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Sam Watkins Anticipated Mark Twain
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(April 20, 2024) When Confederates were stuck in idle encampments, they’d bet on anything, including lice racing. Sam Watkins tells of how one soldier was always winning because he heated his tin plate before the race started. His trick anticipated Mark Twain’s The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County‘
Southerners as Guardians of Tradition
(April 19, 2024) Aside from noting that one captured Confederate private obviously too poor to own slaves replied when asked “What are you fighting for anyhow?” by answering, “I’m fighting because you’re down here,” Shelby Foote added that “in the Southern mind [the war] was a second American Revolution fought for principles no less high, against a tyranny no less harsh” . . . When commanding at Harpers Ferry early in the war Colonel T. J. [Stonewall] Jackson justified risking his life by arguing, “What is life without honor? Degradation is worse than death. We must think of the living and those who come after us and see that by God’s blessings we transmit to them the freedom we have ourselves inherited.”
The choice, then, lay between honor and degradation. There could be no middle ground. Southerners saw themselves as the guardian of the American tradition, which included the right to revolt, and therefore they launched a Conservative revolution.
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Shelby Foote on Lincoln’s Centralization of Powers
(April 17, 2024) Lincoln took unto himself powers far beyond any ever claimed by a Chief Executive. In late April 1861, for security reasons, he authorized simultaneous raids on every telegraph office in the Northern states, seizing the originals and copies of all telegrams sent and received during the past year. As a result of this and other measures, sometimes on no stronger evidence than the suspicions of an informer nursing a grudge, men were taken from their homes in the dead of night, thrown into dungeons, and held without explanation or communications with the outside world. Writs of Habeas Corpus were denied, including those issued by Supreme Court justices. In early May, following the call for 75,000 militiamen, still without congressional sanction, he issued a proclamation increasing the [16,000-man] regular army by more than 20,000, the navy by 18,000, and authorizing 42,000 three year volunteers. On Independence Day when Congress at last convened he explained his extraordinary steps: “It became necessary for me to choose whether I should let the government fall into ruin, or whether . . . availing myself of the broader powers conferred by the Constitution in cases of insurrection, I would make an effort to save it.”
Congress bowed its head and agreed. Though Americans grew pale in prison cells without knowing the charges under which they had been snatched from their homes of places of employment, there are guilty men among the innocent, and a dungeon was as good a place as any for a patriot to serve his country through a time of strain.
Plain Speaking on Confederate Monument
(April 15, 2024) Provided below is an email from Bo Traywick, a VMI graduate and former member of the school’s Board of Visitors, to a newspaperman who asked for his thoughts on Arlington Cemetery’s Reconciliation Monument.
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Dear Jeff,
It was nice chatting with you and Jim today.
During our conversation, you brought up the monument at Arlington Cemetery. You referred to it as the Confederate Monument. This is incorrect. It is (was!) The Reconciliation Monument. It was put up at the invitation of the United States government after the Spanish/American War, when some prominent ex-Confederates like Generals Fitz Lee and Joe Wheeler served. President McKinley, a Union war veteran, invited the South to put up this monument to reconciliation between the North and the South to symbolize the healing of the rift. (Let us not forget that Arlington Cemetery was inaugurated as a petty and vindictive rebuke to General Lee, burying Union soldiers on his front lawn, who died invading us to deny us the same self government we all fought for when the thirteen [slaveholding] colonies seceded from the British Empire.)
My uncle Joe, a surgeon from South Carolina who was killed by Nazi artillery in the Hertgen Forest after having made three invasions and receiving a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, and two Purple Hearts, is buried at Arlington. So much for reconciliation.
I gave a donation to the legal cause to keep the monument in place, but my stance all along is, that the US government invited reconciliation over a hundred years ago, but now, so as not to offend anyone but Southerners, has decided to remove the monument. I am not going to petition, much less beg, the US government for reconciliation. As far as I am concerned, the government can fill up the ranks of the military with [misfits]. I went to Vietnam for that government and got spit on when I got back home, and now I am getting spit on again, so they can take reconciliation and [put it where the sun is perpetually eclipsed.] You can put that in the Times-Dispatch and sign my name to it.
Bo
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Civil War Chat 