I’ll be speaking at the March 19 meeting of the SCV’s John Bell Hood Camp No. 50, at Shrimp & Stuff Restaurant in Galveston (7 p.m., in the private dining room). My talk will be a preview of my March 27 presentation at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, “For-Profit Patriots: Civil War Blockade Running on the Texas Coast.”

I appreciate the invitation, and am looking forward to it.

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Image: Digital model of the blockade runner Will o’ the Wisp, wrecked at Galveston in February 1865.

From today’s Galveston County Daily News:

In another coup for conservationists, Mitchell Historic Properties, a company owned by the family of billionaire developer George Mitchell, might as soon as today finalize the acquisition of a long-troubled building.

Mitchell Historic Properties plans to buy the east two bays of the Hendley Building on the northwest corner of 20th Street and The Strand. The building long housed Demack & Co., a produce wholesaler that closed in 1999. Demack & Co. couldn’t survive when the University of Texas Medical Branch and Galveston Independent School District began awarding multimillion contracts to larger grocery supply chains outside the city.

Bill Ross, senior vice president and general manager of Mitchell Historic Properties, said plans call for a major renovation of the building. One idea is that Galveston Historical Foundation would move into the first floor. Officials with the foundation could not immediately be reached for comment.

The Demack building has fallen into disrepair and has made the foundation’s Heritage at Risk list since 2003. Several family members claimed ownership of the building, complicating city efforts during the years to bring the building up to code. Mitchell Historic Properties, which is buying the building from James K. Rourke Jr. and Jack Alexander Demack, has invested many millions of dollars restoring 17 historic downtown businesses. Stay tuned.

This is wonderful news. Hendley’s Row — a single, large building encompassing four separate bays — is, along with the old U.S. Customs House, perhaps the most important war-related structure in town that survives. A cupola on its roof (visible in the top photo) was used as a lookout to track Union blockaders during the war, and Confederates occupying the building on the morning of January 1, 1863, used its back windows as a platform for sharpshooters and even light artillery during the Battle of Galveston. This structure has been slowly crumbling for a long time — even under Demack & Co.’s active proprietorship, it was a pretty sorry sight — and it’s great to see the prospect of serious and long-lasting restoration work being done.

As anticipated, the Texas State Library and Archives Commission’s Confederate pension records are now available online at the subscription genealogy website Ancestry.com. Hard copies will still be available for order as before but, in keeping with a policy change last fall, researchers will be notified of the cost and must send in their payments before the library staff will make the copies. The actual cost is still appallingly, scandalously low.

The correct section at Ancestry is difficult to find, and is not yet indexed in their military pensions catalog. Use this link to go directly to that section, and be sure to select Texas for the state, as below:

The page reproduced above is a more-or-less random example from the files. It’s an affidavit in support of the 1913 application of Mary Ann McKinney of Mesquite, Texas. Her late husband, Eli Harris McKinney, had served in the 17th Alabama Infantry, and to support her application she submitted this affidavit from two men from Alabama who testified that Eli “was a good soldier and served as such untill [sic.] the close of the war.” (Eli’s CSR, available through Fold3, shows him enlisting in September 1862 and being surrendered with Joe Johnston’s army in North Carolina in April 1865.) Eli had died in 1881, ten years after his marriage to Mary; she began receiving a pension in March 1914 and continued to receive  it until her own death in Ranger, Texas in August 1922. Mary McKinney’s application also provides an important reminder about Confederate pensions: they were issued by the state in which the applicant lived, not the state he was born in, or of the unit in which he served.

The Texas State Library and Archives Commission had an efficient and inexpensive system for providing these materials before, but efforts to put these materials online (even on a paid subscription site) are really opening doors for both professional and avocational researchers. Records that used to take weeks or months to obtain by postal mail can now be retrieved in minutes. How damn cool is that?

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That didn’t take long.

Ed Hansen, the West St. Paul City Council member who caught some flack over the weekend for flying a Confederate Battle Flag with the word “REDNECK” on it at his home, collapsed like a dollar-store lawn chair when faced with his constituents at a council meeting Monday night. Of course, he didn’t admit he’d made a mistake, and instead went off on a self-absorbed whinge about people being “thin-skinned and. . . so easily offended.” He also insisted that

the flag had become a distraction because people “wanted to get into debates about Civil War history.”

Funny how that happens.

Personally, I think the other Confederate-redneck-flag guy, Ken Webber in Oregon, has chosen a wrong path in (first) his refusal to remove the flag from his truck when it was parked at his private employer’s lot, and (second) in pursuing a legal case he’s likely to lose. But I’ll give Webber this much: he’s got more stones than “One-and-Done” Councilman Ed Hansen of West St. Paul, Minnesota.
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Original Image Caption: “This is a question of personal liberty. It has nothing to do with racism,” said West St. Paul City Council member Ed Hansen, photographed Monday outside his home in West St. Paul. In addition to the Confederate flag hanging on his deck railing, Hansen is brandishing the Gadsden flag with a coiled rattlesnake, which has been adopted by the tea party movement. Since the photo was taken, Hansen decided to remove the Confederate flag. (Pioneer Press: Richard Marshall)

Items that don’t warrant a post of their own, but are of note nonetheless:

• A while back there was some news coverage of the fact that, while other Alabama museums are struggling desperately, funding for the Confederate Memorial Park in Mountain Creek remains substantial as it benefits from a special, set-aside tax in that state, not the general fund. One of those museums is the privately-operated Helen Keller museum, which is fearful of losing valuable documents because state funding programs for conservation has been slashed. Curiously, Keller herself was the daughter and granddaughter of Confederate officers, and was even profiled in the Confederate Veteran magazine in 1903 as a “daughter of the South.” Now a bill has been filed in the Alabama legislature that would redirect those funds to the state’s Medicaid program.
• Did you know the federal government is still paying two Civil War pensions? I didn’t.
• The case of Ken Webber, the rural Oregon school bus driver who was fired after refusing to remove a large Confederate flag from his truck, blazoned “REDNECK,” when it was parked in his employer’s lot, continues. His former employer, a private transportation contractor, has asked for a dismissal of the case. (The school district was also a defendant in Webber’s lawsuit, but I believe was excused by the court because Webber didn’t work directly for them.) The interesting thing about this case to me is that Webber, as far as I can see, hasn’t made any claim that his flag is an expression of Southern culture or Confederate heritage or any particular historic connection; he seemingly equates the Confederate Battle Flag with redneckism/redneckitude/redneckery. Advocates for public display of the Confederate Battle Flag ought to be uneasy about that.
• Update: No sooner did I post this, than there’s a story of another Confederate “redneck” flag, this one in Minnesota, displayed by a city council member. His neighbors are not thrilled. Good times.
• That fiberglass statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest outside of Nashville was seriously vandalized recently, to the tune of several thousand dollars’ damage. The owner of the private monument was quick to assert that it was done because of Black History Month, adding that ” I have to go through something like this every February.” The local cops have no idea what he’s talking about.
• Finally, a production company called Southern Legacy Films, a company organized explicitly “to promote the Southern Cause,” is producing a movie to “tell both sides” of the Great Hanging at Gainesville, Texas. In that infamous event,  a mob of local men, supported by Confederate state troops, rounded up and hanged, after a drum-head tribunal, twenty-one men who were suspected of being Union sympathizers. Seven had actually been condemned by the tribunal; incensed, the crowd grabbed fourteen more and strung them up. too.  Twenty-one other men  were shot, hanged or lynched in other violence, bring the total death toll to over forty. The picture is a joint project between the Texas SCV and Southern Legacy Films. The mob’s actions, according to a local SCV member working with the production company, was simply the result of the “tensions of the time.” I have no idea how one tells the story of the Great Hanging in a way that reflects well on the Confederacy or the mob, but it looks like they’re going to try. Funny how the abuses of Sherman’s bummers (real or imagined) are never waived off by True Southrons™ as simply the result of the “tensions of the times.” (h/t Kevin)

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The third season of the show began last Friday with Martin Sheen, whose birth name is Ramón Antonio Gerardo Estévez. Sheen is probably known as much for his political activism as for his acting career. The Sheen episode focuses primarily on two uncles who, in the first half of the 20th century, fought in civil wars in their home countries. Sheen’s parents were both immigrants to the United States, his mother from Ireland and his father from Spain. His mother’s elder brother, Michael Phelan, fought in the Irish Civil War in the early 1920s for the Irish Republican Army against the National (or “Provisional”) government, headed by Michael Collins. His Galician father’s brother, Matias Estévez (right, with his family), fought for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War against the fascists under Franco. Both men found themselves on the losing side of their respective wars, and both ended up imprisoned by their fellow countrymen. There’s an even more remarkable discovery farther back in Sheen’s family tree, but you’ll just have to watch the episode for that.

One of the things I thought about while watching Sheen’s episode was that, while he felt an obvious natural affinity to those two men, each of whom had taken up arms for a political cause, and found themselves imprisoned for it (in Matias Estevez’ case, for years), there was no indication that Sheen saw their causes as explicitly his cause. There was no suggestion that Martin Sheen saw himself, personally, as obligated to carry on the fight against the current government of the Republic of Ireland, or go go on a loud, chest-thumping rant about Franco’s fascists. (Possibly because he’s still dead.) It seemed very different than the way some people view the legacy of their ancestors in this country, who fought through a much older conflict, now long past any living memory.

There are some things I don’t much like about Who Do You Think You Are?, all of which are probably due to the necessity of condensing complex stories into a 40- or 45-minute package of entertainment. They compress what would normally be months or years of research by an individual to an improbably short period of time. They use historians and archivists with access to records that, while presumably available to the public, are often obscure and not really accessible to non-specialists. They ignore the dead ends and false leads that are bane of any genealogical researcher. They sometimes take what I think of as a “maybe” finding and present it as an established fact. And inevitably, they tend to zero in on the ancestors who seem to have the most entertaining story, or the most relevance to the modern day celebrity, rather than the more mundane folks who much make up the bulk of that person’s tree.

But what the show does right, I think, makes up for those flaws. It makes the point rather well that prior generations lived lives as complex and difficult — often much more difficult — than our own. It conveys the notion that their stories need to be told, too. It makes doing that historical seem easy (much easier than it often is), and undoubtedly inspires a lot of people to try their hands at it. And that seems to me to be a worthwhile thing.

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The action fought by the 1st Kansas Colored Volunteers on October 29, 1862, marked the first time that an African-American regiment experienced combat during the Civil War. No quarter was asked and none given by either side during the fight, which involved brutal hand-to-hand combat. A veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, Chris Tabor has focused his research on the particularly brutal warfare that raged in Western Missouri. He authored The Skirmish at Island Mound which provides the first ever detailed research into the first battle fought by African American soldiers during the Civil War.

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Atlantic commenter XinJeisan flags an interview with Ohio State University historian Mark Grimsley, conducted by Mike Few for the Small Wars Journal. It’s an interesting piece, because it effectively summarizes the course of Reconstruction in the former Confederacy, and also because it puts that struggle over political power in the context of other insurgencies in world history. Here, Grimsley argues that the level of violence in the South, while low compared to the wholesale slaughter that preceded it, was nonetheless one that today would be considered a war:

A more clunky response, since you mention social scientists, would be to point to the Correlates of War Study, which defines a war as any event that results in a thousand or more battlefield deaths each year.  If you substitute “deaths from political violence” for “battlefield deaths,” then several years during Reconstruction would come close to meeting this standard.  In Louisiana alone, for example, an estimated 2,500 people perished between 1865 and 1876.

My own state, Texas, provides another example. Grimsley notes that a disproportionate number of Federal troops posted in the old Confederacy during Reconstruction were in Texas, in part to guard the border with Mexico. Nonetheless, violence against African Americans and whites believed to be aligned with the Reconstruction government was commonplace. Even officers of the Freedmen’s Bureau were targets. I blogged recently about NARA’s “Discovering the Civil War” exhibition, currently at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, and the inclusion of a bound volume of incidents recorded by Freedmen’s Bureau officers, “Criminal Offenses Committed in the State of Texas, 1865-68.” According to the companion book to the exhibition, the three volumes of the set record some 2,000 separate incidents of white-on-black violence between September 1865 and December 1868, ranging in scope from simple assault to torture to murder. Many are clearly linked to the economic and social turbulence of Reconstruction — several incidents on this page are noted as being brought about by a dispute over wages, for example, while other cases are less clear — but there is no avoiding the conclusion that African Americans were common targets of violence during the period.

One page from the “Criminal Offenses Committed in the State of Texas, 1865-68,” listing reported attacks in September and October 1866. The descriptions of incidents (column 6) include “kicking a woman,” “assault & battery,” “beating woman with quirt on head, face & shoulders,” “cutting with a hatchet,” “shooting,” “fracturing skull” and “homicide.” Three of the twelve victims were women; all but one were black (column 8). All of the alleged perpetrators (column 5) were white. From the companion volume to “Discovering the Civil War.”

Grimsley continues, arguing that white Southerners’ efforts to reclaim power through violence and intimidation was mainly the work of local groups, and that the Klan was more akin to a brand than a top-down, operational structure:

Southern whites never created an insurgency in the Maoist sense of a centrally directed people’s war.  The Invisible Empire of the Ku Klux Klan was a myth.  What you had instead was a complex insurgency of local groups who conducted terrorist campaigns of intimidation and assassination.  These efforts were uncoordinated but had the effect of undermining the Republican state governments.

Some of these groups operated under the guise of the Ku Klux Klan, but in most instances the Klansmen were effective only in curtailing attempts by African American families to assert some degree of economic independence.  Only in South Carolina did the Klan become a major threat to the state government.  The largest and best organized of these groups were the White Leagues in Louisiana, the Rifle Clubs in Mississippi, and the Redshirts in South Carolina.  The latter two succeeded in “redeeming” their respective states.  The first came close to doing so, and would have succeeded had the U.S. government rendered their efforts unnecessary, by abandoning Reconstruction and simply handing them Home Rule.

It’s important to understand that, in saying “the Invisible Empire of the Ku Klux Klan was a myth,” Grimsley’s making a point about the Klan as a unified command structure. Even though the Klan had a national leadership for purposes of recruitment and communication, the individual dens, as they were known, were largely autonomous. And even they comprised only part of the many groups that sprang up across the South to oppose and undermine the process of Reconstruction.

Finally, Grimsley pulls back to look at white Southerners’ response to Radical Reconstruction — terrorism, voter intimidation, political machinations — as part of a unified whole that, in concept, is not at all unique to the American historical experience:

The pattern of the Reconstruction insurgency closely corresponds with dau tranh, a Vietnamese term that literally means “the struggle” but has a much richer connotation. Dau tranh rejects the idea that insurgency should be confined to guerrilla warfare.  Instead it prescribes the exploitation of any and all means to achieve the desired objective.  If given access to the political process by the targeted government—as occurred during Reconstruction—an insurgency following the tenets of dau tranh does not accept the legitimacy of that process (as the targeted government hopes it will), but simply regards such access as an additional tool by which to undermine and overthrow the government.  Dau tranh employs social measures (in the context of Reconstruction, the ostracism of white southerners who supported or tolerated the Republican order), economic measures (the discharge of black laborers and boycotts aimed at uncooperative white merchants and planters), agitation and propaganda (the Democratic press), and paramilitary measures (intimidation and violence).  As one of its foremost interpreters has explained, “the basic objective in dau tranh strategy is to put armed conflict into the context of political dissidence. Thus, while armed and political dau tranh may designate separate clusters of activities, conceptually they cannot be separated. Dau tranh is a seamless web.”

It’s telling that dau tranh (or đấu tranh) has the same meaning as jihad in Arabic — “the struggle.” In Arabic, jihad has a wider meaning that’s not limited to violent conflict, as it is commonly misunderstood in the West. Further, Grimsley’s characterization of the Reconstruction-era Klan — “a complex insurgency of local groups who conducted terrorist campaigns of intimidation and assassination. . . operated under the guise of the Ku Klux Klan” — is not unlike a description of al Qaeda, Arabic for “the base.” Al Qaeda is a very real, and still very dangerous organization, but much of the violence committed in its name, particularly in the Middle East, is done by small groups acting on their own, with little or no involvement by the larger organization. The horrific London bombings in 2005 were inspired by al Qaeda and violent Islamist rhetoric, but the conception, planning and execution of the attack were carried out by terrorists acting on their own initiative within the United Kingdom. International inspiration, but local action. Take Grimsley’s quote from earlier in this paragraph (“a complex insurgency of local groups. . .”), swap out the name of the Klan for al Qaeda, and you’ve got a fair description of the organizational structure of international terrorism over the last decade.

I don’t want to overstate this narrow analogy between modern, Islamist terrorism and the Reconstruction-era violence in the former Confederacy. But Grimsley’s observations are enlightening when it comes to viewing white Southerners’ efforts to push back against Radical Reconstruction. Political agitation, intimidation, violence and murder were all used, in concert and in parallel, to restore something akin to the status quo antebellum. In that sense, it’s remarkable how much the insurgency of white Southerners against the policies and supporters of Reconstruction resembles insurgencies elsewhere. As Mark Twain purportedly said, history doesn’t actually repeat itself, but sometimes it does rhyme.

Private Hercules McGraw is a series of interconnected free-verse poems in the voice of the title character, chronicling his experiences during the war. S. Thomas Summers is a teacher of Writing and Literature at Wayne Hills High School in Wayne, NJ and an adjunct writing professor at Passaic County Community College in Wanaque, NJ. He blogs original Civil War poetry at Lint in My Pocket — Artillery on the Ridge. Used with permission.

Devil’s Den

by S. Thomas Summers

I could tell, sun was gonna pour fire
and we was gonna sweat. Found Willy
soaking up as much shade as he could
under an oak big enough to offer Goliath
a place to sit. Willy was glad to see me breathing,

told me we was gonna fight again.
that we was gonna run up some hill
named Devil’s Den. Willy was scared.
Seemed a rattler fat as a log lived ‘tween the rocks
on that hill. Guess it was the devil locals

spoke about. Anyways we started moving
and Yanks started spitting at us, but Willy
kept an eye out for that snake. Bullets didn’t
bother him none. Once I yelled –
Willy, there’s that devil now. He done fainted

dead away. Whole regiment probably thought
he-caught one cause he lay still as death.
It’s the only time the war let me laugh.

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