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Boo-Birds and Soreheads

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Alexander Stephens, Vice President of the Confederate States of America

Alexander Stephens, Vice President of the Confederate States of America

In the past, I have been critical of what I sneeringly referred to as the Confederate States of America. Now, as I am slowly working my way through the second volume of Shelby Foote’s magnificent The Civil War: A Narrative, I realize that further distinctions need to be made.

On the Southern side were such admirable and talented men as Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, and such great generals as Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson and Nathan Bedford Forrest (though the latter, as founder of the Ku Klux Klan, was not terribly admirable).

Where I was mistaken is that certain political partisans, such as the Tea Partiers, have more in common with the people who were like a saddle sore to Davis and Lee. The diminutive Alexander Stephens, Davis’s Vice President, got so disgruntled by the politics of Richmond that he just moved back to his home state of Georgia and stayed there. The Confederate paper dollar plummeted in value, eventually sinking to one-twelfth the value of a gold dollar. As Foote writes:

[T]here were many behind the southern lines who disagreed with [Davis]; who were also for peace, but only on Union terms. Some had lost heart as a result of the recent reverses [at Gettysburg and Vicksburg], while other had had no heart for the war in the first place. The latter formed a hard core of resistance around which the former gathered in numbers that increased with every Federal success. It was these men Davis had in mind when, after referring to “threats of alienation” and “preparation for organized opposition.”

I cannot help but think that the Limbaughs and Hannities of our time would also have fought against their government at Richmond. There is a certain strain of sorehead or boo-bird that is incompatible with any leader who is actually trying to accomplish something even halfway laudable—even if we were to assume that States’ Rights was a laudable goal (which I myself do not).

After Gettysburg, Lee asked Davis to be relievbed of his command.  Davis responded with a heartfelt letter that made the Army of Northern Virginia take back his resignation:

RICHMOND, VA., August 11, 1863.

GENERAL R. E. LEE,

Commanding Army of Northern Virginia.

GENERAL : Yours of the 8th instant has been received. I am glad that you concur so entirely with me as to the wants of our country in this trying hour, and am happy to add that, after the first depression consequent upon our disasters in the West, indications have appeared that our people will exhibit that fortitude which we agree in believing is alone needful to secure ultimate success.

It well became Sidney Johnston, when overwhelmed by a senseless clamor, to admit the rule that success is the test of merit, and yet there is nothing which I have found to require a greater effort of patience than to bear the criticisms of the ignorant, who pronounce everything a failure which does not equal their expectations or desires, and can see no good result which is not in the line of their own imaginings. I admit the propriety of your conclusions, that an officer who loses the confidence of his troops should have his position changed, whatever may be his ability; but when I read the sentence, I was not at all prepared for the application you were about to make. Expressions of discontent in the public journals furnish but little evidence of the sentiment of an army. I wish it were otherwise, even though all the abuse of my self should be accepted as the results of honest observation.

Were you capable of stooping to it, you could easily surround yourself with those who would fill the press with your laudations and seek to exalt you for what you have not done, rather than detract from the achievements which will make you and your army the subject of history, and object of the world’s admiration for generations to come.

I am truly sorry to know that you still feel the effects of the illness you suffered last spring, and can readily understand the embarrassments you experience in using the eyes of others, having been so much accustomed to make your own reconnoissances. Practice will, however, do much to relieve that embarrassment, and the minute knowledge of the country which you have acquired will render you less dependent for topographical information.

But suppose, my dear friend, that I were to admit, with all their implications, the points which you present, where am I to find that new commander who is to possess the greater ability which you believe to be required ? I do not doubt the readiness with which you would give way to one who could accomplish all that you have wished, and you will do me the justice to believe that, if Providence should kindly offer such a person for our use, I would not hesitate to avail of his services.

My sight is not sufficiently penetrating to discover such hidden merit, if it exists, and I have but used to you the language of sober earnestness, when I have impressed upon you the propriety of avoiding all unnecessary exposure to danger, because I felt your country could not bear to lose you. To ask me to substitute you by someone in my judgment more fit to command, or who would possess more of the confidence of the army, or of reflecting men in the country, is to demand an impossibility.

It only remains for me to hope that you will take all possible care of yourself, that your health and strength may be entirely restored, and that the Lord will preserve you for the important duties devolved upon you in the struggle of our suffering country for the independence of which we have engaged in war to maintain.

As ever, very respectfully and truly,

(Signed) JEFFERSON DAVIS.

I take back my words about the Confederates States of America. Even in the South, there were Archangels, and there were also malignant spirits.

A Grim Secret

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Union General Ulysses S. Grant

Union General Ulysses S. Grant

Ulysses S. Grant was an altogether unprepossessing man. He didn’t have the swagger or gravitas of such Union generals as McDowell, Pope, McClellan, Burnside, Hooker, or Meade; but on the other hand, he was not a coward, a poltroon, or pathologically cautious either. His successes were due not only to his pertinacity, but to a grim secret that he knew and made use of as head of the Army of the Potomac.

Yes, the South had the more dashing generals, but they were on the wrong side when it came to the numbers. You see, the North had a larger population of eligible males to sacrifice to death, disability, and capture than the South. The South had, for all practical purposes, 100% conscription. At the end of the war, there were still at least 2 million eligible men who hadn’t worn the blue uniform. Take a look at this website by the Civil War Trust or charts and tables on Civil War casualties.

This Chart Says It All

This Chart Says It All

The other factor was that Grant never ran. At the end of the battle, he was still there and still game for more bloodshed—not for the sake of shedding blood, but for the sake of ultimate victory.

I have been reading the second volume of Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: A Narrative. Even with his Confederate sympathies, Foote could appreciate Grant’s grand strategy at Vicksburg. If the North won Vicksburg, the whole Trans-Mississippi South would be lost. The problem was: How to get at it. The most obvious way was to invade Mississippi and take it from the rear. Unfortunately, that failed; and in any case the area was controlled by the South’s most ingenious and fierce commander of cavalry, Nathan Bedford Forrest. (After the war, Forrest was one of the founders of the Ku Klux Klan.)

Grant was not afraid to fail, and he failed a total of seven or eight times before he found a way of marshaling his army and navy forces to effect a landing on the eastern side of the Father of Waters, well out of the way of Forrest’s cavalry. He made straight for Jackson, Mississippi, where he wrecked the railroad lines that supplied the Confederates at Vicksburg. Along the way back toward Vicksburg, he fought two battles at Champion Hill and the Big Black River. Then and only then did he directly besiege Vicksburg. From then on, it was pretty much a matter of starving the rebels until they surrendered early in July.

It was right around then that the North won its decisive victory at Gettysburg.

It wasn’t long before Lincoln concluded that, in Grant, he had a general who could outfight Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. That is exactly what he proceeded to do in what has come to be known as his Overland Campaign. It didn’t matter how many men he lost jat battles such as the Wilderness, the North Anna, Spotsylvania Court House, and Cold Harbor just so long as he didn’t fall back after each battle, as the Army of the Potomac was wont to do. He not only did not fall back: He pushed Lee’s forces step by step closer to the final showdown in front of Richmond. And by then, it was all over.

Too bad that Grant made such a terrible President. He was a smart man, and a great military leader, but none of us are perfect.

 

 

Sheer Funk

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“Fighting Joe” Hooker

“Fighting Joe” Hooker

It is no secret that, until he decided on Ulysses S. Grant, President Lincoln had nothing but trouble with his generals in charge of the Army of the Potomac. They were specialists in losing battles, such as Ambrose Burnside at Fredericksburg, who would have attacked again into the teeth of Robert E. Lee’s guns had Lincoln not removed him. When he did, he replaced him with “Fighting Joe” Hooker, one of the more promising of his subordinates.

At the outset, Hooker looked good. Not only was he dashing and debonair, but he seemed to have put together a good plan for attacking—and encircling—Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.

But then, something happened. Lee and Stonewall Jackson worked out a highly successful attack on Hooker’s right flank at Chancellorsville. That flank folded, spectacularly. And then, surprisingly, Hooker folded. It was a case of sheer funk. He started issuing contradictory orders while Lee picked him apart. Even when one of Hooker’s generals (Sedgewick)  re-took Fredericksburg, it still made Chancellorsville one of the North’s most spectacular losses.

It reminds me of the time I was backing up my car in a parking lot, not thinking someone was right behind me. It was a woman driver who just panicked as she saw my car coming at her at the frightening speed of 5 mph.

There had been no sign in previous battles that Hooker would lose his marbles once he was put in charge. But he did nonetheless.

Incidentally, the term hooker to refer to a prostitute comes from Joe Hooker’s surname. Before he took charge, he was quite a drinker and parter. Perhaps he should have had a few drinks at Chancellorsville, together with some loose women. The result couldn’t have been worse.

Unfortunately for Lee, he lost his favorite subordinate, Stonewall Jackson, to a case of friendly fire. What was at first a wounded arm wound up being an amputated arm followed by a fatal case of pneumonia.

The Man Who Created a Nation

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Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881-1938)

Although the leaders of Turkey seem embattled now because of the protests taking place in Istanbul, one has to consider that, for the most part, the nation has been admirably stable. Especially when one considers the immediate neighborhood: Syria, Iraq, Iran, Cyprus, Greece, and Bulgaria. That was mostly due to the efforts of one man, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who almost single-handedly changed the course of Turkish history.

Born in Salonika (now Thessaloniki in Greece), Atatürk was not even Turkish. Although a Muslim, he always considered himself a Macedonian. Commissioned as an officer in 1907, he began his career at a time when the Ottoman Empire was in transition between the absolutism of the Sultan (and Caliph) and the rising Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), which has come to be known as the Young Turks.

Mustafa always preferred to stay at arm’s length from the CUP officers and their leader Enver Pasha, whom he felt to be a poseur. Knowing this, the CUP leadership essentially sent him to various places to keep him out of the way.

Until World War One. The Empire allied itself with the Kaiser and put German officers in charge of army units. At the Battle of Gallipoli, however, it was Mustafa Kemal who ignored the advice of Liman von Sanders of the German General Staff and destroyed an Allied army consisting mostly of Australian and New Zealand troops.

Then, after the war, Greece under Eleftherios Venizelos attacked Turkey. Many of the coastal areas of Turkey were at this time under control of Britain, Italy, and France; so Mustafa Kemal based himself in Angora (now called Ankara) where he would be free of the Greek-loving Allies. Once again, he proved his mettle by destroying the Greek army and driving them into the sea. In connection with this, he is usually blamed for atrocities at Smyrna (now Izmir). Although casualties were in the low thousands, most of the damage was done by fires set by the fleeing Greeks.

This military victory, combined with equally important diplomatic victories at European peace conferences, led to the Allied occupations coming to an end and Atatürk’s government in Angora becoming the de facto power.  In short order, Atatürk abolished the Sultanate, allowing the last Sultan to go into exile in Europe, and choosing one of the ex-Sultan’s family to be the Caliph. Within a year, he also abolished the Caliphate and put Turkey on the road to becoming a secular Muslim republic. (Sounds like an oxymoron, doesn’t it?)

Within the first few years of his rule, Mustafa Kemal abolished Arabic script in favor of the European alphabet, abolished the fez and turban as required headgear for Turks, and secularized the Turkish Army. He stayed in Angora, partly because Istanbul was crawling with elements of the discredited CUP faction.

Curiously, the old Ottoman Empire was only partly Turkish. Toward the end, the Sultans had drawn their heirs from a harem of Albanian, Greek, Circassian, and other women, mostly from far-flung parts of the Empire. Nominally, they were still descendants of Osman, after whom the Empire was named, but did not give any special privileges to the Turks of Asia Minor. It was Atatürk who made Turkey a Turkish nation, with relatively small minorities of Armenians and Kurds. (In case you’re wondering, the Armenian genocide took place before he came into power.)

Mustafa Kemal could have become another Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin, but instead he wanted to empower his people. Admittedly, he kept his fingers on the scales and would intervene personally when he felt that his successors were going in the wrong direction. He was something of a dictator, and something of a founding father. But he created a nation.

There is an interesting biography by Lord Kinross entitled Atatürk: A Biography of Mustafa Kemal, Father of Modern Turkey.

Laughing in the Face of Death

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A Viking Battle Scene

A Viking Battle Scene

Once again, I am inspired by one of Jóhannes Benediktsson’s “Daily Life” columns on the Iceland Review website. This one appeared on March 7 of this year, while I was involved in a typical tax season imbroglio not unlike the one illustrated above.

The subject of Jóhannes’s column was based on a meditation about the inevitability of death:

I’ve come to the conclusion, that I must somehow cheat death. Like artists do. They live on through their art. And the same goes for politicians. They will always be remembered in history books.

But there is another way to become immortal, I’ve discovered. And it is so much easier.

The trick is, according to the Icelandic Sagas, to say something incredibly witty, right before you die. It doesn’t matter who you are.

Following are some (well, actually most) of the highlights from his column. First up is a messenger sent by some assassins to see whether Gunnar of Hlidarendi was home:

“You’ll have to find that out for yourself. I do know his halberd was home.”

The name of the assassin, according to Njals Saga (the greatest of all the Icelandic sagas), was Þorgrímur Austmaður, and it is his only appearance in the saga. After his famous line, he collapsed in his own blood. Shown below is a halberd:

A Halberd

A Halberd

When gutted by a spear in the Gisla Saga (a.k.a. Gisli Sursson’s Saga), Véstein Vésteinsson cried out, “Bullseye!” (Mighty sporting of him, that!)

Then, in my second favorite saga, Grettir’s Saga, Átli Asmundarson cries out when hit by a broad spear: “Ah! It seems that broad spears have become fashionable.”

Finally, there is poor Þormóður Kolbrúnarskáld in The Saga of the Confederates who is all but disemboweled. Looking at his guts lying on the ground, he exclaims, “The king has fed us well!”

Now there are many reasons to love the sagas, and there is far more than gory violence and unbelievable sangfroid to be encountered in them (though it is by no means absent). I have read all the sagas from which Jóhannes quotes, most of them more than once, and keep finding myself sucked in by a frontier society that strives to arrive at some sort of balance in the absence of a king or any effective hierarchical government.

All the early Icelanders had to rely on was themselves, with the occasional help of some of the more prosperous families who offered their services as intermediaries in the disputes that inevitably arose.

In many ways, it was very much like our own Wild West.

Can This Be Me?

Budé

Guillaume Budé

In 1503 he married the daughter of an ancient Norman house, and it is said that, on his wedding-day, by an exceptional act of self-denial, he limited his time of study to three hours only. In his studies he was aided in every possible way by the devotion of his wife. Once, when he was busy reading in his library, one of the servants suddenly rushed in to inform him that the house was on fire. The scholar, without lifting up his eyes from his book, simply said to his informant:—allez avertir ma femme; vous savez bien que je ne m’occupe pas des affaires du menage! (Translated as: “Go tell my wife. You know I don’t concern myself with household matters.”) His health was seriously impaired by his prodigious industry, and the surgeons of the day vainly endeavoured to cure him of his constant headaches by applying a red-hot iron to the crown of his head. Happily he was enabled to find a safer remedy by taking long walks and by cultivating his garden.—John Edwin Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship, Vol. II, Entry on “Guillaume Budé”

Aristocide

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Children of the Nobility Wearing Russian Peasant Costumes

Children of the Nobility Wearing Russian Peasant Costumes

What happened to the Russian nobility after the October Revolution of 1917? Either they escaped the Soviet Union, or they became targets for extermination under Stalin. Around 1918 Grigory Zinoviev declared that as much as ten percent of Russia’s then population of ten million would have to be annihilated as being “counterrevolutionaries.” As Zinoviev’s colleague Martin Latsis said:

Do not look in the file of incriminating evidence to see whether or not the accused rose up against the Soviets with arms or words…. Ask him instead to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror.

Ironically, after the assassination of Sergei Kirov in 1934, Zinoviev was ordered to be arrested and tried during the first of the big show trials what became Stalin’s purges. Of course, he was found guilty and executed, along with thousands of others.

In a new book by Douglas Smith entitled Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy, a brief description entailed what happened to one noble family, the Obolenskys:

Prince Vladimir Obolensky was killed at his estate in early 1918; later that year his older brother Alexander was shot at the Fortress of Peter and Paul in Petrograd. Prince Mikhail Obolensky was beaten to death by a mob at a railroad station in February 1918. Prince Pavel Obolensky, a cornet in the Hussars, was shot by the Bolsheviks in June 1918 and left for dead…. Princess Yelena Obolensky was killed at her estate in November 1918; her dead body was burned along with her manor house. Many more Obolenskys suffered similar horrific fates; they included seven members of the family who perished in Stalin’s prisons years later.

Particularly brutal were the fates of those aristocrats who sided with the White Army during the Civil War that followed the Revolution. And then along came Stalin, who did his best to demolish what remained.

This is not to say that there weren’t survivors, former aristos who “blended in” with the proletariat and lay low to avoid the attention of the Chekhist agencies of the Red Terror. What is astonishing was that the Bolsheviks and Stalinists found it necessary to execute an entire class which had already forfeited all its powers and wealth. But then, that’s what tyranny is all about: It is not above kicking you when you’re already down.

 

Serendipity: The Janissaries

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At One Time, They Were Feared by the Enemies of the Ottoman Empire

At One Time, They Were the Most Feared Infantry in Europe

They look rather silly, don’t they? But in the 15th and 16th centuries, they were the elite infantry of the Ottoman Empire. The Janissaries conquered the Balkans, much of the Black Sea coast, and Hungary. Little known to most people is that they were almost exclusively Christians, who were either kidnapped or bought from their parents by recruiters under the empire’s devshirme system. But, like many things that were once a good idea, it didn’t look so good any more by the time the 1800s rolled around.

The following discussion comes from David Brewer’s excellent book The Greek War of Independence: The Struggle for Freedom from Ottoman Oppression and the Birth of the Modern Greek Nation:

The Sultan’s problem within his borders lay, as it had done before, with the corps of janissaries. They were now practically useless as a military force, and [the Sultan] Mahmoud had to fight his wars with mercenaries and with troops raised by local pashas. The janissary regiments in the provinces drew pay and rations in idleness, while those in the capital were an unruly menace, as a contemporary visitor described. “Lords of the day,” he wrote,

they ruled with uncontrolled insolence in Constantinople, their appearance portraying the excess of libertinism; their foul language; their gross behaviour; their enormous turbans; their open vests; their bulky sashes filled with arms; their weighty sticks; rendering them objects of fear and disgust. Like moving columns, they thrust everybody from their path without any regard of age or sex, frequently bestowing durable marks of anger or contempt.

In 1807 Mahmoud’s predecessor Selim III had tried to bring the janissaries under control by incorporating them into his so-called Army of the New Order. The janissaries reacted violently, the New Army was formally abolished and Selim lost his throne. In the following year, the first of Mahmoud’s reign, his grand vizier publicly advocated reforming the janissaries and curbing their abuses, but lost his life in the ensuing janissary revolt.

In the space of some four hundred years, the janissaries went from an elite military force to a kind of mafia, with members of the corps selling “protection” to merchants. They acted as the firemen of Constantinople, but it was also widely believed that they set the fires in the first place.

For a delightful novel about the decay of the janissary corps, I recommend Jason Goodwin’s The Janissary Tree, a 19th century mystery whose “detective” is a eunuch connected with the Sublime Porte. In 1826, the Sultan could take no more and began arresting and executing the remnants of the corps. In Ottoman history, the persecution is referred to as the “Auspicious Event.”

By the way, Jason Goodwin not only writes entertaining detective stories set in the Ottoman Empire, but he is also a historian whose Lords of the Horizons is perhaps the best introduction to the Empire.

A Jesuit Paradise?

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Stamps Commemorating the Jesuit Missions of Paraguay

Stamps Commemorating the Jesuit Missions of Paraguay

It is interesting to me that, for the first time in its history, the papacy is in the hands of a Jesuit, from South America no less. In southeastern Paraguay and in the Argentinean state of Misiones, there are numerous ruins attesting to the 17th and 18th century Jesuit missions—missions that were so powerful that they were, in effect, in control of the Guarani Indians of the area. If you ever saw Roland Joffe’s 1986 movie, The Mission, with Robert DeNiro, Liam Neeson, and Jeremy Irons, you have some idea of what the Jesuit government of Paraguay was like.

You can find out even more by reading the forgotten classic history by R. B. Cunninghame Graham entitled A Vanished Arcadia: Being Some Account of the Jesuits in Paraguay 1607 to 1767.

It even finds its way into Voltaire’s Candide, but its author being such an anticlerical cuss, he has his hero kill the Jesuit commandant of one of the missions. Yet he writes in Histoire Politique et Philosophique des Indes:

When in 1768 the missions of Paraguay left the hands of the Jesuits, they had arrived at perhaps the highest degree of civilization to which it is possible to conduct a young people, and certainly at a far superior state than that which existed in the rest of the new hemisphere. The laws were respected there, morals were pure, a happy brotherhood united every heart, all the useful arts were in a flourishing state, and even some of the more agreeable sciences: plenty was universal.

I have long thought that, if my thoughts had ever taken a turn toward the Catholic priesthood, I would have become a Jesuit. My teachers at St. Peter Chanel in Bedford, Ohio, wanted me to become one of them, a Marist. But, in the end, I became neither.

So now Pope Francis is a Jesuit from Argentina. He, I am sure, is quite aware of the history of the Jesuits in the southern cone of South America. It would be nice if he did for the Catholic Church what the Jesuits did for the Guarani in Paraguay and Argentina. Benedict XVI was a good man, but not strong enough for the task of making his faith relevant to a world that is falling away from the Church.

 

East

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Are We Wearing Blinders When We Look at European History?

Are We Wearing Blinders When We Look at European History?

Our understanding of history is based on what happened in England and France, with an occasional detour to Spain, Germany, or Italy. We think of the First World War as having begun in 1914 and ended in 1918, and the Second World War as having begun in 1939 and ended in 1945. That those were merely the dates in which Western Europe and the United States were involved somehow doesn’t make it into our textbooks, let alone our consciousness.

We are so inundated with books and films about the Second World War that we forget that the whole Western European involvement was only a sideshow. Once Hitler had begun Operation Barbarossa and invaded Russia in June 1941, it was the beginning of the end for his dreams of a Thousand Year Reich. Things looked up for a while for the Panzer invaders, but soon they were dying by the millions—after having caused millions of civilian and military casualties in the Ukraine and Belarus.

Also, long before 1939, the Japanese had invaded Manchuria and Southern China, and the Germans had marched into Austria and Czechoslovakia. That wasn’t war?

Perhaps because I am increasingly conscious of my Hungarian roots, I prefer to not concentrate on the usual Western sequence of Hundred Years War, Crusades, Magna Carta, Renaissance, Reformation, Thirty Years War, Enlightenment, French Revolution, Napoleon, Metternich, and so on. There was also history occurring when Hungary was conquered by Suleiman the Magnificent and his Janissaries at the battle of Mohacs in 1526, when Poland was partitioned three times in the eighteenth century, when two Balkan Wars were fought in 1912-1913 leading up to the “main event” after Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, when Greece invaded Turkey in the early 1920s and was soundly defeated by Kemal Ataturk, resulting in thousands of Greek refugees being forced out of Smyrna and the rest of Ionia.

There is ever so much more: the war between the Reds and the Whites after the October Revolution of 1917, Stalin’s purges of the late 1930s, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the brave Polish resistance to Communist rule under the leadership of men like Adam Michnik and Lech Walesa, and Tito’s repudiation of Stalin.

The next time you are tempted to read a history book, remember that there are probably large lacunae in your knowledge. Instead of another book on the cockamamie British royalty, read Robert D. Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts or Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad or The Fall of Berlin. Read poetry by Czeslaw Milosz, Russian novels like Vasili Grossman’s Life and Fate, or the journalism of the Hungarian Gyula Krúdy in Krúdy’s Chronicles.

But mostly, recognize that there is a whole world out there with which you may not be acquainted, but which will influence the course of history to come for generations to come.