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re: 150 years ago this day...
Posted on 1/18/14 at 9:15 pm to BadLeroyDawg
Posted on 1/18/14 at 9:15 pm to BadLeroyDawg
Tuesday, 19 January 1864
Much is often made of the disadvantages the “agricultural, pastoral” South faced in fighting the “industrialized, technological” North during the Civil War. This should not be taken to extremes, however. The Confederacy certainly had manufacturing capabilities, and moreover had some very ingenious persons employed in the war effort to use creativity in weapons design. One such was a nasty, little item devised around this time: the “coal torpedo.” It was a hollow lump of cast iron, the hollow part of which was packed with gunpowder and sealed. This was then milled, ground and painted until it looked like a perfectly ordinary lump of coal. All that was required was for a passerby at a Union naval fueling station to drop this into a coal pile about to be loaded onto a ship. When the bomb was shoveled into the ship’s boiler it didn’t even need a fuse to turn it into a devastating explosive. Not enough were made to have much of an effect, although one would come close next year in City Point, Virginia.
Thomas E. Courtenay, engaged in secret service for the Confederacy, informed Colonel Henry E. Clark, that manufacture of "coal torpedoes" was nearing completion, and stated: "The castings have all been completed some time and the coal is so perfect that the most critical eye could not detect it." These devices, really powder filled cast iron bombs, shaped and painted to resemble pieces of coal, were to be deposited in Federal naval coal depots, from where they would eventually reach and explode ships' boilers. During the next few months Rear Admiral David D. Porter, commanding the Mississippi Squadron, became greatly concerned over Confederate agents assigned to distribute the coal torpedoes, and wrote Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles that he had "given orders to commanders of vessels not to be very particular about the treatment of any of these desperadoes if caught- only summary punishment will be effective."
Boats from the USS Roebuck, under Acting Master Sherrill, seized the British schooner Eliza and sloop Mary inside Jupiter Inlet, Florida. Both blockade runners carried cargoes of cotton. Three days later the Mary, en route to Key West, Florida, commenced leaking, ran aground, and was wrecked. The prize, crew and most of the cotton were saved. In ten days, Sherrill's vigilance and initiative had enabled him to take six prizes.
This evening a party scouting for Colonel Williams, in command of the military post at Rossville, Arkansas, returned to camp, having captured in the Magazine Mountains, some fifteen miles east of the post, the county records of Vernon and Cedar Counties, Missouri. The books and papers so captured and retained were worth one million dollars to those counties.
Colonel Powell Clayton attacked Brigadier General Joseph Orville Shelby's smaller Southern force, twenty miles below Pine Bluff, Arkansas, on the Monticello Railroad. The fight lasted half an hour, when the enemy fled, pursued by Clayton with his command, for two hours and a half. The Confederates were driven seven miles. Shelby's force was estimated at almost eight hundred. Colonel Clayton marched sixty miles in twenty-four hours, and made fight and gained a victory.
An unsuccessful attempt was made to burn the residence of President Jefferson Davis, at Richmond, Virginia.
A sale of confiscated estates took place at Beaufort, South Carolina.
Much is often made of the disadvantages the “agricultural, pastoral” South faced in fighting the “industrialized, technological” North during the Civil War. This should not be taken to extremes, however. The Confederacy certainly had manufacturing capabilities, and moreover had some very ingenious persons employed in the war effort to use creativity in weapons design. One such was a nasty, little item devised around this time: the “coal torpedo.” It was a hollow lump of cast iron, the hollow part of which was packed with gunpowder and sealed. This was then milled, ground and painted until it looked like a perfectly ordinary lump of coal. All that was required was for a passerby at a Union naval fueling station to drop this into a coal pile about to be loaded onto a ship. When the bomb was shoveled into the ship’s boiler it didn’t even need a fuse to turn it into a devastating explosive. Not enough were made to have much of an effect, although one would come close next year in City Point, Virginia.
Thomas E. Courtenay, engaged in secret service for the Confederacy, informed Colonel Henry E. Clark, that manufacture of "coal torpedoes" was nearing completion, and stated: "The castings have all been completed some time and the coal is so perfect that the most critical eye could not detect it." These devices, really powder filled cast iron bombs, shaped and painted to resemble pieces of coal, were to be deposited in Federal naval coal depots, from where they would eventually reach and explode ships' boilers. During the next few months Rear Admiral David D. Porter, commanding the Mississippi Squadron, became greatly concerned over Confederate agents assigned to distribute the coal torpedoes, and wrote Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles that he had "given orders to commanders of vessels not to be very particular about the treatment of any of these desperadoes if caught- only summary punishment will be effective."
Boats from the USS Roebuck, under Acting Master Sherrill, seized the British schooner Eliza and sloop Mary inside Jupiter Inlet, Florida. Both blockade runners carried cargoes of cotton. Three days later the Mary, en route to Key West, Florida, commenced leaking, ran aground, and was wrecked. The prize, crew and most of the cotton were saved. In ten days, Sherrill's vigilance and initiative had enabled him to take six prizes.
This evening a party scouting for Colonel Williams, in command of the military post at Rossville, Arkansas, returned to camp, having captured in the Magazine Mountains, some fifteen miles east of the post, the county records of Vernon and Cedar Counties, Missouri. The books and papers so captured and retained were worth one million dollars to those counties.
Colonel Powell Clayton attacked Brigadier General Joseph Orville Shelby's smaller Southern force, twenty miles below Pine Bluff, Arkansas, on the Monticello Railroad. The fight lasted half an hour, when the enemy fled, pursued by Clayton with his command, for two hours and a half. The Confederates were driven seven miles. Shelby's force was estimated at almost eight hundred. Colonel Clayton marched sixty miles in twenty-four hours, and made fight and gained a victory.
An unsuccessful attempt was made to burn the residence of President Jefferson Davis, at Richmond, Virginia.
A sale of confiscated estates took place at Beaufort, South Carolina.
1
Posted on 1/19/14 at 6:57 am to BadLeroyDawg
And 207 years ago, Robert Edward Lee was born. Columnist Paul Greenberg penned this on January 19, 2006 as a remembrance...
In the writings of the Ephesians there was this precept, constantly to think of some one of the men of former times who practiced virtue. — Marcus Aurelius
It always sneaks up on me, the arrival of January 19th in the midst of gray winter. Like a sudden shaft of light. Can any observance as quaint as Lee's Birthday still be on the calendar? It rings strange in these postmodern times, as archaic as a reference to St. Crispin's Day. Except to hobbyists and Civil war buffs, even the names of the storied old battles — Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg — begin to acquire the faded resonance of Agincourt.
Who now thinks, let alone thinks constantly, on Robert E. Lee except professional Southerners and professional debunkers? And which separate but equally showy tribe would the old general have despised more? For his was a Greek restraint, as out of place in this deconstructed age as a classical ruin next to one of post-mod architect Frank Gehry's outsized plumbing fixtures.
Lee's Birthday? It doesn't compute. At a time when the dominant mode of discourse is responsibility-free irony, how are we to respond, if at all, when told to consider men of former times, and even speak of Virtue? Is it even possible to say the word anymore without a smirk, or expecting one in response? What matters in our virtual reality, everyone knows even if not everyone will say it aloud, is winning. And, hey, the old guy was a loser. C'mon, change the channel.
No, Robert E. Lee was not a modern figure; he was not even a contemporary one. He would not countenance the kind of advanced strategies that have become the hallmark of warfare in our so much more advanced times — terrorism, mass reprisals, war on civilians . . . . All of that Lee left to Sherman and Sherman's counterparts on the Confederate side.
Even in his own time, the General seemed a remnant of some earlier, classical period. And he could no more change over the course of the war than a figure on a Greek frieze might. A gentleman lost in the first stages of modernity, he resisted the frenzy of secession before the war just as he did the despair of defeat afterward. He did not boast of victories or try to shift the blame for defeats. He just went on.
At Chancellorsville, which a British military historian would call the most perfectly executed feat of arms in American history, Lee would twin with Jackson to defeat a force two and a half times the size of his own and better equipped in every respect. At Gettysburg, which would prove decisive, all went wrong. But all he would say after Pickett's Charge had failed, and the Southern cause with it, was: "All this has been my fault."
Lee remained the same at Gettysburg as he had been at Chancellorsville: masterful at everything he could control, resigned to what he could not. If he could not command events, he would always command his response to them.
It is neither the victorious nor the defeated Lee who speaks clearest to us now, but the Lee beyond victory or defeat. He has emerged victorious over the very idea of victory or defeat. He was one Civil War general — sometimes he seems the only one — who did not write a self-serving memoir after the guns fell silent. Instead of dwelling on the deeds of his generation, he would just return to Virginia to teach the next.
There is a scene in Stephen Vincent Benet's "John Brown's Body": A young officer pauses before entering Lee's tent to deliver his dispatch, loath to disturb the General, who is bent over his papers in the candlelight. The messenger knows the war is winding down — indeed, is all but lost by now — and he can only wonder:
What keeps us going on? I wish I knew. Perhaps you see a man like that go on. And then you have to follow.
What held that disparate, desperate, not quite definable idea called the South together so long? And holds it together still from generation to generation? Despite all our defeats and limitations and sins against one other, the idea of the South still lives — even if we cannot agree on just what Southernness is, and even if its meaning keeps changing from era to era.
The South is so much — land, language, history, folkways . . . and something so little as a certain light in the air. For even in eclipse, there is still a corona around our sun. And if there is a single name for that remaining light in these latitudes, it is Lee.
In the writings of the Ephesians there was this precept, constantly to think of some one of the men of former times who practiced virtue. — Marcus Aurelius
It always sneaks up on me, the arrival of January 19th in the midst of gray winter. Like a sudden shaft of light. Can any observance as quaint as Lee's Birthday still be on the calendar? It rings strange in these postmodern times, as archaic as a reference to St. Crispin's Day. Except to hobbyists and Civil war buffs, even the names of the storied old battles — Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg — begin to acquire the faded resonance of Agincourt.
Who now thinks, let alone thinks constantly, on Robert E. Lee except professional Southerners and professional debunkers? And which separate but equally showy tribe would the old general have despised more? For his was a Greek restraint, as out of place in this deconstructed age as a classical ruin next to one of post-mod architect Frank Gehry's outsized plumbing fixtures.
Lee's Birthday? It doesn't compute. At a time when the dominant mode of discourse is responsibility-free irony, how are we to respond, if at all, when told to consider men of former times, and even speak of Virtue? Is it even possible to say the word anymore without a smirk, or expecting one in response? What matters in our virtual reality, everyone knows even if not everyone will say it aloud, is winning. And, hey, the old guy was a loser. C'mon, change the channel.
No, Robert E. Lee was not a modern figure; he was not even a contemporary one. He would not countenance the kind of advanced strategies that have become the hallmark of warfare in our so much more advanced times — terrorism, mass reprisals, war on civilians . . . . All of that Lee left to Sherman and Sherman's counterparts on the Confederate side.
Even in his own time, the General seemed a remnant of some earlier, classical period. And he could no more change over the course of the war than a figure on a Greek frieze might. A gentleman lost in the first stages of modernity, he resisted the frenzy of secession before the war just as he did the despair of defeat afterward. He did not boast of victories or try to shift the blame for defeats. He just went on.
At Chancellorsville, which a British military historian would call the most perfectly executed feat of arms in American history, Lee would twin with Jackson to defeat a force two and a half times the size of his own and better equipped in every respect. At Gettysburg, which would prove decisive, all went wrong. But all he would say after Pickett's Charge had failed, and the Southern cause with it, was: "All this has been my fault."
Lee remained the same at Gettysburg as he had been at Chancellorsville: masterful at everything he could control, resigned to what he could not. If he could not command events, he would always command his response to them.
It is neither the victorious nor the defeated Lee who speaks clearest to us now, but the Lee beyond victory or defeat. He has emerged victorious over the very idea of victory or defeat. He was one Civil War general — sometimes he seems the only one — who did not write a self-serving memoir after the guns fell silent. Instead of dwelling on the deeds of his generation, he would just return to Virginia to teach the next.
There is a scene in Stephen Vincent Benet's "John Brown's Body": A young officer pauses before entering Lee's tent to deliver his dispatch, loath to disturb the General, who is bent over his papers in the candlelight. The messenger knows the war is winding down — indeed, is all but lost by now — and he can only wonder:
What keeps us going on? I wish I knew. Perhaps you see a man like that go on. And then you have to follow.
What held that disparate, desperate, not quite definable idea called the South together so long? And holds it together still from generation to generation? Despite all our defeats and limitations and sins against one other, the idea of the South still lives — even if we cannot agree on just what Southernness is, and even if its meaning keeps changing from era to era.
The South is so much — land, language, history, folkways . . . and something so little as a certain light in the air. For even in eclipse, there is still a corona around our sun. And if there is a single name for that remaining light in these latitudes, it is Lee.
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