Eighth Arkansas Infantry Battle Flag
My colleague Rob Baker has been doing a good job in covering the dispute over the which Confederate flag to display at the historic depot in Ringgold, Georgia. For years, the city has flown a Hardee Flag, similar in design to those used by Pat Cleburne’s troops that fought around the depot in the Battle of Ringgold Gap in November 1863. The local Sons of Confederate Veterans camp is the plaintiff in a long-running legal battle to have the more familiar Confederate Battle Flag displayed, in reference to Confederate soldiers from that area generally who served in all theaters of the war.
As it happens, on Saturday I came face-to-face with the battle flag of the Eighth Arkansas Infantry at the Texas Civil War Museum in Fort Worth, which fought at Ringgold Gap as part of Cleburne’s force. I think this flag was probably present at the fight, as it was replaced with this color of the 1864 pattern, carrying a battle honor for Ringgold Gap. It was said that the Hardee pattern had “no artistic taste about it, but which could not be mistaken” for a U.S. flag, which was a serious problem with using the Confederacy’s First National flag on the battlefield.
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Remembering the First Battle of Adobe Walls
Adobe Walls
Saturday Oct 4
11:00 AM – 4:00 PM
EVENT DATE: OCTOBER 4, 2014
- Buses leave Amarillo Civic Center at 11am and Borger Phillips Building at 1pm for the Adobe Walls Battle Site.
- $50 per person (membership discounts do not apply)
- Reservations must be made in advance no later than August 15th by contacting Amy Mitchell at PPHM at 806-651-2242 or email amitchell-at-pphm.wtamu.edu.
Join the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum and Hutchinson County Historical Museum as we celebrate the sesquicentennial of the First Battle of Adobe Walls with an event on OCTOBER 4, 2014. This historically significant battle occurred on November 25th, 1864 and was the only Civil War battle fought in the Texas Panhandle. The battle site is located in present-day Hutchinson County on the Turkey Track Ranch.
The commemorative event will take place at the 1864 Adobe Walls Battle Site. Guests will be transported from the Amarillo Civic Center (at 11am) and the Borger Phillips Building (at 1pm) by bus. Participants will enjoy speeches from both sides of the battle including appearances by Kit Carson’s great-grandson and Kiowa and Comanche tribe members. Guest speakers include: Alvin Lynn, author of Kit Carson and the First Battle of Adobe Walls: A Tale of Two Journeys, Francie Whittenburg of the Turkey Track Ranch; Brett Cruse of the Texas Historical Commission; John Carson, great-grandson of Kit Carson; and James Coverdale, great-great nephew of Kiowa chief Dohasan.
No private guest vehicles will be allowed on-site and the reservation is non-refundable. Media will need to provide credentials at the gate for admission. An alternate location will be chosen in case of inclement weather.
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Uncle Billy’s Got His Eyes on You. . . .
Remarkably, not everyone seems happy about this public art installation. Imagine that.
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Richmond as Viewed from Church Hill, 1865
Tinkering around with a new zoomable image viewer tool. Built up from four separate images from the Library of Congress:
This should work well for maps, too.
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Friday Night Concert: Weird Al Yankovic’s “Word Crimes”
This may even better than the bluegrass barn dance cover by Postmodern Jukebox. Enjoy.
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Deep Sea Detectives: The Mystery of U-166
Given recent news items about the exploration of U-166 and her last victim, the passenger liner Robert E. Lee, folks might be interested in this old Deep Sea Detectives episode about the discovery and original study of those vessels:
U-166 was discovered in 2001 by two archaeologists from C&C Technologies, Rob Church and Dan Warren, going over data collected for a pipeline survey. I think it was Dan who first suggested the blurry shape might be U-166, which had never been found but was supposedly sunk many miles away. The boat’s hull is broken forward of the deck gun, and the two sections are some distance apart on the sea floor.
Once it had been determined that the wreck was indeed U-166, there was a lot of additional research done both in the U.S. and in Germany. Captain Kuhlmann’s widow was still living, and she had a trunk of his that had been sent to her after his loss that she had left intact. In it were photographs and film footage (below) of the boat during its working-up trials in the Baltic and passage to its forward operating base at L’Orient.
Digital reconstruction of U-171, another Type IXC U-boat that figures in this story, on Flickr here.
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Beating a Dead Traveller
You had to know that Brandon Dorsey, the local Confederate Heritage™ guy in Lexington, would be all over the Washington and Lee flag business, calling for the university to “return the mausoleum to the ownership of the Lee Memorial Association.” I’m not sure who Dorsey is talking about, as the Lee Memorial Association that originally funded the mausoleum appears to have furled its banner decades ago. There’s a present-day Robert E. Lee Memorial Association that operates Stratford Hall, that was begun in New York state and adopted its current name when it moved to Virginia in the 1970s, but that’s (1) clearly not the same group as in the 1880s, and (2) is one that has no claim, legal or otherwise, to the site at W&L.
Dorsey, who calls W&L President Ken Ruscio “the nations [sic.] most notorious grave robber,” has a pretty abysmal track record as a coordinator of protests going back to the Lexington flag ordinance in 2011. That ordinance passed easily, despite Dorsey’s efforts to bring in dozens of people from out of town to tell the Lexington City Council how to run their little city; his campaign to oust Mayor Mimi Elrod, that also relied heavily on people not actually from Lexington, came to naught in 2012 when Elrod won re-election by a wider margin than before; the lawsuit against the city he encouraged in federal court was a complete bust, and his ongoing boycott of the city has had no observable effect on the local tourist economy.
He did successfully coordinate the installation of a fiberglass statue of Stonewall Jackson with a sword in one hand and a golden cross in the other, by the same sculptor who did the dinosaurs-eating-Yankees amusement park, so there’s that.
Interestingly, in making his call for W&L to turn over the mausoleum to a private organization that appears not to exist, Dorsey cites the wording of the original 1882 agreement transferring the mausoleum to the school:
Dorsey doesn’t explain why this particular passage is important, perhaps because it isn’t. Nothing Washington and Lee has done violates this agreement. They haven’t mortgaged the mausoleum, or put it up as collateral, or interfered with the interments of Lee and his family. They removed decorative flags that wouldn’t be added for almost another fifty years, as is their prerogative as owners of the Washington and Lee Chapel.
Everything I’ve read about Lee suggests to me that he abhorred flashy showmanship, and was more than a little uncomfortable with the fame and renown he achieved during his lifetime. As I said last week, he didn’t use his five years as president of Washington College to turn the school into the Confederate shrine some people today want it to be, and I genuinely believe he would be embarrassed by the desire by some to make his and his family’s resting place a shrine of quasi-religious veneration, a sort of Confederate Lourdes or a Dixified version of the Kaaba. I certainly don’t believe he would have any patience with the hair-on-fire shriekers who use his memory as an excuse to engage in the most vile sort of threats, name-calling and accusation in defense of Confederate Heritage. The real, live Robert Edward Lee, a Virginia patrician first and last, wouldn’t have had those people in his front parlor.
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See Y’all in Fort Worth!
I’ll be visiting the Texas Civil War Museum in Fort Worth with some of the crew from CW Talk and signing copies of the blockade running and Buffalo Bayou books from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturday, March July 26. The museum is located at 760 North Jim Wright Freeway. I haven’t visited before, but I’ve heard lots of great things about its collection. Hope to see you there!
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I Should Have My Grog Stopped for This. . .
. . . but I missed an important sesquicentennial Wednesday, the 150th anniversary of the Admiralty Order in Council that established the White Ensign as the sole preserve of the Royal Navy. Prior to 1864, British warships might display any of three different ensigns, based on an archaic system dating back to the Restoration. (Really, don’t ask.)
So while the famous White Ensign had been around for a couple of hundred years before that in one form or another, we’re going to call July 9 the White Ensign’s 150th birthday.
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Another Review for Blockade Running
Andrew Wagenhoffer at Civil War Books and Authors has a review of the blockade running book. Money quote:
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h/t to my colleague Mark Jenkins for flagging this one.
Dead Confederates, A Civil War Era Blog 
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