Day 28. March 28, 1862.
28
War had come to wipe out this effete race….
March Friday 28 1862
Quite cool this morning. I got up and found this a very pleasant morning. It was a very pleasant morning for the time of year. I was about in the camp and I was not very well today. Col [illeg.] Crowther Capt Marshall Lieut [illeg. looks like Glovet] and myself went out to the old battleground on horseback. We saw how the trees was cut up awfully and looked like there was a hard position to take but our forces routed them. They had 11,000 and 15,000 cavalry we had 6000 soldiers and 800 cavalry and 24 pieces of cannon they had 28 pieces of cannon we captured 2 cannon 4 caison
Civil War Weather in Virginia Robert K. Krick P. 48
“7a.m. 30; 2p.m. 36; 9p.m. 24. High wind 2 till sundown.”
The Shenandoah Campaign of 1862 Edited by Gary W. Gallagher P. 51
“After Kernstown and continuing through to the final week in May, Federal plans in the Valley region became ill defined or ill considered or both. Confusion marked the operations of Banks and Frémont. Two Federal forces operated in western Virginia, sometimes less than fifty miles apart, yet neither was instructed or encouraged to cooperate with the other. Banks reported to the commander of the Army of the Potomac, and sought to execute his designs. Frémont* reported directly to the War Department. One of these forces had begun on the defensive before its mission had been switched to an offensive pursuit of Jackson’s little force. It was to finish its work as quickly as possible and then move elsewhere. The other force operated on the offensive as well but with a different and entirely unrelated goal, and that, too, was someplace other than the Shenandoah. As March closed, then, the Federals in the Valley region were on divergent courses.”
A Virginia Yankee in the Civil War The Diaries of David Hunter Strother David Hunter Strother P. 22
“MARCH 28, FRIDAY.—Bright and warm. . . . After tea General Banks paid Colonel Brodhead and myself a social visit. He talked more freely than I ever heard him. I have never heard anyone whose views agree more exactly with my views. He says both sections have been governed by extremists who have carried their points because of the moral cowardice of the people, or rather the mass of office seekers who represent the people. He thinks, as I have always thought, that the Kansas-Nebraska Bill* and the repealing of the Missouri Compromise line was the fatal act that opened the Civil War. He says that all parties disapproved of it, but that political cowardice, which was the leading characteristic of our past government, induced men to support it who foresaw its dangerous tendencies.
Speaking of Virginia, he characterized our late public men as a very inferior set, both in manners and intellect, whiskey-drinking being the common ground on which they all met. I have myself considered the Old Virginia people as a decadent race. They have certainly gone down in manners, morals, and mental capacity. There seems to be nothing left of their traditional greatness but a senseless pride and a certain mixture of dignity and suavity of manner, the intelligence of a once great and magnanimous people. It was high time that War had come to wipe out this effete race and give this splendid country to a more active and progressive generation. That this will be the final result of the war, I do not doubt.”
*Kansas-Nebraska Bill: “Again and again one must repeat that the unhappy Pandora box of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill was not breakdown of, but failure to use, the federal democratic process.” Lincoln and Prevention of War: Which ‘Blundering Generation’? What ‘Irrespressible Conflict’? An Interpretation of the Lincolnian View 1953 Ralph G. Lindstrom P. 19
Alabama’s Muscogee Herald, in 1856:
“Free society! We sicken at the name. What is it but a conglomeration of greasy mechanics, filthy operatives, small-fisted farmers, and moon-struck theorists. All the northern, and especially the New England states, are devoid of society fitted for well-bred gentlemen. The prevailing class one meets with is that of mechanics struggling to be genteel, and small farmers who do their own drudgery, and yet are hardly fit for association with a southern gentleman’s body servant. This is your free society which Northern hordes are trying to extend into Kansas.”
The Field of Blood: Violence In Congress and the Civil War Joanne Freeman P. 265
“Quoting a claims investigator on the “destruction of the Lawrence (Kansas) Herald of Freedom, witnesses described a band of roughly seventy armed men riding from the scene waving bayoneted books above their heads as war trophies’.”
Note: In 1837-38, the House received roughly 130,200 petitions protesting against slavery in the District of Columbia, 32,000 petitions against the gag rule, 21,200 petitions against slavery in the territories, 23,160 petitions against the slave trade, and 22,160 petitions against the new slave states. Note: The Southern Strategy, aka divide & conquer; Bill Moyers relays a conversation with Lyndon B. Johnson:
“We were in Tennessee. During the motorcade, he spotted some ugly racial epithets scrawled on signs. Late that night in the hotel, when the local dignitaries had finished the last bottles of bourban and branch water and departed, he started talking about those signs. “I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it,” he said. “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.’”
Note: The quick ricochet: It’s a tripwire, it’s a code, who they are at least not. U.S. poverty rate in 2021? 13.4%. And you know that line is way too low to begin with. When President Johnson signed the Poverty Act in 1964, the “Great Society” rate was roughly 22.2%.
The Mind of the South W. J. Cash (1941) P. 67
There you have it then. Seeing always from within the frame of Southern unity, the common white, as a manner of course, gave eager credence to and took pride in the legend of aristocracy which was so valuable to the defense of the land. He went farther, in fact, and, by an easy psychological process which is in evidence wherever men group themselves about captains, pretty completely assimilated his own ego to the latter’s—felt his planter neighbor’s new splendor as being in some fashion his also.
His participation in the legend went even further yet. Though nothing is more certain than their innocence of conscious duplicity, one who did not know them might have said that these planter captains of his were studying with Machiavellian cunning to dazzle and manipulate him. For continually, from every stump, platform, and editorial sanctum, they gave him on the one hand the Yankee—as cowardly, avaricious, boorish, half Pantaloon and half Shylock—and on the other the Southerner—as polished, brave, generous, magnificent, wholly the stately aristocrat, fit to cow a dozen Yankees with the power of his eye and a cane—gave him these with the delicate implication that this Southerner was somehow any Southerner at random.”
A YANKEE ANTIQUE.
“March 27, 1865.—Sergeant Calvin F. Harlowe, company C, 29th Massachusetts, 3d brigade, 1st division, Ninth corps—a mark’d sample of heroism and death, (some may say bravado, but I say heroism, of grandest, oldest order)—in the late attack by the rebel troops, and temporary capture by them, of fort Steadman, at night. The fort was surprised at dead of night. Suddenly awaken’d from their sleep, and rushing from their tents, Harlowe, with others, found himself in the hands of the secesh—they demanded his surrender—he answer’d, Never while I live. (Of course it was useless. The others surrender’d; the odds were too great.) Again he was ask’d to yield, this time by a rebel captain. Though surrounded, and quite calm, he again refused, call’d sternly to his comrades to fight on, and himself attempted to do so. The rebel captain then shot him—but at the same instant he shot the captain. Both fell together mortally wounded. Harlowe died almost instantly. The rebels were driven out in a very short time. The body was buried next day, but soon taken up and sent home, (Plymouth county, Mass.) Harlowe was only 22 years of age—was a tall, slim, dark-hair’d blue-eyed young man—had come out originally with the 29th; and that is the way he met his death, after four years’ campaign. He was in the Seven Days fight before Richmond, in second Bull Run, Antietam, first Fredericksburgh, Jackson, Wilderness, and the campaigns following—was as good a soldier as ever wore the blue, and every old officer in the regiment will bear that testimony. Though so young, and in a common rank, he had a spirit as resolute and brave as any hero in the books, ancient or modern—It was too great to say the words “I surrender”—and so he died. (When I think of such things, knowing them well, all the vast and complicated events of the war, on which history dwells and makes its volumes, fall aside, and for the moment at any rate I see nothing but young Calvin Harlowe’s figure in the night, disdaining to surrender.)” Whitman Poetry and Prose Walt Whitman Penguin Putnam Inc. P. 762-763
**Burnside had just taken over for McClellan, on 11/9/62, & was even more malignantly incompetent. 13K Federal casualties, so many that the last wounded didn’t even make it to D.C. hospitals until month’s end. There was no transport. It was all Burnside’s fault he made the men repeatedly attack. He kept ordering them. Rebels only lost 5k. 114,000 North against 72k South. Cold Harbor was second only to Marye’s Heights at Fredericksburg.
***Like at the end of 1862, which saw both sides “stalled” same as the year began, Antietam was a draw, but with 12,000 casualties to show for it and the two armies in basically the same position as at the start of the day. Devastating.
****Historians have naming rights they bestow upon themselves. Now professional historians call truth “interpretation.” A set of White men wander off in search of a more populist rendition, the carnival version of the story, a Ken-Burnsesque palatable storyline with an incessant cicada-whiny violin, cicada shrill trill like a strange regional dialect, a sickly sentimentalism that was not a stand-in for accurate historical analysis. At the 2016 Cross Lecture Series, minute 15:30, Gary W. Gallagher: “I hear the Ashokan Farewell one more time, I always feel like going out and kicking a cat or something but anyway….” But in all truth, before Shelby Foote uses a dip pen on it– 2,968 pages worth over the course of 20 years– the war was on the world’s back burner (if you count ‘popular culture’ as the world, though). Mississippi lurked just 14 miles from Foote’s house the whole time he wrote the million plus words. He was born a half century after the war ended. Foote is much criticized for, among other things, not being big on footnotes (see Foote interview April 1); to that, I quote Solnit:
Men Explain Things to Me Rebecca Solnit P. 87-88
“Nonfiction has crept closer to fiction in our time in ways that are not flattering to fiction, in part because too many writers cannot come to terms with the ways in which the past, like the future, is dark. There is so much we don’t know, and to write truthfully about a life, your own or your mother’s, or a celebrated figure’s, an event, a crisis, another culture is to engage repeatedly with those patches of darkness, those nights of history, those places of unknowing. They tell us that there are limits to knowledge, that there are essentially mysteries, starting with the notion that we know just what someone thought or felt in the absence of exact information.
Often enough, we don’t know such things even when it comes to ourselves, let alone someone who perished in an epoch whose very textures and reflexes were unlike ours. Filling in the blanks replaces the truth that we don’t entirely know with the false sense that we do. We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don’t. Sometimes I think these pretenses at authoritative knowledge are failures of language: the language of bold assertion is simpler, less taxing, than the language of nuance and ambiguity and speculation.”
Note: They knew all the ways a word can go, every last Lost Cause historian over the centuries. WEB DuBois, 1939:
“I have the greatest contempt for historians who try to disguise and distort history in order to make it suitable for afternoon teas.”
Or, Michel Rolph Trouillot:“The fact that history is also produced outside of academia has largely been ignored in theories of history.”
Or, James Baldwin:
“The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.”
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went out to the old battleground on horseback….
It’s in Ordinances. It’s in them, their Constitutions, the Southern politician’s speeches, the Declarations of Causes. Like massive blood evidence. Texas has one. Mississippi has one. They all have one. They fought for exactly what they said they fought for. So in that way, the Real War is right in those books. Where else is truth? Even if it’s one sentence long. Which it is. In very clear English. From Alexander Stephens’ Cornerstone Speech March 21, 1861: “African slavery as it exists among us– the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.” “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the White man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.”
In the same paragraph is thus: “One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the anti-slavery fanatics.”
That’s precious.
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