Canister!
Items that don’t warrant separate posts on their own, but are of interest and worth mentioning:
The saga of the Texas SCV license plates continues. Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson, the lead advocate for the effort, published editorials in newspapers around the state (like this one) making an analogy between the proposed SCV plate and one previously approved honoring the Buffalo Soldiers. It’s now become a talking point, even popping up in the comment threads here. (It’s funny how the heritage-not-hate crowd always insists it’s never about race, but invariably and immediately falls back on the but-you-did-it-for-the-black-folks argument, instead of being considered on its own merit.) Sure enough, pounding that particular analogy has made a convoluted and unpleasant argument even more convoluted and unpleasant. Mission accomplished!- Kevin reminds us that the bromide that slavery was on its way out, and would have died a natural, peaceful death without bloodshed within a generation or two, is an assumption that only came later. It was not something the secessionists believed in 1860. It’s certainly not something believed at the time by Confederate officials and various secession conventions, much less folks like the Knights of the Golden Circle.
- Jimmy Price, who blogs about the USCT at The Sable Arm, has a profile up of Milton M. Holland, the mixed-race son of a white slaveholder from Texas. Freed by his father before the war and sent to Ohio, he eventually enlisted in the 5th USCT and earned the Medal of Honor at New Market. For those keeping score at home, First Sergeant Holland was first cousin to James Kemp Holland, a Confederate military aide during the war to Governor Murrah of Texas. It’s a small damn world.
- The Texas State Library and Archives Commission recently changed its policy on ordering copies of Texas Confederate pensions, and now requires payment up-front before the order is filled. You can still request up to ten records by e-mail, but they’ll now e-mail back with the fee required, before making and mailing the copies. (Previously they had send an invoice with the requested copies, and relied on users to follow up with payment.) They also announced that their Confederate pension holdings are in the process of being digitized by Ancestry, which will make all those documents available online to subscribers. The materials are expected to be online by February 2012.
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Image: Captain Paul J. Matthews, Founder of the Buffalo Soldiers National Museum in Houston, appeared in Austin on Thursday, Nov. 10, as the board discussed the Confederate plates. Photo: Associated Press, Ralph Barrera/Austin American-Statesman.
Friday Night Concert: “Freight Train”
Elizabeth Cotten (1895-1987) learned to play her older brother’s banjo at age seven, and soon moved on to the guitar. With no formal instruction, she taught herself to play left-handed, on a right-handed guitar strung for a right-handed player. She essentially played the guitar upside-down, plucking the strings with her left thumb and forefinger.
When she was about eleven or twelve, she wrote what would become her best-known work, “Freight Train.” In this interview, recorded two years before her death, she describes the genesis of the song:
I laid in bed at night and hear it stewing on the track, trying to come in. It said, choo-choo-chukachukachukachuka, and I’d go to sleep hearing that, the rest of the night. I guess that gave me a mind to write something about a freight train.
When she grew up, though, she put music aside and worked in a variety of jobs. In the 1950s, a chance encounter in a Washington, D.C. department store with Ruth Crawford Seeger led to her being hired as a domestic by the Seeger family. The Seegers, a fiercely musical family, quickly recognized Cotten’s musical talents, which led her — forty years after she’d mostly abandoned performing — to record for the then-burgeoning folk music market. She toured and performed frequently through the 1960s and 1970s, making regular appearances well into her ninth decade.
“Freight Train,” with its intricate melody, was an immediate hit among folk musicians (including this early, frenetic British skiffle version, turned into an outlaw ballad), and was covered by many other artists including Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, and the ’80s alternative band Opal. It’s a great favorite among amateurs, as well, including this young performer who’s about the same age as Elizabeth Cotten was when she composed the song. “Freight Train” is, in fact, such a great melody, even this Duane Eddy abomination can’t quite kill it. For my money, the simplest version of the song, played by Cotten herself on a single, acoustic guitar, remains the gold standard.
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Happy Thanksgiving, Everyone!
It’s probably a little late to go turkey-shopping for this holiday, but Nicolette Hahn Niman at The Atlantic has a neat piece on the history of the turkey, and so-called “heritage” birds that are so popular these days. I knew, of course, that turkeys were native to the Americas, but had no idea about this:
European explorers transported turkeys back to their homelands and domesticated turkeys soon became widely disseminated in Spain, Germany, France, Italy, and England. Some were eventually transported back to the colonies; the Mayflower is believed to have carried some domesticated turkeys. Early settlers commonly raised them on American farms.
From this complicated past, several varieties have emerged, although there is understandable uncertainty about their precise origins. (Note that the American Poultry Association, the official arbiter of poultry breeds, currently does not recognize the various types as distinct breeds, recognizing only turkey “varieties.”) The most successful have been the Bourbon Red, Standard Bronze, and Narragansett. The latter two are believed to descend from a strain developed in Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay region. The line was probably a cross between turkeys brought from Europe and wild American turkeys. Narragansetts and Standard Bronze turkeys, even more so, closely resemble wild turkeys, with Narragansetts being slightly smaller with feathers lighter and grayer in color.
Neat, huh? Even the “classic” American poultry, reportedly advocated by Ben Franklin as a truer symbol of the United States than the bald eagle, is an immigrant. Heh.
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Image: “Thanksgiving in camp sketched Thursday 28th 1861,” by Alfred R. Waud. Library of Congress.
Steve Perry and “Uncle Steve Eberhart”
Steve Perry, a.k.a. “Uncle Steve Eberhart,” c. 1934.
As many readers will know, African Americans were a fairly common sight at Confederate soldiers’ reunions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Today, some view photographs from these reunions as evidence that the black men shown were considered full and equal soldiers by the white veterans. While there was undoubtedly plenty of reminiscing and genuine bonhomie between the white and black men at such events, a closer look at contemporary descriptions from the time reveals that there were crucial differences in the way each group was viewed and treated that subtly but firmly reinforced the long-established racial order in the South. Simply put, even after the passage of forty, fifty or sixty years, former slaves and body servants were still expected to keep their place and defer to the attitudes that prevailed in the Jim Crow South.
Warning: The following includes extensive historical quotes that use offensive language and themes.
Didn’t See That One Coming.
From the Austin American-Statesman:
The state Department of Motor Vehicles’ governing board has just voted down a proposal for a specialty license plate displaying the Confederate battle flag.
The vote was unanimous.
I could see this vote going either way, but figured it would be close regardless. (It was a 4-4 tie last time around.) Previously I mentioned that one of my county elected officials, Cheryl Johnson, was on the board and had previously voted in favor of the measure, citing the inevitability of a lawsuit if it were not approved. She apparently did not attend the meeting today and so did not vote on the measure.
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Hearing the Rebel Yell
One of my readers points to this Smithsonian article on motion picture and audio recordings of old Civil War soldiers, shot in the early 20th century. In particular, this is a great video showing a group of old Confederate veterans recreating the famous “rebel yell.” Waite Rawls and the folks at the Museum of the Confederacy made their own effort at recreating the rebel yell, using a couple of recordings like the one above, remastered and remixed into a multitude of voices.
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“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.
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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.
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Dead Confederates, A Civil War Era Blog 
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