“This congregation of scum and wickedness”
On Friday we had a talk over at Coates’ place about the new series making its debut tonight on AMC, Hell on Wheels. TNC flags a review that cuts to the core of the plot:
The hero is Cullen Bohannon, played by Anson Mount with a grizzled animality and gaunt humanity that help the character to shoulder the burden of history. Bohannon fought for Confederacy. He was a slave owner, but he freed his slaves before the Civil War began, guided by the influence of his wife: “She convinced me of the evils of slavery.” She also did needlepoint, as we see in a dewy-eyed flashback to the days before Union soldiers raped and killed her.
Cliché much? Confederate revenge stories are getting really, really old. Any gravitas they had as a serious plot device surely died along with Quentin Turnbull.
I can imagine the pitch meeting with AMC executives right now — “OK, see, it’s, uh, like Gladiator meets Deadwood. Get it?”
Clearly the producers of this miniseries are trying to bottle the lightning of HBO’s Deadwood. I never followed that series, but (historical license aside) it was highly regarded as a drama, with complex characters and writing that turned traditional Western tropes upside down. It doesn’t sound like Hell on Wheels is even attempting to stake out new territory in the same way. Patterson’s review continues:
The players in this drama are figures in a panoramic diorama. In its world of mud and sepia, feral whores face down lank preachers, Irish immigrant brothers seek their fortunes, Scandinavian-born enforcers looms as creepily as The Seventh Seal‘s Grim Reaper, and noble savages keep on keeping on. Second billing goes to Common, who plays Elam Ferguson, a former slave working for Union Pacific. The actor does a lot of good simmering and dutiful glowering, and his character’s relationship with Bohannon is the richest one on screen. The performance is just good enough to distract you from the fact that Ferguson less resembles an individual than an archetype addressing a few centuries’ worth of racial grievances.
None of Hell on Wheels‘ juicy eruptions of pulp or sporadic glimpses of soul impedes the myth-belching progress of a story about the little engine of empire that could. The shots are heavily styled in a way that is variously enrapturing and distancing, taking cues from landscape paintings, Mathew Brady photographs, and revisionist Westerns—all to the end of toying with the old myths of the New World. But you can hardly see the world for the myths, and the show seems bent on encouraging a sophisticated audience to set its intelligence aside in a sophisticated way.
Doesn’t sound like Hell on Wheels is going to challenge anyone’s thinking about the past in the way that Deadwood did, or The Wire or Breaking Bad even Mad Men do in their more modern settings. That’s a shame because, you know — locomotives! 😉
As a side note, there was a query about the term “Hell on Wheels,” and whether it was an anachronism for the series. It’s certainly not, as it was a contemporary term for the transient settlements of saloon keepers, gambling dens and other distractions of the flesh that followed the rail head snaking west across the plains. The term, in fact, may have been popularized in part by Samuel Bowles’ 1869 book, Our New West, which gave as vivid a description of these places as any ever committed to paper:
As the Railroad marched thus rapidly across the broad Continent of plain and mountain, there was improvised a rough and temporary town at its every public stopping-place. As this was changed every thirty or forty days, these settlements were of the most perishable materials, — canvas tents, plain board shanties, and turf-hovels,—pulled down and sent forward for a new career, or deserted as worthless, at every grand movement of the Railroad company. Only a small proportion of their populations had aught to do with the road, or any legitimate occupation. Most were the hangers-on around the disbursements of such a gigantic work, catching the drippings from the feast in any and every form that it was possible to reach them. Restaurant and saloon keepers, gamblers, desperadoes of every grade, the vilest of men and of women made up this “Hell on Wheels,” as it was most aptly termed.
When we were on the line, this congregation of scum and wickedness was within the Desert section, and was called Benton. One to two thousand men, and a dozen or two women were encamped on the alkali plain in tents and board shanties; not a tree, not a shrub, not a blade of grass was visible; the dust ankle deep as we walked through it, and so fine and volatile that the slightest breeze loaded the air with it, irritating every sense and poisoning half of them; a village of a few variety stores and shops, and many restaurants and grog-shops; by day disgusting, by night dangerous; almost everybody dirty, many filthy, and with the marks of lowest vice; averaging a murder a day; gambling and drinking, hurdy-gurdy dancing and the vilest of sexual commerce, the chief business and pastime of the hours, — this was Benton. Like its predecessors, it fairly festered in corruption, disorder and death, and would have rotted, even in this dry air, had it outlasted a brief sixty-day life. But in a few weeks its tents were struck, its shanties razed, and with their dwellers moved on fifty or a hundred miles farther to repeat their life for another brief day. Where these people came from originally; where they went to when the road was finished, and their occupation was over, were both puzzles too intricate for me. Hell would appear to have been raked to furnish them; and to it they must have naturally returned after graduating here, fitted for its highest seats and most diabolical service.
So if any of y’all watch tonight, I’d be happy to hear your impressions.
Update: Alyssa Rosenberg is equally disappointed in the first few episodes.
______________
Image: Looking west from the 100th Meridian, October 1866. The man in the photo is likely either Samuel B. Reed, chief engineer of construction for the Union Pacific, or Thomas Chase Durant. Library of Congress.
General Stephen D. Lee Disses Black Confederates
One area that the advocates of black Confederate soldiers (BCS) are mostly silent on is the stated attitudes and opinions of actual Confederate leaders who lived and fought through the war of 1861-65. Those views comprise a hard, bitter lump of historical reality that must surely cause indigestion for BCS advocates, given that the “Confed cred” of those men is unassailable. We’ve seen, for example, how both Howell Cobb and his fellow Georgian, Governor Joseph Brown, viewed the prospect of arming slaves with revulsion, and saw it as a betrayal of everything the Confederacy stood for. We’ve seen how Kirby Smith asserted that the Confederacy should “go to the grave before we enlist the negro [sic.].” And we’ve seen how, according to John Brown Gordon, even the venerable Robert E. Lee himself liked to humor his colleagues with an anecdote mocking the pretensions of an African American cook to being a soldier. It’s ugly, unpleasant stuff, but it’s right there, and ignoring it won’t make it go away.
Stephen Dill Lee (right, 1833-1908) was a Confederate general — the youngest of the South’s lieutenant generals, in fact — who after the war went on to a varied career as an author, a legislator, and educator. He was very active in Confederate veterans’ organizations, and succeeded Gordon as Commander-in-Chief of the United Confederate Veterans. In many ways, S. D. Lee was the public face of Confederate veterans, both in the North and the South. S. D. Lee is remembered today particularly for his charge to the Sons of Confederate veterans, given as part of a speech in New Orleans in 1906. Lee’s charge has been used ever since as the guiding principle of the organization, and features prominently in SCV publications, both in print and online. (Read it here, at the bottom of the page.) Indeed, the quasi-academic arm of the SCV, the Stephen Dill Lee Institute, is named in his honor.
The SCV has, of course, spent a great deal of time and effort in recent years pushing the BCS meme. While lots of folks endorse or promote the idea that there were large numbers of African Americans formally enlisted and armed in the Confederate ranks, the SCV is (through its state divisions and local camps) by far the largest single proponent of the idea. Much of this is simply based on careless research or misunderstood documents, but it also results in cases of over-reach that should be genuinely embarrassing to the group, including retroactive assignment of name and rank to men who never claimed such, or the creation of an entire faux cemetery of black Confederates, without a single actual interment there.
So it comes with considerable irony to learn that around the same time the SCV was founded, S. D. Lee was telling reporters at a Confederate reunion what he thought of as a funny anecdote, complete with cartoonish African American “dialect,” that relies on ugly racial stereotypes about African Americans’ courage under fire and instinct for self-preservation for its “humor.” From the Idaho Statesman, January 25, 1896 (warning: offensive language and themes follow):
Local Texas SCV License Plate Updates
Recent developments in the public discussion over the proposed SCV license plate that caught my eye.
First, Texas legislators State Representative Sylvester Turner and State Senator Rodney Ellis argue that the state should reject the plate, using familiar arguments against the plan:
The Sons of Confederate Veterans largely dismisses the flag as a symbol of racial oppression and suggests such a view would be a misreading of the flag’s historical significance and use.
But the Sons of Confederate Veterans is attempting to rewrite a history of the South and Southern culture without a critical perspective on the damaging institution of racial slavery. . . .
Texas does not need a state-sanctioned vanity plate for the Confederacy. The reasons for this are clearly stated in the U.S. Constitution and in hundreds of efforts since the Civil War to provide equality for all citizens.
If there are Texans who wish to honor the Confederacy, let them do so on their own, through their organizations and their associations. They have the right to such free speech in the marketplace.
The state should not be a willing party to an effort to honor a symbol of those efforts that sought to divide the nation and, in doing so, fought a senseless war that took the lives of thousands of Americans.
Turner and Ellis are dead right in their assessment that the SCV (and other heritage groups) have turned a blind eye toward the long and ugly history of the Confederate Battle Flag as a symbol, choosing to focus instead on a somewhat narrow interpretation of its history in 1861-65, and willfully ignoring its much more recent usage — not by fringe hate groups, but by supposedly “respectable” people — as a symbol of intolerance and violence (figurative, if not actual). No one group, whether the SCV or the NAACP, has the prerogative to unilaterally define what the CBF “means” to others.
It turns out that my county’s Tax Assessor-Collector, Cheryl Johnson, is on the Texas Department of Motor Vehicle License Board that will decide the matter. The last time it came up for a vote (when it tied 4-4), she not only voted in support of it, it was she who made the initial motion to approve a batch of applications that included the SCV plate.
Johnson said she plans to vote for including the plate should it come up for a vote again. She said her support was not for the symbolism of hate but because the state likely would lose a lawsuit and be forced to include it anyway.
The Sons of Confederate Veterans have threatened to sue the state should the resolution not pass.
“To me, it’s a freedom of speech issue,” Johnson said. “(Sons of Confederate Veterans) have sued before to get the license plate and have won. I voted in favor because I didn’t think the state would win any lawsuit.”
So that’s a “yes” vote, but we’ll-get-sued-and-lose-anyway isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement of the plate.
Finally, Heber Taylor at the Galveston County Daily News suggests that a way around the issue is to use a different flag, on that’s less divisive, and squares well with Texas symbolism:
Use the real flag. The official one. The one that flew over government buildings in Texas during the Civil War.
That flag is called the Stars and Bars, and it has flown at theme parks such as Six Flags Over Texas, where the purpose is to educate customers, rather than to gratuitously offend.
The Stars and Bars doesn’t look like the Confederate battle flag. The official Confederate flag looked a lot like the United States flag — so much so that the soldiers on both sides were confused. In early battles, they tended to shoot friend as well as foe. So the Confederate armies carried a flag with a different design in battle.
The problem with that symbol is its history after the war, during the terror of Jim Crow. Many, perhaps most, people view it as a symbol of hatred and racism.
How do you say yes to history and no to racism?
Actually, it’s not that hard in this case.
The answer is indeed not that hard. Unfortunately Mr. Taylor’s suggestion will be a non-starter, because (as noted previously), this plate has nothing to do with honoring Confederate soldiers or commemorating the war; it’s aboutusing the aegis of state government to promote the SCV as an organization. The proposed plate says nothing about the war, or the sacrifices of Confederate soldiers or civilians; it doesn’t depict a soldier or other item representative of that conflict; it reads “Sons of Confederate Veterans” with the logo of that group, which features the CBF as its central device. They won’t change the flag on the plate because the whole point is to promote the SCV, first and last.
____________
“We don’t need to be opening old wounds.”
There’s been speculation brewing for a while now whether Governor Perry would take a position on the proposed Texas license plate promoting the SCV (right). On Wednesday, he gave his answer:
The Republican presidential hopeful was in Florida for a fundraiser and told Bay News 9’s “Political Connections” and the St. Petersburg Times that, “we don’t need to be opening old wounds.”
The plates have been requested by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a nonprofit Perry has supported over the years. They show the group’s logo, which is derived from the Confederate battle flag. . . .
But [rejecting the proposed license plate] was a departure from Perry’s past opposition to NAACP-led efforts to remove two plaques with Confederate symbols from the Texas Supreme Court building in Austin 11 years ago.
Then lieutenant governor Perry wrote to the Sons of Confederate Veterans in a March 2000 letter obtained by The Associated Press that, “although this is an emotional issue, I want you to know that I oppose efforts to remove Confederate monuments, plaques, and memorials from public property.”
“I believe that Texans should remember the past and learn from it,” Perry wrote in the letter, obtained through an open records request.
One of the 11-inch by 20-inch bronze plaques featured the seal of the Confederacy, and the other the image of the battle flag and quotations from Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. They were eventually removed in coordination with the office of then Texas Gov. George W. Bush.
Perry had waffled on the license plate question previously, simply saying its was a matter for the board to decide. That body will meet next month and may vote on the issue then. Last time it came up, a few months ago, the vote was 4 to 4, with one member absent. My thoughts on the license plate here.
I don’t think this helps Perry much, politically; it really is a no-win deal. His rhetoric in the past has pretty well established him (fairly or not) as a states-rights, secession-leanin’ sort of guy in his opponents’ eyes. To them, he’s already a caricature, and rejecting a license plate with the Confederate flag on it isn’t going to change that. On the other hand, certain folks have gone to great lengths to denounce Southern pols who, once deemed friendly to Confederate heritage issues, are seen to have become apostates in their pursuit of higher office.
Will Rick Perry be the next target of Brag Bowling’s ire?
__________
Update: Thursday’s print editions of the Houston Chronicle put this story on the front page, above the fold, all the way across. You know, the headline you see looking through the window of a newspaper vending box. This seems like a pretty small story in the larger scheme of things, but I guess it sells papers.
__________
Embellishment of Memory: Humans as “Consummate Bullshitters”
This isn’t specifically about the Civil War, but it’s highly relevant to the study of the war, because we all rely so heavily on memoirs and years-later reminiscences to understand the events of 1861-65. Via Sullivan, Jonah Lehrer looks at studies of how peoples’ accounts of past events changes over time:
Humans are storytelling machines. We don’t passively perceive the world – we tell stories about it, translating the helter-skelter of events into tidy narratives. This is often a helpful habit, helping us make sense of mistakes, consider counterfactuals and extract a sense of meaning from the randomness of life.
But our love of stories comes with a serious side-effect: like all good narrators, we tend to forsake the facts when they interfere with the plot. We’re so addicted to the anecdote that we let the truth slip away until, eventually, those stories we tell again and again become exercises in pure fiction. Just the other day I learned that one of my cherished childhood tales – the time my older brother put hot peppers in my Chinese food while I was in the bathroom, thus scorching my young tongue – actually happened to my little sister. I’d stolen her trauma.
The reason we’re such consummate bullshitters is simple: we bullshit for each other. We tweak our stories so that they become better stories. We bend the facts so that the facts appeal to the group. Because we are social animals, our memory of the past is constantly being revised to fit social pressures.
My emphasis. So much for the concept. How does it play out in practice? The effect is profound:
Consider an investigation of flashbulb memories from September 11, 2001. A few days after the tragic attacks, a team of psychologists led by William Hirst and Elizabeth Phelps began interviewing people about their personal experiences. In the years since, the researchers have tracked the steady decay of these personal stories. They’ve shown, for instance, that subjects have dramatically changed their recollection of how they first learned about the attacks. After one year, 37 percent of the details in their original story had changed. By 2004, that number was approaching 50 percent. The scientists have just begun analyzing their ten year follow-up data, but it will almost certainly show that the majority of details from that day are now inventions. Our 9/11 tales are almost certainly better – more entertaining, more dramatic, more reflective of that awful day – but those improvements have come at the expense of the truth. Stories make sense. Life usually doesn’t.
This last part is really important, and bears as well on the limitations of eyewitness testimony. Whenever people witness an event — a fender-bender in the parking lot, an argument between co-workers, the assault on Little Round Top — their perspective is necessarily different from that of other witnesses, and usually incomplete. Human memory is not a simple video recorder that inscribes a fixed and unchanging record of what we see and do; it’s fluid and dynamic process that changes over time. Our brains are wired by evolution and experience to makes sense of all those sensory inputs, to help us understand and react to what we’ve seen. In the process, we fill in gaps and make assumptions that establish a more coherent narrative to ourselves. This is involuntary and mostly unconscious. Such embellishment is not lying or deception, but neither does it reflect actual reality. When you combine that phenomenon with the multi-generational game of “telephone” which is the way most family histories are passed down, it’s a wonder that anything true comes down to us through memory. As I said a while back, referring to a relative of mine,
None of this diminishes the value of the memoirs of old veterans like Daffan, but it does remind us that, even as important as they are as the record of the men who were there, they nonetheless have real limitations. Their tales of battle, hardship, humor and adventure are only as complete as they themselves recalled them.
Or were willing to.
__________
Image: Union veteran and child, via here.
Friday Night Concert: “Roll, Alabama, Roll”
There are numerous variants of this song out there, but I like this one, as it includes verses one doesn’t often hear. It also includes a reference to a hoary old tale about the ship:
At first she was called the Two-Ninety-Two,
Roll, Alabama, roll!
For the merchants of the city of Liverpool,
Roll, Alabama, roll!
Put up the money to build the ship,
Roll, Alabama, roll!
In hopes of driving commerce from the sea,
Roll, Alabama, roll!
The mysterious number was actually 290; the “Two-Ninety-Two” of the lyric was probably chosen to rhyme (sort of) with “Liverpool.” Nonetheless, the number 290 was indeed the original designation given the to the ship before she was officially named, and it was the subject of much speculation and whispered discussion even at the time, when it was an open secret in Liverpool that John Laird & Sons, across the river, was building a warship that would ultimately find its was into Confederate hands. The rumor that “290” was a reference to the number of secret investors in the project was swirling around the Mersey, even as the ship’s frames were being set up in Birkenhead.
Alas, there was no great mystery or significance to it; Laird numbered its vessels sequentially, and Alabama happened to the 290th building project undertaken by the shipyard.
Oh, well. Still a pretty great shanty. Not half bad in Polish, either.
_________
Talkin’ Blockade Runners
I gave a talk Thursday evening at the Brazoria County Historical Museum in Angleton. I hadn’t presented on that subject in a long time, but it seemed to go reasonably well. The audience was small but engaged, with a good many questions during and after the presentation. I always think of that as a good sign. I focused primarily on the vessels I know best, Denbigh and Will o’ the Wisp. The third large steam runner wrecked near here, Acadia, is the subject of an exhibit at the museum, which houses many of the artifacts recovered from the site in the late 1960s/early 1970s.
A last-minute addition to the program was Flem Rogers, a specialist in Civil War era weapons, who brought with him several arms loaned for the evening by private collectors. All were produced in the UK and imported through the blockade. It was a great way to close the evening, with some hands-on lessons that really brought home the practical issues involved in arming Confederate forces.
I’d like to extend my thanks to Michael Bailey and Herb Boykin, of the museum, who did so much to make my visit there a pleasant and successful one. The museum has a fantastic collection — and, I will point out, a very well-organized collection storage facility, often a problematic-but-hidden aspect of local history museums — and I hope to get back down there to do some follow-up research soon.
____________
Image: ‘PS Banshee‘ by Samuel Walters, Accession number 1968.5.2, National Museums, Liverpool. This ship, the second of two Banshees that ran the blockade, made a famous daylight dash through the Federal blockade into Galveston on the morning of February 24, 1865.
Looking In From the Outside, Black Confederates Edition
Leslie Madsen-Brooks, an assistant professor of history at Boise State University, has put up an essay on the online discussion over BCS. It’s interesting to see an outsider’s view of this business. For those who’ve followed the discussion for a while, it covers a lot of familiar territory, and a lot of familiar names. For folks who are new to the subject, it gives a pretty good lay of the land, and a useful introduction to the characters involved.
And boy howdy, are there some characters. 😉
h/t Kevin Levin and Brooks “Perfesser” Simpson
_______________
Image: Unidentified young soldier in Confederate uniform and Hardee hat with holstered revolver and artillery saber, Library of Congress.
Canister
Odds and ends:
- A quick reminder that I’ll be giving a talk on Civil War blockade runners on the Texas coast at the Brazoria County Historical Museum, 100 E Cedar Street in Angleton, on Thursday evening at 6:30.
- Lynna Kay Shuffield provided some additional information on the death of Samuella Holland, wife of James Kemp Holland, that helps fill out his biography.
- The Houston Museum of Natural Science just opened a major new exhibit, Discovering The Civil War. I’ll blog more about it soon, but for now, please just go. You won’t be sorry.
Any more news items that folks should know? Put ’em in the comments.
___________
Someone Is Wrong in the Newspaper!
A friend recently pointed me to a guest column in the local paper that I’d missed, challenging the idea of a sesquicentennial celebration of Juneteenth here in 2015. The writer, Robert Hart, peppers his column with “facts” that “Juneteenth proponents should know,” which are mostly wrong. You can read it here. While Hart suggests time would be better spent interviewing African Americans about segregation, which pretty much everyone agrees was a Bad Thing, I suspect he’s mainly interested in deflecting attention off onto something other than the central role of slavery in the Confederacy. His column has almost nothing to do with Juneteenth, offering instead a list of standard Southron Heritage™ talking points about various bad acts perpetrated by the Yankees.
Anyway, the Galveston County Daily News was kind enough to run a guest column of mine today, countering Hart. It’s not great writing on my part, as I found it harder that in oughter be to keep it under 500 words:
Robert Hart recently published a guest column in the GCDN (“Juneteenth proponents should know facts,” Oct. 5), on celebrating the sesquicentennial of Juneteenth in 2015. Mr. Hart’s column, unfortunately, includes a great deal of information that serves only to deflect attention from the subject. Whether or not Ulysses Grant personally owned slaves has nothing to do with the legitimacy of Juneteenth as a day of celebration.
Worse, many of the “facts” Hart includes in his column are demonstrably false. Hart says that Grant “owned slaves in Missouri and freed them only when he had to.” In fact, Grant is known to have owned a single slave during his lifetime, a man named William Jones, possibly received from his father-in-law, probably in 1858. Grant formally manumitted (freed) Jones in March 1859.[1]
Hart claims that Robert E. Lee “freed his slaves 10 years before the war.” Not true. As biographer Elizabeth Brown Pryor discovered in going through the general’s papers, Lee personally owned slaves at least as late as 1852, considered buying more shortly before the war began, and used slaves as personal servants throughout the war itself. More important, from late 1857 onward he was acting as executor of his father-in-law’s estate at Arlington House, where he ruled with a far stricter hand than the Custises ever had. There’s credible evidence that he personally supervised the whipping of runaway Arlington slaves in 1859.[2] Lee did not formally manumit these slaves until the end of 1862.[3]
Hart continues, saying that “the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t free a single slave when it was issued.” Again, not true. As Eric Foner points out in his recent, Pulitzer Prize-winning book on Lincoln and emancipation, the order freed tens of thousands of slaves immediately in Union-occupied areas, and firmly established permanent emancipation as official war policy.[4] The Emancipation Proclamation made the Union Army a rolling, blue tide of emancipation. More than any battlefield victory, the Emancipation Proclamation doomed the Confederacy.
Hart argues that slavery in the United States ended with the passage of the 13thAmendment, but meaningful emancipation occurred over decades, and slaves themselves often made it happen. Some “stole themselves” from their masters. Tens of thousands of former slaves took up arms to free their kindred as part of the Union Army’s famed U.S. Colored Troops. Many more were emancipated (like those in Texas) when the Federal army arrived to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation.
Emancipation and the end of slavery are worth celebrating – not just for African Americans, but for all Americans who value liberty and freedom. Every date on the calendar is the anniversary of some small piece of that story, but some dates carry more significance than others. For both practical and symbolic reasons, June 19 is the best choice for Galveston, for Texas, and for the nation.
[1] Brooks D. Simpson, Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph Over Adversity, 1822‐1865 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 71-72.
[2] Elizabeth Brown Pryor, Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters (London: Penguin, 2007), 270-73.
[3] Emory M. Thomas, Robert E. Lee: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1995), 273.
[4] Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2010), 243.
Of course, h/t to Bob Pollock, who continues to do the bloggy knowledge on Grant.
___________
6 comments