Home » Posts tagged 'civil-war'

Tag Archives: civil-war

L.A. in the Civil War

Posted on by

Docent at Wilmington’s Drum Barracks (2008)

Southern California was separated from the main battlefields of the Civil War by thousands of miles, yet it was contested territory. The California State Legislature was a hotbed of secessionism, and there was talk of separating the state into two halves, with the southern half being part of the Confederate States of America.

Two military officers stationed in the area became major players in the East: Albert Sidney Johnston becoming a general for the Confederacy, and Winfield Scott Hancock for the Union.

Winfield Scott Hancock, One of the Heroes of Gettysburg

Fortunately for the Union, there was a strong cadre of Yankee sympathizers in town. These included Phineas Banning, responsible for building the Port of Los Angeles; District Attorney Ezra Drown; rancher Jonathan Warner; and publisher Charles Conway.

The only remaining military facility from those days is in Wilmington—the Drum Barracks, just south of Phineas Banning’s palatial estate.

Los Angeles in 1861

If you’d like to read a more detailed account of how L.A. fared during the Civil War, with numerous photos, I recommend you check out this website from TV station KCET, entitled “We Have Been and Are Yet Secessionist”—Los Angeles When the Civil War Began.

Fort Tejon

Posted on by

Reconstructed Enlisted Men’s Barracks at Fort Tejon

Near the top of the Grapevine along Interstate 5 is an old fort constructed soon after California joined the Union. Beginning in 1854, the fort was occupied by the U.S. 1st Dragoons to protect Southern California from the North and vice versa. Martine and I had been there a couple times before, but we were starved for some sort of destination. Although the Fort Tejon State Historical Park was open, all the buildings and their exhibits were closed in the interest of social distancing. Semi-open as it was, it was still interesting to wander around the premises looking at the reconstructed buildings.

First we drove to the mountain community of Frazier Park on the route to Mount Piños, at 8,847 feet (2,697 meters) the tallest mountain in nearby Ventura County. There, we ate at a little Mexican restaurant before doubling back to the I-5.

Entrance to Fort Tejon

There were never any real battles fought at Tejon—other than sham affairs involving re-enactors—and, what is more, as soon as Fort Sumter was fired upon, the 1st Dragoons were all shipped east, to be replaced by three companies of the 2nd California Volunteer Cavalry. There was some secessionist feeling in Southern California, but there was the staunchly Union Drum Barracks in Wilmington to keep Los Angeles in line. By September 1864, the Fort was decommissioned.

It was blisteringly hot at the Fort, despite the fact that we were a 4,000 feet (1,219 meters) altitude. The temperature was around 90° Fahrenheit (32° Celsius), but dropped down considerably as we returned to the Coast with its “June Gloom” marine layer.

The Buildings at Fort Tejon Looked to Be Made with Adobe Bricks

Most of the reconstructed buildings at Fort Tejon looked very authentic, being made with adobe bricks.

It was nice once again to have places to go, even with all the coronavirus restrictions in place.

Bulldozing the Past

Posted on by | 1 Comment

Statue of Robert E. Lee on His Horse Traveller in Richmond

Liberals sometimes exhibit some nasty, ultimately destructive traits. I am dismayed by the current trend of paving over any tribute to Confederate heroes. Many of these Confederate heroes, I believe, deserve to be commemorated. The Commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, Robert E. Lee, was by his lights a good man. So what if he owned slaves? He was a great military leader. Given what he had to work with, he was better than any general on the winning side.

General Braxton Bragg, after whom Fort Bragg is named, was nowhere near as deserving as Lee, but he was no ogre deserving only of ignominy. Even the memory of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the greatest cavalry general of the Civil War and the founder of the Ku Klux Klan, deserves to be honored—for some things.

There are no statues honoring Henry Wirz, the Swiss-born commandant of Andersonville Prison, who was the only Confederate officer hanged for murder after the war—and deservedly so.

I love reading about the War Between the States, and I honor the memory of the South’s greatest generals. Why mess with statues honoring them? Why change the name of Fort Bragg? Why ban the Confederate battle flag on NASCAR vehicles and displays? I am perfectly willing to coexist with history, even if some of my political allies are not.

Christopher Columbus Is Also in Danger of Having His Reputation Erased

Christopher Columbus is being eclipsed for the same reason. Again, by his lights, Columbus behaved like most Europeans loose in the New World. He was not an extraordinarily bad man like Pedro de Alvarado or Nuño Beltran de Guzmán, whose bloody careers led to the death of thousands of Mexican and Central American natives. I might not recognize Columbus Day as a major holiday, but few people do. But any attempt to blot out the history of his times only does all of us a disservice.

Who’s next to go? Thomas Jefferson? Abraham Lincoln? Where does it all stop?

 

Why I’m Stuck on the Maya

Posted on by

Maya Girls

My first real trip outside the borders of the United States was to Yucatán in November 1975. I was so entranced with what I saw that I kept coming back to Maya Mexico for years, until 1992. During that time, I also wanted to go to Guatemala, but a civil war between the Maya and the Ladinos (Mestizos) was raging until 1996; and Guatemala was on the State Department’s “Level 4: Do Not Travel” list until just recently. Even now, the State Department as the whole country classified under a blanket “Level 3: Reconsider travel to Guatemala due to crime” warning.

Why is it that I am so fascinated by the Maya that I would risk flouting President Trumpf’s State Department?

For one thing, the Maya are incredible survivors. The Aztecs were ground down by Cortez within two years. In Peru, it took forty years before resistance was smashed by Pizarro and his successors. And the Maya? That took a full 180 years before the last Maya kingdom (at Tayasal in Guatemala) was leveled.

Today, there are 1.5 million speakers of Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. There are some 6 million speakers of the 26-odd Mayan languages and dialects. Of course, the Incan Quechua language has even more speakers: some 8.5 to 11 million speakers in several South American countries.

In recent years, there have been several disturbances in the Maya area:

  • In Mexico, there was a Maya war against the Ladinos in Yucatán that lasted from 1847 to 1901 and a Zapatista revolt in Chiapas that flared briefly in 1994.
  • In Guatemala, there was a violent civil war against the Ladinos from 1960 to 1996. It is estimated that tens of thousands of Maya were massacred by the army.
  • In El Salvador, there was a civil war from 1979 to 1981. (Only some of the indigenous peoples involved in that one were Maya.)

The Maya are still there, occupying large parts of Mexico (Yucatán, Chiapas, Tabasco, Campeche, and Quintana Roo); Belize; Guatemala; and parts of Honduras and El Salvador. It is no small achievement for them to have survived so much persecution for upwards of 500 years.

That is what interests me.

 

 

The Federal Republic of Central America

Posted on by

One Real Coin of the Federal Republic of Central America

Between 1823 and 1840, what we know of the countries of Central America was a single country, with the following two exceptions:

  • British Honduras (now Belize) has never officially been recognized by Guatemala.
  • Panama did not exist as a separate country, but was a part of the Republic of Colombia.

In 1839, a young American by the name of John Lloyd Stephens was appointed by President Martin Van Buren to be a special ambassador to the unified Federal Republic of Central America. The only problem was that, by the time Stephens and his artist companion Frederick Catherwood landed in Central America, the Federal Republic was in the process of splitting apart.

John Lloyd Stephens (1805-1852)

Stephens’s main interest was to visit the Mayan ruins scattered around Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico—but going as a plenipotentiary of the United States was a big plus, especially since the countries of Central America were coming apart like a cheap suit.

I have just finished re-reading Volume i of Stephens’s Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatán. The only ruins Stephens and Catherwood were able to visit before presenting their credentials to the government were in Copán, Honduras.  Most of the rest of that volume concerns the efforts of the two to find the government, which Stephens does in El Salvador, quite by accident:

The next day I made a formal call upon Señor Vigil [Vice President of the Republic]. I was in a rather awkward position. When I left Guatimala [sic] in search of a government, I did not expect to meet it on the road. In that state I had heard but one side [that of Guatemalan rebel General Carrera]; I was just beginning to hear the other. If there was any government, I had treed it. Was it the real thing or was it not? In Guatimala they said it was not; here they said it was. It was a knotty question. I was in no great favor in Guatimala, and in endeavouring to play a safe game I ran the risk of being hustled by all parties. In Guatimala they had no right to ask for my credentials, and took offence because I did not present them; here, if I refused, they had the right to consider it an insult.

As I read Stephens, I was reminded of how great some of the 19th century U.S. historians were. Not only Stephens, but also William H. Prescott (History of the Conquest of Mexico), Francis Parkman (the volumes of France and England in North America), and John Lothrop Motley (The Rise of the Dutch Republic). They are unfortunately not read much today, but I am convinced they are, in their own field, among the lights of 19th century American literature.

 

Erasing the Confederacy?

Posted on by | 1 Comment

Nathan Bedford Forrest (1821-1877)

For some reason that perplexes me, there seems to be a concerted attempt of late to eliminate all traces of the Confederacy: its memorials, its flags, and its heroes. I, myself, have nothing against Robert E. Lee, a man I regard as a legitimate American hero who just happened to fight on the losing side. I even admire the somewhat unsavory Nathan Bedford Forrest, a brilliant cavalry general who just happened to be one of the founding members of the Ku Klux Klan.

These are men who believed in slavery along with millions of their countrymen. In fact, Forrest had before the war been a slave dealer. Do I think slavery is evil? Yes. Do I blame people in the past for believing differently than we do? Not at all. Slavery was petty universal until some point in the 19th Century. It exists even today in the United States, where many prostitutes are in fact slaves of the men who pimp them. We are wasting our time when we are trying to reform our ancestors by pulling down statues, banning flags, and denigrating heroes of times past.

To a certain extent, I believe that much of this whitewashing the past is due to the fact that even the Solid South is not necessarily solid. Americans from Blue States have invaded part of the South, and Red Staters have returned the favor.  If I lived in Memphis today, I probably would be persistently annoyed by all the trappings of the War of the Southern Confederacy.

Let the South have their heroes. Does that mean that we should permit slavery in the 21st century? By no means. We just have to admit that times and mores have changed.

If you reject my reasoning, I suggest you read the three hefty volumes of Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: A Narrative.  It is written predominately from the Southern point of view. As I read it, I kept thinking, “These people were Americans, too!”

How the North Won the Civil War?

Posted on by

California Gold Paved the Way to Victory

This evening, I was reading John McPhee’s Assembling California when, suddenly, I came upon this quote by John Bidwell who wrote the following in his memoirs, first published in 1900:

It is a question whether the United States could have stood the shock of the great rebellion of 1861 had the California gold discovery not been made. Bankers and business men of New York in 1864 did not hesitate to admit that but for the gold of California, which monthly poured its five or six millions into that financial center, the bottom would have dropped out of everything. These timely arrivals so strengthened the nerves of trade and stimulated business as to enable the government to sell its bonds at a time when its credit was its life-blood and the main reliance by which to feed, clothe, and maintain its armies. Once our bonds went down to thirty-eight cents on the dollar. California gold averted a total collapse and enabled a preserved Union to come forth from the great conflict.

Bidwell should know: He was, in addition to being a California settler as far back as 1841, but was a member of congress and a candidate for Governor of the State of Califonia.

McPhee states that “by 1865, at the end of the American Civil War, seven hundred and eighty-five million dollars had come out of the ground in California, making a difference—possibly the difference—in the Civil War.”

The Infamous Shad Bake

Posted on by

Major General George E. Pickett, C.S.A.

Major General George E. Pickett, C.S.A.

He is most famous for leading a spectacularly failed charge against an entrenched elevated position at the Battle of Gettysburg. But he was not to blame for that: The charge was ordered by Lee and executed as ably as possible considering that it was foredoomed to end in disaster.

But that was not the last act of Pickett’s career in Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Pickett was commanding general of C.S.A. forces at Five Points, off the right flank of the Petersburg defenses. Lee had given his general direct orders regarding holding his position: “Hold Five Forks at all hazards. Protect road to Ford’s Depot and prevent Union forces from striking the Southside Railroad. Regret exceedingly your forced withdrawal, and your inability to hold the advantage you had gained.” [Italics mine]

The tone of this order did not sit well with General Pickett. Whereupon, feeling that he had covered his bases adequately in case Sheridan should attack, Pickett accepted an invitation from a fellow officer to join in a picnic of shad that had been caught in the Nottoway River. Both he and Fitzhugh Lee left their forces to subordinates and indulged in a nice shad bake.

Unfortunately, Sheridan picked that point to attack Five Forks and stage one of the most decisive victories of the long Siege of Petersburg, sending the defenders scampering for their lives.

Needless to say, that did not sit well with Robert E. Lee, who terminated Pickett’s command a few days later.

 

In at the Finish

Posted on by

Abe Lincoln Walking he Streets of Richmond in April 1865

Abe Lincoln Walking he Streets of Richmond in April 1865

It is not generally remembered that Abraham Lincoln was visiting the Union lines during the final breakthrough of the siege of Petersburg. Once  General Sheridan crushed the Confederate resistance at Five Points, there was no more holding back of the Grant’s army: Richmond would have to be abandoned.

Even before it was entirely safe to do so, Lincoln had Admiral Porter sail up the James River and land him in the Rebel capital. On April 4, 1865, he walked around what remained of the city (part of which was still in flames). At first, he was accompanied only by a few Naval officers and men, until General Weitzel, who controlled the Union forces in the city, provided an adequate guard for him.

It is a pity that Matthew Brady was not there to take photographs of the lanky President being approached by Black Virginians, who recognized him at once and sang hymns of thanksgiving. Of course, he received a much less welcoming response from most White residents.

I am close to finishing Volume III of Shelby Foote’s great The Civil War: A Narration, which covers the period from the Red River Campaign of 1864 to Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Since the beginning of the month, I have read little else, and my mind is full of Civil War battles and the awful destruction of thousands of Americans of both sides. To this day, the butcher’s bill for the Civil War dwarfs the sum total of casualties of all other wars in which the U.S. has participated since its inception in 1776.

Marching Through Georgia

Posted on by

The Route of Sherman’s March to the Sea

The Route of Sherman’s March to the Sea

Much has been written about William Tecumseh Sherman’s March to the Sea in terms of its savagery—but almost nothing in terms of its ingenuity. After Atlanta was destroyed by Sherman’s forces, Confederate General John Bell Hood decided to attack toward Tennessee, destroying Sherman’s supplies.

But what Sherman had decided instead was to avoid Hood’s army altogether and march to Savannah, where he could be resupplied with Union ships waiting near the harbor. So he divided his army into two columns and, while marching, supplied his army with provender hijacked from plantations in the rich farm land along the route. In fact, Sherman arrived in Savannah with more cattle than he started from in Atlanta. And his men were well fed with turkeys, hogs, sweet potatoes, molasses, and corn that they were able to commandeer enroute.

William Tecumseh Sherman - 1893 Stamp Issue

William Tecumseh Sherman – 1893 Stamp Issue

It had been always been the Union Army’s strategy to fight and defeat the enemy’s army. Even Ulysses S. Grant, besieging Petersburg on the outskirts of Richmond, had doubts about the plan, but finally decided to give his approval. Sherman wasted no time in disappearing from the scene, fighting no battles until he re-emerged at Savannah.

The Confederates were thoroughly confused. Hood was marching his army into Tennessee, where it ran into George Thomas’s forces at Franklin and Nashville. Other Confederates thought that Sherman’s goal was Macon or Augusta, which they dutifully reinforced, only to be avoided by Sherman’s columns as they attacked no city larger than Milledgeville, which was until 1868, the State Capitol.

I am currently reading Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: A Narrative, Red River to Appomatox, which provides a Southern view of the end of the Civil War. Even Foote does not accept that Sherman’s soldiers were particularly brutal, though there was a considerable amount of agricultural theft, freeing of slaves, and destruction of property. It seems to have been under control, however, and Foote makes no claims of murder or rapine.