I cover all

It seems appropriate that somebody should mark the 160^th Anniversary of the surrender of Robert E. Lee to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House. I look around me at the media and I see nothing—I mean to say, bupkis—so I guess that somebody is me.

Perhaps the DOGiE brochachos/Proud Boys/Three Percenters crowd are deep in denial about the event. And perhaps that’s because not only did it represent the final loss of the Army of Northern Virginia and a big win by the Army of the Potomac, but because after Lee surrendered, so did every other Confederate general across the country.

It ended the War Between the States, and the Confederacy absolutely, positively, unquestionably lost. And this is something the White Christian nationalist lot really does not like to acknowledge.

Not for nothing are they called the Lost Cause. (Hint: because they lost.)

The pity is that Abraham Lincoln let the 11 Confederate states back into the Union without some kind of thorough de-Nazification process. Well—okay, not his fault, really, him having been assassinated six days after the Appomattox surrender by one of those sore loser Lost Causers. And yes—Congress did pass the Fourteenth Amendment, which does provide for banning insurrectionists from serving in elected federal office, but that doesn’t appear to have stuck; viz: the current occupant of the White House, several Senators and a whole flock of Representatives.

(The Fourteenth also guarantees birthright citizenship, which the insurrectionists are currently riding over in APCs. It appears that it’s one thing to pass laws and an entirely different thing to follow and enforce them. The Constitution these days being more of a guideline or a suggestion than the actual foundation of our civil society.)

So it turns out that that war didn’t actually end 160 years ago, or at least that the ideals of the Confederates—White, male supremacy floating on a completely unsustainable economy--have re-emerged in recent years like zombies. SECDEF Pete Hegseth (who might possibly be able to drink more than Grant, although I'm betting the latter would be able to get up from the table while Petey would be under it) is busy texting war plans to random reporters and renaming military bases after Confederate (losing) generals. They're also rewriting history to blot out things like slavery and anyone non-White who accomplished anything. Ergo silence on this anniversary. So we have to do it all over again, somehow.

In the meantime, for our National Poetry Month entry I’m giving you Twentieth Century American poet Carl Sandburg’s take on the endgame of all wars. Happy 160^th, y’all!

“The Grass”

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work—
                                          I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:

                                          What place is this?
                                          Where are we now?

                                          I am the grass.
                                          Let me work.

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Resistance moon: Children, do you want your freedom?

The city of New Orleans started taking down public monuments to the Confederacy this week. In the night. With the workmen wearing flak jackets and helmets on account of death threats.

Yes—the people who have been strutting about since November, calling the majority of Americans snowflakes, do not see the irony in gloating, “We won, get over it,” while at the same time screaming about the sacrilege of moving on from The Woah. Perhaps they think the statute of limitations for losing bigly—including unconditional surrender—expired after 150 years?

Not for nothing is it called The Lost Cause.

One of the biggest cod-Confederates I’ve seen lately is a politician right here in the Old Dominion, who’s been tweeting up a storm in emulation of his obvious hero, the Kleptocrat, stamping his feet and moaning about how this is desecration of our glorious heritage, etc., etc., etc.

Here’s what you need to know about Corey Stewart: he’s running for governor of Virginia, and he’s from that bastion of the Old South, Duluth. Minnesota. They used to call his kind carpetbaggers.

So my entry for today is not strictly a poem, but it is intertwined with the legacy that Stewart and his ilk are so fixated on honoring and preserving: slavery. (And its modern-day manifestation: racism.) Using the term Jacob’s ladder to refer to the connection between heaven and earth goes back to…Jacob, in the Bible. Jacob dreamt of a ladder that went all the way to heaven, with angels and everything. In Christianity, Jacob’s ladder is a metaphor for Christ, who bridges humanity and the godhead.

The spiritual “Jacob’s Ladder” dates to at least 1825, and was sung by slaves, who for generations could only dream of an escape from bondage. It’s in the form of call and response, which is useful for participation by unlettered congregations, as well as for ad libbing new sentiments. Truly—as the spirit moves you, you bring your brothers and sisters along.

American race-based human chattel slavery began right here in the Old Dominion in 1619. When the Lost Causers these days wave the Confederate flag around and bellow “states’ rights”, keep in mind that the “right” they were concerned about 160 years ago was the one to extend slavery into the new territories and thus maintain political power in Congress. Consider all those rebel armies the 1860s version of lobbyists, if you like. Southerners were afraid that if new states were admitted to the Union as free states, they’d be outvoted in Congress, as indeed they would be. So it was all about power—keeping it, and wielding it over other humans based on skin color.

For nearly 250 years, until the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified in 1865, slaves sang “Jacob’s Ladder” as an expression of faith and hope, and to draw the kind of strength it takes to persevere for that length of time. It’s served that purpose ever since, through Reconstruction, through the KKK, through the Depression, through the Civil Rights movement… And it still has value now, in the Gauleiter era.

One of my favorite versions is the one by Sweet Honey in the Rock that was used in Ken Burns’ seminal documentary The Civil War more than 25 years ago. 

So no “poet” today; perhaps not even a poem. But, as resistance goes, this is it, baby.

Gratitude Monday: Dog days

You know you’re in Northern Virginia when you get out of your air conditioned car any time during daylight hours and your glasses fog up. It’s that combination of temperatures above 90 degrees and humidity that rivals the Amazon. (This means that about a month ago I reconciled myself to the fact that I was going to have a bad hair day that lasts through mid-September.)

Saturday I returned a book to the library around 0800, and from the moment I got out of the car, walked ten yards to dump it in the book return slot and then got back into the car, I was functionally blind.

There’s also that sense that every time you leave an air conditioned building you feel like you’ve walked into a blast furnace, and it’s sucking the air right out of your lungs. On days like these I wonder at the fortitude of men who met in battle within an hour’s drive of here in July, August and September. Their uniforms were wool, their rifles and packs were heavy and the only water they had was what they carried in their canteens.

Every time I’ve walked the fields of Manassas and Sharpsburg I’ve thought about them, wondering how they managed to form ranks, much less fight for hours, in that heat and humidity. It reminds me that what we enjoy today has been paid for over and over across the years.

It makes me grateful for clean water coming from the taps; for air conditioning in offices, residences and transportation; for peace in my neighborhood; for opticians; for cotton clothing; for construction workers, first responders, crossing guards, and everyone who does their job out in this God-awful heat. And for the prospect of fall. 

High-water mark of the Confederacy

The first day of the Somme, bloodiest day in British military history, commenced a mere 53 years after another watershed battle, the bloodiest in the history of the United States. July seems to attract cataclysms.

In the summer of 1863, Robert E. Lee was taking the war into the North. Up until June of that year, nothing significant had happened in the East above the Mason-Dixon line. Lee wanted to change that for a number of reasons.

For one, all the slogging around Virginia was wreaking havoc on vital agriculture. He hoped that a swoop through Pennsylvania might give the Old Dominion a rest. At the same time, in the time-honored custom of armies everywhere, he expected to pick up a few things to keep the Army of Northern Virginia going. (There was a shoe factory in nearby Chambersburg, for example.)

Finally, he hoped to convince Northern pols that fighting to keep the South in the union wasn’t an economically or politically viable proposition. Invading Harrisburg or even Philadelphia would give a lot of people pause to think.

And from his experiences with the Army of the Potomac and its various commanders, he reckoned he had a reasonable chance of making that happen.

Well, except he was operating under a couple of handicaps: his most gifted general, Thomas J. Jackson (known as Stonewall from his performance at the first battle of Manassas), had died of wounds inflicted by his own troops at Chancellorsville in May. Lee had considered Jackson his right arm and it was a grievous loss.

The second drawback was that his cavalry commander, J.E.B. Stuart (James Ewell Brown, if you’re asking) had basically disappeared up his own behind. One of the main functions of cavalry was to gather intelligence about the enemy’s movements. After making big splashes in the Peninsula and Maryland campaigns of 1862 by dashing around the Army of the Potomac, he separated his unit from Lee’s main force in late June, leaving Lee with no reliable data on the Army of the Potomac’s whereabouts.

Lee found them, under the command of George G. Meade (of whom it might be said that at least he wasn’t Joe Hooker. Or George B. McClellan. Or Ambrose Burnside), at Gettysburg, a small town with a theological seminary and interesting topography, on 1 July.

The two armies maneuvered some and fought for three days in July heat that you cannot imagine unless you’ve experienced it. Thanks to the actions of cavalry Brigadier General John Buford at the first meeting, Union forces held the high ground, but it can’t have felt like much of an advantage to those who were there.

To a certain extent fighting blindly (Stuart showed up on 2 July, but didn’t have much in the way of intel to share), Lee issued uncharacteristically ambiguous orders to Lt. General James Longstreet on the 2^nd, and then sent Maj. General George Pickett’s division up Cemetery Ridge on the 3^rd, resulting in utter carnage.

(In Ken Burns’ seminal documentary, The Civil War, historian Shelby Foote made a comment on Pickett’s charge that has stuck with me. It was something to the effect that, if he’d been a soldier given the order to cross that open space and run up the hill in the face of massed Yankee fire, he’d have said, “Lieutenant—I don’t think so.” That comment came back to me when I stood at Colleville-sur-Mer and looked down from the cliff onto Omaha Beach. I don’t know how either the Georgians or the GIs of the 29^th Infantry Division took those steps.)

After three days of this, the armies faced each other in heavy rain on the 4^th; then Lee withdrew. Meade did not pursue. The Union held the ground, but the Army of Northern Virginia (what was left of it) was able to return to Virginia and regroup.

Up until then, Lee had believed in the invincibility of his army—he’d asked it to do impossible things so many times, and it had. Not this time. At Gettysburg, he was heard to repeat, “It is all my fault.”

Combined with the surrender on 4 July of Vicksburg to U.S. Grant (breaking the lines of communication for the Confederacy in the West), Gettysburg basically was the point at which it became clear that the North was never going to quit, and the South was never going to win.

But the war would continue for another 22 months, with Grant taking command of the Army of the Potomac steadily grinding down Lee’s armies, and Sherman implementing the concept of total war through Georgia and the Carolinas.

Gettysburg was the tipping point, 153 years ago today.

Unalienable Rights

Last week a friend was cleaning out her study, preparatory to repainting and –carpeting it, and she came across a box o’ letters and cards. Naturally she had to sit down and read them—as you do. One of them was an email I’d sent round in 2002, which she had printed out and saved, because for her it struck to the heart of the Independence Day matter.

I’d completely forgotten about it—this was six years BP (before Parallax Views), after all. But it seems appropriate, in light of some recent events, to revisit these thoughts. So, I’m going to recycle, with some tweaks.

*    *    *    *

It’s the Fourth of July, and most of you have the day off and are involved in family activities, acts of home improvement and incineration of various food items. But since my improvement efforts are limited to the not inconsiderable task of decluttering, and I am forbidden by state and local law from handling flammable substances, I’m spending some time thinking about this holiday. Here are my thoughts:

In June 2002 I made a trip to Gettysburg and Valley Forge. It had been years since I’d last visited the former and I’d never been to the latter, so I decided it was time to see both places…to contemplate someone else’s spilt blood for a change, but also to refresh my intellect with some more visceral stimuli. (I may need to rethink the idea of trying to escape depression by visiting battlefields; but I have to say that it’s not a bad thing to be reminded that, no matter how dreadful our life might seem at any given time now, it was made possible by the sacrifices of generations of men and women who thought—no, who believed—that the idea of the United States was worth a lot more than most of us ever consider today.

At Valley Forge, because it’s so peaceful now, and the weather was so gorgeous, I had to push my imagination to picture what those men (yes—and women) endured all those years ago. But the winter of 1777-78 was as harsh and miserable climatically as the Continental Congress was mean with supplies. The men encamped there for six months faced elements of the finest army then known just a few miles away, fat and happy in Philadelphia, while they huddled in tents and log cabins and tried to ignore hunger pangs by staying busy mending gear or being drilled by imported professional soldiers.

More than anything, I think, those six months represented an act of faith. How could they possibly have found logical reasons to support the idea that from those wretched conditions, and with those few, hungry, poorly-equipped citizen-soldiers, they’d be able to find a way to defeat an imperial force at the height of its power?

It was a very bleak winter indeed for those men camped on those slopes that are now green with the exuberance of summer. I wondered how the commanders stopped the desertions, when it must have been so easy for the individual soldier—unpaid, underfed and ill-clothed—to just disappear in the night. From where I was standing, it looked like they had very little to keep them in Valley Forge, and plenty to draw them anywhere else. But, for the most part, they stayed. They trained. They learned how to act in contravention of their natural instincts as pioneering types who valued the interests of the individual above all; they banded together to face forces in superior numbers and with superior arms, and to keep coming back again and again even when they lost battles.

(And they actually had very few victories. The astonishing thing I recall from my embarrassingly brief studies of our rebellion against Mother England is how Washington managed to win the war without ever really winning any decisive battles until Yorktown—time after time, he would nip at the British heels, or leave the enemy holding the ground, but always manage to stay in the game…until the French joined forces with us and until Parliament decided that they were tired of the American sinkhole. Pity we didn’t study that model as we began wading into the big Muddy 55 years ago…)

The name of the place is certainly apt, for it was the forge of the Continental Army that in turn transformed the Declaration of Independence into the reality of the United States. (Back in November 2000, my colleagues in the UK took great glee in sending me that “Notice of Revocation of Independence.” You know—the one that starts out, “In the light of your failure to elect a President of the USA and thus to govern yourselves, we hereby give notice of the revocation of your independence, effective today.” And goes on to trash our beer, our cars and our sports. After laughing jovially [the first couple of times] and politely [the next seven times] I finally had to draw the line. I made a point-by-point rebuttal that concluded with the irrefutable reminder that no one, and certainly no Brit, could revoke our independence because it wasn’t GIVEN to us, we took it by force of arms. That seemed to dampen the hilarity.)

Think about it: the challenge of creating a citizen army of farmers, merchants, lawyers, tailors, doctors, teachers. Men who struggled with the idea of breaking away from Mother England; whose only substitute loyalty for the King was to their individual colony, being forged into a single fighting force that would eventually send packing the imperial forces of the most powerful nation then on earth. That deceptively peaceful valley was where that citizen army—the first ever—was created: forged and tempered, like weapons-grade steel.

A hundred miles west and nearly 90 years later, the ground of Gettysburg was more actively baptized in blood than that of Valley Forge. Three days in July, in the ghastly heat of a mid-Atlantic summer, with the soldiers on both sides wearing woolen uniforms and carrying 60-pound packs; two armies of Americans making use of all the technology and “best practice” at their disposal to destroy one another. The term “killing ground” comes to mind as you pass through the various battle sites and landmarks—the Lutheran seminary, Cemetery Hill, Big Round Top. So many names of places; so many more names of the dead left there. At one area near Little Round Top, they reported that you could walk across the entire field without your boots ever touching the ground, it was so thick with corpses.

Two armies, 75,000 in grey and butternut brown, 93,000 in blue, descending on a town of a few hundred. It must have seemed like Armageddon to the residents. Summer stillness broken by the sounds of marching infantry, artillery carriages being positioned, skirmishers testing the opposition. Then Hell came to town.

I was once shooting (photography) the commissioning of a new cruiser for the Navy. When they fired the ceremonial cannon I popped a contact lens. I cannot imagine the unholy din of the mechanics (field guns, rifles) mixed with the more chilling screams of wounded and dying men and horses. For three days, in heat like today, the two armies fought themselves to exhaustion. Over the issue of whether national sovereignty can be broken by its component parts through secession.

In my own family there were men who fought on both sides of that war. Men who believed that the individual states should shape the destinies of their citizens (including the practice of owning other humans) and men who believed that the Union, once formed, was indivisible, and that chattel slavery is an abomination to God and man.

Now, when you get past the carnage of those three days in Gettysburg (the costliest battle ever fought on the North American continent, and the one that broke the back of Confederate hopes), and the two more years it took for Grant and Sherman to finish the job, here’s the remarkable thing about that war: when it finally ended, and the cannons were spiked and the men returned home, the nation reunited and life resumed with a genuine peace. Even with an assassinated President being replaced by a man of considerably lower abilities, and even with the 30-odd years of Reconstruction (not a stellar period in our history), the people of the South returned to full citizenship, their representatives clogging up Congress to this day.

And this brings me to the point of this, well, rather lengthy ramble, which is the whole point of this holiday. I.e., the anniversary of the founding of this nation. Nearly 240 years ago, representatives of the thirteen colonies got together and decided that the time had come to put up or shut up. They tasked the gentleman from Virginia with putting into words both their grievances with Mother England, and their aspirations for a new sort of nation-state. Here’s what he said:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. –That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

What a concept! And it ends just as strongly as it begins:

“We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by the Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

Lives, fortunes and honor were on the line at Valley Forge, and again at Gettysburg. The ideals that are enumerated in the Declaration (and codified in the Constitution) so clearly are the same ones that still make the United States the beacon of hope throughout the world. Ideals that caused people for generation after generation to leave homes and families, risk dangerous ocean and land journeys to come to places like Massachusetts, Louisiana, Wisconsin or Oregon to begin new lives. Catholics, Old Believers, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, Baptists, atheists; and all the colors that skins can come in. Many brought nothing with them but their dreams and their willingness to work long hours come day, go day, year after year to build a new life here—a life they could not possibly have imagined in their countries of origin. They didn’t always have such an easy time, and they didn’t always find a warm welcome, but they came, they worked and they created something really unimaginable in any other country on earth.

One difference I noticed immediately on my arrival in the UK for an ex-pat assighment was the underlying principle that shapes all actions, both business and personal there. The Old Country still operates on the premise that the economic and social conditions into which you are born are your basic lot in life. Efforts at bettering your status through education, industriousness and innovative thinking bring the risk of disapproval in a number of ways. (Not in every case, but most of them) The class system is alive and well, and oddly, some of the most ardent proponents are from the working and middle classes. I actually heard the expression “She has ideas above her station” used by more than one of my contemporaries. Needless to say, my gob was smacked, and I found it hard to keep my eyeballs from bugging so far out of my face that they bounced off the walls.

In contrast, the idea that has permeated American society from the get-go is the conviction that, no matter what your starting point, if you work hard enough, if you come up with a more effective way of doing things, if you play a new angle, you can make life better. If not for yourself, then for your children. Those unalienable rights: Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That hope brought some of my family to the East Coast in the early years of the 17^th Century, and the most recent additions to the West Coast at the end of the 19^th. It made some of them take that trans-continental journey without benefit of the internal combustion engine or air conditioning. It induced others to put on those woolen uniforms and 60-pound packs and risk everything in support of that promise: Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

It’s also what leads some individuals to fly commercial aircraft into buildings where people are working to fulfill that dream.

I have to say that, with all our flaws, that ideal still prevails. Think about it—four years of blood-soaked warfare that cost more than 500,000 American casualties amidst the greatest bitterness and rancor imaginable, and we managed to literally pull ourselves together again pretty quickly, sublimating the regional differences to professional sports rivalries. Contrast this with what’s gone on in Ulster, the Balkans or the Middle East. Even with the khaloshes of the 2000 presidential election, and whatever your opinion of W., it is a tribute to the Founding Fathers that the government they crafted didn’t collapse that November, nor did the military step in to “save the day”. We get to be the source of amusement for the entire world, the press goes wild for a couple of months, that big-haired broad gets a shot at the Florida governorship (remember her?), and life goes on.

Contrast that with post-Perestroika Moscow in the early 90s. Remember those tanks outside the Duma building?

What the Founding Fathers put together back in the days when Mozart was composing still works. Despite our abysmal history of racism, our reprehensible record of national conquest, our lamentable policy of child impoverishment and the appalling behavior of our greedy corporate executives, people from all over the world are still lining up to leave everything and risk all for the chance at Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Millions over the past four hundred years have come to these shores to build a decent life for themselves and their families. In the course of this individual pursuit they built an economy that, for all its periodic woes, still manages some amazing feats. Among other things, that economy and our belief in the improvement of the condition of man enabled us 70 years ago to spend billions blasting most of Western Europe back to the Stone Age to combat Nazism, and then spend billions more rebuilding the infrastructure and economies of those same countries. Where else in history will you find that kind of thing?

So, listen, folks. I’d just like you to think about how this all came about. The pledges of life, fortune and honor to the ideal that Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness are unalienable rights. The frozen faith of Valley Forge, the horror of Gettysburg. The men and women over the past few centuries who, in the words of Lincoln, “gave the last full measure of devotion” for that ideal.

I know we have miles to go (or possibly kilometers, if we want to join most of the world). But we’ve already come so far.

Sick and tired of fighting

On 26 April 1865, General William Tecumseh Sherman ended the campaign that had taken him from Tennessee through Georgia and South Carolina at a small farm near Durham, North Carolina, when he accepted the surrender of Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston.

The two opposing generals had exchanged communications for a week or so. Following Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox, Johnston pretty much knew the game was up. Also, Sherman had been pursuing him through all terrains, even constructing corduroy roads to get through the Salkehatchie swamps to the tune of twelve miles per day. You’re not going to get away from someone like that, even if you’ve got full strength and a secure supply chain, which Johnston did not.

Although one of the all-time proponents of what we’ve come to call total war (he referred to it as “hard war”), when he knew he’d won, Sherman had no interest in exacting punitive terms. In fact, he proposed generous conditions both politically and militarily, as he’d heard Lincoln express. But Lincoln was dead, and President Andrew Johnson was in a Radical Republican chokehold, so Sherman had to retract his offer.

He was still fighting with Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton (who was pretty much the poster boy for Radical politics) about the legitimacy of his actions, when Johnston accepted the purely military terms, and the surrender was given on 26 April. The two armies could go home. The following month, Sherman wrote:

“I confess, without shame, I am sick and tired of fighting—its glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentations of distant families, appealing to me for sons, husbands and fathers…tis only those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shriek and groans of the wounded and lacerated…that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation.”

Here are a couple of things about this event:

When Sherman died in February 1891, Johnston served as a pallbearer, standing hatless in bitterly cold weather. He caught a cold and died a month later from pneumonia. But the fiercest of enemy commanders had genuinely abandoned all enmity when hostilities had ceased.

And it has always been interesting to me that it was the soldiers, the Union commanders, who were kind and generous to the defeated, while the politicians screamed for blood, punishment and degradation. Sherman was right, 150 years ago, and today as well.

April soft and cold: The sisters Death and Night

To mark the 150^th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, let’s hear from one of the most American poets of all time, Walt Whitman.

Already in his forties when the War Between the States broke out, Whitman hadn’t intended to join the army, although he was a firm supporter of the Union cause. But after searching for his wounded brother at the end of 1862 (he found him), he took a part-time job with the Paymaster General in Washington, and volunteered as a nurse in army hospitals.

Whitman’s most famous poem about Lincoln’s death, “When Lilacs Last in the Courtyard Bloom’d” is longer than I like to post. And I want to go a different route anyhow. So here’s “Cavalry Crossing a Ford”, which I find highly evocative. I’ve not given you any poetry from this period (because I find so much of it awful), so let’s run with this one for a bit.

“Cavalry Crossing a Ford”

A LINE in long array, where they wind betwixt green islands;

 They take a serpentine course—their arms flash in the sun—Hark to the musical clank;

 Behold the silvery river—in it the splashing horses, loitering, stop to drink;

 Behold the brown-faced men—each group, each person, a picture—the negligent rest on the saddles;

Some emerge on the opposite bank—others are just entering the ford—while,

Scarlet, and blue, and snowy white,

The guidon flags flutter gaily in the wind.

And, closer to the mark for the end of the war and the loss of Lincoln:

“Reconciliation”

WORD over all, beautiful as the sky!

Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost;

That the hands of the sisters Death and Night, incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil’d world:

... For my enemy is dead—a man divine as myself is dead;

I look where he lies, white-faced and still, in the coffin—I draw near;

I bend down, and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.

The cost of a night at the theatre

Five days after Robert E. Lee surrendered his armies to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, President Abraham Lincoln was feeling a little like he could take a break from the onerous duties of being not only a wartime president, but a president trying to reclaim rebellious states as well as to rein in some of the most fractious mad dogs ever accumulated in an American administration.

So going to the theatre to see a farce might have seemed like a welcome night out, seeing as to how it looked like the war was winding down, and he could now get on with the work of re-integrating the people of the South back into the Union. It was Good Friday.

If you want to get a feel for the kinds of strain he had borne up under, take a look at two photographs.

1861, when he took office:

Final photo taken, just before his death:

Well, you know the story: an unemployed actor got past the one sleepy guard into Lincoln’s box, shot him and escaped, broken leg and all. Lincoln lingered through the night but died early the next morning at a house across the street from Ford’s Theatre.

It’s kind of pointless to speculate on how Reconstruction might have been different had Lincoln still been in office, instead of his truly ineffectual successor, Andrew Johnson. (We lucked out way better when Harry S. Truman replaced Franklin D. Roosevelt at the end of World War II, instead of any of Roosevelt’s previous vice presidents.) He would have had his hands full, for sure, but he already had four years of experience dealing with the likes of Stanton, Chase, Stevens and other Radical Republicans.

Plus—unlike Johnson, Lincoln had a charisma and strength of character that won him a lot of popular support, which probably would have added weight to his decisions, as well as to contests with the Radicals.

And with a different Reconstruction, what might our national history have looked like?

Oh, well, dunno. But it was truly a loss to the country then and since that Abraham Lincoln went to the theatre 150 years ago today.

Frail forms

On the 150^th anniversary of the surrender at Appomattox, I’m going to fudge the rules of National Poetry Month just a little. I’m giving you a song—which I propose is basically a poem with music. So you’re really getting a two-fer, you lucky dogs.

The song is by Stephen Foster. When I was in school, everyone knew Foster—come on: “Camptown Races”? “Oh, Susanna”? “My Old Kentucky Home”? “Old Folks at Home”? “Beautiful Dreamer”? (Seriously—did you not see Mighty Joe Young?) “Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair”? (A local kiddie-TV host used to sing, “I dream of Brownie with the light blue jeans. She is as sweet as licorice jelly beans.” Well, that may be TMI.)

But I’m sharing something I did not learn in grade school. Even though it was written in 1854, I think it sums up the event that marked the end of the War Between the States. (Because although Lee only surrendered one army, as one of his generals predicted, every other Confederate command followed suit shortly.)

As a New Military historian, my focus is on the human side of warfare. I wrap my head around how wars affected people—those who caused them, those who fought them, those who were overrun by them. And the image that I have of those April days at Appomattox is of all those men, exhausted, hungry, ragged, covered in mud, sick in the soul, turning over their arms and colors to men perhaps not as gaunt or ill-clad, but every bit as weary and soul-shattered.

Blue or grey, they wanted nothing so much as to go home, rebuild their lives and put the hard times behind them. So I’m giving you Mavis Staples singing “Hard Times, Come Again No More.”

Here are the full lyrics.

“Hard Times, Come Again No More”

Let us pause in life's pleasures and count its many tears

While we all sup sorrow with the poor:

There's a song that will linger forever in our ears;

Oh! Hard Times, come again no more.

Chorus:

'Tis the song the sigh of the weary;

Hard Times, Hard Times, come again no more;

Many days you have lingered around my cabin door,

Oh! Hard Times, come again no more.

While we seek mirth and beauty and music light and gay

There are frail forms fainting at the door:

Though their voices are silent, their pleading looks will say

Oh! Hard Times, come again no more.

There's a pale drooping maiden who toils her life away

With a worn heart whose better days are o'er:

Though her voice would be merry, 'tis sighing all the day

Oh! Hard Times, come again no more.

'Tis a sigh that is wafted across the troubled wave,

'Tis a wail that is heard upon the shore,

'Tis a dirge that is murmured around the lowly grave,

Oh! Hard Times, come again no more.

To which I say—amen.

Appomattox April

When we last left the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac, they were arrayed around Petersburg, with the former, under Robert E. Lee, defending and the latter, commanded by Ulysses S. Grant, positioning to take Richmond, 20 miles or so to the north.

That siege started in June of 1864, and it didn’t break until 1 April 1865, when Phil Sheridan’s cavalry turned Lee’s flank at the Battle of Five Forks. Grant followed through the next day, ending the siege. The Confederates evacuated the next night. Lee had intended to regroup, connect with Joe Johnston’s Army of Tennessee and find a way to turn against Grant, but he lost time when his men had to forage for provisions.

(It was always a wonder to me that the eleven states that seceded from the Union actually chose a confederate form of government—a loose affiliation with little power and even less will to enforce laws across state boundaries. Since this form of government had totally screwed the pooch when the original 13 states had attempted it following independence from Britain. A “confederated” government meant that fielding armies in fighting strength with all the equipment, supplies and services such forces require, was always pretty much a crap shoot. And that was even before the various Federal armies cut their supply lines.)

By the time Lee got to Appomattox Station, where a supply train was waiting, his army was down to one cavalry and two small infantry corps. Grant’s men harried them along the way, with Sheridan’s cavalry cutting right through the Army of Northern Virginia.

On 7 April, when Grant sent Lee a note inviting his surrender, Lee refused, but inquired about terms. By that time he’d been cut off from the hoped-for supplied, had lost considerable portions of his force and was running out of plans to realistically pull his men out of the Union vise.

There was a battle early on 9 April, but what that basically did was make it blindingly obvious that Lee’s army was vastly outnumbered. He sent a note to Grant requesting terms of surrender. Grant, en route to meet with Sheridan, replied inviting Lee to name a meeting place: The Confederates scouted the little village of Appomattox Court House and chose the house of Wilmer McLean as the best option.

(It is a true irony that McLean had lived near Manassas Junction in 1861. He’d fled Northern Virginia to escape the violence of the war, and had resettled in Appomattox. He witnessed the beginnings of the war in Virginia, and he hosted its end.)

It’s passed into lore how Lee received Grant wearing an immaculate uniform. You wonder how he was able to do that, given the condition of his army, but then you never hear of Lee being out of uniform, or mussed or dusty or rain-soaked, no matter what. Grant, on the other hand, showed up unshaven and muddy, from his boots to his rumpled shirt. Anyone viewing it from a distance would have thought he was the hired hand meeting with the boss. Or that he was the one surrendering his army.

And yet, it was Grant who—with the power hand in the relationship—was generous and scrupulous in his surrender terms. You have to understand that there were Radical Republicans in Congress and the Administration who wanted every Confederate commander and politician hanging as traitors from trees lining the roads from Richmond to Washington. Grant had considerable power to set terms that would shape subsequent surrenders and set the tone—one way or the other—for policies toward the Confederacy.

Officers gave parole not to take up arms against the Union; company and regimental commanders took responsibility for similar commitments by their men. Arms, artillery pieces and public property to be collected and turned over to Grant’s designated agent. Officers could keep their sidearms, personal horses and effects.

And then, “each officer and man will be allowed to return to their homes, not to be disturbed by United States authority so long as they observe their paroles and the laws in force where they may reside.”

Grant also permitted soldiers to take their personal horses and mules home for the spring planting, and he directed that a supply of rations be handed over to the gaunt army.

When all was agreed, the two generals shook hands and Lee rode away. At first the Federals cheered in celebration, but Grant put a stop to it. It took a few days to get everything sorted; for one thing, no Confederate commander wanted to subject his troops to a formal surrender ceremony. But on 12 April Lee’s armies massed to stack arms and colors in accordance with the terms of surrender.

Grant had assigned General Joshua L. Chamberlain (one of my personal heroes and the embodiment of the idea of a citizen-soldier) to oversee the parade. Chamberlain was still in pain from the wound he suffered in the battle of the Crater (and fortunate to be alive; it was deemed mortal at the time).

First up was General John B. Gordon’s division, marching in column between Chamberlain’s troops lined up on either side of the road. Chamberlain ordered his men to come to attention and “carry arms”, a profound gesture of respect. In his account:

“Gordon, at the head of the marching column, outdoes us in courtesy. He was riding with downcast eyes and more than pensive look, but at this clatter of arms he raises his eyes and instantly catching the significance, wheels his horse with that superb grace of which he is master, drops the point of his sword to his stirrup, gives a command, at which the great Confederate ensign following him is dipped and his decimated brigades, as they reach our right, respond to the ‘carry.’ All the while on our part not a sound of trumpet or drum, not a cheer, nor a word nor motion of man, but awful stillness as if it were the passing of the dead.”

Chamberlain knew that his order might generate blowback from Unionists, and it did. But it was the on-the-spot manifestation of the spirit of Grant’s terms—no gloating or retaliation, just respectful acknowledgement. His troops were just about as tired as Gordon’s and all the successive divisions; better fed and equipped, maybe, but every bit as ready to shed their uniforms and go home, where they could take a bath, kiss a loved one and do anything that didn’t involve discharging weapons at other men.

It’s odd—the mythos that has come down to us about the surrender at Appomattox is built heavily around the dignity and gallantry of Lee, his immaculate uniform, his grave demeanor, his impeccable manners all contrasting with Grant’s slovenliness. And yet if you look only at the actions and the results, Grant was the one who set the tone for respect, reconciliation and rebuilding a stronger, fraternal Union. No reparations; no hostages; no prisoners. Feed the hungry, discharge them with the means of livelihood to go home.

“Go home”—possibly the only two words any soldier ever wants to hear after so much as one campaign. After four years…they must have brought entire divisions to tears.

Because it brings me to tears even now, 150 years later.

Hard war

One hundred fifty years ago, while Ulysses S. Grant’s Army of the Potomac was attempting to strangle the capital of the Confederacy at Richmond, there was another campaign going on in what was called the Western Theatre, with another strategic railhead city at the core of it.

We’re talking the concept of total war, which General (yes mam) Sherman was introducing to the South, starting around Chattanooga, Tenn., and moving towards the Atlantic. His idea was basically to manifest the Clausewitzian precept that the object of war is not to win battles, kill armies or even conquer lands; it’s to destroy the enemy’s ability to wage war. And you do that by destroying anything that can contribute to the war effort.

This is how successful he was: you mention his name anywhere south of the Mason-Dixon Line even now and you’d better be prepared for stick. It’s as though he was there last week.

The idea was that Sherman’s armies would rely less on Union supply lines and more on what the farms of Georgia could provide in the spring and summer of 1864. This would at once support mobility, deprive the Confederate armies of those supplies, and attack the morale of the entire South. What the Federals couldn’t take, they torched, pretty much.

The policy, delineated later in Sherman’s Special Field Orders, No. 120, was aimed primarily against property, but of course it rendered thousands of civilians homeless—shelterless—and without the means of feeding themselves. He called it “hard war”, and it was.

On 2 September 1864, Atlanta finally surrendered, after a battle that started six weeks before. Sherman then moved on to the Atlantic.

Essentially, Sherman’s campaign broke the back of the South. The fall of Atlanta also gave Abraham Lincoln something to take to the Presidential election that November, to use against George B. McClellan (ex-commander of the Army of the Potomac).

McClellan was running on a platform demanding a negotiated peace with the Confederacy. Atlanta gave Union voters hope that Mr. Lincoln’s armies actually might be able to end the rebellion by military means, so they reelected him by a comfortable margin.

So 150 years ago today, the nation drew its breath, hitched up its trousers and carried on.

The Crater

By July of 1864, the Union and Confederate armies had settled into stagnant lines around the railhead of Petersburg, about 30 miles south of Richmond. In an attempt to break the stalemate, a plan was developed to tunnel under the Army of Northern Virginia, detonate a mine and exploit the resulting hole in the line and confusion among the defenders. The idea was that a break-through would enable them to pour enough troops through to drive on to Petersburg. And taking Petersburg would cut Richmond’s lines of communications.

Well, that was the idea, although George G. Meade, CG of the Army of the Potomac, and Ulysses Grant, general-in-chief, didn’t rate it much. The miners, from the 4^th Pennsylvania began digging the shaft in late June, but they were operating under the handicaps of improvised supports and tools.

Our old pal Ambrose Burnside, now a mere corps commander, had allocated a division of African-American troops, who were trained pretty well by the standards of the day for their part in the operation. However, on the day before the attack, Meade (who lacked confidence in black men’s combat capabilities) ordered Burnside to use white troops, who had had no training, and weren’t even given clear objectives and expectations by their commander. Who, as it turns out, was both drunk and way behind the lines when the battle commenced.

On 30 July, the mine was detonated after some initial problems, blowing a 200-foot crater in the Rebel line. (The materials for the explosives were as defective as everything else given the 4^th Pennsylvania.) Nearly 280 Confederate soldiers were killed in the initial explosion, and their comrades were rendered stupefied for some minutes.

But so were the attacking troops, who had no notion of what they were supposed to be doing, much less how they should be doing it. They actually rushed into the crater left by the explosion, thinking to take cover there. Instead they were the fish in a rain barrel, being decimated by Confederate fire. 

Only now did Burnside send in the black troops, but they were going into a meat grinder and they, too, were cut down. Many of them were bayoneted after surrendering; it was a dangerous business, being a black man in the Union Army.

The end result was 3800 Union casualties (including 504 dead) and 1500 Confederate (with 361 killed).

Oh—and no change in the lines around Petersburg. The two armies would face each other over the rest of the summer, fall, winter and early spring of 1865.

Throttling the Confederate capital

In June of 1864, Union forces were settling in around Petersburg, a small city about 20 miles south of the Confederate capital of Richmond. Petersburg was a junction for several east-west and north-south railroad lines, which made it critical for supplying whatever armies the South could still field.

Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia had been retreating ever since Ulysses S. Grant took command of all US armies and began driving the Army of the Potomac inexorably south. May had seen several costly battles, which would have stopped any previous Union commander. But not Grant.

Sadly, he was still lumbered with political generals—men who’d been appointed commanders because of their political connections, not because of any kind of military skill or training. The initial attempts in early June to take Petersburg and cut the rail lines failed, so the Federals dug in; the lines extended for about 30 miles.

And there they would stay for nine months.

The bloody month of May

May of 1864 marked a huge change in the prosecution of the war against the Confederacy. Two months before, Abraham Lincoln had given Ulysses S. Grant command of all Federal armies, and Grant’s strategy was to go on the offensive in every theatre of the war.

(Many years ago, on one of my cross-country trips, I was driving through Tennessee on I-40 and noticed the highway signs for Shiloh. It seemed weird to me that I was east of the Mississippi, and yet still passing a battlefield that was in the Western Theatre. But the country was still young, then, and the Mississippi was sort of the jumping-off point for nowhere.)

So in the first week of May, the Army of the Potomac (still commanded by our pal, George G. Meade, who’d faced Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg) moved out of its winter camp and pushed across the Rapidan River in Virginia.

They encountered the Army of Northern Virginia at the Wilderness of Spotsylvania, on 5 May. That’s not very far from Fredericksburg, where the Army of the Potomac had lost a catastrophic fight in December 1862, positioned between the Confederates on the high ground and the Rappahannock River behind them in bitterly cold weather.

And it’s also not far from Chancellorsville, where the year before Lee’s best lieutenant, Thomas J. Jackson—known as “Stonewall”—had been mortally wounded by his own men in the confusion of battle. (He actually died of pneumonia after having his shattered left arm amputated; but the precipitating cause was the gunshot wound.)

That part of Virginia is beautiful—lush, green pastures, farms, woods. It kind of reminds me of Northern France in both appearance and feel. Coming as I do from the semi-arid climate of Southern California, when I see miles and miles of natural green, I want to jump in it and roll around.

But, you know—they didn’t call it “the Wilderness” for nothing. That area is rather like the Ardennes in France—densely wooded, with a lot of brush among the trees. Not ideal terrain for massed infantry to take on one another; there’s no maneuvering room, and no one—not infantry, not cavalry, not artillery—has any clear perspective on what’s going on. (Well, even less that you ordinarily do on battlefields.) But that’s where the two armies met, so that’s where they fought.

The trees and underbrush caught fire in several places from the artillery fire. Men unable to see anything through the black smoke burned to death, or they shot themselves before the flames engulfed them.

Two days of fighting left Lee with a technical victory, although it had cost him a lot. In all that chaos—and spookily close to the place where Jackson had been shot by friendly fire—James Longstreet, one of Lee’s finest corps commanders, was (accidentally) wounded in the right arm by his own men. Lee could not really afford to take the 11,000 casualties, or to lose Longstreet, even temporarily.

And in the end, it didn’t matter to Grant. Unlike any other Union commander before him, he never viewed a tactical defeat as anything other than a setback. He was intent on getting to the Confederate capital at Richmond, basically regardless of the cost.

So throughout May, he pushed the Army of the Potomac to engage the Army of Northern Virginia—at Spotsylvania from the 8^th to the 21^st, and then at Cold Harbor at the end of the month. Every time Lee blocked him, he moved laterally and then pushed forward again. The cost was high, but he had the materiel, the conscripts and the backing of Lincoln; he ignored everything else.