There is presently a pending proposal by VDOT to widen Route 3 through the Stevensburg portion of the Brandy Station battlefield. If the original proposal is approved, that core sector of the battlefield will be largely obliterated. The reasons why this is not acceptable ought to be obvious. The Brandy Station Foundation objected, and fortunately, the Virginia Department of Historic Resources sided with the BSF.

From today’s edition of the Culpeper Star-Exponent:

DHR disputes VDOT’s Route 3 findings

By NATE DELESLINE
Published: March 25, 2011

On Thursday, another front emerged in the battle to widen Route 3 in the Stevensburg area, this time between the Department of Historic Resources and the Virginia Department of Transportation.

The DHR formally rejected an earlier VDOT report that claimed an expansion of the highway would have no adverse effects on the Brandy Station Civil War battlefield, Hansbrough’s Ridge, a Stevensburg-area hill that played a role in the war and a recently discovered, secluded natural spring.

In a letter to VDOT dated Thursday, Julie V. Langan of the DHR details the points of disagreement.

“After examining materials presented to us by VDOT and the consulting parties, listening to the views of all sides during the consulting parties meeting, driving the project corridor and studying the revised maps from the American Battlefield Protection Program, DHR must disagree with VDOT’s assessment of effect.”

The letter goes on to say that Hansbrough’s Ridge is a “dominant presence” on the area’s battlefield landscape and that VDOT should undertake efforts to minimize any adverse impacts.

“Additionally, we request that VDOT engineers explore again any possibilities to minimize the footprint of lane additions at Hansbrough’s Ridge in an effort to preserve as much of the ridgeline as possible.”

Finally, the DHR says a recently discovered historic spring, Wicked Bottom, must also be protected. A highway retention pond would take its place if the current plans were advanced.

Project in brief

At a public hearing on Wednesday, VDOT presented two options to expand a 5.1-mile, two-lane section of Route 3 between Stevensburg and Lignum to four lanes.

The first plan, estimated to cost $38.9 million, would widen the road along the existing track, with narrowed shoulders in some areas to minimize the impact to adjacent properties.

The second plan, estimated at $35 million, would construct a new highway route, bypassing Stevensburg to the north and rejoining the existing highway near Clay Hill Road. The second alignment would also cut out a section of Route 3 that’s had multiple fatal crashes in the past few years.

However, VDOT and law enforcement officials have said previously that driver error, deer strikes and inappropriate driving behaviors, not the inherent design of the two-lane road, are to blame for most of the problems.

VDOT Culpeper District spokesman Lou Hatter said the DHR’s review is part of the National Environmental Policy Act that applies to transportation projects using federal funds. Hatter also said that an adverse impact determination is common when projects impact historic resources.

“Addressing these types of questions typically takes 90 to 120 days after reviewing the public hearing comments and coordinating with DHR,” Hatter said late Thursday.

‘Zero sensitivity’

Brandy Station Foundation president Bud Hall said the DHR report vindicates everyone who championed protection of the nearby historic areas. He was also sharply critical of VDOT’s findings.

“It’s a shoddy piece of scholarship,” Hall said. “Their report showed absolute zero sensitivity. The report concluded that a four lane highway through Hansbrough’s Ridge and Stevensburg would have no adverse effect on the historic resources,” Hall said. “I thought it was ludicrous.

“The construction of a 150-foot wide highway with a 16-foot raised median in the center would effectively destroy historic landscape directly affiliated with the Stevensburg phase of the Battle of Brandy Station. DHR is to be commended and applauded for their correction of the record in this matter.”

In addition to the Brandy Station Foundation, Hall said the Germanna Foundation, Piedmont Environmental Council, the Civil War Trust and other groups went on the record to contest VDOT’s findings.

Asked what an acceptable transportation compromise would be, Hall said officials should mirror what was done in Upperville — a widened road with reduced speed limits and traffic calming elements. “Route 50 is busy if not busier and it’s a very safe model.”

Zann Nelson, a local historian and Star-Exponent columnist, also applauded Thursday’s DHR decision.

“DHR is really on top of things when the citizens come forward and raise questions,” she said. “That’s the way the system is supposed to work. If nobody questions a report, you can’t implement the checks and balances. As painful as it is, it is a system that is working properly.”

Kudos to DHR for doing the right thing. Hopefully, VDOT will now take steps to protect the battlefield. Thanks to Bud Hall for passing this along.

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I’ve been fairly cutting edge with the Civil War on the Internet. I was one of the earliest participants in on-line discussions, I had a website as early as 1997, I started blogging in 2005, and I’ve been using Facebook to promote and sell my stuff. There is, however, one thing that I absolutely and categorically refuse to do: join Twitter. While some argue that no social media strategy is complete without tweeting, I can’t get beyond the thought that Twitter is the ultimate exercise in narcissism. It never ceases to amaze me that with all of his loony, demented ravings, nobody has ever gotten a larger following on Twitter faster than Charlie Sheen, who admittedly doesn’t even write his own posts.

The bottom line is that I already spend too much time on this stuff as it is, and the last thing I’m about to do is to add another layer to my daily Internet usage, and I just won’t do so. That doesn’t mean that others shouldn’t make good use of Twitter as a means of marketing and selling books, I just won’t be one of them.

However, I have to tip my cap to a historian at the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources who is using Twitter to spread the word of the Civil War sesquicentennial. Here’s the article about it, from Yahoo News:

Historian tweets about Civil War to bring back era
By TOM BREEN, Associated Press – Tue Mar 22, 5:02 pm ET

RALEIGH, N.C. – Two months before the start of the Civil War, a North Carolina belle named Catherine Ann Devereux Edmondston tapped out a frustrated message about her secession-opposing sibling in a tweet to her followers: “Sister Frances is a terrible Unionist!”

She might have tweeted, that is, if Twitter had existed in 1861. Instead, Edmondston and other long-dead North Carolinians from a bygone era are having their social networking done for them posthumously. A Raleigh-based historian is using the popular service to bring the home front of a war to modern day audiences nearly a century and a half later.

“We’re not imposing any of our words. This is purely from men, women, and even teenagers who stayed at home and fought the war in their own ways,” said LeRae Umfleet, the historian who manages the collections at the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources.

Since last week, Umfleet has been tweeting from the account (at)CivilianWartime with the words of an escaped slave, a woman whose husband owned a plantation and others. The tweets are moving roughly in chronological order along with the war, meaning that so far the messages mostly express the foreboding and uncertainty of people in North Carolina as they watched war clouds build.

“I have just seen the President’s message,” Umfleet tweeted in the March 11, 1861 words of Mary Bethell. “Mr. Lincoln, I think he intends to coerce those seceding States.”

The Twitter account is part of the ongoing effort of the cultural resources department’s ongoing effort to mark the 150th anniversary of the bloodiest conflict in American history. It seeks to highlight the experiences of those who remained at home while others went off to war — a conflict ever more dire as the battles drag on.

“By the end of the war, we will have seen conflict on North Carolina soil, and we’ll have heard from people with firsthand knowledge of that,” Umfleet said.

The tweets aren’t just short excerpts from a time when letter writing was far more common than today, though. Each tweet links to a blog that contains the full passage being cited as well as information on where to find the original documents.

And all of the tweets are taken verbatim from letters, diaries, autobiographies and other records of what people thought of the conflict as it unfolded.

These tweets of war are an attempt to reach those now accustomed to getting their information from tiny portable screens rather than thick and musty volumes. Siince Monday, the Twitter page has gone from fewer than two dozen followers to more than 240.

“How cool is this!” one Twitter user tweeted Tuesday, linking to the site.

Umstead has been tweeting several times a day so far. She plans to follow the war’s progress by recording thoughts of North Carolinians roughly in step with the chronology of the war, from the first stirrings of secession to the final surrender in 1865.

One of those following the tweets is Wilson Hines, a history major at Wayne Community College in Goldsboro. Hines, 37, says that some history buffs may turn up their noses at services like Twitter, but it’s increasingly important to use tools familiar to younger people to teach them about such a big part of American history.

“All these kids do is spend time on the Internet,” he said. “It’s on their phones, it’s on their laptops … Twitter is a fantastic way to get the word spread about historical events.”

Hines has even seen specific interest in the Civil War growing on Twitter, where the (hash)CivilWar hashtag — a way to search for tweets referring to a particular topic — has grown significantly in the last few months.

“Almost every minute someone’s saying something new about the Civil War, where not long ago there might be one post a day,” he said.

The conflict that millions of Americans followed at the time through newspapers, letters and the telegraph has become something of an Internet-era sensation, with efforts that also include blogs and web sites featuring accounts and images from the war. There are also numerous Facebook pages, and even Twitter accounts set up on behalf of long-dead figures from the war era, including Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant.

Umfleet, who is new to Twitter herself, said she’s taken to tweeting with enthusiasm, although there are hurdles to negotiate when bringing 19th century ways of speaking into the digital age.

“Sometimes their prose is a little difficult to follow, and unfortunately they don’t end their sentences with LOL,” she said.

I’m still not going to run out and sign up for Twitter, but I have to tip my cap to Ms. Umfleet for coming up with a really novel idea, and if it helps get one person in the Civil War, then it’s a good thing.

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Those of you who are long-time readers of this blog know that I have been vehemently opposed to that portion of the Google Book Search project that involves the scanning of copyrighted works without the permission of the author, and then making those books available on-line in some fashion without paying royalties to the authors for the privilege. I came out against this program from the very start, and I enthusiastically supported the class action copyright infringement lawsuit filed against Google Book Search by the Authors Guild.

I then became horribly disillusioned when I learned that the Guild had entered into a tentative settlement with Google that would have perpetuated the copyright infringement AND which would have given Google a veritable monopoly over its massive copyright infringement scheme. Fortunately, Federal law requires that class action settlements have to be approved by the court before those settlements become effective. I’m pleased to report that the Court has roundly rejected this ill-advised settlement.

From CNet News today:

March 22, 2011 12:20 PM PDT
Court rejects Google Books settlement
by Caroline McCarthy

Adding another chapter to a long, drawn-out legal saga, a New York federal district court has rejected the controversial settlement in a class-action suit brought against Google Books by the Authors Guild, a publishing industry trade group.

“While the digitization of books and the creation of a universal digital library would benefit many, the ASA would simply go too far,” a court document explains. “It would permit this class action–which was brought against defendant Google Inc. to challenge its scanning of books and display of ‘snippets’ for on-line searching–to implement a forward-looking business arrangement that would grant Google significant rights to exploit entire books, without permission of the copyright owners. Indeed, the ASA (Amended Settle Agreement) would give Google a significant advantage over competitors, rewarding it for engaging in wholesale copying of copyrighted works without permission, while releasing claims well beyond those presented in the case.”

The settlement would grant Google the right to display excerpts of out-of-print books, even if they are not in the public domain or authorized by publishers to appear in Google Books. When the settlement was initially announced in mid-2009, opposition flooded in from lawyers on behalf of Microsoft, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and a coalition called the Open Book Alliance who decried it as anticompetitive.

“Google and the plaintiff publishers secretly negotiated for 29 months to produce a horizontal price fixing combination, effected and reinforced by a digital book distribution monopoly,” a lawyer for the Open Book Alliance said at the time. “Their guile has cleared much of the field in digital book distribution, shielding Google from meaningful competition.”

The settlement was revised, primarily to deal with objections coming from the European Union, but concerns remained that it would give Google too much power over out-of-print book titles.

The most recent court docket, filed today, explains that Google has digitized over 12 million books since the original 2004 announcement of Google Books and its set of partnerships with several major universities to digitize their research libraries. In 2005, the class action suit was filed over the fact that many of the out-of-print books included in the mass scanning were still under copyright. Settlement negotiations began nearly five years ago.

Last year, the Authors Guild said that it chose to settle rather than head for a court battle because it didn’t want to repeat the well-publicized mistakes that the music industry made while policing digital piracy.

But concerns about the settlement have ranged from the aforementioned antitrust qualms, international law issues related to overseas copyrights, and privacy concerns regarding how much information Google could glean about readers.

The docket filed today, authored by Judge Denny Chin, asserts that “the ASA is not fair, adequate, and reasonable.”

“This is clearly disappointing, but we’ll review the Court’s decision and consider our options,” a statement from Google managing counsel Hilary Ware explained. “Like many others, we believe this agreement has the potential to open up access to millions of books that are currently hard to find in the U.S. today. Regardless of the outcome, we’ll continue to work to make more of the world’s books discoverable online through Google Books and Google eBooks.”

John Sargent, CEO of Macmillan, issued a statement on behalf of the publishers that had joined the plaintiffs’ side of the lawsuit. “While the March 22 decision of U.S. District Court Judge Denny Chin on the Google Book Settlement Agreement that was filed on November 13, 2009 is not the final approval we were hoping for, it provides clear guidance to all parties as to what modifications are necessary for its approval,” he said. “The publisher plaintiffs are prepared to enter into a narrower Settlement along those lines to take advantage of its groundbreaking opportunities. We hope the other parties will do so as well.”

To read the actual court order rejecting the settlement, click here.

Kudos to Judge Chin for protecting my rights–and the rights of other authors. I hope that the Guild now resumes its efforts to protect authors, not to give away the farm.

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My good friend Clark B. “Bud” Hall was born and raised in Mississippi. Bud is the great-grandson of a Mississippi Confederate who fought with Barksdale’s Brigade for the Peach Orchard at Gettysburg. He’s also a Marine Corps combat veteran of the Vietnam War. And, lest there be any questions about Bud’s dedication to the Civil War, he is one of the three founders of the Association for the Preservation of Civil War Sites (now known as the Civil War Trust), was the founder of the Brandy Station Foundation, and presently serves as its president. He won’t like this, but nobody has done more to preserve that battlefield than he has. In short, Bud’s a guy who puts his money where his mouth is.

Bud is also deeply bothered by the way that neo-Confederates distort the causes of the Civil War, and he’s taken up his pen to discuss that concern. From today’s issue of the Fauquier Times Democrat newspaper, I give you Bud’s letter to the editor, reprinted here with Bud’s express permission:

Editor:

Quite often the best way to make a point is to relate a story; and being a Southerner, it’s in the DNA; so, please indulge…

Charles H. Hall, the 21-year old son of a hard scrabble Mississippi farmer, joined an infantry company formed by local gentry in 1861, and was quickly elected as the company’s sergeant. Sgt. Hall’s newly formed regiment was incorporated into Barksdale’s Mississippi Brigade, soon to be a hard-charging unit in General Robert E. Lee’s legendary Army of Northern Virginia.

Sgt. Charlie Hall served faithfully throughout the war and surrendered the company’s flag at Appomattox. He then walked home and started a family. And as I gaze at his image, it is clear how much his steadfastness and courage have inspired me over the years. In my mind’s eye, Charlie Hall is a hero—notwithstanding the fact he served in an unjust cause. And by the way, neither Charlie Hall nor any of his family ever owned a slave.

Sgt. Hall’s great-grandson joined the Marine Corps and was assigned to a fine infantry outfit that was soon sent to South Viet Nam. This writer is that great-grandson, and I served successively as a patrol leader in the deep jungle, and on the commanding general’s staff. I came home after the war, re-entered school, and started a family.

While in Viet Nam—especially while serving on Lt. Gen. Lewis Walt’s staff—I saw and heard things that utterly convinced me the war was an enormous, shameful lie and that young Americans were dying for naught. So feeling both burned and outraged, I helped start a “Viet Nam Veterans Against the War” chapter at my university. Did it help? I don’t know about others, but it certainly helped me.

And although I could not be prouder of the Marine Corps (anyone who knows me realizes that fact), or of the service my mates and I conveyed to our country, it is a fact we served in a bad cause. It took me a long time to finally admit the hard truth that my friends and subordinates who died in Viet Nam perished for nothing. Why? We served in a bad and unjust cause.

Now, where is this going? Thus far, I have made the point that one can serve honorably in a misguided war, and yet be enormously proud of that service. But there is another point.

There are just wars fought to liberate mankind, and other wars waged to perpetuate human bondage. Other wars were prosecuted to fulfill political aims that were deceitfully manufactured before and after the fact. Both of the latter two classes of war are wrong, therefore by definition, unjust.

And indeed, both the Civil War and the Viet Nam War were terribly wrong, and for the South, an unjust calling. We live today with the divisive consequences of both national tragedies.

As to the Civil War, I have studied, written, and lectured about the topic for more than twenty-five years. It has been my pleasure to have co-founded three battlefield preservation groups, and presently I am honored to be the president of one such non-profit group.

And here are the “stern facts,” as the taciturn Winslow Homer would offer:

The central, motivating, pivotal purpose driving the South to secede was slavery. As Confederate General James Longstreet stoutly asserted after the war, “If it (the war) wasn’t about slavery, then I don’t know what else it was about.”

Let’s also hear from someone we know locally—and I am in the first rank of John Mosby’s admirers: “The South was my country, but the South went to war on account of slavery.”

Declining invitations to memorial ceremonies wherein wrong-headed speakers claimed slavery had nothing to do with the conflict, Mosby offered in response he was not ashamed to say he fought for the Confederacy— and did he ever! —but that the South must come to grips with the “true facts of history.”

So, here we are at the end of the story:

If Sgt. Charles H. Hall did not own any slaves, how could he have fought to perpetuate slavery? Simple. His country asked him to, and he served proudly and honorably, for his country.

And if his great-grandson fought in a place he had never heard of until he was ordered there, how do we assess his service? Easy. He served proudly and honorably, for his country.

And as it turned out, Sgt Hall and his progeny were both mere pawns in separate but equal tragedies. Both of us—and others like the “Hall boys”—were victims of morally righteous politicians who blindly put their faith in the myth of war making as the primary mechanism to solve political disputes.

So today when you hear folks contend that slavery was a secondary issue underpinning the Civil War, just think back to the words of a proud, old warrior who cared about nothing but facts.

And John Mosby told nothing but the truth.

Clark B. Hall
Middleburg, VA

Coming from a Southerner who truly is a son of a Confederate veteran, I hope that his words carry some punch. They will undoubtedly upset the apple cart of some of the neo-Confederates out there who are bound and determined to rewrite history to put a human face on slavery and to downplay its role as the central cause of the Civil War. Kudos to Bud for taking a brave stand.

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From General August V. Kautz’s war-time manual, Customs of Service for Officers of the Army, we have Kautz’s list of the qualifications required for a good cavalry commander. As Kautz himself was a cavalryman, this makes for an interesting list.

687. CAVALRY.—A Cavalry Commander requires peculiar qualifications, that are far more rare than for any other arm of the service. He should, first of all, be young, and of fine physical qualities, capable of enduring great fatigue. He should be quick of thought and decision, without being rash; he should be able to form his plans rapidly and clearly, and execute with confidence.

688. He should be devoted to this branch of the service, passionately fond of the horse, unremitting in his care and attention to his command, watching over men and horses, and jealous of their abuse, guarding and protecting them, so that they may be in the best possible condition for the moment of action. When that moment arrives, he should receive it confidently, and should “go in” with a method akin to rashness, counting only on success, and regardless of the cost.

689. The capacity to go from place to place, independent of guides, or with the aid of a map only (that innate knowledge of locality so rarely found), is an essential of the first importance to a Cavalry Commander. He must not be easily misled, and be able to know intuitively whether he is going right or wrong. The whole object of an expedition may fail by a want of capacity to go by the shortest and most available route to the destination; for the main merit of Cavalry is its rapidity of movement, made available by distancing the enemy in seizing a weak point before he can protect it.

690. The improvements in firearms have produced some modifications in the use of Cavalry. It is seldom that Cavalry can approach near enough to charge without being exposed to a destructive fire at long range. The opportunities for the use of the sabre are much more rare; the nature of our country is such that a weaker force can always avoid a stronger mounted force by seeking a wood, or a fence, or a stream, for cover, from which, with the long ranged arm, it can constantly harass its mounted foe as far as it can be seen.

691. This facility to take cover against Cavalry at any time renders it necessary for the Cavalry to be provided with a carbine of long range, so that the horses may be left in rear, and the Cavalry dismount, and act temporarily as Infantry, to overcome obstacles insurmountable for Cavalry; or having availed itself of the rapid movement of the horses to seize a strategic point, that the Cavalry may dismount and hold it like entrenched Infantry; for pure Cavalry cannot hold positions on the defensive—it must either fight to win or run away.

692. In an open country unobstructed by fences, hedges, ravines, or woods, Cavalry is of great service to watch the enemy, to pick up stragglers, carry intelligence, and to harass the enemy. But its chances for charging depend upon the character of the foe, and the nature of their arms. Infantry indifferent in discipline, armed with short range guns, are still assailable by good Cavalry; and good Infantry will cause severe loss to Cavalry, even where successfully attacked; but even the best of Infantry may be surprised and taken unawares.

693. The great merit of Cavalry consists in its celerity of movement; but this does not mean that the horse should be kept constantly at a dashing pace. On the contrary, the habitual gait of Cavalry is a walk. It is only when confronted with the enemy, and where celerity of movement is necessary to be exercised for very short periods to gain definite results, that it is justifiable to urge the horse to greater speed than a walk; then to decide definitely, and execute with rapidity, is the province of the Cavalry leader.

694. It is better on an extended march to keep up a continuous walk for twenty-four hours, than to double the speed and make the same distance in twelve hours. The best horses would fail in the latter case, whilst most horses could do the former without injury. The load which a Cavalry horse must carry defeats any comparison with the saddle horse of the civilian; the equipments that are attached to the saddle, the sabre on one side, and the carbine on the other, the picket rope and pin, the halter, the nose-bag and forage-bag, the haversack and canteen, and often other things disposed about the horse and the men, may all be carried very conveniently at a walk by the horse, but when urged at a trot, or a gallop, are very serious obstacles, and a few miles at those gaits without interruption will soon end his usefulness, even on the best of roads.

695. A march should be conducted, as follows: the column should move out by fours, if possible; otherwise by twos, or by file; but each squadron should regulate its own march; the leading files of each squadron should keep the required gait, which should be a walk on all ordinary marches; squadrons regulate their distances by increasing or slowing the walk gradually; rear files rushing forward at a trot, or gallop, thus crowding on the heels of the horses in front, and then halting suddenly for room to go on, is a great injury to the horses, and an evidence of very bad Cavalry.

696. The Captain or Commander of the squadron should march in rear of his squadron, so as to control the disposition the men have to leave the column on the slightest pretext; none should be allowed to leave, except in cases of absolute necessity, and then the Captain (who should be provided with written permits) should give the proper authority, and it should be required of each man to report his return; otherwise the men will be constantly falling out, and once out of the column and away from the officer, they are liable to commit depredations, or they break their horses down in riding from house to house, or place to place, in search of anything or nothing, with that want of consideration often found among soldiers.

697. Halts need not be frequent, two or three in a day’s march are quite sufficient. Sometimes the obstacles to be passed render halts necessary; and whenever they occur, if only for a few moments, the men should dismount; at such times a few mouthfuls of grass or other food is very refreshing to the horse. The opportunity to water the horses should always be considered and ordered in advance, and should be counted as a halt or rest. On a forced march the horses should not be halted, but they should be relieved fifteen minutes every hour, by dismounting the men, and requiring them to march. For a march of a day more, the walk is the most rapid gait, the Cavalry will go farther in less time, and be in better condition at that gait than any other; the time must be saved by making fewer halts, and marching more hours.

698. On campaigns, the Cavalry is often improperly used. It is a great expense to the Government, although no doubt a great comfort to the Commander of an Army, if he can surround his command with a cordon of Mounted Sentinels, five or six miles out in front of his Infantry pickets; but he can have little knowledge in the use of this auxiliary arm, when he wastes his horse-flesh in so reckless and improvident a manner.

699. The proper place for the Cavalry of an Army is in reserve, so that it may be available in the shortest possible time. If it is out on picket, and widely scattered, the concentration of it fatigues and delays it, and it goes upon the expedition half broken down, and behind time. The rule is never to use the Cavalry where Infantry will do as well or better, and particularly not for picket duty. Infantry is far better for this duty, and only sufficient Cavalry should be used to act as couriers, and to patrol the principal avenues of approach, in connection with the Infantry.

700. Cavalry should not be used as Infantry. Dismounting the men and sending the horses to the rear for days, or even hours, thus separating the two, is a violation of this rule; but it may sometimes be necessary, as when a Cavalry column is pushed forward rapidly to seize a point that can only be held by dismounting; but in such a case Infantry should always be sent as soon as possible to take the place of the dismounted Cavalry. Men and horses cannot be separated any length of time without a proportionate injury to the latter.

701. The embarrassing feature of Cavalry is forage; the horses must be fed, and the feed cannot be transported any great distance, without superior facilities for transportation. In an agricultural district, however, a Cavalry column of almost any size moving through the country will find sufficient to subsist the horses, if a proper system of foraging is adopted. This requires the utmost vigilance. Loosely conducted, it is exceedingly demoralizing and furnishes opportunities for every kind of excesses; especial care should be taken where it may be the policy to conciliate the inhabitants.

702. Recent improvements in arms and equipments have made it necessary that the greater portion of our Cavalry should be armed with repeating carbines and metallic percussion cartridges. The sabre may be dispensed with altogether, or if forming part of the equipment, should be strapped to the saddle. Such a force is almost as formidable as Infantry, and its principal use is to surprise and capture strategic points, and hold them until they can be occupied by the Infantry; they act as skirmishers or flankers to the army when advancing, or retreating. They go into action generally dismounted, and their horses are used only as a means of transportation. Such Cavalry is of special value in a wooded or broken country, where the horses may be covered, and the character of the troops thus concealed from the enemy.

703. Cavalry lightly equipped with sabre and pistol, and used mainly for couriers for carrying intelligence, and watching the enemy, in connection with the Infantry pickets, has not lost its value in this respect, and should be supplied to the Army in proportion to its necessities. The signal branch of the service might be economically united with this arm. But the value of the horse as derived from the force and shock of a charge is fast passing away; as a means of pursuit, of transportation, and rapid movement, he has rather gained than lost in value.

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Sometimes, I get to see and touch some really cool stuff. One of my favorite photographs of me shows me holding John Buford’s Henry rifle. I look terrified but thrilled, probably for the reason that I was terrified and thrilled at the same time.

Today was another one of those days when I got to see and hold something incredibly neat that very few people ever get to see, let alone to touch.

The Ohio Historical Society owns a 4.5 acre parcel in the middle of the Buffington Island battlefield. Funds were set aside to construct an interpretive kiosk on that parcel, which, in addition to a number of other new interpretive markers from the Morgan’s Trail group, will enable visitors to understand what happened there without needing a battlefield guide for the first time. Because I am the chairman of the history committee of the Buffington Island Battlefield Preservation Foundation, the folks at OHS who have been working on this project have been kind enough to include me in the process. Edd Sharp, the president of the Foundation, has also been involved in this process. Today, we had a meeting at OHS to discuss the illustrations that will be included in the interpretive kiosk.

The meeting was productive and successful, and at the end of the meeting, Edd and I got a treat. John Hunt Morgan and all of his officers were imprisoned in the Ohio Penitentiary here in Columbus. Morgan and a few of his officers eventually escaped, and the rest were exchanged. In September 1863, one of the prison guards brought a small notebook into the prison and got every one of Morgan’s officers to autograph it for him, including Morgan himself, two of his brothers, and his brother-in-law and second-in-command, Basil W. Duke. Each officer signed his name, wrote his rank, his unit, and his home town. Some dated the page. It’s really a remarkable artifact, and it’s not the least bit surprising to hear that OHS keeps it in its vault, under lock and key, and with extremely limited access.

Today, for the second time in two weeks, I not only got to look at the entire notebook, but I also got to hold it too. I don’t believe it’s ever been out on display, and I’m quite certain that only a very, very small handful of people have ever seen it since it went into the OHS collection. The staff got it out and allowed me to look at it at the last meeting two weeks ago, but Edd missed the meeting due to illness. He was there today, so today was his turn, and we both got to hold it and look at it in detail.

I wanted to take a photo of Morgan’s signature and post it here, but the staff would not allow me to do so, which I do understand. The signature says, “Jno. H. Morgan, Brig. Gen. C.S.A. Lexington, Ky.” Morgan had neat, tight handwriting. One of the things that I have always enjoyed about handling Civil War documents is to appreciate the beautiful penmanship that even men had in those days, and the signatures in the notebook are no exception.

Scans of Morgan’s, Duke’s, and a few of his other officers will be included on one of the interpretive panels in the new kiosk on the battlefield, so if you ever visit the Buffington Island battlefield and see the likenesses of those signatures, you will know where they came from.

OHS also has the key to Morgan’s prison cell, as well as the Henry rifle of Major Daniel McCook, the patriarch of the Fighting McCooks, who was killed by the first volley at Buffington Island. The photo of Major McCook that will appear in the kiosk shows him holding the so-called “McCook Rifle”, and that same weapon can be seen in the museum at OHS.

One of the fringe benefits of the work I do is getting to see stuff like what I saw today, and I never take that for granted. I’m just sorry that I can’t put up a photo of the notebook or of Morgan’s signature here.

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I am in the midst of doing an overhaul of my 2002 book Protecting the Flank: The Battles for Brinkerhoff’s Ridge and East Cavalry Field, Battle of Gettysburg, July 2-3, 1863. This is one of my favorite titles of my work, even though it’s a short book. It was the first in Ironclad’s The Discovering Civil War America Series–an idea I came up with–and it also made the most extensive use of The Batchelder Papers of any study of East Cavalry Field yet published. It has also sold steadily over the years, and I am grateful to Bernadette Atkins for bugging me into writing it. When Ted Savas offered me the opportunity to give it an overhaul and bring out a new edition, I jumped at it.

The new edition will add material that I did not have in 2002 when it was first written, and will also add an appendix addressing the intellectual fraud of Tom Carhart’s Lost Triumph: Less Real Plan at Gettysburg–and Why It Failed. In the process, I get to deal with one of the more resilient of the plethora of Gettysburg controversies.

No battle of the American Civil War has generated more controversies than did Gettysburg. Ranging from the Meade-Sickles controversy, the Lee-Longstreet controversy, the “where did Farnsworth’s charge really occur” controversy, and so on, these debates continue to stir emotions 148 years later. My study of the fighting on East Cavalry Field touches on two closely interconnected controversies: why did Stuart fire random artillery shots at the beginning of the fighting, and who fired those shots?

Carhart’s theory–completely and totally unsubstantiated by either the historical evidence or the laws of physics–is that the shots were supposed to be a signal to Robert E. Lee that Stuart’s cavalry was in position and ready to coordinate with Pickett’s Charge. Never mind that there simply is not a scintilla of historical evidence to support this preposterous charge, and never mind that the sound of four random artillery shots never, ever would have been heard over the fighting raging at Culp’s Hill–squarely between Stuart’s position and Lee’s headquarters on Seminary Ridge, six or seven miles from East Cavalry Field. This is the cornerstone of Carhart’s theory.

Neither Lee nor Stuart ever said a word about this in their reports. Undaunted, Carhart just makes stuff up and says that Lee elected not to say anything about it in order to protect Stuart’s delicate ego. When I wrote the book initially, I postulated that Stuart’s true plan was to ambush Gregg, and that the shots were to announce his presence to draw Gregg out and lure him into the trap he had laid. In my mind, that was the ONLY explanation that made sense, given Stuart’s troop dispositions. It turns out that I was in the right church but the wrong pew.

Several years ago, historian Bill Styple published a really useful little book titled Generals in Bronze: Interviewing the Commanders of the Civil War, wherein he published the notes of sculptor James E. Kelly of the many interviews of prominent officers of the Civil War that he conducted. One of the men interviewed was Alexander C. M. Pennington, whose battery did superb work on East Cavalry Field. Pennington related that Stuart’s adjutant, Maj. Henry B. McClellan, told him that Stuart knew there was Federal cavalry out there, but was not sure where, and realized that firing the shots would draw a response, thereby enabling Stuart to pin down Gregg’s precise location.

It’s as simple as that. None of this ridiculous conspiracy theory nonsense spouted by Carhart.

The other controversy is which battery fired those shots. Jeff Wert, in his excellent Gettysburg: Day Three, says that Capt. Charles A. Green’s Louisiana battery of Ewell’s Second Corps fired those shots. Robert J. Trout, THE authority on Stuart’s Horse Artillery, states in his history of the Stuart Horse Artillery Battalion, Galloping Thunder: The Story of the Stuart Horse Artillery Battalion, that those shots were fired by Capt. Thomas E. Jackson’s Battery of horse artillery. My buddy J. D. Petruzzi states in his superb The Complete Gettysburg Guide: Walking and Driving Tours of the Battlefield, Town, Cemeteries, Field Hospital Sites, and other Topics of Historical Interest that the shots were fired by Capt. William H. Griffin’s Baltimore Light Artillery, a unit that had recently been converted to horse artillery.

The problem is that none of the Confederate battery commanders left after-action reports, and neither Stuart’s report nor the memoirs of Henry McClellan identify which battery fired those shots. We simply do not know, and the likelihood is that we never will know for certain. All we can do is to guess, but there are some logical guesses that can be made. Jackson’s battery was armed with short range weapons. Green’s guns were not horse artillery and probably were not yet on the field.

So, puzzled, I e-mailed J.D. about this, and he called me in response. We spent some time on the phone, and J. D. pointed out to me a powerful piece of circumstantial evidence. We do know that the Confederate horse artillery was plagued by the same problem as the rest of the Confederate artillery: poor ammunition. We also know that Pennington’s and Randol’s guns blasted Jackson, Griffin, and Green right of the field that day with extremely accurate and extraordinarily effective fire that could not be countered by the Confederates, in part due to the poor ammunition they had. The only one of these three batteries to report significant casualties that day was Griffin’s Maryland battery. Jackson’s battery reported one casualty. Therefore, as J. D. pointed out, and with which I agree, it makes sense that it would have been Griffin’s battery that drew the return fire, thereby causing the reported casualties. Many thanks to J. D. for pointing that out to me.

Can we prove it for sure? No, and I doubt we ever will. Is this a reasonable and defensible assumption? I think so.

And hence, once more unto the breach, dear friends, as the Bard once said. I believe we have tackled two of the more enduring Gettysburg controversies and hopefully will settle the questions once and for all. Then again, this is Gettysburg after all, and the controversies associated with it will probably always resonate.

UPDATE, MARCH 6, 2011: I am now persuaded that it was, indeed, Jackson’s battery that fired the four shots. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, and foremost, further research indicates that Griffin’s battery wasn’t even on East Cavalry Field. Instead, it was serving on Oak Hill with Ewell’s Second Corps, meaning that it could not have fired those shots. Also, I have found a primary source account by one of Breathed’s gunners–admittedly not there when the shots were fired, since Breathed’s batter didn’t arrive until the fighting was well underway–that says very clearly that Jackson’s battery fired those shots, which corroborates an account by Lt. Micajah Woods of Jackson’s battery.

J. D. now acknowledges that he was incorrect in his Guide and that this will be changed in the next printing of the book, whenever that happens. Mystery solved.

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From this week’s on-line edition of Time:

The Civil War’s 150th Anniversary Divides the South

By CLAIRE SUDDATH Claire Suddath – Thu Mar 3, 4:15 am ET

In 1867, former Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest became the first Grand Wizard of a newly formed organization called the Ku Klux Klan. Forrest had been a slave trader before the Civil War; he was also the commanding officer during a battle known as the “Fort Pillow massacre” in Tennessee at which some 300 black Union troops were killed in 1864. (Whether they died in combat or were killed after they surrendered is still a matter of dispute.)

Now, in honor of the Civil War’s 150th anniversary, the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) are seeking to put Forrest on a Mississippi state license plate. But the state’s government opposes it. When asked to comment on the proposal, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, a Republican, told the Associated Press, “It won’t become law because I won’t sign it.” (See the history of photographing the nation’s war dead.)

Barbour’s reaction is just one sign that things have changed since the South commemorated the Civil War’s Centennial in 1961. Back then, much of the South was still segregated – and many people, including Mississippi’s then-Governor Ross Barnett, were fighting to keep it that way. State and local governments took an active role in Confederate celebrations, using them to promote their causes. When the U.S. Civil War Centennial Commission, a group sponsored by the federal government, held its inaugural event in a Charleston, S.C. hotel, Madaline Williams, a delegate from the New Jersey legislature, was denied entry because she was black. For this year’s anniversary, there is no such commission.

And in February of this year, when a Jefferson Davis impersonator was sworn in on the steps of Alabama’s State Capitol for a reenactment of the Confederate States of America’s 1861 Presidential inauguration, Alabama officials stayed away. Similarly, a December “Secession Ball,” held in Charleston, S.C. drew protests and a candlelight vigil from the NAACP. (See pictures of the Cold War’s influence on Art: 1945-1970.)

This year’s Civil War anniversary caps a decade in which Southern institutions have struggled mightily with the racial undertones of their Confederate monuments. In 2001, Georgia redesigned its state flag, shrinking the Confederate battle emblem that had adorned it ever since 1956. Six years later, it removed the symbol all together. The University of Mississippi – the same school that endured campus riots when James Meredith became the school’s first African-American student in 1962 – ditched its mascot Colonel Rebel, a plantation owner, in 2003. And last November, a federate appellate court upheld a Tennessee school district’s ban on Confederate-themed clothing.

As much of the South continues to distance itself from its racially divisive past, the organizations fighting to maintain the prominence of Confederate symbols are pushed further right of the mainstream. Nonetheless, the Sons of the Confederate South plan several highly publicized events over the next four years, as various Civil War-related anniversaries crop up. The club has 840 local chapters spread across 29 states, Europe and Australia. It was founded in 1896; aspiring members must prove direct relation to a former Confederate veteran in order to join. The SCV openly denounces the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups who use the Confederate flag as a racist symbol. Former President Harry S. Truman and Clint Eastwood are often cited as members. (Read “How America Fights Its Wars.”)

But even as the SCV rejects traditional symbols of racism, they provoke debate with their promotion of contentious Civil War leaders like Forrest. “Robert E. Lee has been replaced as the great [Confederate] hero by Nathan Bedford Forrest by these Southern white heritage groups,” says Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, which investigates extremist groups. Lee owned slaves, Potok says, but “he was very much a statesman, and at the end of the Civil War he encouraged Southerners to rejoin the Union in heart and soul. Forrest was very much not like that. The fact that they want to honor him specifically says a lot about what they stand for.”

Chuck Rand, a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, calls any assumption that the Mississippi Forrest license plates are racist is a “knee-jerk reaction” by people who don’t understand the “real causes” of the Civil War. Or, as he calls it, “The War for Southern Independence.” But critics point out that slavery isn’t addressed in these commemorations. The group’s reenactment of Jefferson Davis’ inauguration took place near Martin Luther King’s old Montgomery church and the spot where Rose Parks refused to give up her bus seat in 1955. But during the event, no mention of the South’s racial history was made.

The SCV’s controversial events often make the news, but their perspective on the war and its causes isn’t getting much traction nationally. In December, the History channel refused to run one of the SCV’s commercials that blamed the North for slavery, claiming that slaves were essentially forced onto South plantation owners. Another commercial, also refused by the History channel, claimed that the Civil War was “not a civil war… [but] a war in which Southerners fought to defend their homes and families against an aggressive invasion by federal troops.” (Comment on this story.)

“Lincoln waged a war to conquer his neighbor,” Rand explains, “In our view he was an aggressor against another nation, just as Hitler was an aggressor against other nations.” Most people, Southern or otherwise, are not likely to agree with such an inflammatory statement, but the sentiment underlying Rand’s assertion has deep roots. “Coming out of the experience of the Civil War and Southern Reconstruction, there was a sense of wounded pride and grievance,” explains James Cobb, University of Georgia history professor and author of Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity. But even if racism, intolerance, and discrimination still plague the South – as they do the rest of the country – the sense of regional separateness on those issues has largely diminished. “Time has passed,” says Cobb. “To uphold the Confederacy in this way has become a fairly extreme position.”

Extreme or not, the Sons of Confederate Veterans aren’t giving up the fight. They pledge to advance their cause through parades, advertisements and the battle for commemorative license plates. The South may never rise again, Rand admits, but that doesn’t mean it has to disappear completely. “The North is a direction,” he says. “The South is a place.”

I’m no fan of Haley Barbour, but I give him kudos for doing the right thing here.

Once again, the SCV’s radical agenda is exposed. This organization’s blatantly revisionist approach to history needs to be highlighted, and it needs to be resisted.

And to be quite clear about this. I love the south. I intend to retire there. Most of the SCV members I know–and I know many–are good and decent people who truly commemorate their ancestors. But they also do so without having to justify and humanize chattel slavery by claiming nonsensical things like slaves were forced on the south by the north, that the Civil War was anything but the federal government putting down an active rebellion, and, most reprehensibly, by trying to make slavery acceptable by promoting a myth that tens of thousands of slaves willingly–as opposed to being forced into service by virtue of their bondage–served in the Confederate armies during the war.

We must fight this neo-Confederate hooey wherever we find it.

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In honor of President’s Day, Prof. Glenn LaFantasie of Western Kentucky University has written a very interesting piece on why the 15th President, James Buchanan, is the worst president in American history. It’s also sure to push the buttons of some modern-day Republicans:

Who’s the worst president of them all?
When it comes to who least deserves to be honored today, it’s a close call between the 43rd and 15th presidents
By Glenn W. LaFantasie

In 2006, while the Bush administration smashed its way through two wars, countless constitutional constraints, and a fragile economy constructed on the slippery slope of tax cuts for the wealthy, Sean Wilentz, a Princeton historian, pondered in Rolling Stone whether W. would be regarded as America’s worst president. Rather coyly, Wilentz never came right out and said that Bush 43 was the worst, but his essay gathered together all the evidence that pointed toward only one verdict: guilty as charged.

In making his case, Wilentz mentioned a 2004 poll of historians, who predicted that Bush would surely end up among the worst five presidents. While presidents have a way of rewriting their own history — witness Bush’s recent book tour — he doesn’t seem to be on a path to any near-term redemption. For example, a poll conducted in July 2010 by the Siena Research Institute revealed that 238 “presidential scholars” had ranked Bush among the five worst presidents (39 out of 43), with Andrew Johnson solidly occupying the very bottom of the list. Johnson is a particular favorite for the bottom of the pile because of his impeachment (although he was acquitted in the Senate by one vote in May 1868), his complete mishandling of Reconstruction policy, his inept dealings with his Cabinet and Congress, his drinking problem (he was probably inebriated at his inauguration), his bristling personality, and his enormous sense of self-importance. He once suggested that God saw fit to have Lincoln assassinated so that he could become president. A Northern senator averred that “Andrew Johnson was the queerest character that ever occupied the White House.”

Queerest? Perhaps. But worst? Johnson actually has some stiff competition for the bottom rung of the presidential rankings, not only from W, but also from one of his own contemporaries, James Buchanan, the fifteenth president.

Interestingly enough, Johnson and Buchanan, two of the worst presidents, stand as bookends for arguably the best: Abraham Lincoln. But Lincoln’s greatness might never have manifested itself if it weren’t for Buchanan’s utter and complete incompetency, and for that reason I cast my ballot in favor of the fifteenth president as our absolutely worst chief executive ever.

While I acknowledge that Bush 43 was certainly the worst president I’ve seen in my lifetime (12 presidents have occupied the White House since my birth), he runs neck and neck with Buchanan’s inadequacies as chief executive. Both of them pursued their own agendas: Buchanan hoped to placate the South as the sectional controversy grew worse (and became increasingly more violent) in the late 1850s, while Bush worked assiduously to dismantle the federal government while trying to fit his presidency into his vacation schedule. Buchanan failed to reach his goal; Bush succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Both presidents handed a broken country on to their successors. But Bush broke the nation’s back on purpose, so he wins points for what we might call a competent incompetency.

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By any measure, Buchanan was an odd duck. As the last president to be born in the 18th century (1791), he began life as the son of a storekeeper in Pennsylvania, attended Dickinson College (from which he was briefly expelled for rowdiness), and became an able attorney. Apart from eyelashes and eyebrows, Buchanan lacked any facial hair; he never shaved throughout his adulthood. His eyes were slightly crossed; to compensate for the defect, he often kept one eye shut and cocked his head to the side. Actually Buchanan was nearsighted in one eye and farsighted in the other.

Yet Buchanan built up a prosperous law practice, and savvy investments — particularly in real estate — made him a wealthy man. In 1819, he was engaged to Ann Caroline Coleman, the daughter of a prosperous manufacturer, but he devoted most of his time to his work as an attorney and to politics. For whatever reason, Ann Coleman broke off the engagement and died shortly afterward, perhaps from an accidental or self-induced overdose of laudanum. Her death left Buchanan distraught with grief. “I feel that happiness has fled from me forever,” he told his father. The Coleman family prevented him from attending the funeral. He would mourn Ann’s death for the rest of his life. From time to time friends urged him to marry, but Buchanan vowed never to take a wife. “My affections,” he said, “were buried in the grave.”

The mysteries surrounding his relationship with Ann Coleman resemble the bleak and brooding elements of an Edgar Allen Poe story, with Buchanan cast in the role of a bereft and inconsolable inamorato. He remained a committed bachelor until his death. Some historians have speculated that Buchanan was actually a homosexual, but these claims are based solely on the fact that he roomed for several years with a close friend, William Rufus King, an Alabamian who served in the U.S. Senate and as vice president under Franklin Pierce. Andrew Jackson once called Buchanan “an Aunt Nancy.” A Tennessee governor referred to him and his roommate as “Buchanan & his wife.” But such 19th century political slurs should not be interpreted in a 21st century context. Like most of us, Buchanan kept his sexual preferences — whatever they were — to himself.

During the War of 1812, Buchanan turned to politics, joined the Federalist Party, and served in the Pennsylvania Legislature from 1814 to 1816; he later won election to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he served from 1821 to 1831. In Washington, he turned his back on the Federalists and ardently — although somewhat incongruously, given his wealth and high status — supported Andrew Jackson and the rising populism of the Democratic Party. Jackson appointed him minister to Russia, a diplomatic post that placed Buchanan as far away from Washington as the spoils system could manage. When he returned to the States, he was elected to the U.S. Senate, where he displayed all the traits of a Democratic Party stalwart, a strict constitutional constructionist (in the Jeffersonian mode), and — again, incongruously — a Northerner who strongly, even sometimes impulsively, supported Southern interests, including any measure that would protect or extend the institution of slavery.

In the 1840s, he hoped to receive the Democratic Party nomination for president, but he did not attract much attention in Congress or as a diplomat, and he occupied a middling rank in his own party. When James K. Polk won the presidency in 1844, he named Buchanan secretary of state — a plum appointment — but the new president grew frustrated with the Pennsylvanian, calling him indecisive and thinking him ineffective. “Mr. Buchanan is an able man,” Polk wrote in his diary, “but in small matters without judgment and sometimes acts like an old maid.” As secretary of state, Buchanan’s biggest idea was to propose the annexation of Cuba while the United States went about adding great expanses of territory in the Southwest and along the Pacific Coast after defeating Mexico in the U.S.-Mexican War of 1846-1847. The dream of acquiring Cuba danced in Buchanan’s head for the rest of his life, obviously to no avail, even though plenty of Southerners would have loved taking over an island in the Caribbean where slavery already existed, just 90 miles or so off the U.S. mainland. Americans, he believed, should go wherever they wanted to go, although he said so in a potentially tongue-tying sentence: “Let us go on whithersoever our destiny may lead us.”

Echoes of Buchanan’s belief in Manifest Destiny can still be heard in our own time. In his 2004 State of the Union address, George W. Bush recast (but only slightly) Buchanan’s belief in manifest destiny by trumpeting: “America is a Nation with a mission — and that mission comes from our most basic beliefs. We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire. Our aim is a democratic peace — a peace founded upon the dignity and rights of every man and woman.” That was one of his explanations for why the United States had invaded Iraq without provocation. Buchanan’s “whithersoever” had landed us in the Middle East — without an exit strategy. For Bush and Buchanan, there was simply no way to avoid destiny and providence. If God wanted the U.S. to possess California and Oregon, so let it be done. Ditto Iraq and Afghanistan.

Buchanan thought he could grasp the presidency by wooing support from Southern Democrats, so he remained steadfast in his defense of states’ rights, slavery and its extension into western territories, and aggressive expansionism. Yet his bid for the Democratic nomination failed in 1848, when Lewis Cass of Michigan ran and lost to Zachary Taylor, the Whig candidate, and again in 1852, when Franklin Pierce won the Democratic nomination and the election. Buchanan hoped that Pierce would name him secretary of state, but the new president instead appointed him minister to Great Britain. Once again Buchanan’s ostensible political friends had succeeded in getting him out of the country and, one assumes, out of their hair. In London, he could not stop thinking about Cuba. He traveled to Ostend, Belgium, in October 1854, where, with two other American ministers, he drew up a “manifesto” that called for the use of force by the U.S. to take possession of the island. Inevitably, the Ostend Manifesto was leaked to the press, giving rise to a storm of protest at home and abroad. Congress investigated the diplomatic correspondence surrounding the document’s creation, and Northern antislavery forces denounced it as nothing more than a Southern attempt to expand slavery into the Caribbean. The Pierce administration gave up its designs on Cuba, but Buchanan kept longing for the island, hoping that someday the United States (and he) would hold it in a loving embrace.

From across the Atlantic, Buchanan also kept his eye firmly focused on presidential politics. He resigned as minister to England and returned to the U.S. in time to throw his hat into the ring for the Democratic nomination in 1856. His timing was perfect, since the Democratic Party had been thrown into disarray by the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act two years earlier. The act, which was the brainchild of Sen. Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, voided the earlier Missouri Compromise by allowing the voters of Kansas and Nebraska to decide by means of what was called “popular sovereignty” whether their territories should allow slavery inside their borders. Conflict between pro-slavery “border ruffians” and “free-soilers” resulted in violence between the two sides. President Pierce supported the pro-slavery element in Kansas, despite the fact that free-soilers actually constituted a major of the population. As a result, both Pierce and Douglas, who also had presidential aspirations, lost support in the Democratic Party — a political development that worked to Buchanan’s great advantage.

Regarded as a safe candidate, since he had been overseas during the upheavals over Kansas, the Democrats nominated him at their convention in Cincinnati. In the general election, Buchanan faced off against two other candidates: John C. Frémont of the Republican Party and Millard Fillmore, the former president, of the American (or “Know-Nothing”) Party. Buchanan won, but only by a plurality, not a majority. Nevertheless, he saw his victory as a mandate, namely that Americans had voted for Union over disunion.

From the start of his presidency — indeed, from the very moment of his inaugural address — Buchanan revealed that he was going to do everything he could to sustain slavery and Southern interests, no matter how much his policies would give Northern Republicans proof that the new president was part of what they called a “Slave Power Conspiracy.” Sixty-five years old, with snow white hair, Buchanan took the oath of office and delivered his inaugural address. He made plain his own and his party’s belief that Congress had no authority to interfere with the institution of slavery.

What really mattered to him, however, was the prospect of finding a judicial, rather than a congressional or a presidential, solution to the sectional issue of slavery. Going beyond accepted political bounds, and ignoring the principle of separation of powers, Buchanan had used his influence to sway a Northern Supreme Court justice to side with the Southern majority in a pending case, Dred Scott v. Sandford. When he delivered his inaugural, Buchanan already knew the outcome of that case, although in his address he deceitfully alluded to the forthcoming decision by saying of the Court: “To their decision, in common with all good citizens, I shall cheerfully submit, whatever this may be.” Two days later, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney issued the most infamous decision in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court — an opinion holding that Dred Scott, a slave who sued for his freedom because he had lived with his master for a time in a free state, was not free; that no slave or black person could be a citizen of the U.S.; that Congress had no power to exclude slavery from a territory; and that the slavery exclusion clause of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 was unconstitutional. The opinion did not resolve the sectional controversy as Buchanan and the Taney court had hoped. Instead, it produced thunderous outrage throughout the North. In the South, of course, the decision was cheered. But Northerners saw the court’s action as a partisan ploy.

Ignoring the clamor of criticism from the North, Buchanan nestled into the White House by surrounding himself with advisors who told him what he wanted to hear rather than what he needed to know. The new president lived in a bubble, despite the fact that the nation was beginning to crumble around him. During his first year in office, an economic depression (referred to as the Panic of 1857) hit the country and persisted for his entire term in office. With striking ineptitude, Buchanan failed to deal with the economic crisis in any effective manner, which only helped to increase bitterness between Northern commercial interests and Southern agrarians. Spouting his philosophy of limited government, he told the public that the government lacked the power “to extend relief” to those hardest hit by the depression. As he promised to reduce the federal debt and all government spending, Buchanan nevertheless oversaw during his one term in office a growth in federal spending that amounted to 15 percent of the budget in 1856. When he left office, Buchanan handed over a $17 million deficit to Lincoln.

In the heat of mounting sectional discord and as the economy bottomed out, Buchanan abandoned the traditional understanding in U.S. politics of regarding his political enemies as a loyal opposition; instead, Buchanan, like George W. Bush 150 years later, accused his political opponents of disloyalty, extremism and treason. “The great object of my administration,” Buchanan wrote in 1856, “will be to arrest, if possible, the agitation of the Slavery question at the North and to destroy sectional parties.” In other words, Buchanan wanted to eliminate the Republicans, not just defeat them, rather like how Karl Rove worked strenuously to create a “permanent majority” for the Republican Party during Bush 43’s presidency.

While Buchanan condemned Republicans and abolitionists as the source of all the nation’s troubles, the Kansas problem continued to boil over. When the pro-slavery minority in Kansas submitted a fraudulent constitution legalizing slavery in the territory, Buchanan endorsed the document as legitimate. Then he tried to force his arch-rival, Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, to do the same. In a White House meeting, Buchanan threatened Douglas by pointing out that since Andrew Jackson’s time no senator had opposed a presidential measure successfully without then losing his next bid for reelection. Furious, Douglas replied: “Mr. President, I wish you to remember that General Jackson is dead!” He then stormed out of the White House. (Douglas won reelection to his seat, successfully defeating Abraham Lincoln in the Illinois Senate contest of 1858.)

Buchanan went forward and submitted the Kansas issue to Congress. Then, in his annual message, he enjoyed a “Mission Accomplished” moment by declaring that “Kansas is … at this moment as much a slave state as Georgia and South Carolina.” But Congress had not yet decided the fate of Kansas. After fierce debate, the Senate approved the bill admitting Kansas as a slave state, but the House of Representatives did not. Finally, in Kansas, the free-soil majority voted against the pro-slavery constitution in a fair election. (Kansas would remain a territory until 1861, when, after the departure of Southerners from Congress, it was admitted into the Union as a free state.) With a smugness that smacked of delusion, Buchanan took credit for making Kansas “tranquil and prosperous.”

Even as Buchanan was fanning the flames of sectional strife over Kansas, another crisis in the West demanded his attention as president. In Utah territory, the Mormons combined an overt patriotism and demonstrations of loyalty to the U.S. government with rebellious rhetoric and actions — such as the practice of polygamy, otherwise outlawed in the U.S. — that left many Americans outside of the Great Basin convinced that the members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were intent on dominating the government of Utah, ignoring federal officials and authority in the territory, and enforcing a “Theodemocracy,” rather than a true democracy, under the leadership of Brigham Young. When reports reached Washington in the spring of 1857 that the Mormons were in a state of near insurrection against federal authority, Buchanan concluded — on something less than reliable evidence — that the Utah settlers had “for several years past manifested a spirit of insubordination to the Constitution and laws of the United States,” that the inhabitants of the territory were under “a strange system of terrorism,” and that those who resisted the federal government were therefore traitors. Accordingly, he ordered, in his capacity as commander in chief, a military expedition to the territory that was “not to be withdrawn until the inhabitants of that Territory shall manifest a proper sense of the duty which they owe to this government.” The army blundered its mission, and the Mormons fought an effective guerrilla campaign against the federal troops. Eventually, Buchanan felt the heat of political pressure to end the so-called Mormon War, and a peaceful end to the fiasco. True to form, however, Buchanan claimed credit for a victory in Utah.

The president was a saber-rattler. To solve a dispute between the U.S. and the British over the boundary through the Strait of Juan de Fuca in the Northwest, Buchanan sent troops under the command of Gen. Winfield Scott to Puget Sound. Luckily the argument was settled peacefully. He also dispatched 2,500 sailors and Marines to Paraguay after a U.S. naval captain had been killed there. The campaign lasted months without any appreciable results. Like other presidents who would follow him, including George W. Bush, Buchanan resorted to military force without qualms and then, when the use of force did not quite work out as he intended, he simply declared victory and hoped that everyone would forget his mistakes. At least he did not say out loud to the Mormons, the British or the Paraguayans, as Bush 43 did to his enemies, “Bring them on.” Even so, he assumed the posture of an aggressive commander in chief — one who conveniently overlooked the fact that Congress, and not the chief executive, was supposed to declare war.

Meanwhile, Buchanan pushed ahead with what he considered his most important piece of business: acquiring Cuba for the United States. After his nomination for the presidency, Buchanan reiterated his extraordinary lust for Cuba. “If I can be instrumental in settling the slavery question … and then adding Cuba to the Union,” he exclaimed, “I shall be willing to give up the ghost.” Yet Spain had not changed its mind since the time of the Ostend Manifesto. It had no interest in relinquishing Cuba to any other country, including the United States. A bill to purchase the island languished and then died in Congress. Undeterred, Buchanan kept saying over and over, “We must have Cuba.” Because his desire for Cuba was not fulfilled, he did not give up the ghost.

Instead, he led the nation into its worst crisis. The crisis, at least, was not entirely of his own making, although he surely contributed to the steady escalation of belligerent feelings between North and South while he sat in the White House. He also helped bring about a schism in the Democratic Party that led to a four-way race for the presidency in the election of 1860: in the North, Abraham Lincoln (R) versus Stephen Douglas (D), and in the South, John C. Breckinridge (D) versus John Bell (Constitution Union Party). Buchanan did not run for reelection because he had promised the nation he would serve only one term. In that sense, he was a lame-duck president from the moment he had been elected in 1856, and his disputes with Congress suffered because everyone in Washington knew that he would be gone after four short years.

What triggered the immediate chain of events that led to the Civil War was Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency on Nov. 6, 1860. Fearful that Lincoln was a die-hard abolitionist, rather than a Republican who simply wanted to prohibit the spread of slavery into the western territories, a good number of Southern extremists called “fire-eaters” vowed to take their states out of the Union if Lincoln became president. With his election, South Carolina quickly called a convention to consider the matter of secession, and on Dec. 20, after Lincoln’s election had been confirmed by the Electoral College, the Palmetto State jubilantly declared that it was no longer in the United States. Despite all the rationalizations and elaborate justifications for secession, then and ever after, the action taken by South Carolina was illegal and traitorous. Buchanan, as the nation’s chief magistrate, watched with a slack jaw as the South warned the nation that it would not abide Lincoln’s election, despite the fact that the Illinoisan had been legally elected (and not, say, appointed to the presidency by the U. S. Supreme Court as George W. Bush would be in 2000). Rather than taking the South’s threats seriously, Buchanan in his annual message ignored the impending crisis and asked one last time for a congressional appropriation with which to purchase Cuba. He also suggested that it might be prudent to send a military expedition into Mexico for the purpose of establishing an American protectorate in Chihuahua and Sonora to ward off Indian attacks and bandit raids into Texas and New Mexico. Congress refused his requests.

At first, though, it looked like Buchanan might take decisive action against disunion. In his annual message to Congress, in December 1860, he denied “the right of secession.” The Founders had established a perpetual union, he said, and the federal government had the duty to defend it from all enemies, foreign and domestic. In Buchanan’s estimation, there was no wiggle room when it came to disunion: “Secession is neither more nor less than revolution. It may or may not be a justifiable revolution; but still it is revolution.” By inserting the word “justifiable” in this last sentence, one could detect Buchanan faltering, his knees buckling like a boxer who’s about to collapse to the mat. Sure enough, Buchanan also declared in his message that he and Congress lacked the authority to force any seceded state back into the Union. “The power to make war against a State,” he contended, “is at variance with the whole spirit and intent of the Constitution … Our Union rests upon public opinion, and can never be cemented by the blood of its citizens shed in civil war.”

But he said this 17 days before South Carolina or any other Southern state had left the Union. He was, in other words, providing the South with a handy justification for secession and letting them know the federal government would do nothing to stop the disintegration of the nation. No longer did Buchanan rattle sabers, as he had done in Utah or had threatened to do in acquiring Cuba or invading Mexico. When it came to the South and secession, the president professed to be powerless. In the North, his professed impotence seemed inexcusable, especially among those anti-slavery Democrats who remembered how Andrew Jackson had effectively handled the Nullification Crisis of 1832, when South Carolina tried to void a federal tariff law. Jackson had responded by threatening to use military force against South Carolina, which wisely had backed down. Stephen Douglas was right, though: Jackson was dead, and Buchanan was nothing like him.

Buchanan’s lack of resolve, once South Carolina and the other states of the Deep South did abandon the Union, opened the door for those rebellious states to take possession of federal property — forts, armories, post offices, customs houses — without hindrance. Fort Sumter in South Carolina, which sat on a small island in the middle of Charleston’s harbor, was among the few federal military installations that remained in the hands of the U.S. government. The fate of Fort Sumter threw Buchanan into a fit of indecision. Always something of a sponge who absorbed the ideas and strength of others around him, like W did under the mesmerizing influence of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, Buchanan continued to listen to his Southern advisors who told him to tread carefully or not at all. Throughout the month of December 1860, Buchanan nearly suffered a complete breakdown: He cursed aloud, he wept, his hands trembled, he could not remember orders he had given or documents he had read. Some mornings he found it difficult to get out of bed. Observers noticed that there was a constant twitching in his cheek, an indication that he might have suffered a minor stroke as the crisis mounted. Finally, he decided not to give up the fort, and the Southern members of his Cabinet resigned in protest. Buchanan replaced them with Cabinet officials who were more decisively Unionist in their sentiments.

He wanted someone — anyone but himself — to find a solution to the nation’s problems. Nevertheless, by the end of December Buchanan ordered a supply ship to Fort Sumter; the effort failed, however, when the ship was forced to abandon Charleston harbor when it came under heavy fire from batteries along the shore. Buchanan decided to do nothing else about the fort and the troops who defended it. In fact, it became clear that he intended to take no action against the South for the remaining eight weeks of his term. When he shared a carriage with Lincoln back to the White House after the new president’s inauguration, Buchanan said, “If you are as happy in entering the White House as I shall feel on returning to Wheatland [his private estate in Pennsylvania] you are a happy man.” Lincoln’s reply, if any, is not recorded.

Buchanan spent the rest of his life at Wheatland justifying his actions — and, more pointedly, his inaction — in a memoir in which he referred to himself in the third person, as if he were a figure he had never met in person. He continued to blame abolitionists and the Republican Party for the nation’s troubles, and he absolved himself of any responsibility for the Civil War, stating that he was “completely satisfied” with everything he had done as president. Forgotten by his countrymen as he spent his last years at Wheatland, he died in 1868. Many Americans had assumed he was already dead.

– – – – – – – – – –

Numerous historians have said that no president was better qualified to serve in the White House than James Buchanan, given the vast amount of experience he had gained in elected and appointed offices over the course of a long career in public service. In 1988, some pundits said the same thing about George Herbert Walker Bush, who had served as vice president, ambassador, congressman and director of the CIA before winning the presidency. Too few pundits, however, pointed out how injuriously unqualified George W. Bush was for the presidency. But, then, we all learned that for ourselves over eight long years.

Lately some historians have tried to rehabilitate Buchanan. “It is unrealistic,” writes a recent historian, Russell McClintock, “to think that in 1860 the White House could have been occupied by a chief executive willing to take a sufficiently bold stand” in the secession crisis. Really? McClintock believes that “few of the men who have occupied the White House could have stood up to the challenge of the moment.” But that’s nonsense. It amounts to admitting that most presidents are mediocre, and Buchanan should be forgiven for simply being more mediocre than most of them. Yet Lincoln had no experience in leadership when he took the oath of office. And while it’s true that he fumbled during his first weeks in office, he eventually rose “to the challenge of the moment.” What distinguishes Buchanan, then, is not that his mistakes can or should be excused, it’s that he totally lacked the capacity to rise to the occasion, to act when action was necessary, to defend the country precisely when it needed defending. In other words, he was a terrible president.

Even so, Buchanan’s incompetent incompetency resulted in our worst national catastrophe, though the Civil War cannot entirely be laid at his feet. Other forces, beyond his blunders, led to secession and war, and to some extent, when all’s said and done, there was probably little he could have done to prevent the cascade of Southern states that left the Union after South Carolina marched out in December 1860. Indeed, it’s just possible that if he had attempted to coerce South Carolina to rescind its secession, other Southern states might have seceded in even more rapid order than they ended up doing. That’s not an excuse for his inaction, and my statement differs significantly in substance than McClintock’s apologia for Buchanan. Buchanan might not have been able to change the course of history or to stop the onslaught of Civil War. But he might have at least tried.

As for George W. Bush, and his incompetent competency, he did not usher in a civil war — not quite. But he did make a mockery of the Office of the President of the United States, initiate foreign wars without provocation, mismanage the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, overstep his constitutional authority as president and commander in chief, violate human and civil rights, approve the use of torture, call his domestic political opponents enemies of America and traitors, alienate most of the nation’s allies around the world, lie about WMD, pass tax cuts for the wealthy that brought the national economy to its knees, sign the TARP bill into law while letting foreclosure victims eat cake, and spend a great amount of time pedaling his trail bike and clearing brush on vacation.

Buchanan’s sins were many. Their consequences were felt by Northerners and Southerners through four years of a bloody Civil War. And so we still feel the effects of his ineptness 150 years after the fact. But we are still too close to Bush 43’s despicable actions in office — the ripple effect of all the mayhem he sought purposely to create — for us to understand just how much lasting damage he actually accomplished. Even so, Bush’s eight years in office were an unmitigated disaster. In fact, the more we learn as time goes by, the worse Bush’s presidency continues to get; there will undoubtedly be more damning revelations in the years and decades ahead.

Hence my verdict: As of today, Presidents’ Day 2011, James Buchanan wins the dubious distinction of having been our worst president. Nevertheless, it is well within the realm of possibility — once historians have a chance to reckon more completely with all of Bush 43’s extraordinary transgressions as president — that W might someday unseat Buchanan as the very worst president this nation has ever had.

Sadly, I have to agree with his assessment, and it pains me to do so. Buchanan is the most famous alum of my alma mater, Dickinson College, and he is my home state of Pennsylvania’s only president. His weakness and inaction triggered the Civil War, the cataclysmic event that cost 600,000 American lives in four years of bloodletting. His sitting by and doing nothing while the Union unraveled is, in my humble opinion, unforgivable and an egregious breach of his constitutional duty to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States. Any redeeming values that he may have had, and any qualifications that he may have had for the job, pale in comparison to Buchanan’s epic failure as Chief Executive.

As for Bush 43, time will tell, and I would prefer to leave the discussion of modern politics out of this particular discussion.

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Thanks to friend Keith Toney for bringing this to my attention.

The powers that be in Union County, NC have refused to erect a marker to honor so-called black Confederates for the simple reason that there is very little documentation that these men served the Confederacy voluntarily. At least one of the men that would have been honored was sent to help construct Fort Fisher as a slave and then was returned to his master after the work was complete. Only a neo-Confederate/Lost Causer hoping to put a human face on slavery would consider such service to be voluntary or appropriate of honoring.

From today’s issue of The Charlotte Observer

Marker rejected for slaves in South’s Army
Union County says plan poses an inconsistency.
By Adam Bell
abell@charlotteobserver.com
Posted: Wednesday, Feb. 16, 2011

MONROE Union County is refusing to approve plans for a marker to commemorate slaves who served in the Confederate Army, raising questions of how to appropriately honor men virtually ignored by history.

On the eve of the Civil War’s 150th anniversary, amateur historian Tony Way led the push for a granite marker to be placed at the Old County Courthouse in Monroe next to a 1910 Confederate monument. The new marker would be for 10 black men, nine of whom were slaves, who served the Confederacy during the war and eventually got state pensions.

It would probably be one of a few public markers of its kind in the country, experts say.

Way, a Sons of Confederate Veterans member from Monroe, says he and some friends sought to highlight a little-known facet of county history and make commemorations more inclusive.

But county officials recently recommended the marker not go on the 1886 courthouse grounds, saying it would be inconsistent with other monuments. The existing Confederate monument cites regiments, not individuals. Other war monuments on the grounds name only those who died.

Earl Ijames, curator of community history and African-American history at the N.C. Museum of History, worked on proposed wording for the marker.

“A tremendous opportunity has been lost to have this outreach for black and white people to understand a facet of history that has been swept under the rug,” he said. “It re-enslaves them all over again” by not recognizing their service.

Slaves in the army

So how would a slave end up in the Confederate Army?

Armies need vast amounts of labor, and slaves provided a plentiful source, said David Blight, a Civil War expert at Yale University.

Nearly all of the work that blacks did for the Confederacy was support and logistical, from building latrines to working in armories. Some slaves could have been hoping for more favorable treatment back home because of their service, Ijames said.

Almost no black men fought in battle for the Confederacy, Blight said. He added that though it’s impossible to know how many slaves went willingly, many bolted for the Union lines the first chance they got.

Still, there have been occasional commemorations of the South’s slaves. At Tyrrell County’s courthouse in Eastern North Carolina, a 1902 Confederate statue includes the words, “To Our Faithful Slaves.”

In the 1990s, stories about “black Confederates” seemed to pick up traction, Blight said.

“For neo-Confederates, it was a way of legitimizing the Confederacy in the popular memory: ‘Look, the blacks supported us, too,'” he said. “If they were there, they were impressed or ordered into service. They were not soldiers.”

Eventual pensions

After the Civil War began, Wary Clyburn ran away from his plantation to join his master’s son, Frank Clyburn, acting as his cook and bodyguard for his old friend.

Wary’s daughter, Mattie Rice, was fascinated to hear her father’s stories when she was a young girl in the 1920s. She remembers him describing a battle where Frank was shot. “He crawled up a hill on his stomach, like a snake, and pulled Frank to safety.”

In later years, Wary moved to Monroe, played his fiddle at reunions and got his Civil War pension. He was buried in a Confederate uniform in 1930 at about age 90. Rice, an 88-year-old High Point-area resident, is proud of her father’s service.

The city of Monroe and a Sons of Confederate Veterans chapter honored him in 2008.

The next year, Way, the historian, got to wondering about other pensioners. He and several friends began research with a county librarian’s help. They found records for 10 black pensioners, including a free man, Jeff Sanders.

All were described as “body servants” or bodyguards, even Sanders. Some hauled supplies, carried water or cooked. At least two were wounded.

Hamp Cuthbertson helped build Fort Fisher near Wilmington in 1863, his pension application stated, “under the direction and command of his masters, and enduring severe privation, hunger, illness and punishments, and being returned to the home of his owner about one year later.”

Southern states began providing Civil War pensions in the 1880s; only Mississippi did not exclude blacks. In 1927, N.C. law finally let people of color seek pensions – but only if they went to war as laborers or servants.

“They essentially got pensions by being loyal slaves,” Blight said.

Fewer than 200 sought N.C. Civil War pensions, Ijames said. They got annual pensions of $200, about $2,550 today.

In Union County, most of the 10 men had an average age of 90 when their pensions began.

County concerns

Last May, Way asked county commissioners to approve a marker honoring the men.

Commissioners sent the request to the county Historic Preservation Commission, which recommended that no new marker go on the courthouse grounds unless there was a major new conflict to commemorate.

A Civil War room in a future museum at the courthouse would be the best place to memorialize the 10 men, the preservation group said. No money has been budgeted for a museum, nor is there any timetable to create the center.

The county manager agreed with the group’s assessment. Staff told county commissioners they did not recommend the marker be added and recently told Way of the decision.

He isn’t sure what he will do next. Way said he felt the historic commission did not want to see a monument to African-Americans at the courthouse.

County Manager Cindy Coto and preservation commission Chairman Jerry Surratt said they did not think the historic commission’s actions were based on race.

Surratt said all of the other monuments at the site, except for the Revolutionary War marker where records were hard to come by, honor those who died in service. No marker mentions a person’s race.

About 552 Union County soldiers died in the Civil War, Surratt said, but only their regiments are on the monument.

“If you go back 100 years later and put up a supplement to the monument, with names, it elevates the 10 people by name above the 500 other people who died,” Surratt said. “(It) would turn a race-neutral monument to be racially a step backwards.”

Ijames called it disingenuous to think a monument erected in 1910 at the height of the Jim Crow era would have been intended to honor contributions by black residents.

Until Way contacted Greg Perry, he knew little about his great-great-grandfather, pensioner Aaron Perry, who toiled at Fort Fisher.

“To find out he fought for the Confederacy was mind-blowing,” said Perry, 48, of Monroe.

Perry said he understands but disagrees with the reasons the marker was rejected.

“It’s really sad,” he said. “One thing about history, it can be divisive or it can be healing.”

Not to disrespect Weary Clyburn, but he was a musician. He didn’t tote a musket. With the exception of the one free black, Jeff Sanders, the likelihood is that these men had no choice but to do what they did–they were slaves, and this was part of their bondage. It simply doesn’t make sense to erect a monument to the suffering of slaves, and I think that Union County did the right thing here.

Kevin Levin has an interesting take on this issue today as well.

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