded an appeal to violence, we might reflect on the “joke” going around Salisbury, Rhodesia, in 1960, which might easily have been going around Salisbury, North Carolina, a century earlier. Black riots had erupted in South Africa, and white Rhodesians had begun to shake. Mary Cable, wife of a prominent white man, reported:
“There was a joke going around the Salisbury tea tables about a houseboy and the white lady he worked for. Madam said to the houseboy, “Joseph, I suppose that if there were to be a Kaffir revolution here, you’d kill me.” “Oh, no, Madam,” said Joseph. “I’d go next door and kill Gilbert’s Madam. Then Gilbert would come over here and kill you.”
One does not kill a member of one’s own family. Still, what has to be done has to be done.
Not many slaves defined what had to be done as the murder of their white folks. One the eve of the war a portion of public opinion in the North expected the slaves to rise once hostilities began, and that which marked hope in the North marked fear in the South. When the time came, the hope and the fear proved groundless. The slaves’ response to the war ranged widely and cannot be subsumed under a simple formula. In a variety of ways they helped to bury the Confederate cause, but those ways were of their own choosing and did not follow the scenarios of either their friends or their enemies. The war provided their finest and their worst hour. They displayed superb qualities of self-discipline, decency, restraint, and toughness; they also proved unwilling or unable to take certain measures that, however dangerous, might have helped to avoid the catastrophe of the postwar years.”
Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow Henry Louis Gates, Jr. P. 146
“We know now, thanks to developments in DNA analysis, that one in three African American males carry a Y-DNA signature inherited from a direct white male ancestor (say, a great-great-great-grandfather) and that the average African American autosomal admixture is about 25 percent European. These startling results could only reflect the frequency of the rape of black women by white men during slavery.”
How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America Clint Smith P. 16-17
Note: Writing of family separations, Clint Smith quotes Henry Bibb from his 1849 book Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave, Written by Himself. Before he quotes Bibb, he describes an illustration Bibb includes:
“In his book, there is an astonishing illustration of a man in a suit standing atop a table in the middle of a room, looking down at the people beneath him. In his left hand is a gavel, his fingers wrapped around its neck, and in his right hand is a Black infant, the small child dangling by the wrist. A woman– who looks to be the child’s mother– is beneath the man, on her knees, arms outstretched in desperation, pleading for mercy from men who have sought to render themselves gods. There are several other white men in the frame, all wearing suits and brimmed hats. The one to whom the mother seems to be directing her pleas stands to the left of the table, with what looks like a cigarette between his lips. Another, at the edge of the frame, holds a whip above his head, its lash cracking in the air. Along the lower half of the frame are the enslaved. Some of them are in chains, and two of them are holding each other. One has his head buried in his hands.
Next to the illustration, Bibb writes in devastating detail:
“After the men were all sold they then sold the women and children. They ordered the first woman to lay down her child and mount the auction block; she refused to give up her little one and clung to it as long as she could, while the cruel lash was applied to her back for disobedience. She pleaded for mercy in the name of God. But the child was torn from the arms of its mother amid the most heart rending-shrieks [sic] from the mother and child on the one hand, and bitter oaths and cruel lashes from the tyrants on the other. Finally the poor little child was torn from the mother while she was sacrificed to the highest bidder. In this way the sale was carried on from begining [sic] to end.
There was each speculator with his hand-cuffs to bind his victims after the sale; and while they were doing their writings, the Christian portion of the slaves asked permission to kneel in prayer on the ground before they separated, which was granted. And while bathing each other with tears of sorrow on the verge of their final separation, their eloquent appeals in prayer to the Most High seemed to cause an unpleasant sensation upon the ears of their tyrants, who ordered them to rise and make ready their limbs for the caffles. And as they raised from their knees by the sound of the lash, and the rattle of the chains, in which they were soon taken off by their respective masters,– husbands from wives, and children from parents, never expecting to meet until the judgement of the great day.”
The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism Edward E. Baptist P. 238
“Of course, some women of African-American descent used their sexuality to create a little leverage for themselves. Nor was the shift toward a more “Victorian” way of thought the only reason why, for instance, white women felt anger and competition when their husbands had sex with enslaved women. And despite respectable condemnation of “concubinage,” the coercion of enslaved women continued in the nineteenth century. In one case, South Carolina Governor James Henry Hammond bough a woman and her daughter. The mother became his sexual partner. When her daughter reached twelve, he made the girl his victim as well. (He also molested his four white nieces, creating a scandal that ruined their marriage prospects. Its effects on him were temporary, however, and he was elected to the U.S. Senate.)”
Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life Barbara J. Fields, Karen Elise Fields P. 51-53 (Excerpts)
“In 1946, as thoughtful observers drew lessons from World War II, Montagu dissected the popular belief that underpinned race: the belief that blood is equivalent to heredity, determining the quality of the person and his or her social as well as biological status. He numbered such ideas “among the oldest surviving from the earliest days of mankind..’” ….The scientific concept “DNA” has slid into a spurious synonymy with “blood,” the ancient metaphor of kinship and descent.
When equated to “DNA,” “blood” resumes its prehistoric career. Only as metaphor may one speak of “black genes” and “white genes,” or of “white” and “black” blood. But once invoked, the metaphor launches a logical program of its own: If “blood” is synonymous with “race,” and “DNA” is synonymous with “blood,” then “DNA” is synonymous with “race.” Although spurious, that synonymy engages a powerful logic in its turn. Invoke a race, and the notion of a distinguishing blood stands to reason. In the folk lexicon, that is precisely what race means.”
Note: The absurd One Drop Rule is technically 1/32% of one’s blood, which points to fear at the taint of lily White blood. If your 3rd great grandfather, say, was Black, & you look lily White, the One Drop Rule says you’re still Black. One thirty-second. Of course, take the converse– one drop White blood– that somehow doesn’t automatically make one White. You can look it up on GED match, the DNA pie chart– MLDP WORLD 22– and get your continents in the genetic lottery, what migration your blood is from, blood, that trigger word, when the truth is we all have the same of it. Everyone is at most 50th cousins (or 16th, depending on what you read… then there’s Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon… this is actually the farthest-back person I can trace in any of my lines, ha: 
). It’s the genes that differ, this genotype-phenotype distinction cast beneath your skin determinative all your life originating in the human genome, that 0.1% difference in our DNA across races all in 3 billion pairs of code. Going back several thousand years, back to Denosivian, Hunter-Gatherer, these ancient zombie ancestors, & we couldn’t have gotten here but for them. Their DNA running through the chromosomes & allele frequencies that still lives, along with our 1st memories, the kaleidoscope of what all we carry, the epigenetic traces of ancestor-sorrow & intergenerational trauma we lug around that will be proven someday, the fifteen to twenty generations worth of over 400 years of slavery. The backdrop for this: It’s been just 3 generations free of Jim Crow. That’s it. 75% of the country’s existence has been Jim Crow, but worse. If you took all your DNA, straightened it out then put it end to end, it’s said it would stretch to Jupiter & back ten times. That’s a lot of time & space for ancestral memory to lie, burrow in, take hold, & pass on to further kin down the literal line of genetic mutations and natural selection.
Note: Don’t miss (on YouTube) the yearly reunion of presidential relatives at the Missouri Cherry Festival. Definitely check out this surreal genre of film showing living DNA, say, the Black 6th great-grandson of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Heming (Shannon LaNier) talking to the White great-great grandson of Jefferson Davis (Bertram Hayes-Davis) about vacationing together in NY. They’re cousins. Then there’s a video of Joan Rivers, 1989, in shoulder pads, introducing quite a few descendants sitting one beside the other up in the audience. There’s the great-great grandaughter of James Garfield, the great-great granddaughters of Teddy Roosevelt, the grandson of Grover Cleveland, the grandson of Howard Taft. Or the 4th great grandson of John Tyler, who looks like a lady’s man. See the tall 5th great-grandson of Thomas Jefferson, the swell-looking grandson of Grover Cleveland, & the nervous James Buchanan Henry the 4th. The show finishes with a lively rendition of America the Beautiful. You can see a cousin of Lincoln, who looks eerily similar when he shaves. In another video a Nixon & a Kennedy show up & shake hands. And there’s a descendant of Mary Todd Lincoln, comparing her picture on a book to his own face. But no Sherman kin made it so far to these gatherings, so he or she may be off blazing somewhere. Last, about Thomas Jefferson, to peruse his obnoxious writing on racial differences he supposed existed, see https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch15s28.html See LaNier’s posing next to a portrait of his old grandfather: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/drew-gardner-descendants-1892513
Note: Today, Congress will approve The Act Prohibiting the Return of Slaves: “All officers or persons in the military or naval service of the United States are prohibited from employing any of the forces under their respective commands for the purpose of returning fugitives from service or labor, who may have escaped from any persons to whom such service or labor is claimed to be due, and any officer who shall be found guilty by a court-martial of violating this article shall be dismissed from the service.” Note: The 1840 census was the last one to enumerate slaves in the State of Pennsylvania; the State stopped counting after 1840. In 1860 America, 1.26% of the population were slave owners, which amounted to 393,975 people, according to Duke University. Here is the 1860 census:
1860 Census.
Virginia
1,105,192 Free population
490,887 Slave population
1,596,079 Total
30.7% Slaves
South Carolina
301,271
402,541
703,812
57.2%
Mississippi
354,700
436,696
791,396
55.1%
Louisiana
376,280
333,010
709,290
47.0%
Alabama
529,164
435,132
964,296
45.1%
Florida
78,686
61,753
140,439
43.9%
Georgia
595,097
462,232
1,057,329
43.7%
North Carolina
661,586
331,081
992,667
33.4%
Texas
421,750
180,682
602,432
30.0%
Arkansas
324,323
111,104
435,427
25.5%
Tennessee
834,063
275,784
1,109,847
24.8%
Kentucky
930,223
225,490
1,155,713
19.5%
Maryland
599,846
87,188
687,034
12.7%
Missouri
1,067,352
114,965
1,182,317
9.7%
Delaware
110,420
1,798
112,218
1.6%
Totals:
8,289,953 Free population
3,950,343 Slave population
12,240,296 Total
32.2 Percentage of slaves
Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era 1829-1877 Walter A. McDougall P. 338
“The number of people owning twenty or more slaves reaches 46,274 in the census of 1860; the 383,637 who owned at least one slave represented about one-fourth of all white families in the South. Would plantations and farms have been more profitable if worked by free labor? Perhaps, but the 10 percent average return on investment in slaves drove the price of strong field hands from about $1,000 in the mid-1830s to nearly $2,000 by the mid-1850s. For all their prattle about paternalism and contempt for materialism, southern slave owners were capitalists.”
Note: Shocked, the White South was, at how fast slaves ran off when the North came down the pike, slaves risking life & limb to get behind Union lines even while battle was still raging. To escape, sometimes they’d run off with onions or herbs, tobacco or pine leaves rubbed on their soles to throw off the dogs.
Note: On this date in 1865, Jefferson Davis will sign a law allowing Black men to serve in the Confederate Army. He sure lives in the wrong house to throw that stone, & obviously it’s too late anyway.
Note: Michigan has apparently flipped from Zachariah Chandler’s time: wearing a Confederate flag mask on the floor of the State Senate in Michigan, in 2020, was Senator Zorn. @LOLGOP tweet “Is that a Confederate flag on your face or are you just accidentally endorsing slaughtering American soldiers in defense of chattel slavery?” Zorn dishonored the memory of 90,000 Michigan Civil War soldiers & the 17,753 whose bodies remain in cemeteries of the South. It’s weird that only White Republican politicians are continually “unaware of the significance” of the Confederate flag. E Pluribus Unum, initial motto of the United States but spell check doesn’t recognize it in 2020 like something that will end you if you try to grab it with bare hands. A real ahistoricism where everything is as it never was. That’s how the con works, that’s the long game, the too-strenuous denials counting on the vision of a black velvet Jackson canting it up to the stone fence again while Jeff decides how many stars to sew onto his flag.
Note: March 13, 1852: The first illustration of Uncle Sam appears in a political cartoon in the U.S. (New York Lantern, a weekly newspaper). https://historyonthisday.com/events/united-states/uncle-sam-debuts/
Note: A white flag, or a yellow one (used to indicate men trying to evacuate freshly wounded to a hospital) often meant nothing to the opposite side, with dead space between them & heat rising in the middle of no man’s land, the infinity that lies between. Men would lay days with their comrades helplessly looking on because the instant they’d try to crawl out to help, they too would get shot at. The space between the two sides was especially a no man’s land at night, land sealed in blood like a half-staff flag when it is one-half the distance between the top and bottom of the pole. Nowhere to go if the lay of the ground offers no good cover. The men at Fredericksburg, December 14, 1862, saw that night above them the Aurora Borealis, something to die to at least. See June 9 for further discussion about intentional shelling of medical personnel, & June 4 for Catton’s description of the 3 hour dig of a trench to reach a man 20 yards off.
Note: President Lincoln today issues the order forming the Army of the Potomac into corps. Erasmus D. Keyes is made commander of the IV Corps. The 110th is part of the 4th Brigade.
Below: “The Ides of March, 1883″ Edward John Poynter (1836-1919) Oil on canvas.
.
Jackson is on the retreat….
The Act Prohibiting the Return of Slaves:
Deuteronomy 23:15-16
“Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant that is escaped from his master unto thee.”
Slavers censored this & other lines out of the Bibles they handed slaves. 90% of the Old Testament excised, the new version had 232 chapters. If two versions occupy the same space, is one a trick of the eye?
Of course they called themselves Christians, of course they had everyone’s best interests in mind, of course they believed themselves the sole men on Earth who knew God’s will.
Galatians 3:28
“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Jesus Christ.”
GONE
Excised. Like a bad tooth.
Ephesians 6:5
“Servants, be obedient and them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ.”
SAVED
Of course it was. Just like they say you will be if only you obey these words. But all the churches & all the steeples, open the door out falls the Black peoples.
What they needed was an exorcist.
“…shake the dust off your feet when you leave, as a testimony against them.” Mark 6:11
Shake it off, the English Justification Narratives shaped like the bruise a shotgun kicks into your shoulder, the twisting tracks, scalloped edges of a blood trail visible from West African coastal plains all the way to the north lawn of the White House. The fresh remains, consomme-colored. The viscera of it all, the soaked-through viscera not mistaken for anything else. Such Euro-treasures, physical objects you can spec in museums, but not the boats. The ones that don’t show up in the African Slave Ship Database where you should be able to look up thousands of voyages. But there’s thousands not there, not known, phantom ships, just gone ghost ships. Because they sank. Because they mutinied. You can see the slave manifests; there is no arrival. No port listed. Just the one they embarked from. We only know they were in the Atlantic. They were in the Atlantic. They were. And they were trailed by sharks who learned fresh meat comes over the sides. Sharks would trail a ship a thousand miles like a swim to 7-11. 350 years= 36,000 slave ships. The lost ships, the missing records, the Lost Cause.
Note: Some say the last slave ship to arrive on U.S. shores was a two-masted schooner 86 feet long that landed in 1860 called the Clotilda. It had 110-160 captives. Kidnapped by an African King to sell into slavery, Matilda McCrear, age 2, was on the Clotilda (trip took 70 days). She lived to 82, died in 1940. The ship was burned then sunk in the Mobile River in Alabama (to conceal the trip had occurred, because Congress banned the importation of slaves in 1808). Descendants of the Clotilda founded Africatown in Alabama. In April of 2018, the first pieces were pulled out of the water. See The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning, by Ben Raines (2022). Also, The Last Slave Ships: New York and the End of the Middle Passage, by John Harris (2020).
Note too: In 2000, the state became the last in the Union to overturn its ban on interracial weddings; 40% Alabamans voted against the overturn.
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