The more I study Theodore Roosevelt, the more I appreciate the impact he had on this nation, both in large and small ways. He brought several phrases, for example, into common usage in this country. One of these is “weasel words”. Roosevelt did not invent the phrase, he noted that he first heard it used in conversation in 1879, but when he used it the phrase quickly entered American popular usage. Roosevelt’s most famous use of the phrase was on May 31, 1916 in a speech entitled Mr. Wilson’s Weasel Words in which he attacked Wilson’s call for “voluntary universal military training”, Roosevelt viewing such a plan as inadequate and calling for a draft. (more…)
Lee realized that he was reaching a limit to how he could respond to Grant’s continual movement to the southeast. Protecting Richmond was nailing his army in place, depriving it of the ability to maneuver as Grant used his superior numbers to outflank Lee’s defense. Lee’s left and center along the Totopotomoy were relatively easy to defend, but his right was at a right angle tot he creek as the Union forces were continuing their push south to outflank him. It was for this reason that Lee ordered Early, now in command of the II corps after Lee had relieved Ewell, attack Warren’s V corps.
The Confederate attack, although pressed heroically by the men of Ramseur’s division, proved a costly failure with 1500 Confederate casualties to 700 Union, the Union troops cheering the valor of the Confederate troops they repulsed and captured. (more…)
When you go home, tell them of us and say, For your tomorrow, we gave our today
Inscription on the Memorial to the dead of the British Second Division at Kohima
I have always been careful, as best as I am able, to repay any debts I have incurred in this life. Of course some debts are unrepayable. How, for example, do we repay the debt to our parents for their care of us as children, especially, as in my case, when they died relatively young, before they endured the ravages of age and required our assistance? Our salvation, bought by Christ on the Cross, is completely beyond our poor power to repay. On Memorial Day we honor those who we can never repay, those who have died in our wars. They had the sweetness of life taken from them, usually after a short twenty years or so on this Earth. Most of them are long forgotten, as the decades remove from the scene those who knew and loved them. We owe our peace and freedom to them, and we are in their debt, a debt we can never hope to pay.
Thus we do the best we can. We erect monuments to them which they will never see in this Vale of Tears, give speeches that they can never hear, hold parades that they will never march in. We do our best to care for their widows and orphans, and that is something, but it is not enough. When a man dies for you, your gratitude seeks for an outlet. Gratitude is one of the noblest impulses of Man, just as ingratitude is one of the most ignoble features of our fallen nature.
The only real way to even begin to pay this blood debt is to make it mean something. As Lincoln noted in the Gettysburg Address: that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.
We can do this by preserving our freedom and fighting, when needs be, against those who seek to take that freedom from us. To ensure that the nation remains strong to deter threats from abroad. To never take for granted that this nation that has been purchased for us with the blood of others, over a million others. It is a fought for nation, and it will always be a fought for nation as long as it is free.
For most Americans Memorial Day is the unofficial beginning of summer and the long weekend is filled with fun activities, and there is nothing wrong with that. If our war dead could come back for a Memorial Day weekend, I am sure that most of them would be joining in the fun. However, the day means so much more than that. The debt it symbolizes must be never forgotten, and we should do our best with our lives to repay a debt impossible to repay.
Any understanding of this nation has to be based, and I mean really based, on an understanding of the Civil War. I believe that firmly. It defined us. The Revolution did what it did. Our involvement in European wars, beginning with the First World War, did what it did. But the Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became, good and bad things. And it is very necessary, if you are going to understand the American character in the twentieth century, to learn about this enormous catastrophe of the mid-nineteenth century. It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads.
Shelby Foote
It is fitting that Memorial Day arose out of our bloodiest war, our war without an enemy. Films to watch over the weekend:
10. Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940)-The showcase of this film biopic of Lincoln is the above depiction of one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. The debate portrayed has remarks culled from all the debates, is an excellent recreation of the main arguments made by each of the men, and is evocative of their speaking styles.
Ironically neither of the actors portraying Lincoln and Douglas were Americans. The actor portraying Douglas was Gene Lockhart, a Canadian. If his voice sounds vaguely familiar to you, it is probably because you recall him as the judge in Miracle on 34th Street. His daughter June Lockhart, of Lassie and Lost in Space fame, carried on the thespian tradition of the family.
Lincoln was portrayed by Raymond Massey, also a Canadian. Massey was one of the great actors of his day and bore a strong physical resemblance to Lincoln. Massey served in the Canadian Army in both World War I, where he saw combat on the Western Front as an artillery officer, and World War II, becoming a naturalized American citizen after World War II. Like Lincoln he was a Republican and made a TV ad for Goldwater in the 1964 campaign.
The film helps explain why the Civil War happened. A nation like America could not endure forever denying freedom to millions of Americans on the basis of race. That we did not free the slaves peacefully led to the most terrible war in our history.
9. Friendly Persuasion (1956)-Starring Gary Cooper as Jess Birdwell, the head of a Quaker family in southern Indiana during the Civil War, the film is a superb mix of drama and comedy as the Quakers have to determine whether to continue to embrace their pacifist beliefs or to take up arms against General John Hunt Morgan’s Confederate cavalry during his Great Raid of the North in June-July of 1863. When the oldest son of the Birdwell family, portrayed by Anthony Perkins in his pre-Psycho days, takes up arms, his mother, played by Dorothy McGuire is aghast, but Cooper, as Jess Birdwell, defends him. Although he remains true to his pacifist convictions, Birdwell understands that his son is acting in obedience to his conscience, and, as he tells his wife, “A man’s life ain’t worth a hill of beans except he lives up to his own conscience.”
8. Major Dundee (1965)-Sam Pekinpah’s flawed, unfinished masterpiece, the film tells the fictional account of a mixed force of Union soldiers, and Confederate prisoners, who join forces to hunt and ultimately defeat an Apache raider, Sierra Charriba, in 1864-65. Charlton Heston gives an outstanding performance as Major Amos Dundee, a man battling his own personal demons of a failed military career, as he commands this Union-Confederate force through northern Mexico on the trail of the Apache, with fighting often threatening to break out between the Union and Confederate soldiers. Use of Confederate prisoners as Union soldiers in the West was not uncommon. Six Union infantry regiments of Confederate prisoners, called “Galvanized Yankees”, served in the West. The final section of the film involving a battle between Major Dundee’s force and French Lancers, the French occupying Mexico at the time, has always struck me as one of the best filmed combat sequences in any movie.
7. The Horse Soldiers (1959)-In 1959 John Ford and John Wayne, in the last of their “cavalry collaborations”, made The Horse Soldiers, a film based on Harold Sinclair’s novel of the same name published in 1956, which is a wonderful fictionalized account of Grierson’s Raid.
Perhaps the most daring and successful Union cavalry raid of the war, Colonel Benjamin Grierson, a former music teacher and band leader from Jacksonville, Illinois, who, after being bitten by a horse at a young age, hated horses, led from April 17-May 2, 1863 1700 Illinois and Iowa troopers through 600 miles of Confederate territory from southern Tennessee to the Union held Baton Rouge in Louisiana. Grierson and his men ripped up railroads, burned Confederate supplies and tied down many times their number of Confederate troops and succeeded in giving Grant a valuable diversion as he began his movement against Vicksburg.
John Wayne gives a fine, if surly, performance as Colonel Marlowe, the leader of the Union cavalry brigade. William Holden as a Union surgeon serves as a foil for Wayne. Constance Towers, as a captured Southern belle, supplies the obligatory Hollywood love interest.
Overall the film isn’t a bad treatment of the raid, and the period. I especially appreciated two scenes. John Wayne refers to his pre-war activities as “Before this present insanity” and Constance Towers gives the following impassioned speech:
“Well, you Yankees and your holy principle about savin’ the Union. You’re plunderin’ pirates that’s what. Well, you think there’s no Confederate army where you’re goin’? You think our boys are asleep down here? Well, they’ll catch up to you and they’ll cut you to pieces you, you nameless, fatherless scum. I wish I could be there to see it.”(more…)
Something for the weekend. A Confederate paean to The Infantry sung by Bobby Horton, who has waged a one man crusade to bring Civil War music to modern audiences. After the Civil War, a veteran of the conflict, I can’t recall his name, said that with Confederate infantry and Union artillery there was no position on Earth that he could not take.
Grant, after the fruitless skirmishing on the North Anna, decided to resume his drive by once again heading east and south, around Lee’s left, the same type of movement he had been making since the outset of this campaign. However, he had a tricky problem to resolve: How to cross to the north bank of the North Anna without Lee becoming wise to his intentions, and launching an assault on the Union army as it straddled the North Anna? To divert Lee’s attention, Grant sent two divisions of cavalry west to convince Lee that Grant was going to move west instead of east. The ruse worked, and Grant quietly moved his infantry corps successfully across the North Anna on the evening of the 26th-27th.
Lee on the 27th instantly realized what Grant was doing, and sent his army hurtling south to take up a strong defensive position at Atlee’s Station, only nine miles north of Richmond, where he could guard the railroads that supplied Richmond and his army.
Grant sent his cavalry ahead to blaze a path across the Pamunkey River for his infantry marching southeast. On May 27th Union cavalry established a bridgehead over the Pamunkey at Dabney Ford with a Union engineer regiment building a pontoon bridge. General Custer’s cavalry beat off a Confederate counterattack and Union infantry and Cavalry passed over the Pamunkey on the pontoon bridge.
On the 28th Union and Confederate cavalry fighting dismounted, clashed at Haw’s Shop while the remainder of Grant’s army crossed the Pamunkey, except for Burnside’s corps that was guarding the army’s wagon train.
Lee now knew that Grant was across the Pamunkey but was unsure what Grant’s next move would be, and for now held his position behind Totopotomoy Creek at Atlee’s Station. Here is Grant’s account of this movement in his Personal Memoirs: (more…)
At 630 feet the Saint Louis Arch is the tallest arch in the world. A monument to the westward expansion of the United States, planning for the arch began in 1947 and construction began in 1963. The arch cost around 15 million to construct (dollars not adjusted for subsequent inflation.) The dedication speech by Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, who was running for President, was uncharacteristically brief, which is just as well as a downpour caused the dedication to be held indoors in an auditorium. Weighing almost 39,000 tons, the arch sways one inch in a twenty mile wind, and if the wind were blowing at 150 miles per hour the sway would be eighteen inches. Go here to read more about the arch.
Eighty-eight years ago the first major league baseball game was played under the lights, adding a new dimension to the game of Summer, and making it more accessible to most people who work for a living during the day. The first baseball game under artificial illumination was played in 1880, the year after Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. However the major league teams did not embrace this innovation for over a half century. Economic need, as usual, was the driver involved in making major league night ball a reality. Almost all ball teams struggled during the Great Depression and attendance at games was a matter of life or death for the teams. Some minor league teams and teams of the Negro League had been playing ball under the lights since 1930.
Leland “Larry” MacPhail and Powel Crosley, the general manager and the owner of the Cincinnati Reds, noticed that minor league teams were drawing big crowds playing night games. The Reds were averaging 2000-3000 fans a game, their loyal followers being simply unable to miss a precious day of work during the hard times in the middle of the Depression. They took the bold stance of putting in lights at Crosley Field, hang the expense despite the precarious financial condition of the Reds. The first night game was set for May 24, 1935 against the Philadelphia Phillies. The Reds won two-one and 20,000 fans witnessed it, as 632 flood lights illumined the field. Night ball was here to stay. (more…)
We can lie about him, Dress up a dummy in his uniform And put our words into the dummy’s mouth, Say “Here Lee must have thought,” and “There, no doubt, By what we know of him, we may suppose He felt—this pang or that—” but he remains Beyond our stagecraft, reticent as ice, Reticent as the fire within the stone.
Stephen Vincent Benet, John Brown’s Body
Ultimately the North Anna portion of the Overland Campaign produced little in the way of fighting. Four skirmishes fought over four days with total casualties of 2600 for the Union and 1500 for the Confederacy, high enough for the men killed and wounded and their families but as nothing compared to the casualties amassed at The Wilderness and Spotsylvania. However, one tantalizing question emerges from this section of the campaign: did the Confederates miss a golden opportunity to defeat Grant on May 24 due to the illness of General Lee. The armies now were closer in size than they would be at any time before or later during the campaign: 68,ooo in the Army of the Potomac and 53,000 in the Army of Northern Virginia, Lee having received reinforcements, consisting of Breckinridge’s Valley force, fresh from their victory at New Market and three out of four brigades from Pickett’s James River defense force, Butler and his Army of the James now being safely bottled up. If the Confederates were to go over on the offensive, this was their window of opportunity from a numerical standpoint.
After skirmishing on the 23rd, Lee confronted an interesting strategic situation. Warren had his corps ready to cross the North Anna on his left at Jericho Mills. Wright, Burnside and Hancock’s corps were still north of the North Anna confronting his center and right. In the face of this Lee fortified his line in an inverted V with its apex on Ox Ford. Lee hoped that Grant would assume that he was retreating and cross, allowing Lee to use his inverted V fortifications to divide Grant’s force and allow him to attack the Union troops crossing on his right while his left held off the Union troops crossing the North Anna on the left side of the inverted V.
On the 24th it looked like Lee had his opportunity. Wright and Warren crossed the North Anna on Lee’s left. Hancock crossed on Lee’s right. Grant was fooled completely, cabling Washington that Lee was in full retreat. Burnside was still across the North Anna. A crushing attack on Hancock’s corps beckoned.
No attack was made. Lt. Col. Charles S. Venable, an aide of Lee, explained what happened. Lee suddenly fell sick with a severe bout of dysentery and took to his bed. According to Venable, Lee said from his bed, “we must strike them a blow.” Lee lacked the command structure after the death of Jackson and the absence of Longstreet after his wounding in The Wilderness, for such an attack to be launched without him. (more…)
Cutting edge technology is always risky to use. And therefore it was not certain what would happen when on May 22, 1819 the SS Savannah began a three week journey across the Atlantic, becoming the first steam ship to cross the Atlantic. The Savannah was equipped with sails and only used its boilers for eighty hours during the crossing. During its twenty five days stay in Liverpool the ship and crew were celebrities and were visited by thousands including influential members of the British government and Roayl Navy. Upon its return to the US from its journey, the fate of the Savannah was not happy. Unable to make a profit, the ship was converted to sails only, and was broken up after running aground on Long Island on November 5, 1821. However, the fact remains that the Savannah blazed a path. Regular steam ship traffic across the Atlantic would not occur for another twenty years. Her legacy was remembered in 1959 when the first nuclear powered merchant vessel bore the name Savannah.
Donald R. McClarey
Paul Zummo
Almost Chosen People 