History types like me love this week’s “New Yorker” cover. When I taught U.S. History, the kids enjoyed learning about the Twenties–I taught them how to speak “Flapper”–and they enjoyed especially learning about the Harlem Renaissance. 

I’ve always loved black history, ever since I took a class on the history of slavery at Mizzou, which had the odd effect, in learning about people “endurin’ slavery,” (they never said “durin’ slavery” in the slave narratives, precisely because they knew the difference) of making me even prouder to be an American: their lives were such an integral part of our history and so they live on in our lives, our language and our culture.

Maybe when I taught this material my love for it was a little contagious.

Anyway, I took my time on these lessons: Langston Hughes, Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige (“With which pitch would you like me to strike you out?” he’d call to a batter), Duke Ellington and “Take the A Train,”Billie Holiday and “Strange Fruit,” and excerpts, with Wynton Marsalis, who was perfect in explaining both the technical and cultural nuances of the music,  from Ken Burns’s Jazz.

I took a long time, in one lesson, to teach them Malcolm X, and I did it with primary sources taken from poetry.

The students invariably amazed me. They instinctively connected to, and adored, Louis Armstong, and the story of his life always captivated them. I think most teens, unless we extinguish the spark, have an innate sense of justice, of what’s right, and we all know how keen their Hypocrisy Detectors are. That’s one reason why I loved teaching them.

There’s one scene, in Jazz, when Armstrong captivates another teen– Bix Beiderbecke, a Davenport, Iowa, boy, who hears the sound of Armstrong’s cornet skipping across the water from the bandstand of a Mississippi riverboat. Bix was as transfixed as was Saul on the road to Tarsus. He had never heard a sound that pure, and he would spend the rest of his gifted but tragically brief life chasing after it with his own cornet.

Music is amazing, isn’t it?

The students loved, too, the anecdote about the time Bessie Smith interrupted a set to light into, and then chase, some hooded Klansmen, who ran for their lives. “Pick up them skirts, Trash!” she hollered after them.

A historian who learns a story that satisfying doesn’t need to eat much the rest of the day.

Early that morning, long and twisting columns of butternut gray moved slowly up the three pikes that cut their way toward Franklin, Tennessee. They were miles away but closing fast. Bright metal flashed from within each column, like the glistening of a snake’s scales. The locals later remembered that the thump of boots and bare feet upon the macadam rattled the windows of their houses. These were the Confederates, come to smash the Federals.

–From the novel The Widow of the South,
By Robert Hicks

This is what happened instead: the Confederates smashed themselves upon the Federals, who had gotten to Franklin first and had gone to work with picks and shovels. They’d thrown up earthworks beyond a two-mile stretch of bare field that was punctuated only by islets of scrub brush not big enough to hide a dog, let alone a man. When they marched into Franklin, the Confederates had been ordered to cross that field and carry the federals’ entrenchments. This was in part because their commander’s audacity had won him promotion after promotion in fighting the war which had whittled him half away. John Bell Hood’s reputation for bravery grew even as he’d lost a leg and the use of an arm in battles farther north; at Antietam, in 1862, he’d lost even more when he sent his Texans shrieking like Comanches into the cornfield beyond the Dunker Church. They’d gone into the cornstalks and disappeared. Hood was asked later where his division was. “Dead on the field,“ he’d replied.

Now Hood, who had to be strapped into his saddle, had been sent south to replace a general, Joe Johnston, with too much finesse and not enough deference for the taste of the Confederate commander-in-chief, President Jefferson Davis. Hood was a smasher. In truth, he had been promoted this time beyond his capabilities. But now, in the late fall and early winter of 1864, even the smasher was playing—strategically, at least—with finesse. If he could raise enough hell in Tennessee–enough, maybe, to get in between the two Union armies there and then replicate Napoleon at Austerlitz, or Hood’s breathing hero, Lee, at Chancellorsville—he could take on one army, bloody it, and then turn and knock aside the second on a fighting march north, into Kentucky.

And that feat, if Hood could accomplish it, would force Sherman to double back on the path he’d burned into Georgia. Sherman would have no choice but to come to the rescue of the wreckage John Bell Hood left for him in Tennessee.

Hood wasn’t impressed with the material he’d been given to accomplish the coup he’d designed so artfully. He was convinced his army was made up of diggers—like the Yankees two miles away, they fought only behind earthworks or stout stone walls. They didn’t have the drive or the killer instinct of the Texans Hood once commanded, and, a few days before, at Spring Hill, they had allowed one of the armies that Hood had wanted to maul a free march, screened by trees, past their encampment, so close that a few Yankees had come up to the Confederate campfires to light their pipes, where they were taken prisoner instead. That was a few Yankees. The rest of the army—the Army of the Ohio, led by Union Gen. John Schofield—had slipped away in the night as noiseless as Lee’s had at Antietam, and in the morning an enraged Hood discovered that they were gone.

Now, on November 30, he’d found Schofield’s army again, behind their entrenchments and two miles away across ground bare enough for Hood to put his entire Army of Tennessee on parade, in a grand review. And this, essentially, was what Hood intended to do. This would be an assault to remember; Hood would teach his 26,000 Confederates a lesson. They would take entrenchments, not hide behind them. He was going to put some salt into the Army of Tennessee.

What happened next was, of course, murder.

* * *

Prunes again. Otis W. Smith weighed only a little more now than he had when his Ohio regiment had arrived at Franklin in 1864, over fifty years ago. It was the diet—or the lack of a diet—at the Sawtelle National Home for Disabled Veterans in Los Angeles, California, which allowed Smith, even while confined to a wheelchair with wire wheels big enough to drive a motorcar, to remain as lean as a whippet.

He didn’t want to eat now and he didn’t want to eat then. Smith had seen dead men before—he’d enlisted in 1862, at 17—but never on the scale John Bell Hood had arranged. Smith’s regiment came up the day after Hood’s assault, so he had seen the Confederate dead strewn in driblets across the field and packed in dense clumps against the face of the Union earthworks. They were shapeless, some, torn by artillery shells, gelatinous and shiny—not men, but sacks of men. He may have helped burial details dig the long, shallow trenches into which the shapeless bodies, or fragments of bodies, were rolled by the dozen. Forty Confederates buried here, a penciled epitaph might read on a tombstone no more substantial than the lid from a crate of hardtack.

The Confederates, being dead, couldn’t complain about their lot, but neither could the living graybeards who were Smith’s friends at Sawtelle. If the “inmates,” as the papers called them, complained about the food or an attendant’s cruelty, they’d be “shown the gate.” One Sawtelle veteran taught them an object lesson about what life was like beyond the gate: he’d been burned alive in his little apartment in Santa Monica. Another had wandered off the grounds once, tumbled into a ditch and hadn’t been found for hours—he was lucky enough to go to a hospital, where the food might be marginally better and the staff’s attitude marginally softer.

Sawtelle had been investigated twice, and exonerated twice, in 1897 and in 1912, for allegations of mistreating veterans like Smith. But, in truth, there weren’t that many veterans like Smith. While, like many of those tottering around or being wheeled around the grounds of the National Home—grounds shaded by palm trees, and Smith liked a dappled spot next to a little Spanish-style fountain–he had built himself a new life in California, as a rancher in the Huasna Valley, east of Arroyo Grande. But none of the “inmates,” none of his friends in Arroyo Grande, and not even Smith’s family, knew the secret he’d hidden about the war.

In combat against John Bell Hood’s Army of Tennessee, Otis Smith had won the Medal of Honor. Here is how that happened.

---

…A month after the Battle of Franklin, outside Nashville, Gen. John Schofield was stalling. Perhaps it was the memory of what he and Otis Smith had seen at Franklin in the tangled mounds of Confederate dead. Now, in December, Schofield was in the same place [Confederate Gen. John B.] Hood had been at Franklin. The Union general was about to lead an assault on an enemy that was well dug in. There was one difference between Schofield’s situation and Hood’s. He was a subordinate officer, not in command. Maj. Gen. George Thomas was Schofield’s superior, and Thomas was ordering him, in the second day of fighting at Nashville, to attack a hillside held by entrenched Confederates. So it would be Hood’s men who would be waiting for Schofield’s this time, not the other way around, and they would be eager to return the favor of Franklin. Earlier that afternoon, December 16, three regiments of U.S. Colored Troops had attacked the Confederate right and were repulsed with forty percent of them dead or wounded—the Confederate officer commanding thetroops that had inflicted this destruction noted the African Americans’ bravery in his official report.

The state capitol steps at Nashville, protected by an artillery battery, 1864. Library of Congress.

Now, on the Confederate left, Schofield was to duplicate that costly effort and send his men up the steep slopes of Shy’s Hill. So he hesitated. He asked General Thomas for reinforcements. Thomas studied the hill for a moment and the decision was suddenly made for him: there were Union troops already attacking the entrenchments there. They were Brig. Gen. John MacArthur’s men. MacArthur, an aggressive and, on December 16, an insubordinate Scot, born in a town on the River Clyde, had grown tired of waiting. Thomas ordered Schofield to follow MacArthur’s lead and send in the rest of his men.²

Otis Smith’s 95^th Ohio Infantry was on the right of the impetuous Scot’s attack when MacArthur let it go at 3:30 p.m. The 95^th advanced silently, with fixed bayonets, and began to clamber up the hill, ironically, up hillsides so steep that they protected Smith and his comrades from the enemy entrenched unwisely on the summit, rather than below it, where they would have enjoyed a shallower and so more punishing field of fire. The men atop Shy’s Hill included a depleted Florida brigade; in fact, they could manage to field only enough troops that day to make up a regiment. Their position had been further weakened by Hood, who’d transferred troops from the hill to other points in his line. The Floridians had worked all night digging trenches, had been soaked all day by a cold rain, and so they were exhausted. Suddenly, the 95^th Ohio, after advancing without a cheer and without firing a shot, were in the Floridians’ entrenchments, Otis Smith among them, killing the Southerners with their bayonets.

The Confederate position collapsed and Hood watched, dismayed, as his army’s left dissolved. Those left behind were now surrounded by the Union brigade that included Smith. One Floridian started to tear his regimental flag into pieces to keep the victors from having it. For the 6^th Florida, it was too late: during the assault, Otis Smith had seized their regimental colors. After the capture of Shy’s Hill, the rest of Hood’s men followed their comrades who were retreating on the left. Hood later wrote that he had never seen a Confederate army retreat in such confusion.³ His army was finished. Less than a month after their rout at Nashville, Hood resigned his command, and Otis Smith would be awarded the Medal of Honor that he never talked about, perhaps because it was tarnished.

Artist Howard Pyle’s depiction of a Minnesota regiment’s assault on Shy’s hill, part of the attack in which Otis Smith played a role.

This is why. The officer commanding the Floridians on Shy’s Hill, Gen. Thomas Benton Smith, was being conducted to the rear when he was confronted by Otis Smith’s regimental commander, a peacetime physician, Lt. Col. William Linn McMillen. Words were exchanged. McMillen may have been drunk. He suddenly drew his saber and began striking the disarmed Gen. Smith on the head; one blow was so deep that Smith’s brain was exposed.⁴ McMillen’s own men intervened to disarm their enraged commander. No charges were ever brought against him. He was later promoted, grew cotton in Louisiana after the war, was a state senator, and won patronage jobs from two presidents as postmaster and then port inspector for New Orleans.

In 1886, his victim at Nashville, Thomas Benton Smith, was admitted to an insane asylum where he would spend most of the rest of his life, crippled by the depression that doctors said was a result of his injuries that day below Shy’s Hill. He was temporarily released in 1910 to attend a veterans’ reunion. Out of kindness, he was allowed to conduct close-order drill with some of his old soldiers, and the moment transformed him. An observer wrote that the old general was “as full of the animation of the old days as could be imagined” as he put his little command through its paces.⁵ Gen. Smith died on May 21, 1923, ten weeks after Medal of Honor winner Smith died at the Sawtelle Home in Los Angeles.

Okay, let’s assume you want to write a book about the Civil War. You want photographs, which is fine, because most Civil War photographs are in the public domain—with credit and attribution, they’re free.

This is my great-great grandfather, a Confederate brigadier general. I was named after him. This was taken from a photograph that’s about 156 years old—the uniform was superimposed by an artist. The subject died in 1863—153 years ago. So clearly, this is in the public domain, right?

Wrong.

I had to pay for it, which I don’t mind at all. If I hadn’t paid for it, family or not, I could’ve been sued. But here’s where it gets complicated.
Say I want to use a photo from your family: a great-great-great grandpa, for example, who fought with Sherman at the Battle of Atlanta. You (graciously) give me permission to use the photo, and I (naturally) credit you for it in the caption of the book I publish.

Then we both get sued.

Just because it’s your photo, and in your possession, doesn’t mean you’re the owner. The guy who took the photo is the owner. Rightfully so. But let’s assume, being reasonable people, that the guy who took a photo in 1860 is dead. Pssst! He is!

Then you’re home free, right?

Wrong.

Is someone PUBLISHED the photo—for example, posted it on their ancestry.com family tree, then you are doomed.

A photo taken before Jan. 1, 1923, is in the public domain. Freebie.

But a photo taken before Jan. 1, 1923 and published, say, in 2002, is under copyright until 2047—the life of the creator plus 70 years, or 2047, whichever is greater.

So, let’s say the photo you want was published on ancestry.com in 2002. You can’t use it, because you can’t establish the identity of the “creator,” nor can you assume that the person who posted that photo is the creator and entitled to the copyright. It gets even dicier if the person who published that ancestry.com photo hasn’t been active on that website since 2003, which means you can assume that he or she is dead, dead, dead.

That means that the photograph you want of a private citizen who was once a soldier serving under Sherman during the Atlanta Campaign during one of the most significant events in American history AND who farmed thirty acres in the Upper Arroyo Grande Valley, voted every election day, served on the Branch School board, left behind a brace of little Yankees, that means that the photograph of that person…

 
…is unattainable.

Which is bad for you, a writer. But, in another way, it cheats the subject of the photograph, doesn’t it? A man who would otherwise be an anonymous tombstone who MIGHT get a second look from a passerby who knows a little history (“Oh, look! That guy was in the Civil War!”)—and that’s chancy—has lost the chance to be remembered in a way that’s meaningful to him, to his family, and to our history.

And that’s a tragedy.

How long does copyright last?

Quick Copyright Overview for Genealogists

Due to complicated and ever-changing copyright laws, the duration depends on when the work was created and whether it was published. Here are simplified guidelines (though exceptions apply):

Works published before Jan. 1, 1923, are in the public domain (meaning anyone can use, adapt or copy them freely).

Works published between 1923 and 1963 were protected for 28 years—but the copyright could be renewed for 47 years, then extended for another 20. If the copyright wasn’t renewed, the work is in the public domain. About 85 percent of works published during this period aren’t protected anymore.

If a work was published between 1964 and 1977, the copyright lasts a total of 95 years.

Any published or unpublished work created on or after Jan. 1, 1978, is protected for the life of the creator plus 70 years.

A work created before Jan. 1, 1978, and published between that date and Dec. 31, 2002, is protected for the life of the author plus 70 years or until Dec. 31, 2047—whichever is greater.

Confused? You can assume that anything published within the past 75 years is protected. Once the copyright expires, a work moves into the public domain.

 

 

This is New Ross, Ireland, and the folks in the list are distant ancestors, fleeing the Famine and bound for Canada. When the Fox family got settled in Ontario, Denis’s son, Pat, fathered a little girl named Margaret. Margaret was my mother’s grandmother.

So Mom’s name–her other great-grandfather was Patrick Keefe, another Coolboy tenant– was Patricia Margaret.

This is a replica of the ship that might have brought them, the Dunbrody, and it’s the same ship that brought a third Patrick to Boston–John F. Kennedy’s great-grandfather, from County Wexford. My ancestors were close by, in Wicklow, near the Wexford border.

It must have been terrifying. It would have been a two-day walk from Coolboy to New Ross and few Irish–this was true for most medieval Europeans, and in Ireland, the Middle Ages persisted well into Victoria’s reign–ever traveled beyond the sound of their parish church’s bells.

The voyage took two weeks, and the ships carrying Famine refugees became known as “Coffin Ships” because sometimes half the passengers died. Dunbrody, thank goodness, was an exception: the owners seemed to actually care for their human cargo, and she made dozens of passages between New Ross and the New World (New York, Boston and Quebec) with a very low death rate.

But, if I have the sailing date right, June 1849, the time the Fox family finally, after a long wait, left New Ross (Denis and two children had been sick when they were first scheduled by their landlord, Lord Fitzwilliam, to leave his estate), two of these Famine ships foundered on icebergs: one was lost with all souls and the other lost sixty passengers.

There’s a wonderful book about the Famine and migration called Paddy’s Lament, and emigrants bound for America were feted, with what folks could get together, with a grand farewell party. But these were celebrations shot through with sadness and they inevitably ended with tears.

The Irish called them “American wakes.”

Tomorrow is the 198th birthday of Norton I, Emperor of North America and Protector of Mexico, and he’s another reason why San Francisco, after all the cities I’ve seen, remains my favorite.

If I remember the story right, Joshua Norton spent thousands in an attempt to corner the rice market in the city, then populated by thousands of immigrant Chinese laborers, and had just about pulled it off when an unexpected shipment sailed into the bay and destroyed his scheme.

He disappeared.

He reappeared.

But he reappeared, in full-dress uniform, with epaulets, saber and an imperial ostrich plume and announced his new identity to the City of San Francisco, his imperial capital.
And San Francisco gracefully accepted the honor. For twenty years, it also fed the emperor and his court, a pack of his beloved mongrels who followed him everywhere on his rounds, including to some of the city’s posh restaurants.

Printers ran off imperial edicts–including one that directed a bridge to be built connecting San Francisco to Oakland– Emperor Norton Script (usually in fifty-cent denominations) and, occasionally, a summons to a duel if some local politico had offended Norton.

When Norton collapsed and died on Grant Ave. in 1880, the city went into mourning. The Chronicle headline–spelled correctly, by the way– read “Le roi est mort.”

He was a pauper–he had at most five or six dollars and a few shares in a defunct gold mine that were found along with a cache of letters addressed to Alexander II and Queen Victoria.

Norton would have been buried in a poor man’s pine coffin, but the Pacific Club paid for a beautiful coffin made of rosewood. On the day of his funeral, the crowd that made up the funeral procession behind Norton’s hearse was two miles long.

 

I thought today about my old friend Edmund Ruffin.

Edmund hated the hated the Bank of the United States, hated the federal government, hated abolitionists, hated Abraham Lincoln, and most of all, like many Southerners, he hated change—southern planters, like Ruffin, were beginning to sense that their traditional dominance of the federal government (four of our first five presidents were Virginians) even if increasingly it lay only in their power to block legislation, was eroding, and they were starting to realize, too, that the future lay with the North and with the Free Soil states entering the Union in the West. It is a great irony that as profitable as Southern agriculture was–60% of the value of 1860 American exports was in cotton–no one did more to bring on the Industrial Revolution in America than the Southerners who fired on Fort Sumter: it was Yankee steel that put so many  young Southern men into the ground of Virginia or Mississippi.

And so we are changing, too. White Americans will soon be a minority; the economy faces a postindustrial future that is neither clear nor reassuring; it appears as if it was my generation, the postwar “Boomers,” will be the last to enjoy the assurance (tempered as it was by nuclear annihilation) of an America ever progressing to a brighter, more powerful, more affluent future.  Things look grim. They must have looked that way in 1861.

The crowning insult, of course, for 21st Century Ruffins is the presence of a black man in  the White House–this one more a child of the Pacific Rim and not, to be accurate, an “African American” in the sense that we understand that term, because it is Mrs. Obama, and not her husband, whose ancestors were enslaved: she is of West African descent. Obama’s ancestors, on his father’s side, were from Kenya, a place far away from the Dutch and Spanish and English and Portuguese slavers who dropped anchor off Ghana or Mali and introduced the firearms that led to such rapid West African political destabilization; this was the factor that would lead to the trade in human beings on a scale never before seen.

Over eight years ago, I distinctly remember a New Yorker profile of Obama, this son of a Kenyan, still in the thick of the primaries, that reminded of Lincoln. (This is not a judgment on the current presidency and I am not talking about “greatness” in this paragraph. I don’t know that history will judge the Obama presidency that sympathetically.) Here is the narrower similarity: the writer depicted a young man in the Illinois State House and then the Senate who was dispassionate, rational (John Kennedy traits, at least in politics), and one who was invariably open to hearing the other side in a debate, almost at pain to understand that side’s viewpoint, and willing  to look for an eddy where compromise might be reached when the current necessitated it. He was, in that way, much like Lincoln. That’s what I was hoping for–the Lincoln in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals. But I tried not to get my hopes up: he was also, I thought uneasily, a little too Clintonesque, like Bill the Triangulator–the political equivalent of a man who smiles at you with such charm as he slips his hand into your pocket to remove your wallet–always ready to trim his sails to suit Republican winds.  This, after all, was “Bubba,” the nation’s “first black president,” who perhaps did more than any modern president to incarcerate young black males by the tens of thousands.

For whatever reason, and maybe that reason is and always has been obvious–Obama’s intellect is as subversive in its way as Emmitt Till was in his–the conciliator that the magazine piece portrayed was pinned to the wall from the moment of his swearing-in. A cabal of conservative congressmen, with Newt Gingrich in a special guest appearance, had already met the night before and decided on a scorched-earth policy for the duration of the new administration. They would fight every Obama initiative, block every Obama appointee, frustrate every Obama reform. This included the one reform most inspired by a Republican, Mitt Romney, in the Affordable Care Act, which came down in a ludicrous public debate to death panels and a “Government Takeover of Our Health Care System.” In reality the act was timid to the point of pipsqueakery when compared to the health care programs long ago adopted by nearly every Western democracy.

Of course, in FDR’s day, Social Security faced the same kind of wild-eyed hysteria–still does–even though it took the United States 70 years to adopt such a law once that noted socialist, Otto von Bismarck, had put Germany’s into effect. The other side is today, as it was in 1935 on the eve of the Social Security Act,  immune to conciliation, to compromise, and most of all to reason–“reason can deceive a man,” another German statesman once wrote in the 1930s. I spent an hour today researching and explaining the origins of and the reasons for the presence of so many undocumented Mexican workers in the United States to someone from the other side, and he thanked me for the pains I took and then dismissed Obama, without citing a single reason for his judgment, as a man who has irreparably and deliberately harmed the United States.

So it was with Lincoln.

Lincoln did not make a single speech and issued very few political statements, the exceptions being a few private letters, during the campaign of 1860, because he knew that whatever he said would be twisted by Southern opinion-makers–many of them planters, and so men of immense economic power a who had a stranglehold on every little rural courthouse in the South–into a malevolent scheme to irreparably and deliberately harm Southern rights.

In modern politics, this kind of distortion is mostly seen in the advocacy practiced by the National Rifle Association. Lincoln wanted to limit the spread of slavery, not abolish it. Reasonable Americans want to abolish large-capacity ammunition drums, not the guns themselves. In both cases, men and women of reason are painted as dangerous interlopers, as demagogues who want to destroy American rights.

The foremost Southern right, of course, in 1860, was the right to own human beings. Everything else, for the sake of accuracy, is irrelevant. Everything the South Carolina fire-eaters said in the month between Lincoln’s election and the  secession crisis that began in December was in a code–these were politicians who could weave, in hyperbole, a lurid tapestry whose centerpieces were Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner and John Brown. What they said and wrote in 1860 was  so powerful that the technique  worked to perfection a century and more later with Nixon’s Southern Strategy, with Reagan’s Welfare Queen,  with George H.W.Bush’s Willie Horton.

In 1860, every Southern white man woke up to the realization that somehow his rights were being violated, his freedom that was being threatened, and so it was his duty to go to war to fight tyranny. But the real tyrants weren’t the godless polyglot money-changers so far away in boardrooms and exchanges in Manhattan and Boston and Chicago, they were, in truth, the down-home speechifiers, the nullifiers, the secessionists. These were the opportunists who would push the South into  war. In the months before that war came, Edmund Ruffin and his cohort saw no contradiction in calling Lincoln an extremist long before that man had written the opening sentence to his first Inaugural, a speech that was extremist if sentiments like conciliation, compromise, patriotism and brotherhood can be called “extreme.”

Ruffin must have laughed at the transcript of that speech, if he ever read it, and snorted derisively, in the same way that those who know better on the other side insist that when Obama’s tears are manufactured, as if there would be need for that in a town whose first-graders have just been slaughtered by a madman with an assault rifle. So, not believing a word that came our of Lincoln’s mouth or recorded by his pen, the last principle that Edmund Ruffin supported was war.

He got to pull the lanyard on one of the artillery pieces that opened fire on Fort Sumter at 4 a.m. on April 9,  1861. Edmund Ruffin and his friends, in the pretzel logic they’d come to master, called the event that  they had started “The War of Northern Aggression.”

Ill health prevented him from killing the bushels of Yankees he wanted so badly to kill–his war had come and gone, in 1812–but a few weeks after Lee’s surrender, Edmund Ruffin had the good grace to put the muzzle of a gun to his head and pull the trigger.

What made me think about Edmund was a king-sized “DON’T TREAD ON ME!” flag I saw today, flying in the back of a pickup, and, of course, the shootout in the snow that ended the “siege” in Oregon, which I’d hoped would end when the ostensibly besieged ranchers issued a desperate call for, among other things, Cheetohs. Not even Edmund Ruffin was that funny.

Those things made me think some more: we haven’t learned a damned thing from the 620,000 boys and men we lost 150 years ago.

Our polarization and our refusal to compromise is as grievous today as it was on the eve of war in 1861. In Oregon, men very similar to Edmund Ruffin painted themselves into a corner inside an office on national parkland because they’d created a mindset as paranoid and unyielding as was Ruffin’s. They were hemmed in–long before their takeover– by the enemies their imaginations had created.The killing of Robert LaVoy Finicum a couple of days ago was the dead man’s moment of triumph: it was, after all, the way he wanted to go out. He didn’t have the time to think that the way his life was coming to its end was both tragic and the darkest of comedies. What Finicum’s partners in revolution left behind, in their little fortress on national parkland, was an immense debris field of garbage that they’d failed to clean up. Like Edmund Ruffin, their cause was passionate but empty of accountability.

 

There was one sin no Union soldier forgave in his commander, and that was if he called a halt during a march but didn’t give him enough time to brew coffee. Gen. Phil Sheridan must have known that in rallying his men during the 1864 Battle of Cedar Creek, and among Sheridan’s soldiers were eight young men who would someday settle in Arroyo Grande

In the fall of 1864, the rich farmland of the Shenandoah Valley was razed by Union troops under the command of their fiery, pint-sized commander, Phil Sheridan, in a replication of Sherman’s tactics in Georgia and the Carolinas. The Valley had long provided food and forage for Confederate armies in the East and a conduit for repeated threats to Washington; perhaps a more modern comparison might be the Ho Chi Minh Trail in the Vietnam War.

But on October 19, at the suggestion of one of my favorite Civil War generals, John B. Gordon (shot five times at Antietam, thank you very much), Confederate forces under Jubal Early fell on Sheridan’s men at their encampment on Cedar Creek and generated a rout that looked to be as complete as the one Albert Sidney Johnston inflicted on Grant’s troops the first day of Shiloh.

Unfortunately for Early, this battle turned out with the same result: a Confederate defeat. And it was because of Sheridan and one of the most inspirational moments of the war.

Sheridan was some ten miles away, in Winchester, when, at 9 a.m. he heard the sound of cannon fire (in the massive cannonade on Gettysburg’s last day, residents of Washington, Baltimore and Philadelphia heard what sounded like a distant thunderstorm). He swung into the saddle of his mount, Rienzi, a spirited black Morgan named for a town in Mississippi, and started to ride toward the sound. And then he began to gallop, with frantic staff officers, including young William McKinley, trying to keep up. As Rienzi and Sheridan closed on the battlefield, the little general began to holler–“God damn it, boys, we’ll be making coffee out of Cedar Creek tonight!”–and wave his porkpie hat, rallying his men, who were lining the roads in retreat.

It worked.

Early and his Confederates made the mistake of pausing to rest–the rations in the Union camp were too much for the perpetually hungry rebels to resist–when Sheridan and his dynamic VI Corps commander, Horatio Wright, slammed into them in mid-snack. Meanwhile, George Custer’s cavalry looped around the Confederates, got into their rear, threatening to block their escape route across the creek, and generated a panic that was complete. Jubal Early’s army disintegrated and was never an effective fighting force again.

Here are the Arroyo Grande veterans who fought at Cedar Creek:

• Alexis Adams  12^th Maine
• Herbert D. Adams  Co. K 12 Maine
• William Lane  1^st Lt Co. Co. C 24^th Iowa
• Samuel McBane  Co. F 123^rd Ohio
• Samuel B. Miller Co. G 24^th Iowa
• Timothy Munger, Co. C 8^th Ohio Cavalry (Arroyo Grande’s first City Recorder, 1911)
• George Henry Purdy Capt. Co. A  11^th WV
• William Haze Stobridge  1^st Michigan Cavalry (part of Custer’s command)

 

There are 57 Union veterans in the Arroyo Grande District Cemetery. (We have one county Confederate that I know of, from the Washington Artillery of New Orleans, but he’s disqualified himself by getting buried in San Luis Obispo.) I suppose I will write a book about them.

So what I’ve done in the last two days is to link each soldier to his regiment and then link the regiment to a particular battle–or more than one, since many fought in more than one. A majority seem to have fought in what was then the “West”–the war west of the Appalachians, and I was amazed to find at least four who fought in the Indian conflicts that paralleled the fighting in the east between North and South. The battles in which Arroyo Grande veterans fought are listed below.

I’ve already found the regiment I would have wanted to serve with–surprisingly, a regular U.S. Army unit. They were held in reserve at Antietam, were on the other side of Little Round Top at Gettysburg, idly watching artillery bursts blow up caissons and their horses, and arrived in New York City just after the draft riots. I like their sense of timing.

Now I need to start tracking these men on ancestry.com to see if I can find primary sources and photographs of them. I’ve already found a letter written by one–a woman who served as a Union Army nurse in Tennessee. Then I have to get into my Myron Angel, Madge Ditmas and Pat Loomis and into the veterans’ obituaries to discover what they did here in Arroyo Grande in their mature years–I’ve already ordered a book that’s a kind of postwar psychological portrait of Civil War veterans, so maybe that will help me figure out what brought them to our little valley. I suspect they wanted the distance between themselves and the things they saw as young men.

Then I need to locate each regiment (and company, because those are listed) in combat reports and secondary sources to see if I can pinpoint these men and what they did at Shiloh, or Antietam, or Spotyslvania. And I’ve got a Medal of Honor winner to investigate.

We’ve also got:

–A cavalryman who fought in Custer’s Michigan brigade–his Wolverines–the men he led in the kind of audacious charges, in that quaint mid-Victorian pursuit of glory, that would make him a twenty-three-year-old major general and then doom him 11 years after Appomattox.

–A Minnesotan who fought in the 1862 Sioux uprising, and later in Tennessee. The government would hang 38 Santee Sioux warriors, cousins to the men who would rub out Custer, young men who struck back when they could no longer endure the humiliation that arrived with the “civilizing” of the prairie. They sang before the traps were sprung.

–Three infantrymen with O.O. Howard’s XI Corps at Chancellorsville, in the electric moment when Howard’s men ran for their lives: suddenly rabbits, foxes and deer, panic-stricken, burst from the underbrush and into their camp, and what followed the animals were thousands of Stonewall Jackson’s howling men.

–An ancestor of my friend Will Tarwater’s, a soldier who survived the slaughter of the Union frontal assault at Cold Harbor, Virginia, in 1864, perhaps Grant’s greatest blunder, and a lesson the British failed to learn when they mimicked Grant’s assault, on a massive scale, at the Somme against teams of German machine-gunners. He may have been present later for the ghastly Battle of the Crater in front of Petersburg.

Before I get to the primary sources, I’ve got to re-read my Bruce Catton and my Shelby Foote, my Stephen Sears and my James McPherson: it’s time to re-acquaint myself with a war I once knew almost by heart. And this wouldn’t pretend to be a comprehensive summary of the war–that’s been done far better than I could do–but a series of snapshots of the roles local veterans played in winning it.

 

Patriot Graves

The Civil War Veterans of Arroyo Grande, California

The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

–Lincoln, First Inaugural, March 4, 1861.

Preface:  Gray Ghosts:  My Confederate ancestors and why they had to be defeated.

Chapter 1.  “A Fragment Spared by Time” FDR quote at the last Gettysburg reunion, 1933; then a flashback to Lincoln’s address in November 1863, when the smell of death was still present: the Sanitary Commission had by then interred the fallen soldiers–some in mass graves–but they had not yet gotten to all of the thousands of slain horses.

Chapter 2.  “I Have Long Desired to See California”  A Lincoln quote. Why they came to Arroyo Grande, and what they accomplished here.

Chapter 3.  “He Fights”  Grant in the West: Fort Donelson, Shiloh.

Chapter  4.  “If There Is a Worse Place than Hell, I Am in It” Lincoln’s quote. Low ebb: Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville.

Chapter 5. “The Whites Are the Same Everywhere” Red Cloud. Indian wars, 1862-64. The Minnesota Sioux uprising, the Powder River War against Red Cloud, the Sand Creek Massacre, Colorado.

Chapter 6. “This is a Glorious Occasion for a Speech” Which Lincoln declined to deliver. July 4, 1863: The turning points at Gettysburg and Vicksburg.

Chapter 7. “I Intend to Make Georgia Howl!” Sherman’s invasion of Georgia; the Battle of Atlanta, The March to the Sea: Savannah and the Carolinas.

Chapter 8.  “A Most Fearful Sacrifice” John Bell Hood quote. The fight for Tennessee in the fall and winter of 1864: Franklin and Nashville. A lot of our veterans fought in this campaign, one in which Hood, less one arm and one leg with which he’d started the war, proved himself a consummate master at getting his own Confederates killed, and in bushel-loads.

Chapter 9.  “There Will Be No Turning Back” Grant’s message to Lincoln. The war across the Rappahannock: The Wilderness Campaign, Cold Harbor, Sheridan’s war of movement in the Valley vs. trench warfare in front of Petersburg; the surrender.

Epilogue: Mr. Handy’s Bivouac