“Lee at the Alamo”
Alternative history is pretty far down the reading list for me. But this “what if” from Harry Turtledove, based on a germ of an idea tossed off decades ago by Bruce Catton, is a fun one. Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee, acting in stead of the ailing General David Twiggs, finds himself in command of the U.S. Department of Texas at San Antonio when Texas secedes from the Union in February 1861:
Lee frowned at the needless profanity, but agreed with the sentiment. “Well, then, ah, Colonel” —he used the rank and denied it at the same time— “perhaps you will be so good as to tell me what I can do for you. Since you say you do not need the Army’s help, I cannot imagine that you were looking for me in particular.” A genuinely modest man, he meant that.
“I don’t need the U.S. Army’s help, Colonel Lee,” McCulloch said, his voice deep and raspy and fierce. “I need the God-damned U.S. Army gone.”
“I beg your pardon?” Lee knew—knew only too well—that Texas was in the process of dissolving the bonds linking her to the Union. He knew as much, yes. That a jumped-up militia colonel should dare to speak to him so took him aback all the same.
“Gone,” McCulloch repeated, as if to a simpleton. “If you will surrender your forts and your guns and muskets and munitions without kicking up a fuss, you and any of your men who don’t care to join the great Southern cause can march on out of Texas, and nobody will touch a hair on your head. But if you say no, sir, I cannot answer for the consequences, and that is the Lord’s truth.”
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Lincoln Documents Returned to National Archives
Here’s a rather notable video segment about a dealer in historical documents who, upon being notified that a document he’d sold had been missing from a file held by the National Archives, took active steps to see that it was returned.
I’ve been to too many collections, and asked to see too many documents listed in the catalog, only to find a note in the folder that reads, “Missing since [date].” The theft of materials from archives — with shrinking staff and often poor security — is a terrible problem. I’ve long believed that a not-insignificant proportion of the documents market is made up from material gone missing from archives, and especially so with autographs — whole letters can often be traced back to their source, but a signature excised from a larger document cannot.
As retired National Archives Civil War Subject Specialist Mike Musick notes in the video, there’s no way to know when the original theft in this case occurred; it may have happened while the documents were still under the stewardship of the War Department, decades ago. No matter; what’s important is that the material is back where it belongs.
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Texas Drought Exposes African American Burial Site
Over at Interpreting Slave Life, Nicole Moore highlights a recent news item from north Texas, where a previously-unknown African American burial ground has been exposed by the drought in Navarro County, near Corsicana:
Forensics experts told Bailey the remains appear to belong to an African-American man, about 40 years old, who was likely a freed slave.
“We believe it was a person who worked on a plantation in that river bottom [sic.],” [Navarro County Sheriff’s Deputy Frank] Bailey said.
The reservoir is one of Tarrant County’s [i.e., Fort Worth’s] water sources.
Cemeteries were noted and moved before it was filled in the 1980s, but this small cemetery was not marked, and the graves did not have tombstones.
Boaters first found the remains in 2009 along the shoreline. But lake levels rose again within days, quickly reclaiming the site.
So, for three years, archaeologists and historians have waited for the reservoir to reveal them again.
The site was uncovered by the receding waters of the Richland Chambers Reservoir. It’s not actually a river bottom, but formed by the flow of Richland and Chambers Creeks. The Navarro County Times is also covering the story, as is the Corsicana Daily Sun.
There weren’t a lot of what what’s commonly thought of as plantations in that area in the mid-19th century. Navarro County had a total of 251 slaveholders in 1860, owning in aggregate 1,890 slaves. Seventeen slaveholders owned twenty or more slaves — one of the common standards for what designated a planter as opposed to a mere farmer — and only one of who owned more than a hundred.[1]
The largest slaveholder in Navarro County was Anderson Ingram (c. 1799 – c. 1875), who with three brothers purchased thousands of acres of land along the Trinity River, which forms the county’s eastern boundary.[2] In 1859, Ingram was actively farming 900 acres, on which his slaves cultivated 6,500 bushels of corn and 382 bales of cotton.[3]
Far more common were relatively small farming operations like that of Aaron Perry in neighboring Limestone County, who raised hogs and corn, much of the latter likely used for fattening the former before killing time in the fall.
I haven’t been able to locate Anderson Ingram’s property on plot maps from the General Land Office dated to 1858 and 1872, but if it was in the eastern part of the county, it was in the same general part of the county as the reservoir. In any event, the exact location of the site is held in confidence by local authorities to prevent its disturbance by both looters and the curious. There are likely more burials nearby, which may help present a more complete picture of north central Texas on the eve of secession.
[1] University of Virginia, Geospatial and Statistical Data Center. “Historical Census Browser.” Retrieved September 06, 2011, from the: http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/collections/stats/histcensus/index.html.
[2] Christopher Long, “Ingram, Anderson,” Handbook of Texas Online (http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fin07), accessed September 06, 2011. Published by the Texas State Historical Association.
[3] Ralph A. Wooster, “Notes on Texas’ Largest Slaveholders, 1860,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 65 (July 1961).
Image: The Richland Chambers Reservoir, Navarro County, as imaged in ArcGIS Explorer. In this view, which incorporates bathymetry data, the original courses of Richland and Chambers Creeks can be seen faintly. The city of Corsicana appears at upper left. Full-size image here.
The Third Assistant Engineer
In response to my recent post on Monitor‘s turret, one of my readers writes:
One photo of all but one officers in chairs, shows at viewer’s left, seated before the turret, my Woollen kinsman, USS Monitor 3rd Asst. Engr. Robinson Woollen Hands, sitting atop a jury-rigged stool of two Monitor armored deck-light covers. He perished at his engine-room duty station when the Monitor foundered. His memorial stone is at Baltimore. The enlisted of the Monitor survivors group, the Starboard Watch Society, voted Robinson the most beloved of all the officers by the enlisted.. The first item recovered from the deep that identified the wreck as thee USS Monitor, and not just a monitor class vessel, was not the earlier lantern, but the armored deck-light cover. Possibly Robinson is sitting on the one first one recovered from the deep?
My correspondent goes on to say that Hands’ brother, George Washington Hands, Jr., was a captain in the Virginia infantry and “considered Robinson a traitor and never bespoke Robinson’s name again.” Their father, George Sr., was the civilian master of the steamer River Queen that was the scene of the famous meeting between Lincoln, Sherman, Grant and Porter in the closing days of the war.
It’s quite amazing how many stories there are like this; there’s the story of Edward Lea and his father Albert, the former a U.S. naval officer on the Harriet Lane and the latter an engineer officer on Confederate General Magruder’s staff at the Battle of Galveston. And of course Farragut’s Flag Captain, Percival Drayton, son of a prominent South Carolinian family who, early in the war, participated in a naval bombardment of forts commanded by his brother Thomas.
“Brother against brother” was too often literally true.
Robinson W. Hands’ memorial stone in Baltimore, via Find-a-Grave; a deck porthole cover like one of those Hands is sitting on, recovered from the wreck site, via National Geographic.
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Image: Officers of U.S.S. Monitor, July 9, 1862. Front, l. to r.: Robinson W. Hands, Edwin V. Gager. Seated, l. to r.: Louis N. Stodder, George Frederickson, William Flye and Daniel C. Logue and Samuel Dana Greene. Standing, l. to r.: Albert B. Campbell, Mark T. Sunstrom, William F. Keeler, and L. Howard Newman of U.S.S. Galena. Library of Congress photo; identifications from The Monitor Chronicles.
The Uneasy Remembrance of Private Albert Cashier
Many of you will have heard the story of Pvt. Albert D. J. Cashier, Co. G, 95th Illinois Infantry. Private Cashier was born a woman, Jennie Hodgers (1843-1915). My colleague Damian Shiels, who blogs at Irish in the American Civil War, recently told Cashier’s story here.
Apart from the wartime masquerade, there are a couple of other remarkable things about Cashier’s life. (I use that name and the masculine pronoun, because that’s how Cashier chose to present himself for more than 50 years.) The first is that, whatever his reasons for adopting a male identity and entering the Union army, Cashier continued to present and live as a man, settling in the village of Saunemin, Illinois, about 90 miles southwest of Chicago. Cashier lived in Saunemin for more than 40 years, supporting himself with small jobs and living alone. As independent radio producer Linda Paul discovered two years ago, Albert Cashier was a strange, eccentric person:
For me though, probably the most fascinating part of this project was trying to unpeel the onion to find a more nuanced portrait of Jennie Hodgers. I found a person who could be kind to children, offering them a treat whenever they came to her home. But there was also a hot-headed, disingenuous, petty and unquestionably eccentric Jennie Hodgers. She had her foibles, just like the rest of us. . . .
A few years before the rest of the world found out about Cashier’s true gender, Cathy Lannon’s great grandmother made the discovery. She had heard that Albert was sick one day and so she asked a nurse to go over to help him out. In short order the nurse came running back and spluttered,“ Mrs. Lannon, he’s a full fledged woman!“ The nurse was so upset that she packed up and left town and Lannon’s great-grandmother in a great act of empathy, didn’t tell anyone about it, including her husband.
In Cashier’s final years (right, c. 1913), it seems, a series of injuries resulted in a handful of people discovering his secret, but they kept quiet, and it was not until a year or so before Cashier’s death that the story became public and Cashier was revealed publicly as being female. Cashier was eventually confined to a state asylum where he was forced to wear a dress, very much against his will. By that time, Cashier was somewhat famous, and in August 1915 the Rockford, Illinois Republic noted that he was “failing rapidly. . . mental state is rapidly deteriorating.” When Cashier died in October, he was buried with full military honors, in the uniform of the Grand Army of the Republic, with a standard veteran’s headstone. (Six decades later, in the 1970s, a larger stone was dedicated, with both Cashier’s names on it.)
Now one of my readers has passed along a news story from public radio WBEZ 91.5 in Chicago, telling the story of the restoration of the old soldier’s tiny house — and the unease that some locals still feel about discussing Cashier’s legacy. Returning in 2011 to Saunemin, Linda Paul resumes the story:
I’ve only just met the very affable Mayor Bob Bradford, but in no time flat, I’ve managed to get on his nerves.
See, the last time I was in town, a few years back, a couple of folks – a small number, really – weren’t so sure they wanted their town to celebrate the life of someone they considered a “cross-dresser.” So I may have gotten off on the wrong foot by asking Mayor Bradford if that’s still the case today.
“Well, I get a little perturbed when you use the word cross-dresser,” said Bradford.
Bradford said that anyone who uses that term just really doesn’t understand the story.
“And the story was, is, that Jennie Hodgers – Albert Cashier – was trying to make a living,” he notes. “And back in those days, a woman could not make a good dollar by being a housekeeper or doing laundry and so forth. But a woman could get three squares a day, and could make a good salary by serving in the army. So I think that was the reason. I don’t think it had to do with cross-dressers.”
I suppose if Mayor Bradford gets all squirmy at the mention of cross-dressing, maybe we shouldn’t even bring up the notion of transgender. 😉
In any event, it’s great that Saunemin’s residents have finally gone to the trouble and expense of restoring this small reminder of a very unusual Civil War story. I suspect that, in the coming years, they will wonder why they didn’t do it sooner, and why they were so uncomfortable with Albert Cashier’s legacy for so long.
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Image: Albert D. J. Cashier’s tiny house in Saunemin , Illinois, under restoration in 2010, via Pantagraph.com. Cashier photo via Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.
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