Civil War Days in Mariposa: April 7-9, 2017

Dates and links for the upcoming Civil War Days to be held in Mariposa

Friday, April 7: Educational Day
Education Day is no cost to any and all registered Elementary and Middle Schools. All are invited: Public, Private, or Homeschool. Registration in advance, only.

Saturday, April 8 and Sunday, April 9: Civil War Days (home page)
Tour the military and civilian encampments where you will see firsthand how life was during this trying time in American history. Visit with both Confederate and Federal soldiers and see how they lived while on campaign. Walk through the town of Longville and see how the war touched the day to day lives of the Civilians as well. Visit the sutlers, who provided supplies to the soldiers and civilians, and shop for everyday items from this period. (See the above home page for the schedule and more information.)
Tickets sold at the gate—$5 for children, $10 for adults

Here is the event schedule.

Previous years' reenactment battles can be found on YouTube.

Picture from last year's announcement in the Sierra Sun Times

Civil War-related online courses

This will be a page that will need to be updated as I find more courses (and hopefully take some of them). If you find additional courses or take any of these, be sure to let me know about it so I can add it to this post.

Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs)

The Civil War and Reconstruction
Columbia University: Eric Foner

• 1850-1861: A Nation Divided
• 1861 - 1865: A New Birth of Freedom
• 1865-1890: The Unfinished Revolution

History of the Slave South
University of Pennsylvania: Stephanie McCurry

Whitman's Civil War
The University of Iowa International Writing Program: Ed Folsom and Christopher Merrill

The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877
Open Yale Courses: David W. Blight

Poetry in America: The Civil War and Its Aftermath
Harvard University: Elisa New

The Great Courses
(Note: I'm including The Great Courses on this page since many of these titles can be checked out through local libraries. Other methods of access will cost money, whether through purchasing the courses or through The Great Courses Plus streaming option)

American Civil War
Gary W. Gallagher, University of Virginia

Robert E. Lee and His High Command
Gary W. Gallagher, University of Virginia

Mr. Lincoln: The Life of Abraham Lincoln
Allen C. Guelzo, Gettysburg College

Abraham Lincoln: In His Own Words
David Zarefsky, Northwestern University

Copperhead: Harold Frederic (1893 novel) and 2013 Film (Ron Maxwell, director)

Earlier this year Amateur Reader posted on Harold Frederic's The Damnation of Theron Ware, which reminded me of my reading of that novel as well as Frederic's novella The Copperhead. At that time, the movie adaptation was available on Amazon Prime for only a few dollars, so I splurged and watched it. A few notes about both of them, although I'll provide the caveat that it has been a while since I've read Frederic's novella.

Frederic's short stories about the U.S. Civil War have usually been published together, often including The Copperhead. Copperheads, for those unfamiliar with the term, were northern U.S. opponents to the Civil War. In the case of Frederic's novella, the central character of Abner Beech is adamantly opposed to the Civil War, causing friction with the other residents of Four Corners in upstate New York. Jimmy, an orphan the Beeches have welcomed into their household, narrates how the abolitionist movement took hold in the area:

There was a certain dreamlike tricksiness of transformation in it all. At first there was only one Abolitionist, old “Jee” Hagadorn. Then, somehow, there came to be a number of them—and then, all at once, lo! everybody was an Abolitionist—that is to say, everybody but Abner Beech. The more general and enthusiastic the conversion of the others became, the more resolutely and doggedly he dug his heels into the ground, and braced his broad shoulders, and pulled in the opposite direction. The skies darkened, the wind rose, the storm of angry popular feeling burst swooping over the country-side, but Beech only stiffened his back and never budged an inch. (from Chapter 1)

Frederic, a native of Utica, makes upstate New York as much a character in many of his stories as the men and women populating them. On his writing of the U.S. Civil War, Frederic takes a very guarded position. There is no righteousness of the cause, there is no romanticism of war. Frederic focuses on the men, women, and children left at home during the fighting. In the novella, Frederic makes it difficult to like Abner Beech. Beech is against the war, mainly because he doesn't think it worth spilling blood. He's as racist as they come and doesn't have a problem with slavery. Or at least he doesn't think it an institution worth fighting over. If the southern states want to seceded, Abner says let them leave.

Edmund Wilson wrote an introduction to a reissue of The Civil War Stories of Harold Frederic and had this to say about these stories:

His [Frederic's] stories of New York during the Civil War reflect the peculiar mixture of patriotism and disaffection which was characteristic of that region and for which [good friend Horatio] Seymour was so forthright a spokesman. Due to this, these stories differ fundamentally from any other Civil War fiction I know, and they have thus a unique historical as well as a literary importance. The hero of the longest of them—really a short novel—is not merely a critic of Republican policies but a real out-and-out Copperhead, an upstate farmer whose ideas are rooted in the principles of the American Revolution and who believes the South has the right to secede.

I recommend The Civil War Stories of Harold Frederic even though they don't represent his best writing and are uneven. The best of them, The Copperhead included, focus on "the mixed feelings aroused by the war but also in their realistic footage focusing on the civilians at home." (Wilson, again, in the introduction)

Abner was too intent upon his theme to notice. “Yes, peace!” he repeated, in the deep vibrating tones of his class-meeting manner. “Why, just think what's been a-goin' on! Great armies raised, hundreds of thousands of honest men taken from their work an' set to murderin' each other, whole deestricks of country torn up by the roots, homes desolated, the land filled with widows an' orphans, an' every house a house of mournin'.” (from Chapter 8)

I thoroughly enjoyed the 2013 movie Copperhead directed by Ron Maxwell and adapted by Bill Kaufman. Minor changes made to the characters, Abner Beech in particular, improve the story. Abner, played perfectly by Billy Campbell, focuses more on his belief that the Constitution should guide the states' and citizens' actions, and he's less than thrilled by the steps President Lincoln has taken. A major change to his character is that the movie Abner is very much anti-slavery, but he puts his dedication to the law over his hatred of slavery. There are other changes as well, and for the most part well done. If it's possible, there's an even stronger focus on the home front, as you see boys heading off to war and coming home, if they come home alive that is, irreparably changed.

The strength of the movie is its focus on the issue of community during wartime and the many divisive factors (political, religious, legal, familial, economic) that can tear it apart. If I had any complaints about the movie, it would be that the ending was even more heavy handed than Frederic's. In such moments, though, it's easy to see what Frederic was striving for. Men like Jee Hagadorn (played perfectly with scene-chewing aplomb by Angus Macfadyen) may be on the right side of this moral question, but at what cost in other areas? Fortunately the movie and the novella don't pretend to make either Jee or Abner representative of the pro-war or anti-war North, instead using them to highlight important moral questions about this tumultuous period. Highly recommended.

(Cross-posted at A Common Reader)

Billy Campbell as Abner Beech in Copperhead

This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy by Matthew Karp

This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy by Matthew Karp, Harvard University Press

From the book's publisher's page:

When the United States emerged as a world power in the years before the Civil War, the men who presided over the nation’s triumphant territorial and economic expansion were largely southern slaveholders. As presidents, cabinet officers, and diplomats, slaveholding leaders controlled the main levers of foreign policy inside an increasingly powerful American state. This Vast Southern Empire explores the international vision and strategic operations of these southerners at the commanding heights of American politics.

For proslavery leaders like John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis, the nineteenth-century world was torn between two hostile forces: a rising movement against bondage, and an Atlantic plantation system that was larger and more productive than ever before. In this great struggle, southern statesmen saw the United States as slavery’s most powerful champion. Overcoming traditional qualms about a strong central government, slaveholding leaders harnessed the power of the state to defend slavery abroad. During the antebellum years, they worked energetically to modernize the U.S. military, while steering American diplomacy to protect slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the Republic of Texas.

As Matthew Karp demonstrates, these leaders were nationalists, not separatists. Their “vast southern empire” was not an independent South but the entire United States, and only the election of Abraham Lincoln broke their grip on national power. Fortified by years at the helm of U.S. foreign affairs, slaveholding elites formed their own Confederacy—not only as a desperate effort to preserve their property but as a confident bid to shape the future of the Atlantic world.

From Fergus M. Bordewich's review in The Wall Street Journal:

Cuba was a particular obsession for pro-slavery policy makers. The island’s wealth was fabulous—in the 1850s, it produced fully a quarter of the world’s sugar—and slavery was firmly established there. American diplomats tried for years to purchase the island outright and forestall any attempt at emancipation by Cuba’s Spanish rulers. “We regard an attempt . . . to blast with the plague of emancipation that garden of the West, as a crime against civilization,” wrote the Charleston Mercury, a frequent mouthpiece for pro-slavery opinion.

Many slaveholders hoped that expansionist efforts would produce new slave states and add heft to Southern power in Congress, as well as new wealth built on the backs of the enslaved. In fact, their more extravagant hopes never bore fruit, not so much because Northerners resisted—though some did—but because the South itself was divided on the issue. Gulf Coast Democrats wanted more territory, but, as Mr. Karp acutely notes, “Upper South moderates, cautious Whigs and ex-Whigs, and even southeastern conservatives generally opposed the most aggressive schemes”—in part because the result might not be what they hoped for. Few southern leaders, he writes, “believed that the United States could digest a meal so unpalatable as a free black Cuba.”

With the benefit of hindsight, the story of America’s pro-slavery foreign policy is mostly a study in failure. Apart from the acquisition of Texas, the southward expansion that slaveholders sought didn’t take place, and slavery itself disintegrated in the heat of civil war. But Mr. Karp makes a persuasive case that we cannot grasp our country’s history without taking account of slavery’s dreams and ambitions. “We can be grateful that slaveholders never gained the world they craved,” writes Mr. Karp, “but we achieve nothing by failing to take the true measure of its dimensions.”

Additional links:

Matthew Karp discuss the tensions between slaveholders and abolitionists that led to the annexation of Texas as a slave state on Texas Public Radio's show The Source (21 minutes)

A discussion between Mr. Karp and Ibram X. Kendi at Black Perspectives

A lengthy and informative review by Benjamin Park

A discussion of the book between Mr. Karp and Timothy Shenk

The book's page at Professor Park's blog

Mr. Karp answers some questions about the book

Mr. Karp discuss This Vast Southern Empire at an event cosponsored by The New School and Jacobin Magazine (45 minutes)

The Quartermaster: Montgomery C. Meigs, Lincoln’s General, Master Builder of the Union Army by Robert O’Harrow Jr

The Quartermaster: Montgomery C. Meigs, Lincoln’s General, Master Builder of the Union Army by Robert O’Harrow Jr, Simon & Schuster

This book has received mostly good reviews. Here's the blurb from Peter Cozzens:

The Quartermaster offers a vivid and eminently human portrait of Montgomery Meigs, the brilliant and principled general whose mastery of supply and logistics on a grand scale contributed decisively to Union victory in the Civil War. Too long overlooked, Meigs deserves a place beside such luminaries as Grant and Sherman, as O'Harrow convincingly demonstrates in this fast-paced, bracing account. This is one of the most important Civil War biographies to appear in recent years.

An excerpt can be read on the publisher's page.

Allen Guelzo's review at The Wall Street Journal is behind a paywall, so I wanted to provide an excerpt from it since it mentions another book on Meigs' life. While Guelzo's review is largely positive, he did have some issues with it:

Mr. O’Harrow’s account is short and breezy, relying mostly on the published volumes of Meigs’s journals and the Civil War Official Records, with an occasional dip into Meigs’s papers at the Library of Congress. It will not displace Russell Weigley’s more thorough but more stodgy 1959 biography of Meigs, and it shares with Weigley’s biography a surprising absence of attention to the actual practices of wartime contracting. Nor does Mr. O’Harrow spend much time on how Meigs managed the vast network of subordinate quartermaster officers assigned to each corps, division, brigade and regiment of the Union armies.

Mr. O’Harrow also misses one of the more startling conclusions that Meigs’s tenure as quartermaster general offers—that he handled nearly all of the government’s supply needs through private contractors. Only when it came to organizing a military railroad system did Meigs substitute direct government intervention for the free market. This practice stands in contrast with that of the Confederacy, which preferred to nationalize industries, transport and suppliers, with the result that its armies went to war poorly clad, poorly equipped and hungry.

Even so, it sounds like a fun read of who James McPherson called “the unsung hero of northern victory.”

Additional links:

Reviews at Goodreads

Mark Greenbaum's April 12, 2013 piece on Montgomery C. Meigs at The New York Times

Robert O'Harrow Jr.'s talk at The National Archives was recorded and can be watched in the video below. (Introduction begins at 4:20)

January 22, 2017 meeting notes

A spirited meeting for the initial Morgan Hill Civil War Round Table group, with a range of ages from 12 to... retirement age.

Meg Groeling Thompson read some "action reports" from Civil War snowball battles. The details of these engagements can be found here. They're not quite the action reports we're used to seeing regarding conflicts, are they?

We were fortunate to have the President of the South Bay Civil War Round Table, Jim Rhetta, with us, as well as participants form the East Bay and several local middle school students. For a group just getting its feet under it, we were very fortunate. Many topics were mentioned for future discussion on the website as well as at the meetings, from vintage coins and stamps to rations required for four-legged participants. Media offerings about the period, from short stories to movies, will be discussed here and in the meetings.

The next meeting is scheduled for Sunday, 1pm on March 5th, again at BookSmart in Morgan Hill. If you have an artifact from that time period, please bring it to share with everyone! Any and all contributions are welcome.