ANTIETAM: America's Bloodiest Day

September 17, 2017 -  just shy of one week after 9/11 - marks the 157th anniversary of the bloodiest day in American history. It was on this day in 1862 that General Robert E. Lee's first invasion of the north was turned back, Confederate recognition by Britain and France was thwarted, and the Emancipation Proclamation was ensured. The cost of this was around 23,000 American casualties, almost 4,000 of which were killed in combat. In comparison, 9/11 witnessed the deaths of 2,996 while some 80,000 Russian and French casualties resulted from the single day Battle of Borodino in 1812.

The Battle of Antietam followed a string of Confederate victories led by the newly appointed General Lee beginning in late June of 1862. In a period of one week, Lee won a series of stunning battles that drove the Union Army back from the gates of Richmond. In late August, Lee followed up his opening victories with the Battle of Second Bull Run, located south of Washington DC. In another decisive win, Lee almost outflanked and destroyed the Union Army as it withdrew over Bull Run.

With these victories in hand, Lee decided it was time to take the fight north.

As he would do in the Gettysburg campaign, Lee marched his army nearer to the mountains in northwest Virginia, using them as a screen to cover his forces moving north. Believing the Union commander, General McClellan, to be a slow and cautious leader, Lee took the risk of dividing his forces on the march. While Lee's estimation of McClellan was accurate, Lee did not know that an order containing his marching plans was accidentally discovered by Union forces. With Lee's marching orders in hand, there was little stopping McClellan from attacking the Confederate army piecemeal, and thus bring an end to the war.

McClellan, however, failed to take advantage of Lee's mistake. As he began his attack, McClellan's advance actually drove Lee's disparate forces towards one another. Their final position, however, found the Confederate army sandwiched between the large Potomac River behind them and the Antietam Creek in front of them.

Unable to rapidly retreat across the Potomac, such a situation could prove disastrous to the army should they lose the battle ahead. What's more, Lee with 40,000 men was far outnumbered by McClellan's 80,000. One large push forward with all his troops should have led to the destruction of Lee's forces.

The Battle of Antietam ended in a tactical draw. However, the repulsion of  General Lee's invasion into the North forcing his return to Virginia, was a strategic win for the Union. It was the most significant victory of the war in terms of American foreign policy objectives.  Some argue that Antietam, not Gettysburg, was the turning point in the war. Why did McClellan fail to destroy Lee at Antietam? We invite our readers to watch this short 4-minute video explaining the battle. We can summarize Antietam by describing McClellan's strategy as a rolling attack on Confederate lines from north to south (see map at left). Fighting commenced in the morning at a cornfield at the north end of the battle, then passed further south to an area called the West Woods. From here the action moved to a sunken dirt road now known as the Bloody Lane. Further south it seemed as though the tide turned as Union forces crossed the large stone bridge, pouring troops around Lee's southern (right) flank. Last minute Confederate reinforcements, however, pushed back Union forces and thus brought the battle to an end.

Antietam proved that Lee wasn't invincible - and with Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, the war was increasingly tied to the moral fight against racial slavery. Despite their need for Southern cotton, neither Britain nor France - both of which condemned slavery - would be giving their support to the slave-holding South.

Although the war would drag on for another three deadly years, the blood spilled in war against racial slavery would providentially reflect slavery's grim death toll. For the six million African slaves that died in the Atlantic crossings, one-tenth of that number - 600,000 - is the estimated number of American dead during the Civil War. From Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address:

"...if God wills that [the Civil War] continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'"

ANTIETAM: America's Bloodiest Day

September 17, 2017 -  just shy of one week after 9/11 - marks the 157th anniversary of the bloodiest day in American history. It was on this day in 1862 that General Robert E. Lee's first invasion of the north was turned back, Confederate recognition by Britain and France was thwarted, and the Emancipation Proclamation was ensured. The cost of this was around 23,000 American casualties, almost 4,000 of which were killed in combat. In comparison, 9/11 witnessed the deaths of 2,996 while some 80,000 Russian and French casualties resulted from the single day Battle of Borodino in 1812.

The Battle of Antietam followed a string of Confederate victories led by the newly appointed General Lee beginning in late June of 1862. In a period of one week, Lee won a series of stunning battles that drove the Union Army back from the gates of Richmond. In late August, Lee followed up his opening victories with the Battle of Second Bull Run, located south of Washington DC. In another decisive win, Lee almost outflanked and destroyed the Union Army as it withdrew over Bull Run.

With these victories in hand, Lee decided it was time to take the fight north.

As he would do in the Gettysburg campaign, Lee marched his army nearer to the mountains in northwest Virginia, using them as a screen to cover his forces moving north. Believing the Union commander, General McClellan, to be a slow and cautious leader, Lee took the risk of dividing his forces on the march. While Lee's estimation of McClellan was accurate, Lee did not know that an order containing his marching plans was accidentally discovered by Union forces. With Lee's marching orders in hand, there was little stopping McClellan from attacking the Confederate army piecemeal, and thus bring an end to the war.

McClellan, however, failed to take advantage of Lee's mistake. As he began his attack, McClellan's advance actually drove Lee's disparate forces towards one another. Their final position, however, found the Confederate army sandwiched between the large Potomac River behind them and the Antietam Creek in front of them.

Unable to rapidly retreat across the Potomac, such a situation could prove disastrous to the army should they lose the battle ahead. What's more, Lee with 40,000 men was far outnumbered by McClellan's 80,000. One large push forward with all his troops should have led to the destruction of Lee's forces.

The Battle of Antietam ended in a tactical draw. However, the repulsion of  General Lee's invasion into the North forcing his return to Virginia, was a strategic win for the Union. It was the most significant victory of the war in terms of American foreign policy objectives.  Some argue that Antietam, not Gettysburg, was the turning point in the war. Why did McClellan fail to destroy Lee at Antietam? We invite our readers to watch this short 4-minute video explaining the battle. We can summarize Antietam by describing McClellan's strategy as a rolling attack on Confederate lines from north to south (see map at left). Fighting commenced in the morning at a cornfield at the north end of the battle, then passed further south to an area called the West Woods. From here the action moved to a sunken dirt road now known as the Bloody Lane. Further south it seemed as though the tide turned as Union forces crossed the large stone bridge, pouring troops around Lee's southern (right) flank. Last minute Confederate reinforcements, however, pushed back Union forces and thus brought the battle to an end.

Antietam proved that Lee wasn't invincible - and with Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, the war was increasingly tied to the moral fight against racial slavery. Despite their need for Southern cotton, neither Britain nor France - both of which condemned slavery - would be giving their support to the slave-holding South.

Although the war would drag on for another three deadly years, the blood spilled in war against racial slavery would providentially reflect slavery's grim death toll. For the six million African slaves that died in the Atlantic crossings, one-tenth of that number - 600,000 - is the estimated number of American dead during the Civil War. From Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address:

"...if God wills that [the Civil War] continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'"

Lincoln and Grant -- diamonds in the rough

Richard Henry Dana Jr. (1815-1882) was a member of one of the old blue blood families of Cambridge, Massachusetts. An author and lawyer who prided himself on his compassion for the common man and his anti-slavery work, Dana [pictured] was one of those who -- when he came face to face with the wartime president and the top Union general -- could see nothing beyond their rebarbative edges.

From Grant Takes Command by Bruce Catton:

"Some men looked at Ulysses S. Grant and to their dismay saw in him no trace of breeding or gentility... [After meeting Grant at Willard's Hotel one day] Richard Henry Dana concluded sadly that the man was no gentleman; he 'had no gait, no station, no manner'; he was smoking a cigar, he had 'rather the look of a man who did, or once did, take a little too much to drink,' and altogether he seemed to be an 'ordinary, scrubby looking man with a slightly seedy look, as if he was out of office on half pay.' 

A week or so later Dana visited the White House, saw Lincoln, found him no better, and wrote to his father: 'Such a shapeless mass of writhing ugliness as slouched about in the President's chair you never saw or imagined.' "

Mr. Dana -- who wrote the popular Two Years Before the Mast on his adventures as a sailor from Boston to California -- "lamented that Lincoln 'does not act or talk or feel like the ruler of a great empire in a great crisis.' What bothered Dana the most was that the president resorted to parables where principles were needed: 'He likes rather to talk and tell stories with all sorts of persons who come to him for all sorts of purposes than to give his mind to the noble and manly duties of his great post.' "

                 

UPDATE: Take a couple minutes to look at this video on the essence of Ulysses Grant by Jean Edward Smith.

Here is how Mr. Smith begins the preface to his biography (2001):

When I was ten or so, my father took me and several of my cousins to Shiloh battlefield. We toured the site and as young Southern boys are wont to do, speculated enthusiastically how the Confederates could have won if only they had done this or that. My father, who was not an educated man, listened attentively and then in his soft Mississippi drawl cautioned us about what we were saying. It was bad for us to have lost, he admitted, but it would have been worse if we had won. The United States would not exist if the South had prevailed, and we should thank our lucky stars General Grant was in command that terrible Sunday in 1862. Grant never lost a battle, my father said, and he never ran from a fight. He held his surprised and battered army together at Shiloh, and when the smoke cleared it was the rebels who withdrew, leaving Mississippi open to the Union's advance. Grant saved the United States, my father said, and we should be "damn glad" he did. I had scarcely heard of General Grant before then, but from that day on I was hooked.

                                   

Bruce Catton relates how one of Lincoln's secretaries, William Stoddard, asked about Grant's capacity as a general --

The President said: "Stoddard, Grant is the first general I've had! He's a general!" Stoddard asked what he meant by this, and Lincoln explained: 

"I'll tell you what I mean. You know how it's been with all the rest. As soon as I put a man in command of the army he'd come to me with a plan of campaign and about  as much as say, 'Now, I don't believe I can do it, but if you say so I'll try it on,' and so put the responsibility of success or failure on me. They all wanted me to be the general. It isn't so with Grant. He hasn't told me what his plans are. I don't know, and I don't want to know. I'm glad to find a man who can go ahead without me." 

"I hope to have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky!"

Those are the words of President Lincoln attesting to the absolute importance of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, which on the eve of the Civil War ranked 9th in population and was an agricultural powerhouse. Mr Lincoln said:

"I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game. Kentucky gone, we cannot hold Missouri, nor Maryland."

[There were 33 states at that time; fifteen of those, including Kentucky. allowed slavery.
Here is a map of the border states].

"The strategic importance of Kentucky also lay in the Ohio River, the nation's major east-west waterway that comprised the state's 500-mile border with three Midwestern states -- Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.
Furthermore, two of the Ohio River's main tributaries, the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers, flowed into the southwest portion of the Confederacy. Whichever side could control Kentucky possessed an excellent staging area for an invasion into the heart of the enemy's territory."

"Raftsmen Playing Cards" (George Caleb Bingham, 1847)

When you think of Kentucky, navigable waterways should come to mind! It leads the 48 lower states in length of such streams and rivers.

"Kentucky is the only state to be bordered on three sides by rivers. The Ohio River [is the northern boundary].

"The Mississippi River separates Kentucky from Missouri, making up the western border.

"The Big Sandy River and the Tug River make up the eastern border, with Virginia and West Virginia."

(The Tennessee River runs through Kentucky, but does not form one of its borders. It comes up from the South, and empties into the Ohio River at Paducah. The Tennessee River is the largest tributary of the Ohio).

The 'Delta Queen' on the Ohio River at Vanceburg (50 miles west of Ashland)

Nowadays, the city of Cincinnati (across the Ohio River from Covington) ranks 66th in population -- two spots below Saint Paul, Minnesota. But in 1860, Cincinnati was the nation's seventh largest.
Its population of 160,000 was bigger than Chicago -- and dwarfed that of Washington DC (ranked 14th).

Back then, the city of Louisville was our country's 12th largest with 68,000 people. It was founded two years after the Declaration of Independence was written -- as a portage site by the Falls of the Ohio, the only major barrier on the upper Ohio River.

"Kentucky voted to remain in the Union, but as a neutral party. Both the Confederacy and the Union announced, 'We will respect the neutrality of Kentucky,' because neither one wanted to push Kentucky toward the other. Both presidents [Lincoln and Jefferson Davis] were natives of Kentucky. 

"The Confederacy violated the state's neutrality in September 1861 by seizing and fortifying the Mississippi [at a couple towns]. The South took this drastic step in an effort to maintain control of the rivers... but the state legislature called on the Union Army for help. From 1862 onward, Kentucky was largely controlled by the Union.

"More than any other state, the idea that the Civil War was a war between brothers was true in Kentucky. One example of many was the family of the late Henry Clay, Kentucky's longtime congressman and senator who forged sectional compromises in 1820 and 1850: four of his grandsons fought for the Confederacy, while three grandsons fought for the Union."

[Most of Mary Todd Lincoln's relatives in Lexington were pro-Confederate].

Originally, Kentucky was part of Virginia.

"In 1775, the now-legendary frontiersman Daniel Boone blazed a trail through the Cumberland Gap –a notch in the Appalachian Mountains at the junction of Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee."

The Gap was 1,300 feet in altitude. Indians used it as a footpath, and buffalo came through looking for better pasture.

                   

"Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap" (George Caleb Bingham, 1852)

Train rails eventually came through the Gap

What were the next territories granted statehood after the original 13?
Vermont -- 1791.

Kentucky -- 1792.

Tennessee -- 1796.

Ohio -- 1803.


In the presidential election during the Civil War, former general-in-chief George McClellan carried only three states: his home of New Jersey, Delaware, and Kentucky.
(In the 1860 election, Mr. Lincoln beat out three men -- including Stephen A. Douglas, who managed to win only Missouri).

One of President Lincoln's "political generals"

Benjamin Franklin Butler (1818-1893) was "the archtype of the fixer, the influence man... There was always something soiled about the man, but he remained uncanny and untouchable."

The historian Bruce Catton goes on to say of him and other politicians who became Civil War generals: "The army had to carry these costly misfits on its shoulders."

A Massachusetts congressman and governor, Benjamin Butler showed an easy agility in jumping back and forth from the Democratic party to the Republicans. Late in his career, he ran for president as the nominee of the Greenback party (a farmer/labor coalition).

Bruce Catton gives a lucid explanation of why General Butler lasted as long as he did:

"Somewhere, in the tangled mesh of politics that lay between Washington and the fighting fronts, Butler possessed influence that even the commander of the armies could not break. Grant tried to have him removed, and failed... 

"Butler held one prodigious trump card which Grant could not see. This was a presidential election year, and just when Grant was trying to rid himself of this incompetent general the leaders of the Republican party, very much against their will, were in the act of renominating President Lincoln for a second term. It was not time to rock the boat, and Butler was just the man who could rock it to the point of capsizing it. 

"From the beginning, Lincoln's real problem had been political. He had a war to win and he had to find generals who could win it, but above everything else he had to control the war -- not merely the fighting of it, but the currents which would finally determine what it meant and what would come of it all... 

"There were strong men in the North who wanted revenge.. and the South was not part of the country as they saw it. Lincoln stood in their way, and they would put one of their own kind in his place if they could. Standing with them were the men whose minds were laudably high but deplorably narrow: the abolitionists... 

"What had kept them off the warpath so far was partly the fact that Lincoln did seem to have most of the people with him... To date, only nobodies had offered themselves against him, men like John Charles Fremont, who was heading a rickety third-party slate. But Butler was a somebody. Soldiers might know him as a cipher, but with abolitionists and bitter-enders he was a mighty hero. He had boundless ambition and a total lack of scruples, and he saw himself as a  presidential possibility. If the army suddenly dropped him he would land in the arms of the political extremists... 

"So the truth of the matter probably is that in the infinite, complicated economy of the Civil War it was better to keep Ben Butler a major general, even though soldiers were needlessly killed because of it, than it was to inject him back into the political whirlpool... The Administration had to ask, in effect: Where will this man do the least harm -- as a general, or as a politician out of control?"

Other political generals of the Union Army included John A. McClernand, a longtime Illinois acquaintance of the Lincolns (he married a close friend of Mary Todd's); Franz Sigel, who was exiled from Europe after the failure of the 1848 revolutions -- he helped solidify German immigrant support for the Union cause; and Nathaniel Banks, who had served a term as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.
In a less corrupt world, of course, President Lincoln would not have had to play ball with such men (he had enough headaches trying to keep his professional generals in line).


An anecdote from Benjamin Butler's days as military governor of New Orleans, where the residents called him Spoons ("they believed that, in addition to committing an illegal hanging and insulting Southern womanhood, he had personally stolen silver spoons with his own hands"):

Butler censored the city’s newspapers and arrested people and confiscated their property if they showed support for the rebellion. William J. Seymour, editor of The Commercial Bulletin, was one who felt Butler’s heavy hand. Seymour and several other editors met with the general to try to persuade him to rescind the censorship order on the grounds that it violated their constitutional right of free speech (conveniently ignoring the fact that Louisiana had rebelled against the Constitution). 

As the discussion became heated, Seymour asked Butler what would happen if he ignored the order and printed whatever he wanted to in his own newspaper. Seymour claimed Butler "roared like a mad bull," pounded his fist on the desk, and snarled, "I am the military governor of this state — the supreme power — you cannot disregard my order, Sir. By God, he that sins against me, sins against the Holy Ghost."

UPDATE: For many countries abroad, the Civil War was about republicanism and monarchy. What was the mood in England as American brothers turned their guns on each other? The historian James McPherson offers this appraisal of how the Brits viewed the conflict:

They focused on symbolic issues early in the war. For example, Benjamin Butler's famous "woman order" in New Orleans, in which he said that occupying Union soldiers who were being insulted and harassed by Southern women should treat them as ordinary women of the street plying their avocation. And the British thought this was an outrage. Butler also hanged a man who had run up and torn down the American flag over the courthouse in New Orleans, and the British thought that was barbarous. These were the two issues that aroused a lot of very strong anti-American and pro-Southern sentiment in Britain in 1862...  

Punch, the British humor magazine with a very satirical twist to it, was very anti-Lincoln through much of the war. Their cartoons of Lincoln portrayed him as a kind of malevolent, backwards buffoon. Toward the end of the war, they began changing their tune.

Friday BookReview: Bruce Catton and Appomattox

[first published May 1, 2015]


                                                             

This book has had a towering impact. So, when a historian at Western Kentucky University drew up a list of the twelve best books on the Civil War, it was no surprise that Mr. Catton's work was chosen #1.

An excerpt from the professor's comments:

Published in 1953, A Stillness at Appomattox details the experiences of the Army of the Potomac during the final year of the war, but it is much more than a retelling of an often told tale. In fact, one could say this book is a prose poem to the Army of the Potomac and the men who fought in it.  

As a child growing up in Michigan, Catton knew and spoke to Civil War veterans in his small hometown. Although a good part of his career was spent as a newspaper journalist and columnist, he took up writing Civil War books in the 1950's, became the senior editor of American Heritage magazine, and gained great fame as an author until his death in 1978. Catton wrote not only with a journalist’s eye, but also with a novelist’s sensibilities (although he published only one novel on the Civil War for juvenile readers)... 

Catton forged a trail for later Civil War historians by writing his account of the Army of the Potomac from the point of view of soldiers in the ranks. By means of lilting sentences, adroit portraits of men and their peccadilloes, and iron-hard descriptions of men in battle, Catton turns the Army of the Potomac into more than a mass of men in wartime; his picture of the army and its soldiers convinces you that he was there with them, which of course he wasn’t, but you feel that anyway because his narrative carries you back into the world in which those soldiers lived and died. Beneath the surface of Catton’s chronicle runs the awful specter of the tolls of war — how war dehumanizes, stultifies, and yet breeds comradery, trust and even love among those who wage it. Long before academic historians turned to highlighting the “face of battle” in their military studies of the Civil War, Catton sketched accurately and effectively the dour features of that face.  

More to his credit, Catton discussed — in this book and in others — how slavery was the cause of the war, the plight of slaves and freedmen as the war wore on, and the importance of the Union cause as a driving force behind the determination of Northern soldiers to win the war and reunite the country. This book leaves sharp images lingering in the reader’s mind, largely because Catton expertly sets scenes, describes people in human terms, and refuses to disguise the ugly, malevolent and heartless aspects of war. Yet, in the end, the book is surprisingly uplifting, a splendid tale of victory, no doubt because Catton so adeptly uses irony and compassion to tell the Army of the Potomac’s story. Walt Whitman once famously said, “the real war will never get in the books.” He was wrong. The real war, in all its dimensions, can be luminously found in this, the best book ever written about the Civil War.
                                   

President Eisenhower at Gettysburg with the historian

This is a review posted by a reader (at Amazon):

Catton's book tells the story of the Civil War in the East beginning in the winter of 1863 following the Battle of Gettysburg. The first thing to notice about the book is the clear, lyrical quality of the prose... Also Catton has a gift for lyrical metaphors to drive home his points -- whether in describing the fields or in describing the emotions of the men. His writing at its best has a poetical, moving quality. Most importantly, Catton writes lucidly. His descriptions of the battles and of troop movements are relatively easy to follow. Many of the accounts I have read since I first tried this book are detailed and ponderous. This is never the case with Catton. He gives a good, basic picture of the battles he describes which will stand the reader looking for more detailed accounts in good stead. 

Besides the quality of the writing, A Stillness at Appomattox is notable for the story it has to tell. Broadly speaking, Catton focuses on how the Civil War changed after its first two years, and he explains why. Although the carnage of the first two years of the war was immense, the scope of the war increased markedly following Gettysburg. The Civil War became the first total war, bringing trench warfare, sustained fighting, destruction of property, and hardship to noncombatants in its wake. Many later writers have also made this point, but Catton unforgettably drives it home. 

Catton thus describes the final Union campaign in the East (there is little in the book on the Western theatre of the war) of the Army of the Potomac from the Wilderness through Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, Petersburg, and Appomattox. He describes the desperate, harsh nature of these engagements under the leadership of U.S. Grant. Catton also pays a great deal of attention to Philip Sheridan, to the destruction he wrought in the Shenandoah Valley Campaign, and to his key roles in the Battle of Five Forks (Petersburg) and the final race to the Appomattox Court House. Catton's discussion of Sheridan brought home to me the cruel all-out nature of the final stages of the war. 

Catton also integrates well the military aspects of the Civil War with the political aspects. There are good pictures of Lincoln and of the war-weariness of the North which threatened the military efforts of the armies until the last phases of the conflict... Although Catton writes from the Union side of the line, he clearly is impressed with the military and personal character of Robert E. Lee and with the valor shown by the Army of Northern Virginia under the most trying of circumstances. 

I was enthralled by the pace of the book, by Catton's writing, and by his love for and knowledge of his subject. This is a book to come to as an adult. It will encourage the thoughtful reader to reflect upon the Civil War as the watershed event in our nation's history.

April 12, 1861: Fort Sumter is fired upon by Confederate forces

April 9, 1865: General Lee surrenders to Grant at Appomattox

                    

Appomattox Courthouse

The 150th anniversary of the surrender ceremony was re-enacted several weeks ago. Click on some of the coverage from CBS, and a short video from C-Span about the family home where the original meeting took place.

UPDATE: Another big fan of Mr. Catton's classic is Scott Johnson at "Powerline" blog.

Old antagonists at North/South reunion

Friday BookReview: "Uncle Tom's Cabin"

[Doc Pence has long considered Mrs. Stowe's 1852 classic, which outsold every other fictional work of the 19th century, as the Great American Novel.

The masthead lookout, however, promises that a review of Farmer's nomination will swim into view next month "spouting his frothed defiance to the skies."]



             

Here are excerpts from an essay by Kelly S. Franklin (he's a professor at Hillsdale College):

In its first year of publication, Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold more copies in America than the Bible did.

The novel catapulted Harriet Beecher Stowe onto the world stage, and by 1854, only two years after publication, the novel had been translated into 37 different languages. Attacking the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which forced free states to assist in recovering escaped slaves, Stowe ignited the powder keg of popular sentiments surrounding the tragedy of American slavery. She gave us the memorable figures of Uncle Tom and Little Eva, and the daring escape of Eliza Harris across the floating ice of the Ohio River...

As a professor of American literature, I face a challenge every time I teach Stowe’s famous book in the classroom. Her stock characters, her melodramatic set pieces, and the moralizing of her narrator grate on 21st-century readers. Yet this strange, sensational novel remains one of the most important works in our cultural heritage.

Is it, we might ask, just an artifact of our history? Do we dutifully overlook Stowe’s imperfect artistry for the sake of the admirable (if dated) anti-slavery message of her book? But as we read it, we find that inexplicable power surging between the lines of her prose. "You’re going to hate it," I tell my students, "and then you’re going to love it."

So why do I teach Uncle Tom’s Cabin? I teach it not only because of its anti-slavery message, but just as importantly because of the way that Stowe delivers it. That is, I think Stowe’s great contribution to American culture lies not merely in rejecting slavery, but in the amazing narrative technique that deeply moved millions of readers. Stowe’s powerful novel works not so much by arguing against the evils of slavery (although it does), but rather by bringing readers face-to-face with a suffering fellow human being. In that encounter, she creates dramatic moments of empathy that—for Stowe—serve as the necessary foundation for any future social or legal action. Her approach, even a century and a half after slavery’s abolition, remains extremely relevant to us today, as we face our own array of moral and societal evils. Stowe offers a fundamentally democratic approach to solving national problems: we must first change hearts if we want to change laws.

                       

       

By the time Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, all the arguments for and against slavery had already been made. Legislators and thinkers on both sides of this divisive issue had used philosophy, economics, science, law, and even the Bible to make their case. But in Stowe’s mind, both argument and law had failed the American people, and the United States needed an approach that appealed instead to the human heart. Even for many Americans opposed to slavery, the issue remained somewhat abstract; but Stowe’s novel brings her readers into a fictional encounter with an individual slave, where human empathy—the power of shared feeling—does the work that other forms of persuasion had failed to do.

To bring about this encounter, Stowe consciously draws readers into the world of her novel. In the fourth chapter, titled "An Evening in Uncle Tom’s Cabin," she even addresses us directly with this invitation: describing Tom’s home, a “small log building,” Stowe’s narrator says, “Let us enter into the dwelling.” Indeed, the title of the novel itself is Uncle Tom’s Cabin so that when we begin to read, we enter the book itself, as if we were entering the cabin...

In the ninth chapter of her novel, titled "In Which It Appears that a Senator Is But a Man," Stowe takes readers into another home, that of the fictional Ohio senator John Bird, who is personally opposed to slavery but a vocal advocate of the Fugitive Slave Act. The senator defends this contradiction to his wife, protesting, "Mary! Mary! My dear, let me reason with you." We can hear Stowe’s own frustration in Mrs. Bird’s response: "I hate reasoning, John,—especially reasoning on such subjects. There’s a way you political folks have of coming round and round a plain right thing." For Stowe, American reasoning can no longer be trusted, because politicians have sacrificed the good and the true upon the altar of the pragmatic.

But when the escaped slave Eliza Harris, fleeing the Kentucky master who tried to sell her child, arrives on Senator Bird’s doorstep in distress, Stowe creates an encounter that changes the heart of the legislator. The abstract issues of law and property collide with the physical presence of a suffering woman and her child. The senator, struck by Eliza’s real sorrow, and by her fierce love for her child—for he, too, is a father—rejects the Fugitive Slave Act and breaks the law. Stowe’s narrator tells us that, before this encounter,

his idea of a fugitive was only an idea of the letters that spell the word,—or , at the most, the image of a little newspaper picture of a man with a stick and bundle, with “Ran away from the subscriber” under it. The magic of the real presence of distress,—the imploring human eye, the frail, trembling human hand, the despairing appeal of helpless agony,—these he had never tried.

Here it is the vaguely Eucharistic "real presence" of an actual escaped slave (Stowe claimed to have conceived the novel during a communion service) that converts Senator Bird. Empathy—the compassionate experience of another’s suffering—rather than logic or debate, has won. Senator Bird himself helps Eliza escape, driving her by carriage at night to a safe location. Empathy has turned into real charitable action, for as Mrs. Bird says to her husband, "Your heart is better than your head."

Stowe does more than change the hearts of her characters; she acts out this life-changing encounter for her readers in hopes that we will respond in kind. To move us in this way, she leaves one tragedy unanswered by the resolution of the novel: the brutal murder of Uncle Tom at the hands of Simon Legree. Tom’s death, for all its melodrama and heavy-handed Christian allegory, retains real dramatic power and clinches Stowe’s appeal to empathy. The characters in the novel cannot save Tom. Now it is we whose hearts must change to end the horror of human slavery. Stowe leaves it to us to decide what comes next...

The meeting between President Lincoln and Mrs. Stowe

Friday BookReview: 19th-century debate of republicanism vs monarchy

[first published November 13, 2015]



by David Pence

"Monarchies and much of the world's aristocracies despised American democracy... Queen Victoria and British Prime Minister Palmerston, France's Napoleon III, Spain's Queen Isabella, and Pope Pius IX were happy to see conflict in the only nation on earth where people ruled themselves. 'Every friend of despotism rejoices at your misfortune,' wrote London Times correspondent William Howard Russell."          (from a reader review of Mr. Doyle's book)

The Cause of All Nations is subtitled "an international history of the American Civil War" by University of South Carolina professor Don H. Doyle. He wrote an earlier book comparing two nations with North-South regional differences -- the United States and Italy. That work introduced him to characters and European perspectives from the 19th century when Italians were forming a nation and Americans were testing one. Doyle emphasizes the Italian (and opposing papal) viewpoints of our Civil War, as well as describing the "return of the empires" by France and Spain in the Americas. There could have been a short chapter about how diplomatic recognition and free trade with the South for France, Britain, or Spain would have internationalized a world-wide naval conflict over the cotton trade. But the author leaves those matters to others while his interest is to place support for the North or South in terms of movements in Europe and the Americas pitting republican nations against monarchical empires. With American military forces in civil war, there was no one to enforce the Monroe Doctrine allowing "the empires' return."

In 1861 Spain annexed the Dominican Republic and France invaded Mexico. The annual 'Cinco de Mayo' celebration in Mexico is a memorial of the Mexican army's victory in the Battle of Puebla (the Fifth of May 1863) against the French invaders. That was one of the few early victories as Emperor Napoleon III was successful in establishing a Catholic monarch, Maximilian, as emperor of Mexico. The Mexican nationalists fought a sustained war against the Second Mexican Empire. The French troops eventually withdrew in 1866, and Maximilian was executed in 1867. He had accepted the Emperor title from Catholic Mexican aristocrats and saw himself as a true protector of the nation. As he bravely faced his execution he said, "Men of my class and station are meant to protect or be martyrs of the nation. I forgive all and ask all to forgive me. My blood is to be shed for the country." Maximilian had authored the Black Decree (October 1865) outlawing any gathering of armed men, with a penalty of execution to be carried out within 24 hours of the crime. More than 10.000 men were killed under that Decree and a generation of Mexican men were raised considering liberty and fraternity to be the cultural alternative to the tyranny of a Catholic order.

                               

From series of paintings of the execution of Emperor Maximilian
 (Édouard Manet, d. 1883) 

The Dominican Restoration war (1861-1863) ended with an empire's withdrawal as well. The Dominican Republic was restored with the withdrawal of Spanish troops in 1863. In that republic the Catholic Church was tied to  both republican and monarchical national movements. This would always be true in "White Catholic and Hispanic" Dominican Republic -- which has always defined herself most sharply from her neighbor invaders from "Black, Catholic/voodoo and French-speaking" Haiti.  

In Italy, the republican nationalist movement was directed against foreign empires (Austria and France) that controlled major sections of the geographic boot of Italy. Those Catholic emperors and their armies protected the Pope and Papal States from the claims of Italian nationalists like Mazzini (1805-1872) and Garibaldi (1807-1882). The men of the Risorgimento (the resurgence) believed that liberty depended on men forming nations under God. They would unite the entire geographical peninsula under the new bonds of fraternity forming the Italian nation. They remembered the Roman republic. They wore red-shirts linking that color with revolution for the next century. The Italian nationalists and their bonds of  fraternity were not as godless as the French revolutionaries or many of the Mexican revolutionaries. When Pius IX ('Pio Nono') was first elected, Italian nationalists and Catholic "liberals" throughout Europe were elated. This did not last long after the papal Secretary of State was assassinated and the pope exiled during the six-month Roman Republic. He was restored by French troops of Napoleon III who repaid his conservative Catholic French supporters with military protection for the pontiff. The pope became the enemy of the republicans, modernists, and liberals as he allied with foreign Catholic monarchs and emperors. The Catholic Church, founded on the apostolic fraternity of Holy Orders, became the enemy of political fraternity from the Masons to extra-ecclesial political clubs. This has led to a devastating impoverishment of Catholic political thought in developing a communal masculine ethic of citizenship and republican fraternity. The Popes did however remind men of a central truth often lost in that revolutionary age of "the people." Fraternity apart from God would lead to murder by the mob.
                                           

Pius IX: reigned 1846-78

Professor Doyle shows how Southern diplomats cultivated the sympathy of Pius IX and Emperor Napoleon III of France. This was certainly not an obvious alliance springing from Southern religion. The diplomats painted the Northerners as the mob against authority and were aided by the Irish-born bishop of Charleston: Patrick Lynch. The bishop wrote successfully to the pope to enlist him in urging Catholics in every state to support a "bid for peace." When Jefferson Davis was in prison he had on his wall a signed papal missive to show support. The pope approved the replacement of the anti-clerical Benito Juarez (1806-1872) with the Catholic Austrian Emperor’s brother Maximilian to be the new Emperor of Mexico. This combination of support for the French invaders of Mexico and sympathy for the South to establish buffers against the "radical puritans" of the Anglo-Saxon Protestant United States is what Doyle called the "Latin Strategy." Doyle's book, one reviewer said, was like visiting a well-known restaurant but getting there by a completely new roadway. It is a road that uniquely presents crucial events and characters in the 19th-century emergence of political fraternity as an enemy to slavery and an advocate of national republics.

Garibaldi spent brief periods in the U.S. in the early 1850s

The book ends with a beautiful exposition of the Statue of Liberty -- originally named "Liberty Enlightening the World." This gift from the French people was erected in 1886 after being built in France in stages for many years. At her feet are the broken chains of slavery. In her left hand is a book representing the law necessary for freedom; and her outstretched right arm is the light pointing out toward the open seas. A free republic (government by, for, and of the people) with no slavery to bind its feet now lights the way for the rest of mankind. The New York harbor may be a home to the refugees of the world, but that was not the deepest meaning of the French gift. For Doyle and our French benefactors, the statue is a thankful reminder that the Civil War was about "a last best hope for earth." The Law in Lady Liberty's hand was not the Constitution of 1787, but the document of July 4, 1776, declaring all men are created equal. What the French memorialized twenty years after the Civil War, the old Italian freedom fighter Garibaldi had known from the onset. When he was asked early in the war to lend his name and possibly lead a force in the Union Cause he said, "Tell me also if this agitation is regarding the emancipation of the Negroes or not." Comparing Lincoln’s First Inaugural, the Gettysburg Address, and the Second Inaugural provides dramatic historical evidence that, for the best of America's leaders, it was late in the course of the war that the true meaning of the conflict emerged. That hiddeness of Divine Providence in the lives and wars of nations is one of the many lessons that can be learned from studying this book's exploration of emerging nations, the dying European empires, and the American Civil War.        

UPDATE: Here is an interview with Professor Doyle (conducted by Sidney Blumenthal, longtime adviser to the Clintons).



Some excerpts from a review in the 'Wall St Journal':

Americans tend to think of the Civil War in a kind of geographical vacuum, as a purely American contest at which other nations were mere passive spectators. Don Doyle, a professor of history at the University of South Carolina, vividly demonstrates that, far from being a “ ‘brother’s war’ fought by Americans over uniquely American issues,” the Civil War was an earthshaking event that threatened and engaged the governments and people of Europe, from the British Midlands to Rome.

So thoroughly have liberal political values today triumphed around the world, says Mr. Doyle, that it is hard to remember that, a century and a half ago, the United States was the world’s only significant republic. European reactionaries and defenders of a hierarchical status quo exulted when America’s “republican experiment” seemed to collapse in on itself. Lord Palmerston, the British prime minister at the time of the American Civil War, remarked of the embattled North that it “shows that Power in the Hands of the Masses throws the Scum of the Community to the surface,” while a French cabinet officer blithely told a visiting American: “Your Republic is dead, and it is probably the last the world will see.”

... The Union victory in 1865 emboldened popular democratic movements everywhere in Europe. The consequences of a Confederate victory, Mr. Doyle asserts, would have been far-reaching, not just for the United States but for the world. He writes that “it would have meant a new birth of slavery rather than freedom, possibly throughout the Americas.”

   

                                                       

Friday BookReview: Mr. McCullough on the pivotal year for General Washington's soldiers

                                             

The Grand Union Flag

"Also known as the Continental flag, it is the first true U.S. Flag. 

"It combined the British King's Colours and the thirteen stripes signifying Colonial unity. George Washington liked this design so well that he chose it to be flown to celebrate the formation of the Continental Army on New Years Day, 1776. On that day the Grand Union Flag was proudly raised on Prospect Hill, near his headquarters at Cambridge, Massachusetts."

Here is a six-minute radio interview with Mr. McCullough when the book came out a decade ago.


The 'Guardian' newspaper in England published this review:

Might the Americans have lost the War of Independence? They very nearly did. This book is the story of how close George Washington, as commander of the American army, came to defeat in the terrible year of 1776 which also saw the Declaration of Independence. At the end of that year, he assumed that the British, who had chased him all the way from New York, were about to cross the Delaware river and capture Philadelphia, capital of the revolution. He wrote that all the enemy were waiting for was 'ice for a passage, and the dissolution of the poor remains of our debilitated army'.

But Washington was wrong, as he frequently was about military things. David McCullough's account bears out the saying that this war was lost by the British rather than won by the Americans; the book could have been subtitled 'Failures to Pursue'. When Washington wrote those words, he did not know that General Howe, the British commander, had already decided that it was getting too cold to carry on fighting. The war season was over. He would go back to New York and mop up Philadelphia and the Yankee army the following spring.

Howe had thrown away victory before. In August, he had let the defeated American army escape after the battle of Brooklyn (or Long Island). But his failure to take Philadelphia when he could was worse. The British never grasped that it was good publicity which kept Washington's small army in the field, by producing fresh flows of volunteer reinforcements. As soon as Howe's incredible decision was known, Washington snatched the opportunity for a 'brilliant stroke'; he came back across the Delaware and won two small but dazzling victories over Hessian and British forces at Trenton [Dec 26, 1776] and Princeton [about a week later]. They were anything but decisive in military terms. The war dragged on until the British surrender at Yorktown in 1781. But after Trenton, the American public realised that they could win and must win. The corner had been turned.

A British reader has to know a bit of history before starting this book. McCullough is not trying to tell the story of the American Revolution or even of the whole War of Independence. The battle of Bunker Hill (1775) is over when the book begins, with the British locked up in Boston by a cheerful, disorderly little army with almost no gunpowder.

Fortunately for 'His Excellency', as George Washington was known, the British had not got round to occupying the Dorchester Heights above the city. The Americans, showing true inventive genius, went 300 miles to the abandoned Fort Ticonderoga, extracted its enormous guns and towed them back over snowy hills and frozen lakes [arriving toward the end of Jan 1776]. When they opened fire from the heights, Howe at once conceded checkmate and abandoned Boston.

Next came Washington's defence of New York. An enormous British force of warships and troop transports assembled offshore meant that Washington had no long-term hope of defending Manhattan. He hesitated and made bad mistakes. In their only stroke of first-class generalship, the British landed on Long Island and pulverised his army. But Howe's 'failure to pursue' allowed Washington to get the survivors back across the East River in small boats: 'America's Dunkirk'.

There followed long and complicated campaigning in what is now New York's outer suburbia, as the Americans evacuated New York and were driven slowly back, losing battle after battle, until they crossed the Hudson into New Jersey. From there, Washington and his dwindling, exhausted army retreated southwards to Newark and then across the Delaware. Congress had already fled from Philadelphia to Baltimore. Washington thought the army game was up; it would have to be guerrilla warfare in the Alleghenies. But then Howe stopped and blew a whistle for half-time.

This is a well written, conventional war history, illustrated with quotations from the letters and diaries of men and some women on both sides. The American witnesses are wonderfully observant and articulate; they were mostly well-educated volunteers who already 'enjoyed a higher standard of living than any people in the world', as McCullough reminds us. But narrowing the subject to one year has drawbacks as well as advantages.

The plus is that McCullough is offering one more irresistible narrative of a fabled Long March, from hope through despair to hope again... The minus is the lack of political background, which is perfunctory. So New York and Long Island were full of 'loyalists'? What were their own dreams for America and what happened to them in the end? So Washington was a slave-owner and a friend of liberty? Plenty has been written about that elsewhere, but at least a sample should have entered this book.

McCullough inserts profiles of his leading actors. Some work better than others. George Washington, a man of marble famously hard to penetrate, remains opaque. There's any amount of secondary evidence that his men adored him, that he had the gift of transmitting confidence. But why and how?

What McCullough does show is that Washington had the incredibly rare gift of learning from the criticism of subordinates. After Long Island, he discovered that some of his commanders thought he was hopelessly indecisive. He considered this, apparently agreed, and simply made himself more decisive.

In contrast to 'His Excellency', other leaders emerge in sharp relief. None is more appealing than the fat young Boston bookseller, Henry Knox, an Ulster Scot with a booming voice who already weighed nearly 18 stone [252 pounds] at the age of 25. Only in a revolution, and especially a can-do American revolution, could this [porker] turn into a wonderful general who began by thinking up and carrying through the mad feat of towing the guns from Ticonderoga and ended up as one of the victors at Yorktown.
                                             

General Knox

McCullough doesn't ask himself what would have happened if Washington had been crushed in 1776. But Knox gives the answer. America was already independent. What mattered was that Americans should realise it. The British could be dealt with, if not now, then later. Even if they still won battles, they were becoming history.

UPDATE: I have driven the highway route from the Albany area through the entire length of Massachusetts. Even though I was cocooned with plush comforts, it still seemed as if Beantown would never come into view.

What Knox and his men accomplished is simply astounding.

What was their toughest stretch? Traversing the Berkshire Mountains once New York was behind them.

                   

Let's close this out with an appropriate colonial fiddle tune.