One of my favorite human beings is KCBX’s Tom Wilmer, the host of “Journeys of Discovery.” I did not know he belonged to the California National Guard like my friends Dan Sebby and Erik Brun. I knew Tom was working on restoring a World War I-era French 75mm cannon, but I did NOT know he’d finished it. It is amazing.

The 75 was also the field piece for the AEF, the American army fighting in France. We had no light artillery of our own. We also had no fighter planes, no tanks, no light machine gun, no heavy machine gun and, until we began mass-producing British knockoffs, no helmets.

We just had us, our Smokey Bear campaign hats and the Model 1903 Springfield. That was about it.

My friend Tom has always been an adventurer, an explorer. I am not. I prefer chairs and sofas and recliners. So that’s one reason he’s my hero. I hope it’s okay that I tell this story:

Tom was hiking along Highway 1 as a teen and became desperately sick with the flu. He trudged up a hill–a 1300-foot hill–to the Camaldolese Benedictine hermitage near Big Sur (great fruitcake, and I don’t even LIKE fruitcake) and they took him in, I think for a week, and took care of him until he was better. Good people taking care of a good person.

Those are French-manned 75’s, like the one Tom rebuilt, in action at the horrific 1916 Battle of Verdun, which claimed over 305,000 German and French lives (I despise jokes about French “cowardice.” Go to Verdun.) and wounded another 400,000.

“100,000 died” struggling for Fort Douaumont; those are our kids. When it was the Germans’ turn to occupy the fort, the Bavarians, because they are civilized, decided to brew coffee inside. There was no fuel to start a fire to brew the coffee. One of the Bavarians, suddenly inspired, emptied out a hand grenade’s charge and make a little mountain of the contents to start the fire.

When the explosion came, the Bavarians were blinded and burned black. Their comrades shot them down, thinking they were French colonials, Senegalese, who terrified the Germans.

There’s a French 75 just outside the main museum. The nearby ossuary contains the bones of thousands of soldiers from both sides who will never be known. You can see them in their stacks just beneath plexiglas panels in the floor.

All of them, of course, had been little boys once whose mothers applauded their first steps, whose fathers rousted them early for morning milking or who went to sleep at night with the dogs they loved tucked tight next to them.

The French cemetery, which of course is vast, features both Christian and Muslim gravestones, many for the Senegalese, the latter facing Mecca. All of them died for France.

I was touring the museum with my teaching partner Amber and our kids when a guide grabbed me gently by the elbow.

“Are these your students?”

My heart sank. We’d been yelled at in Paris by a policewoman who had a shot at becoming an NFL offensive guard.

I nodded.

“They are so RESPECTFUL!”

Might just be the greatest compliment of my life.

Those are some of our students atop Fort Douaumont at Verdun.

Thank you, Tom and Erik, my artillery guys.

An excerpt from Robert Lowell’s 1960 poem about his artwork, “For the Union Dead:”

…Parking lots luxuriate like civic
sand piles in the heart of Boston.
A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin-colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse, shakingBottom of Form

over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens’ shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage’s earthquake.

Two months after marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

The monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city’s throat.
Its colonel is as lean
as a compass needle.

He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound’s gentle tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure
and suffocate for privacy.

He is out of bounds. He rejoices in man’s lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die—
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.

---

The 54th leaves Boston in this scene from the film Glory, which remains, in my mind, the finest Civil War film yet made. Frederick Douglass watches from the reviewing stand and, as fine as the soldiers are, it’s the reaction of the Black Americans in the crowd, and Col. Shaw’s reaction at seeing his family, that move me most:

---

Black troops played roles in the combat careers of two Arroyo Grande settlers. At the December 1864 Battle of Nashville, this old man, Otis Smith, a Huasna Valley farmer, earned the Medal of Honor for seizing the battle flag of the 6th Florida Volunteer Infantry in the Union assault on the Confederate flank atop Shy’s Hill, the high point that guarded the city.

Once Smith had carried the Florida regiment’s position, the rest of the Confederate line crumbled. Their commander, John Bell Hood, ruefully said that he’d never seen an army flee in such disorder. This is a replica of the flag that Smith captured—which would have meant fighting or killing five or six men to get to it. The original, with some corners missing—souvenirs for the men of Smith’s 95th Ohio Volunteer Infantry—is on display in the Florida Museum of History today.

This is in no way intended to denigrate Smith’s bravery. He deserves his Medal of Honor. But the story isn’t complete until you know the whole of it, and that involves Black soldiers. Smith’s regiment was able to stampeded the Floridan’s, on John Bell Hood’s extreme left, in part because of what happened earlier in the day. Three regiments of what were then called U.S. colored troops attacked Hood’s center. They were repulsed with heavy casualties; afterward, the Confederate officer in charge of the position praised them for their bravery.

Hood noted that. As a result, he shifted troops away from his flank to his center. That left the depleted 6th Florida, already miserable from soaking overnight rain, unprepared for the ferocity of Otis Smith and his comrades. Black men had made his moment of glory; they may in fact have saved the life that still marks lives in Arroyo Grande today. The Mankins brothers, managers of Brisco Lumber and members of a family long noted for cattle ranching and community service, are descendants of Otis Smith.

The second incident, involving another Huasna Valley farmer, Adam Bair, remains one of the saddest moments of the Civil War. It bears reminding that recent scholarship has revised the casualty count from the traditional statistic of 620,000 dead to 750,000 or more. That is the modern equivalent of eight million Americans lost.

Among them were the soldiers who fought in the Crater in 1864, the victims of racism on the part of their own leader, a hero of Gettysburg, George Gordon Meade.

From an earlier blog post about the Battle of the Crater, witnessed by Adam Bair:


https://jimgregory52.wordpress.com/2021/06/19/they-would-charge-into-the-city-if-the-order-were-given/

Tomorrow is the 90th Anniversary of the Kansas City Massacre. Police were escorting an associate of Pretty Boy Floyd’s to Leavenworth when they were jumped by gangsters with Thompson submachine guns.

Two police officers, a police chief and an FBI agent were killed. The attempt to free the prisoner, Frank Nash, failed, because the gunmen killed him,t oo.

There are still bullet holes from 1933 in the walls of Union Station.

That was a hard year for Missouri. A highway patrolman and the Boone County Sheriff were assassinated, a police chief was kidnaped, an eighteen-year-old Black man was lynched in St. Joseph, and Bonnie and Clyde took up housekeeping in Platte City, about 30 minutes north of Kansas City.

Kansas City is a beautiful town–unexpectedly hilly–but it was wide-open in the 1920s and 1930s, both in good ways (Louis Armstrong played in speakeasies there) and in bad–violence and political corruption.

That’s where my Grandmother Gregory comes in. She was a powerful woman, the Democratic Chair of Texas County, Missouri, and one of the first women delegates to an national political convention, in 1924, for the Democrats in sweltering heat inside Madison Square Garden. It took them 109 ballots to nominate a nonentity, John W. Davis, trounced by Calvin Coolidge that November.

In the 1930s, the political “boss” of Kansas City was a Democrat, Tom Pendergast, whose machine was legendary and who influence extended far beyond the city limits. Nine years ago, I wrote down what my father told me about those times:

In Depression-era Missouri, before every election, my Dad remembered, a new car would pull up outside my Grandfather’s farmhouse and two men in three-piece suits (usually reserved for funerals, and even then for the Deceased) would deposit a bank-bag full of cash on Dora Gregory’s kitchen table. For them, it was but one more stop on a kind of purgatory circuit. That part of the state was thinly populated, so you had have a real passion for soybeans to make the drive enjoyable.

They were bagmen for the Kansas City Pendergast Machine, one of those old-timey operations that brought dead voters back to life, among other shenanigans.

Tom Pendergast had Texas County in the bag, because, come Election Day, my pre-teen Dad handed out fives to waiting voters, murmuring, “The Democratic Party thanks you,” over and over, like a priest at Eucharist, so the Democrats never lost Texas County. The bank bag on Grandma’s kitchen table assured that.

To be fair to the Machine, it distributed food, not just bribes, and people in the hills were hungry in the depths of the Depression. A young Dad also helped distribute food to the needy. Grapefruit stymied them. “We boiled it, Bob,” they told him apologetically, “an’ then we fried it, but it still tasted putrid.” (Dad, a supply officer in 1944 London, also gifted an English family he knew with a bag of oranges. They virtually adopted him: the British had not seen oranges since the fall of France in 1940. Citrus fruit seems to follow the course of my father’s life.)

Boss Pendergast also made the career of Harry Truman possible, which, in turn made me possible: Truman favored my grandfather’s blackberry wine on campaign swings downstate–he’d stop for a sip or seven– and that little talent of Grandpa Gregory’s paid off in World War II: Truman got Dad appointed to Officers’ Candidate School as a Quartermaster, and so he served much of the war defending London’s pubs from the Nazi Hordes, which saved me the inconvenience of having him get killed before I had the chance to be born.

And thank goodness, too, Dad survived the war to tell me the stories that would make me decide to become a history teacher.

Tonight marks the anniversary of Lincoln’s shooting.

I’ve always found this photo of him, taken in February by Alex Gardner, incredibly moving because his face shows so clearly the war’s impact.

But he was not fragile.

I’m sorry to get clinical, but Booth’s bullet entered the back of Lincoln’s head behind his left ear and came to rest behind his right eye.

He should have died on the floor of the Presidential Booth at Ford’s.

A few months earlier, aboard the presidential yacht on a visit to Grant’s headquarters, the president, smiling, picked up an axe–a tool he was very familiar with–and, grasping it at the end of the handle, held it straight out at arm’s length.

I can do that! some of the young sailors thought. When they tried, they found out that they couldn’t.

When they carried him across the street from Ford’s to a boarding house and laid him across a bed–diagonally, because he was so tall–the attending physicians began to strip the clothes from his body.

Onlookers, including Secretary of War Stanton, who’d once argued a court case with Lincoln and dismissed him then as a nonentity, were stunned. The president had the musculature of a Classic statue.

The Lincoln in popular myth hated physical labor and we might remember, from our childhoods, images of him taking long breaks under a shade tree to read Pilgrim’s Progress or Shakespeare or Blackstone’s Commentaries.

That’s not quite true. Only a man who’d devoted so much time to working so hard could have fought as hard as Lincoln did that night.

He died at 7:22 a.m. on April 15, 1865. It was the day after Good Friday.

In 2019, Robin, Elizabeth and I traveled to New York City to see our beloved niece Emily graduate from NYU. That was the biggest thrill of the trip. The second-biggest thrill?

1. Having my favorite skyscraper, the Art Deco Chrysler Building, Just outside our hotel room window?

Nope.

2. Going to a real-live actual Broadway show? (Come from Away, about all the airplanes that had to land in Newfoundland on 9/11 and how Canadians embraced their visitors. It was delightful.)

Nope.

3. Sitting inside Yankee Stadium?

Nope.

4. Riding up to the VERY SPOT at the top of the Empire State Building where Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan FINALLY met in Sleepless in Seattle?

Nope.

Okay, I give up. Here it is: We were all walking, Jackoways and Gregorys and Aunt Robin, in the East Village when we passed the Cooper Union.

The COOPER UNION! I started hopping up and down on the sidewalk. I’d done this before, in the midst of what was, I am sure, a thrilling AGHS lecture on the Thirty Years’ War—“BDSF!” I reminded my students; the war’s four stages were Bohemian, Danish, Swedish and French—when I recognized, from a couple of miles away, the sound of a B-17’s engines. It was “Sentimental Journey,” on its way to McChesney Field in San Luis Obispo, just north of us.

I left the classroom and hopped up and down on the lawn between the 200 and 300 wings at Arroyo Grande High School as the plane flew overhead. The squirrels there, who liked to skitter into my classroom for weekend courtship dances while I was grading essays, were a little stunned. So were my students.

And now I was stunned because I was across the street from the Cooper Union. I, happily digesting some Greenwich Village squid-ink pasta–the best I’ve had since an AGHS student trip to Venice– did not know it was there.

On tomorrow’s date in history in 1860, Abraham Lincoln, largely unknown outside the Midwest, delivered the speech inside that building that would make him president.

And now, in 2019, I was standing in front of the Cooper Union. And that is the 1860 photograph, taken in Matthew Brady’s New York studio, that captured Lincoln in the hours before his speech.

You’d look in vain for in the Cooper Union speech for the kind of eloquence that marked the Gettysburg Address or Lincoln’s Inaugurals, but what he said in the Cooper Union–densely reasoned, lawyerly, with every word carefully chosen–was so compelling that many of the jaded New York reporters (some of them, for their lack of homework on the man, might’ve been miffed a little because they’d been assigned to cover this Illinois rube, a little taller than the cornstalks from whence he came) put their pens down and forgot to take notes.

He was that good.

He had arrived, on February 27, 1860.

His death on April 15, 1865, only made it certain that he would never leave us.

Ever since I was a little boy, Lincoln has been alive to me. I have read everything I can about him. I’ve watched every Hollywood depiction of him, most of them hokum. I watched perhaps the hokumiest, John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln, the other night for the sheer pleasure of being in the television presence of Henry Fonda’s Lincoln.

But it was, finally, the Irish actor Daniel Day-Lewis, his research meticulous, who made Lincoln come alive to me. Lewis lived inside the man, as he does all his characters, for months.

Lincoln– and Lewis understood this–would have pronounced the word “care” as “keer;” his voice was thin and reedy but he knew how to project it. Lewis knew how difficult Lincoln’s relationships were with Mary and with Robert, his eldest son. But he also knew how Lincoln could tell a story, sometimes to give himself time to think, or, conversely, how he could choose words that were like knives when he had to wound the obtuse, the wrong-headed or the faint of heart, if only to shock them at the sight of their own blood.

(At Gettysburg, the marathon orator Edward Everett had the decency to admit that Lincoln’s words, in his two-minute speech, had bested his, which lasted two hours. Everett was the main attraction that day in November 1863. Lincoln’s invitation to the battlefield, dusted with lime in the fall, a prophylactic measure that failed to erase the stench of horses unburied since July, was a mere politeness. Lincoln was not popular.)

Best of all, Lewis understood, while we appropriately remember the man’s kindness, that Lincoln had a temper. His will was spun steel and his ambition, as a law partner once remarked, “was a little engine that knew no rest.”

So the best part about the Cooper Union speech might be that Lincoln knew exactly what he wanted to say, knew how he wanted to say it, and all of it, every word, was a servant of his ambition. The nation, on February 27, 1860, was obviously and perhaps irrevocably coming apart.

Only Lincoln knew, from the intuition that he was singular–that insight was perhaps the greatest gift left him by his mother and stepmother–that he had inside reservoirs of such deep strength. They were deep enough to lift the nation to a better place.

That, of course, meant four years of heartbreak and the modern equivalent of 6.6 million deaths.

And I don’t know that we’ve reached that better place yet.

But who could ask for a better guide?