Dragons - Chapter 37 (DRAFT)

“Is everything all right?”

Shit, I was thinking. An in-person interview. That means I’ll have to find time to fly to Boston. Unless they were planning to send someone out to meet me. That would be more convenient, but what are the odds of that? Will they at least pay my plane fare?

“Alan,” Bethany said. “Is everything all right?”

“What?”

“You look like you just got some bad news. Is everything all right at home?”

“Yeah,” I said quickly. “It’s fine. It’s nothing.”

“Is it Jacob?” she said, clearly not believing me. “Is he sick?”

I forced myself into the moment, thrusting my wayward thoughts aside. “No, he’s fine,” I said reassuringly. “It’s nothing, really. Just some everyday bullshit. I’m sorry it interrupted our conversation. Where were we?”

Bethany looked at me searchingly, perhaps wanting to move on, perhaps not. Then she looked down. “I was embarrassing myself in front of you,” she said. “Telling you all kinds of things I shouldn’t have.”

“Like what?” I said, genuinely surprised.

“Like all that business with Mary. I shouldn’t have told you that. She’s your boss.”

“What’s that got to do with it?” I asked, sensing a change, and wanting to rekindle the connection that had evidently been lost. “She treated you like shit. She treats everyone like shit. It’s okay. You can say it. It’s just you, me and the ocean out here.”

She smiled and then gave me a look, a look like I hadn’t seen in a long time, something that took me back to a time when Jenny and I were dating. It was nice, but awkward, and we both had to look away.

“And then I cried in front of you,” she said with gentle annoyance. “Of all the monumentally stupid things to do, a woman crying in front of her male boss has got to be at the top of the list. I can only imagine what you think of me.”

I felt the whirlpool of my worldly thoughts draining away as I realized she was doing that thing women do when they want you to reassure them, to come to their rescue. Sometimes that meant they were flirting with you, and the realization that Bethany might be flirting with me—that she had recognized my half-hearted overtures and had decided to respond in kind—it seemed to transport me. It was tantalizing, the idea that here, amidst the reminders of all the roles we were forced and we forced ourselves to play—husbands and wives, supervisors and employees—it was tantalizing that she still wanted me to think about playing one more, tantalizing and frightening at the same time. I wondered wildly how to respond, suddenly unsure if I wanted things to progress or not. In such situations, I knew, there were things you could say to shut it down, to clearly communicate that you weren’t interested, and there were other things you could say to unequivocally drive it forward, and still other things that were coy and playful, not undeniably leading anywhere, but keeping the door open and both players in the game.

“I don’t think any less of you,” I said, meaning every word but at the same time conscious of how scripted I sounded.

“You’re just saying that.”

“No,” I said. “Really,” feeling the indignation as if it was real. “You didn’t know what she was. You needed some advice and went there in good faith.”

She nodded her head ruefully, as if knowing I was right, but unable to accept it. “But I haven’t told you the worst of it. The part that makes me really upset.”

I waited the requisite number of seconds. “I’m listening.”

She settled back on her hands, her strong calves and bare feet dangling off the ledge and her white blouse glowing in the moonlight. Was she arching her back? Or just stretching?

“How does Jenny like staying at home with Jacob?”

I remembered the phone call from earlier that evening and the way it had made me feel isolated and impotent, and I realized that this conversation, this script no one had written but everyone knew by heart, would probably end at the same destination. I suddenly wanted to derail it. I wanted something, but not this. Maybe it was the sea air. Maybe it was the kind of day I had had, starting in one time and place and ending in another. Maybe I was just sick of pretending, of play-acting, of trouble-shooting other people’s problems as if I knew how to fix everything.

“She hates it,” I said. “She can’t handle it. I called home earlier tonight and caught the two of them in the middle of a battle royal. I had to talk them both in off the ledge. If I hadn’t called, I think Jenny would have wound up hurting him.”

It was a stark confession, but it fell effortlessly off my lips, and felt good doing so. These things were true, weren’t they? Sometimes you had to say them out loud to really be sure.

“Maybe Jenny and I should change places.”

She said it flippantly, giving me enough latitude to take whichever meaning I preferred. I looked at her and our eyes locked. Are you still flirting with me? I sent silently. I’ve dropped my façade. Will you?

Slowly she nodded, lowering her eyes as if unsure of her footing in this new territory.

“What I mean is I’m thinking about quitting and staying home with Parker.”

“You are?”

“I am,” she said, her words starting to flow more easily. “It’s taken me a while, but I’m finally beginning to realize that Mary wasn’t just rude, she was manipulating me. She manipulates everyone. She gets you to do what she wants by making you second-guess your own instincts. I was struggling, and she knew it. God was telling me to stay home with my baby, but I didn’t want to listen.”

Oh, fuck. God.

“Don’t look at me that way, Alan. He’s real, you know, and sometimes He tries to tell you things. But you have to listen, and I wasn’t. I was so focused on trying to be something I’m not, something I thought I wanted to be, that I couldn’t hear Him even though he was talking directly to me.”

I held my tongue. Bethany and I didn’t see eye to eye on God, but we didn’t have to. He was part of who she was, and if we were going to walk together on this beach, I was going to have to accept that and not judge her.

“Look, it doesn’t matter. What matters is Mary played me, and I came back to work after Parker was born just like she wanted. By reacting the way she did, by treating my pregnancy with so much disgust, she made me think that’s how all professional women felt, that all successful women dumped their kids in daycare and got back to work as soon as they could. If that’s what I wanted to be, that was what I was going to have to do. She didn’t even have to convince me. Just looking at me the way she did, I couldn’t imagine it any other way.”

As I listened, letting go of my expectations of her, it became clear that all our scripts truly had been left behind, and I found a new exhilaration absent the fear that had accompanied the previous one. Boss and employee, husband and wife, father and mother—we had not only dropped all of our existing roles, importantly we had failed to pick up the new one we had been toying with, not wanting it, not even for the frivolous thrill play-acting it would bring. Out here, alone and in the presence of infinity, we had become just two people talking honestly with each other, all of our pretense left at the foot of the wooden hotel stairs with our shoes.

“And now you feel differently,” I said.

“God, yes,” Bethany said, her eyes tearing up again.

I held out my arm. It felt honest and natural. And Bethany accepted it in the same spirit, scooting over to nestle in next to me, her head in the crook of my shoulder.

“It’s okay,” I said, squeezing her warmly. “You don’t have to be anything you don’t want to be. Not for David, not for Mary, not even for me.”

She touched my thigh, but there was nothing provocative about it, and it did not arouse me. It was just a human touch, her inner need silently matching mine, desperate for the non-judgmental connection it seemed only we could offer each other. On our beach that night there was no history and no presumptions, just two people who had found each other lost in the same maze. In a few minutes, I knew, we’d get up and resume our independent searches for the way out, but for that moment, for that endless and fleeting now, we blissfully shared the simple understanding that neither one of us had built the damn thing—at least not intentionally.

She sighed heavily. “Why are things so difficult?”

I shook my head, my chin brushing through her hair, the fresh smell of it filling my nostrils. “I don’t know, Bethany.” I said soothingly, almost adding, I wish I did, but holding it back. The waves came crashing in, and I felt comfortably lost in the limitless possibilities of life.

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“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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A Campaign of Giants by A. Wilson Greene

This one has a nice story behind it. Here’s what I said at the end of my post on On to Petersburg by Gordon C. Rhea:

Sadly, there are apparently no more works coming anytime soon from Rhea’s masterful pen. But he does leave this reader with some kind of hope for the future.

“The executive director of Pamplin Historical Park, A. Wilson Greene, is the leading historian of the Petersburg Campaign. He has recently completed the first book of a multivolume study that when finished will stand as the authoritative word on the campaign.”

It’s already on my "Books to Get" list.

That was in September 2018. I’m writing now in August 2019 and, needless to say, A Campaign of Giants, subtitled The Battle For Petersburg, and further subtitled Volume One: From the Crossing of the James to the Crater, is that referenced work.

Let’s jump right in. It is Saturday, June 18, 1864. Much of Grant’s army has already crossed the James River, and major pieces of it are hurling themselves against earthwork lines hastily thrown up by the Rebels in an attempt to capture Petersburg and cut the supply lines for the Confederate capital at Richmond. As you read this extended excerpt, know that I am including it because it is essentially the story of the entire campaign in miniature.

Colonel [Joshua Lawrence] Chamberlain had emerged from the obscurity of regimental command on July 2, 1863, when his unit, the Twentieth Maine, successfully defended the far left flank of the army on Gettyburg’s Little Round Top. Chamberlain would receive the Medal of Honor for his heroism that day, but a more immediate reward resulted in his promotion to command of Griffin’s First Brigade. Chamberlain’s outfit included five depleted veteran regiments and an oversized new one, Pennsylvanians all. The thirty-five-year-old Chamberlain had been a professor at Maine’s Bowdoin College when he left the classroom in 1862 to fight for the Union. His distinguished postwar political and literary career -- including a penchant for self-promotion -- and the attention paid him by modern writers and filmmakers have elevated Chamberlain’s stature well beyond what it was on June 18, 1864, although without doubt the colonel from Maine enjoyed a sterling reputation among those who knew him.

Are you with me so far? A citizen soldier, in the proudest American tradition. Elevated to command because of his courage, competency, and good fortune. Now, for the situation he’s facing.

Chamberlain had managed to advance his brigade across the railroad and into cleared ground south of Baxter Road, where Confederate shells played havoc with his waiting troops. The colonel placed his seasoned regiments, averaging about 250 men each, in his first line, extending along a front of about 400 yards. The 121st Pennsylvania anchored his left with the 142nd Pennsylvania, 150th Pennsylvania, 149th Pennsylvania, and 143rd Pennsylvania aligned, in that order, left to right. The rookie 187th Pennsylvania, numbering about 1,000 muskets and innocent of any combat experience, deployed in a second line some fifty yards behind the first and covering about three-fourths of the length of its five sister regiments. Two batteries -- Capt. Patrick Hart’s Fifteenth New York and Capt. John Bigelow’s Ninth Massachusetts -- came forward to provide close support, joined later by a third set of guns.

The war has been going on for a long time. Pennsylvania would in total organize 215 numbered infantry regiments in the Civil War, and the rookie 187th is now making its appearance. The “veteran” regiments of the 121st, 142nd, 143rd, 149th, and 150th are all down to about 250 men, meaning that each has lost 750 or more to battle wounds, death and/or disease. And note the precision that Greene attempts when placing each one on the battlefield. This, I’ve discovered, is often the mark of a serious historian.

While supervising the initial deployment, Chamberlain and his staff looked up to see a Confederate shell that exploded immediately above them. The blast unhorsed every officer in the colonel’s entourage, severely wounded Chamberlain’s mount, Charlemagne, and claimed the lives of three men while wounding seven others, including the brigade color bearer. Chamberlain retrieved the flag and held it aloft as his troops withdrew a short distance to a safer location, awaiting orders for an assault against the main Confederate line.

Needless to say, mortal danger abounds. For his men. For Chamberlain and his officers. Even for his horses.

Those orders, according to Chamberlain, arrived in the person of an unidentified lieutenant colonel bearing instructions “in the name of the general commanding” for Chamberlain’s brigade to assault the enemy’s works alone. An astonished Chamberlain purportedly penned a three-paragraph response to the unidentified general officer (presumably Meade) explaining the operational situation and suggesting that if an attack be made, the entire army should be ordered forward. When the staff officer returned, he brought the welcome news that the rest of the army would, indeed, be ordered forward, but that Chamberlain’s advanced position dictated that his brigade lead the effort.

Perhaps because of the hasty movement across the James, general officers are far from the troops that they command. Orders are sent based on the sketchiest of operational understandings. Some brigade or even regimental commanders question the orders they are given, some carry them out, and some firmly refuse to do so.

This tale had been repeated so often as to become generally accepted as factual. Its pedigree, however, is suspiciously limited to Chamberlain’s own testimony and that of a sergeant in the 143rd Pennsylvania, Patrick DeLacy, both writing several decades after the war. The notion that Meade would send direct orders to a lowly brigade commander, bypassing both Warren and Griffin in the process, is illogical, as is Chamberlain’s claim that he directed a written response straight to the army commander without going through channels. No evidence exists of any order designating Chamberlain to lead the attack, although the peculiar terrain that prevented a coordinated advance among Warren’s units might have left Chamberlain with the impression that his regiments had charged alone. The complaints of Sweitzer’s soldiers that Chamberlain had failed to provide support on their left demonstrates that both of Griffin’s attacking brigades went forward without a firm physical or visual connection. Chamberlain’s postwar version of events has come under question in other contexts and this seems to be an example of the eloquent colonel’s fondness for enhancing his personal reputation and that of his soldiers at the expense of the truth.

We see only through a glass darkly, and one of the things darkening the glass is the desire of the combatants to promote their own brands rather than communicate (or even understand) the truth. Again, like any serious historian, Greene is trying to get to the truth, and is willing to call into question anything that seems fishy or otherwise calculated for the approval of posterity.

It is incontestable, however, that Chamberlain’s Pennsylvanians charged ahead about 3:00 P.M., consistent with Warren’s wishes. They faced a daunting task. Kershaw’s Division, thought by the Federals to be 3,000 to 5,000 strong and well supported by artillery, waited behind the works of the old Dimmock Line and the hasty barricades constructed by Beauregard’s forces early that morning. Ransom’s Tar Heels and Elliott’s South Carolinians Dug in on Kershaw’s left, opposite Chamberlain, as part of an unbroken chain of Beauregard’s brigades. Chamberlain’s men would top the small ridge behind which they had sought protection, descend into the valley of Poor Creek, and then climb toward the Confederate line across shelterless ground. Chamberlain explained to his regimental commanders that they were to move quickly down the slope, break ranks to cross the stream as rapidly as possible, then re-form on the other side and rush the enemy. The veterans in Chamberlain’s first line knew that many would never return from such a mission, and an officer in the new 187th Pennsylvania shared their concern. “My heart dropped to my shoes,” he remembered. “Cold drops stood on my forehead [and] my blood was frozen solid.”

Men were about the charge an entrenched line of determined defenders. They were frightened, but they would do it anyway, believing it was necessary and honorable to do so.

The Maine colonel attempted to calm the nerves of his anxious soldiers by delivering an inspirational speech and positioning himself at the head of the lead column. “Attention! Trail Arms! Double-quick, march,” Chamberlain intoned as the buglers sounded the advance. The men crested the ridge and began to take musketry and artillery fire while yelling “like a pack of infuriated devils,” then plunged into the morass at the base of the hill. Chamberlain, on foot, reached the little stream, whose banks were festooned with dwarf trees and thick vegetation. Enfilading fire peppered the drainage, and Chamberlain saw that maneuvering through this terrain would be a deadly business. He turned to his left and began to give instructions for the men to oblique to their left in order to expedite their advance. As he did so, a minie ball ricocheted off the ground and into his right hip, passed through his lower abdomen, nicked his bladder and urethra, and came to rest just under the skin behind the bone near his left hip.

Correctly diagnosed. A deadly business.

The wound was as painful as it was serious, and Chamberlain staggered under the blow. Fearing, however, that by falling he would demoralize his men, the colonel thrust his officer’s sabre into the ground as a prop and continued to stand as his troops rushed past and ascended up the slope. Eventually, a loss of blood compelled his collapse. In the meantime, some of Chamberlain’s men reached the base of the Confederate works before the lethal fire pouring from the muzzles of rifles and cannon stopped them, and then drove most of them back down the hill, leaving the ground blanketed with casualties. A few intrepid souls remained at the base of the works, in defilade and hoping that a renewed attack or nightfall would provide them relief. The green soldiers of the 187th Pennsylvania broke when they reached the ravine, and although some of them rallied, their hesitance robbed the brigade of whatever slim chance it enjoyed of breaking the Rebel line. “Our boys killed ‘blue bellies’ to their hearts content,” wrote a satisfied captain in Kershaw’s Division.

An unsupported attack, breaking hard against an entrenched line, and fizzling, leaving some men in retreat, some dead, and some pinned down in an impossible situation.

Two of Chamberlain’s aides, Lts. West Funk and Benjamin Waters, spied their colonel lying down in the mud and muck and dragged him out of the defile. Chamberlain remained conscious and ordered the subalterns to notify the brigade’s ranking officer that he was now in charge. He also instructed them to find support for the artillery, which was on the near side of the railroad cut and in danger of capture should the Confederates come screaming down the slope in a counterattack. Funk and Waters did as they were told, and Chamberlain remained alone, his life blood oozing into the Virginia soil.

Meanwhile, the attention of combatants, commanders, and historians alike are drawn to the gallantry of their officers, men bravely committed to achieving the practically impossible. To wit, the following three paragraphs.

When Captain Bigelow of the Ninth Massachusetts Battery learned of Chamberlain’s wounding, he sent some men to retrieve him. The colonel waved them off and, thinking his wound fatal, urged them to devote their attention to those who might be saved. The cannoneers ignored this plea and, under fire from Confederate ordnance, loaded Chamberlain onto a litter and carried him to a spot behind Bigelow’s guns. Eventually, an ambulance transported the colonel to a field hospital several miles distant, where the first surgeon he saw declared him a lost cause.

By this time, the colonel’s younger brother, Capt. Tom Chamberlain, had learned of his sibling’s dire situation and persuaded two surgeons form his old brigade, Dr. A. O. Shaw of the Twentieth Maine and Dr. M. W. Townsend of the Forty-Fourth New York, to examine his brother. These physicians recognized a difficult case but decided to attempt to repair the damage to Chamberlain’s internal organs. Chamberlain had not been fully sedated, and at one point during the procedure his suffering became so acute that the doctors considered abandoning their work to spare a dying man such agony. Chamberlain, however, encouraged them to continue, and against all odds they managed to complete their work and provide the colonel at least the chance for recovery.

Warren and Griffin both reached the hospital once the fighting ebbed for the day and watched somberly, believing like most others that the gallant colonel would soon breathe his last. At Chamberlain’s behest, they hurriedly drafted a request to promote the wounded man to brigadier general, hoping that the honor could be approved before the sufferer expired. Their request reached Grant’s desk on June 20 and by virtue of Special Orders No. 39, the general-in-chief named Chamberlain a brigadier general of volunteers to rank from June 18. Despite the work of Shaw and Townsend, Chamberlain also considered himself mortally wounded and wrote a heartfelt letter to his wife on June 19, pledging his undying love and promising to meet her in heaven. But God had other plans for Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. Transferred to the Naval Hospital in Annapolis, Maryland, Chamberlain received excellent care, and on September 20 he earned a discharge and a convalescent furlough. On November 18, 1864, Chamberlain would return to active duty.

But God had other plans. What tribute to gallantry would be complete without the obligatory appeal to Providence? Disappointing that the Almighty wasn’t focused on rescuing any other members of His flock.

Chamberlain’s brigade failed to break the Confederate line for reasons other than simply the wounding of its popular commander. Like Sweitzer, Wheaton, and Martindale, the Pennsylvanians had charged with what they perceived as little direct support on their left.

And there you have it. As I said, a story in miniature of the whole campaign -- and maybe the entire Civil War. Courageous action, hampered by political jockeying and uncoordinated attacks, and lauded with providential appeals to heart-tugging gallantry.

All That Is Possible For Men To Do

I really want to underscore the juxtaposition of what happened in the trenches versus what happened in the command tents of this campaign. Here’s a description of another uncoordinated and unsupported attack on the Confederate line.

Ayres ordered his division forward at 3:00 P.M. in concert with the rest of the Fifth Corps, but he made little progress. “Just as soon as we raised the top of our works the rebs opened,” wrote Sgt. Charles Thomas Bowen of the Twelfth U.S. Infantry. “Sometimes a solid shot would knock a file of men ten feet in the air or a charge of canister tear down half a dozen files.” Bowen thought that “the air seemed full of iron of all shapes whizzing by us” and the officers ordered the regulars to hit the dirt. “We gradually sunk ourselves in the sandy soil by a regular hen scratching with our hands,” admitted Bowen, who considered the resistance to be “the heaviest artillery fire I ever was in … Arms, legs, headless trunks, & heads without bodies were strewn in every direction.” The 146th New York suffered a similar nightmare. Their officers quickly called a halt to the slaughter and the men employed their bayonets and tin cups to create “a miniature breastwork” behind which they made themselves “as small as possible to avoid Confederate fire.” A shell decapitated the Fifth New York’s color bearer, splattering his brains over his comrades before that regiment reached cover.

Want more?

Dushane’s Marylanders hardly moved forward at all, but on Ayres’s right Kitching’s heavy artillery regiments formed in two lines and advanced at the signal. Kitching reported the loss of 159 men to a “fearful fire of artillery and musketry” and his soldiers, too, employed “bayonets, spoons, hands, sticks, -- almost anything … to ‘scratch dirt,’ and like magic a line of two or three thousand men who are one moment exposed to every shot will be pitching head foremost into the earth, like moles.” Field’s troops were beginning to arrive and they contributed to the almost effortless repulse of Ayres’s division. “The men went in, but not with spirit,” thought Colonel Lyman, “as much to say, ‘We can’t assault but we won’t run.’” Ayres managed to shift some of his troops into abandoned Batteries 22 and 23 on the Dimmock Line, facing west, and thus refusing the army’s left flank. Warren suggested that the assaults be renewed that evening, but Meade disapproved. “We have done all that is possible for men to do,” confessed the army commander, “and must be resigned to the result.”

That, I think, may be the best summary of all. We have done all that is possible for men to do, if, by men, you mean the men in the squads, companies, and regiments that are offering themselves up for slaughter on the off chance that someone, somewhere can pierce the Confederate line and turn the tide of battle for the scattered and distracted Federals.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I get it. Like Lee at Gettysburg, or Grant at Cold Harbor, you don’t really know what men can do until you throw them with love and patriotism into the meat grinder of battle. And in the brutal efficacy of combat, there are only so many tools in the toolbox, and most of them are thinking, breathing people with inner dialogues and others who love them. But at some point, does it not become essential to break out of the mold that has been cast for you, to recognize meaningless slaughter for what it is, and to seek some other way of solving your problems and resolving your differences?

That, unfortunately for the American Civil War, was never the job of the generals. It was the job of the politicians. And they, famously, were abundantly inadequate to their task.

The Incident at Stony Creek

But the lessons explored above are manifest in dozens of other Civil War engagements. The Petersburg Campaign has other and somewhat unique lessons to teach us, to better understand the heartlessness of man and the horror of war.

When the Federals reached the narrow bridge over Stony Creek, they found a deep stream defined by precipitous and rocky banks. General Wilson and his staff forced their way across the span near the head of the column, leaving the impression that the commander “was confoundedly alarmed.” A bottleneck occurred as the frantic aggregation of cavalry and hundreds of terrified blacks attempted to gain access to the slender bridge. The Second New York Cavalry, First Connecticut Cavalry, and Fifth New York Cavalry tried to blunt the pursuing Confederates. They inflicted a few casualties, wounding Maj. James Breathed of Lee’s horse artillery, but the mass of retreating humanity turned the entire operation into anarchy. “The men were almost completely demoralized,” remembered Chaplain Louis Boudrye of the Fifth New York Cavalry, “at least one third having either thrown away or lost their arms in the flight.” Some troopers desperately endeavored to ride their horses down the steep slope and across the wide stream, many of them tumbling into the swirling water. “Men and horses mingled in almost every conceivable shape, struggled to reach the opposite bank,” remembered Boudyre, “while bullets whizzed among the trees, and shells screamed over our heads.”

Lomax and Wickham applied the pressure at Stony Creek. “They fired right smartly … & partially checked us but … the enemy retired rather sullenly until our sabres began to knock their caps off,” boasted a trooper from the Third Virginia Cavalry. “They then fled precipitately exposing to view about 1500 negroes scampering across the fields (of all sizes & sexes) with great bundles of plunder stolen from their masters’ houses, upon their backs. … Such screaming & yelling as they sent up Pandemonium itself could scarcely beat.”

Are you following the scene here? The Confederates have repulsed another anemic Federal charge -- this time of cavalry -- and are chasing not just the soldiers, but a passel of (soon to be former?) slaves, who are desperately trying to reach the perceived safety of the Union lines. And the slaves in question are not just young men (like the Union soldiers), but include whole families: men, women and children. Now, brace yourself before reading on.

Many soldiers in blue and gray commented on the tragic abandonment of infants and toddlers, tossed aside by desperate slave mothers facing the awful choice between escaping slavery or being seized with their offspring. “Little nigger babies could be found lying in the woods nearly dead that were thrown away by the Yankees in their flight,” wrote a Virginian, choosng to blame Northern soldiers under the standard premise that few of the slaves left their homes voluntarily. The African Americans vied with Union troopers at the crossing of Stony Creek, faring poorly in the competition, and many were left stranded on the north side, to be captured or killed by the pursuing Confederates. “Negro women were seen throwing their little babies ruthlessly aside,” reported Pvt. John Gill of the First Maryland Cavalry Battalion, although it is possible instead that the mothers sought safety for their infants by placing them out of harm’s way. “Our men became greatly enraged, and it was difficult to restrain them. It was a question of quarter or no quarter, and it was mostly no quarter.” An officer in the First Vermont Cavalry confirmed that “the Rebels seemed to be inflamed with rage against the Negroes for running away, and leaving the ‘Yankees,’ would sabre the ‘Niggers’ without mercy.” Only about 200 of the runaway slaves managed to navigate the creek and keep pace with the fleeing Federal horsemen. Few Civil War scenes involving noncombatants would present greater horror.

It’s a good thing those Southerners were fighting for their right of their States to secede from the Union, because I’d hate to think of terrified mothers and their babies being slaughtered for some unimportant reason. Was there anyone, I wonder, who witnessed this scene and seriously asked themselves what they were doing in the war and why? If it hadn’t happened to me before this, I’d have to believe that this is the incident that would have pushed me off the pacifist cliff. I mean, really. Is anything you want so important that it warrants the murder of mothers and their babies?

The Sacrifice of Life Was Useless

I was happy to see, however, that some in the Union army began to question some of the tactics of their commanders.

The soldiers manifested their disillusionment in several ways, most pointedly in their disinclination to execute frontal assaults, the standard tactic in most engagements. “One thing is certain,” averred Lt. Col. Hazard Stevens, “our men are not so ready to charge earthworks as they were, so many of the best officers and men have been killed that the remainder are rather averse to rushing in blindly.” Surg. Nathan Hayward of the celebrated Twentieth Massachusetts, a unit that had seem more than its share of savage combat, agreed that “the Second Corps will no longer charge works with the vigor and enthusiasm with which they commenced their series of charges.” Citing the death or wounding of twenty brigade commanders and seventy regimental leaders in such assaults, Hayward asserted that “the sacrifice of life was useless and the soldiers knew it.” He decried that “orders for the charges have been given in the coldest methodical official manner … not the presence of general to encourage and inspire the men by the example of their own determination,” and insisted that these reluctant soldiers “are not cowards; they are eager to meet the rebels on an equal field. But they have lost faith in the wisdom of generals who order assaults … with what they consider insufficient means.” Lt. Claron I. Miltimore of the Thirty-Seventh Wisconsin simply concluded that “Grant and Lee are building a mighty slaughter pen for many an innocent victim as the ox who walks coolly to the slaying floor.”

This is a much different army than the one Grant took into the Wilderness in early May 1864. In two short months, assault after fruitless assault has not only worn it down, it has shown it the absolute futility of the approach still championed by its generals.

And perhaps nowhere is that futility more apparent than in the debacle that is “battle” of The Crater. Greene uses this as the climax to this, his first volume on the Petersburg campaign. It is the slaughter that ensued when some Pennsylvania miners tunneled under the Confederate line and exploded a mine directly beneath it, creating a deep and steep-walled crater that the waiting Union troops were unable to exploit. Instead, inexperienced troops (mostly African-Americans) were marched down into it, where they were shot mercilessly by the surviving and surrounding Confederates.

Wounded men … were the exception in the crater that grim afternoon. “The slaughter was fearful,” explained Captain Featherston. “The dead were piled on each other. In one part of the fort I counted eight bodies deep.” Pvt. James Paul Verdery of the Forty-Eighth Georgia entered the crater, but found the center “invisible to the eye owing to the many dead & dying Blacks piled upon one an other.” David Holt of the Sixteenth Mississippi thought that the scene in the crater “was the most horrible sight that even old veterans … had ever seen,” exceeding the carnage at Spotsylvania’s Bloody Angle. Surgeon Minor considered the spectacle unnerving. “The ditches were almost filled with the dead. Men had to walk on the dead, could not find room for their feet. Such a sight,” he informed his sister, “was never seen before.”

It was a nightmare. But in many ways, only a sequel of what had come before, and a preview of what horrors were yet to come. I’m anxious to read Greene’s forthcoming volumes.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Dragons - Chapter 36 (DRAFT)

“Hello?”

“Well, he’s finally to bed.”

I looked at my watch. It was almost eleven, more than three hours since Jenny and I had last spoke.

“Jacob?”

“Yes, Jacob. Your little trick worked. I let him calm down and then let him choose.”

“Did he brush his teeth?” In some ways it was like no time had passed at all.

“Yes. I let him pick which toothpaste to use. We opened the new tube I just bought at the pharmacy. It was a new flavor and he really liked it.”

Bethany had turned her head away, as if to give me some measure of privacy, but I didn’t want it. I reached out and grabbed her hand, forcing her to turn back and look at me.

“I’m glad.”

“Where are you?” Jenny asked. “I think I can hear the ocean.”

I smiled at Bethany. “I’m taking a walk on the beach,” I said, and she smiled back, exactly like we were sharing a secret.

“Nice. Throw a stone in the ocean for me.”

“It was a long day. I thought I’d try to clear my head a little before going up to bed. I’m nearly back to my hotel now.” It was fun, in a way. These lies. That’s what they were, right? Lies? They didn’t feel like lies the way they rolled off my tongue.

“Well, I’m tired, too. I was just calling because I forgot to tell you something earlier.”

“What’s that?” I said, giving Bethany’s hand a squeeze.

“Quest Partners called. They want to set-up an in-person interview.”

“What?” I said, suddenly pulling my hand away from Bethany’s and switching the phone to the other side of my head. “When?”

“This afternoon. I tried to call your cell but you must have been in the air. And then tonight with Jacob it slipped my mind.”

“No, when do they want to set-up the—” I stopped suddenly, realizing that I may not want to reveal to Bethany that I was interviewing. “When do they want to meet?”

“As soon as you’re able,” Jenny said. “They seem really interested in meeting you in person. I told them you were traveling on business and wouldn’t be back until late next week. But you should call them tomorrow if you can.”

Bethany was looking at me with great concern, and I could only imagine what she might be thinking. I tried to dismiss her with a quick shake of my head and fluttering hand. “Who? Call who?” I said intently into the phone.

“Pamela Thornsby. The woman you already spoke to. Do you have her number?”

“Yes...” I said, my free hand unconsciously patting myself down as if I would turn up Pamela’s number in one of my pockets. I had blown the phone interview with her. I was absolutely certain I had. Now she wanted a second, in-person interview. It couldn’t make any sense out of it. “Yes, I do. I’ll call her.”

“Good. If you get the chance, call me a let me know how it goes. I told you I had a good feeling about this one.”

“Okay.”

“Good night, honey. I love you.”

“I love you, too.” I said it distantly, the phone folding shut as it fell away from my face.

+ + +

“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/

The Redskins by James Fenimore Cooper

One of the things I like about Cooper -- and about the series of “Littlepage manuscripts” of which The Redskins in the third and final volume -- is that he is a political writer. He’s writing fiction -- fiction with characters and plot and pacing -- but with a political subtext throughout. And although that political subtext is taken from the now long-forgotten 1840s, some of the issues that he dramatizing are as relevant today as they were then.

Case in point, this, from Cooper’s preface:

Every one who knows much of the history of the past, and of the influence of classes, must understand, that whenever the educated, affluent, and the practised, choose to unite their means of combination and money to control the political destiny of a country, they become irresistible; making the most subservient tools of those very masses who vainly imagine they are the true guardians of their own liberties.

Cooper is talking about tenants on gentried land, who have been taught to couch in the language of liberty their desire to abdicate the lawfully-binding covenants with their landlords and to take possession of the land they have worked and improved, sometimes over generations. But his words could just as easily be applied to today’s political movements of both the left and right, where different segments of the educated, affluent, and the practised are choosing to unite their means of combination and money to control the political destiny of a country, while the subservient masses imagine they are truly guarding their own liberties. Think of battles over the Second Amendment. Or Abortion.

But although Cooper isn’t dramatizing those thorny issues, he is dramatizing a kind of political science. Indeed, the first hundred pages or so of his manuscript read almost like a Platonic dialogue, in which spokespeople on both sides of the argument present and defend their positions. One of these voices, of course, is a Littlepage -- in this case Hugh Littlepage, the grandson of Mordaunt Littlepage, the protagonist of Cooper’s earlier work The Chainbearer, himself the son of Cornelius Littlepage, the protagonist of Cooper’s even earlier work Satanstoe.

At one point in this dialogue, Hugh, having just returned from Europe to his native estate in upstate New York, is learning from his uncle the extent to which some of the tenants of his estate are going to claim the lands for themselves. He is aghast that such unlawful conduct. He says:

“I wonder the really impartial and upright portion of the community do not rise in their might, and put this thing down -- rip it up, root and branch, and cast it away, at once.”

To which his uncle replies:

“That is the weak point of our system, which has a hundred strong points, while it has this besetting vice. Our laws are not only made, but they are administered, on the supposition that there are both honesty and intelligence enough in the body of the community to see them well made and well administered. But the sad reality shows that good men are commonly passive, until abuses become intolerable; it being the designing rogue and manager who is usually the most active. Vigilant philanthropists do exist, I will allow; but it is in such small numbers as to effect little on the whole, and nothing at all when opposed by the zeal of a mercenary opposition. No, no -- little is ever to be expected, in a political sense, from the activity of virtue; while a great deal may be looked for in the activity of vice.”

This will give you a taste of what I mean. It is a fictionalized dialogue, but in it you can hear the echoes of Edmund Burke, James Madison, and other political philosophers.

Hugh Littlepage is the novel’s narrator, and he, and therefore much of Cooper’s narrative voice, is clearly on the side of the landlords in the political dispute that frames the drama of The Redskins. At one point, in a discussion with his business agent, the agent says this:

“One thing has struck me in this controversy as highly worthy of notice; and it is the naivete with which men reconcile the obvious longing of covetousness with what they are pleased to fancy the principles of liberty! When a man has worked a farm a certain number of years, he boldly sets up the doctrine that the fact itself gives him a high moral claim to possess it forever. A moment’s examination will expose the fallacy by which these sophists apply the flattering unction to their souls. They work their farms under a lease, and in virtue of its covenants. Now, in a moral sense, all that time can do in such a case is to render these covenants the more sacred, and consequently more binding; but these worthies, whose morality is all on one side, imagine that these time-honored covenants give them the right to fly from their own conditions during their existence, and to raise pretensions far exceeding anything they themselves confer, the moment they cease.”

This is much of the sense of Littlepage’s opposition throughout the novel -- they are not just confused, or even duped by “the educated, affluent, and the practised” -- they are, in fact, sinful and immoral. They wish to take what is not theirs, and they wish to do it in the hypocritical guise of their own liberty. And there is one particular device that Cooper employs to illustrate this hypocrisy that helps to make this novel a very interesting read.

The Redskins

The title of the novel, The Redskins, is an allusion to this device. Some of the tenants, modeling themselves after the storied patriots of the Boston Tea Party, have taken to disguising themselves as Indians, and in that costume, have perpetrated night raids and vandalism on the property of their landlords. These Redskins, however, are not called that by any of the characters in the book. The term of reference is instead “Injins.” And in the long narrative arc of Cooper’s trilogy, this is not meant as a term of respect.

Here, Hugh is thinking about asking some true Native Americans to help him keep watch against an attack from these “Injins.”

If “fire will fight fire,” “Indian” ought to be a match for “Injin” any day. There is just the difference between these two classes of men, that their names would imply. The one is natural, dignified, polished in his way -- nay, gentleman-like; while the other is a sneaking scoundrel, and as vulgar as his own appellation. No one would think of calling these last masquerading rogues “Indians”; by common consent, even the most particular purist in language terms them “Injins.” “Il y a chapeau et chapeau,” and there are “Indian” and “Injin.”

For there are “Indians” in The Redskins -- in particular one Indian, who has been with the Littlepage story from the very beginning. His name is Susquesus, also known as Trackless, and when Hugh and his uncle first come across him, sunning himself in a clearing with an equally old companion, these are the comments that are offered:

“There are the two old fellows, sunning themselves this fine day!” exclaimed my uncle, with something like tremor in his voice, as we drew near enough to the hut to distinguish objects. “Hugh, I never see these men without a feeling of awe, as well as of affection. They were the friends, and one was the slave of my grandfather; and as long as I can remember, have they been aged men! They seem to be set up here as monuments of the past, to connect the generations that are gone with those that are to come.”

Cooper doesn’t get much more transparent than that. For Susquesus, and his companion, the slave Jaaf, are exactly that. Monuments to the past. And in that guise they serve several important functions. They are not just rocks that stand in the swift-moving stream, they are moral sentinels that stand watch over the changing generations; the unchanging and innate sense of truth and justice that lives at the heart of men.

A central action of the novel is a large sojourn of many Indians, all come to pay homage to the wisdom of the ancient Onondago chief Susquesus, and perhaps to take him back with them to the advancing wilderness. For as Cooper did so expertly in The Leatherstocking Tales, he does here again in The Littlepage Manuscripts. As the white man and his civilization encroaches deeper and deeper into the American continent, the wilderness, and the natural morality that attends it, flees farther and farther west.

Here is how Susquesus begins his much-anticipated speech to the gathered Indians:

“Brethren,” commenced Susquesus, “you are welcome. You have travelled on a long, and crooked, and thorny path, to find an old chief, whose tribe ought ninety summers ago to have looked upon him as among the departed. I am sorry no better sight will meet your eyes at the end of so long a journey. I would make the path back toward the setting sun broader and straighter if I knew how. But I do not know how. I am old. The pine in the woods is scarce older; the villages of the pale-faces, through so many of which you have journeyed, are not half so old; I was born when the white race were like the moose on the hills; here and there one; now they are like the pigeons after they have hatched their young. When I was a boy my young legs could never run out of the woods into a clearing; now, my old legs cannot carry me into the woods, they are so far off. Everything is changed in the land but the redman’s heart. That is like the rock which never alters. My children, you are welcome.”

Are you following that? Everything is changed in the land but the redman’s heart? You have travelled on a long, and crooked, and thorny path? We’re back to the idea of the moral pathfinder, the needle on the compass that responds not to magnetism but to the moral force; and not of man and his civilization, but of the natural world.

Nuther Tomahawk Nor Law

Against this ancient nobility the baseness of the “Injins” are continually shown in sharp relief. But it is not just the natural order that they have violated.

“Colonel, I can’t say that I do rightly understand the state of things down hereaway,” drawled out the interpreter, after yawning like a hound, and giving me the most favorite title of the frontier. “It seems to be neither one thing nor t’other; nuther tomahawk nor law. I can understand both of them, but their half-and-half sort of thing bothers me, and puts me out. You ought to have law, or you had n’t ought; but what you have should be stuck to.”

“You mean that you do not find this part of the country either civilized or savage. Not submitting to the laws, nor yet permitted the natural appeal to force?”

This is a discussion between Hugh Littlepage and a character called Manytongues, an interpreter brought in to help the disputants communicate with each other. And although he can speak all the appropriate languages -- those of the white man, the Injin, and the Indian -- he is unable to determine to which tribe the Injins belong. In their words and actions they have removed themselves both from the laws of man and from the natural order of things. In Hugh’s words, they are neither civilized nor savage. Nuther tomahawk nor law.

And Manytongues’s reaction to this reality is both interesting and predictable. Manytongues is a kind of pathfinder in his own right, used to helping others find their way down the “long, and crooked, and thorny path.” But there is no path to follow here, leaving each man to survive by his own wits and devices.

“There is no court and jury like this, colonel,” slapping the breech of his rifle with energy, “and eastern powder conspired with Galena lead, makes the best of attorneys. I’ve tried both, and speak on sartainty. Law druv’ me out upon the prer-ies, and love for them keeps me there. Down thisaway, you’re neither one thing nor tuther -- law nor rifle; for, if you had law, as law ought to be, you and I would n’t be sitting here, at this time of night, to prevent your mock Injins from setting fire to your house and barns.”

To these sentiments Hugh Littlepage can only accede and, in doing so, summarize the political lesson of the entire novel, which Cooper helpfully places in all caps so as not to miss it.

There was only too much truth in his last position of the straightforward interpreter to be gainsaid. After making some proper allowances for the difficulties of the case, and the unexpected circumstances, no impartial man could deny that the laws had been trifled with, or things never would have reached the pass they had; as Manytongues affirmed, we had neither the protection of the law, nor the use of the rifle. It ought to be written in letters of brass in all the highways and places or resort in the country, that A STATE OF SOCIETY WHICH PRETENDS TO THE PROTECTION THAT BELONGS TO CIVILIZATION, AND FAILS TO GIVE IT, ONLY MAKES THE CONDITION OF THE HONEST PORTION OF THE COMMUNITY SO MUCH THE WORSE, BY DEPRIVING IT OF THE PROTECTION CONFERRED BY NATURE, WITHOUT SUPPLYING THE SUBSTITUTE.

The Excesses of Popular Delusion

And the villains in all of this? They are not the anti-rent Injins themselves. Not according to Cooper. To Cooper, the real villains are the partisan demagogues who have hoisted the Injins onto their anti-rent petards by appealing to their sense of liberty and freedom.

America no longer seemed America to my eyes; but, in place of its ancient submission to the law, its quick distinction between right and wrong, its sober and discriminating liberty, which equally avoided submission to the injustices of power, and the excesses of popular delusion, there had been substituted the rapacity of the plunderer, rendered formidable by the insidious manner in which it was interwoven with political machinery, and the truckling of the wretches intrusted with authority; men who were playing into the hands of demagogues, solely in order to secure majorities to perpetuate their own influence. Was, then, the State really so corrupt as to lend itself to projects as base as those openly maintained by the anti-renters? Far from it: four men out of five, if not a larger proportion, must be, and indeed are, sensible of the ills that their success would entail on the community, and would lift up heart and hand to-morrow to put them down totally and without pity; but they have made themselves slaves of the lamp; have enlisted in the ranks of party, and dare not oppose their leaders, who wield them as Napoleon wielded his masses, to further private views, apostrophizing and affecting an homage to liberty all the while! Such is the history of man!

See what I mean? Is Cooper writing in the 1840s, or the late 2010s?

The Wisdom of the Stranger

But, for me at least, the novel does not end well. Susquesus seems to betray his very nature by ultimately siding not just with the laws of the white men, but with their God. Here he is responding to the requests of the sojourning Indians, who wish him to return with him to the advancing wilderness.

“My sons, the journey you ask me to make is too long for old age. I have lived with the pale-faces until one half of my heart is white; though the other half is red. One half is filled with the traditions of my fathers, the other half is filled with the wisdom of the stranger. I cannot cut my heart in two pieces, I must all go with you, or all stay here. The body must stay with the heart, and both must remain where they have now dwelt so long. I thank you, my children, but what you wish can never come to pass.

“You see a very old man, but you see a very unsettled mind. There are red traditions and pale-face traditions. Both speak of the Great Spirit, but only one speak of his Son. A soft voice has been whispering in my ear, lately, much of the Son of God. Do they speak to you in that way on the prairies? I know not what to think. I wish to think what is right; but it is not easy to understand.”

It is difficult for me to interpret this, as it seems to run counter to the subtext that I have seen throughout this work and many of Cooper’s others. Here is Susquesus, frequently called Trackless through the three Littlepage manuscripts because of his unerring ability to find his way through both environmental and ethical forests, succumbing to a kind of confusion. Apparently, as the soft voice of the white man’s “Son of God” whispers in his ear, he loses his ability to think and to understand.

But not, evidently, to render judgment.

“These men are not warriors,” continued Susquesus [speaking of the anti-rent Injins]. “They hide their faces and they carry rifles, but they frighten none but the squaws and pappooses. When they take a scalp, it is because they are a hundred, and their enemies one. They are not braves. Why do they come at all? What do they want? They want to land of this young chief [referring to Hugh Littlepage]. My children, all the land, far and near, was ours. The pale-faces came with their papers, and made laws and said ‘It is well! We want this land. There is plenty farther west for you redmen. Go there, and hunt, and fish, and plant your corn, and leave us this land.’ Our red brethren did as they were asked to do. The pale-faces had it as they wished. They made laws, and sold the land, as the redmen sell the skins of beavers. When the money was paid, each pale-face got a deed, and thought he owned all that he had paid for. But the wicked spirit that drove out the redman is now about to drive off the pale-face chiefs. It is the same devil, and it is no other. He wanted land then, and he wants land now. There is one difference, and it is this. When the pale-face drove off the redman there was no treaty between them. They had not smoked together, and given wampum, and signed a paper. If they had, it was to agree that redman should go away, and the pale-face stay. When the pale-face drives off the pale-face, there is a treaty; they have smoked together, and given wampum, and signed a paper. This is the difference. Indian will keep his word with Indian; pale-face will not keep his word with pale-face.”

It is fair, in other words, what the white men did to the Indians because they had no treaty or common law between them, but it is unfair what the anti-rent Injins did to the white landowners because they did have a treaty and a common law between them. Is that really the judgment that Susquesus wants to impart to his loyal followers? It certainly isn’t the kind of moral judgment I would expect from a trackless pathfinder -- but maybe that’s the point. Susquesus has lived so long with the white man, and has been so confused both by his laws and his willing contempt of them, that even he can no longer see things clearly.

Perhaps so. With his parting words to his Indian brothers, he appears to both acknowledge this and to try and reclaim his moral compass.

“My children, never forget this. You are not pale-faces, to say one thing and do another. What you say, you do. When you make a law, you keep it. This is right. No redman wants another’s wigwam. If he wants a wigwam, he builds one himself. It is not so with the pale-faces. The man who has no wigwam tries to get away his neighbor’s. While he does this, he reads in his Bible and goes to his church. I have sometimes thought, the more he reads and prays, the more he tries to get into his neighbor’s wigwam. So it seems to an Indian, but it may not be so.”

So it seems to an Indian -- an Indian, I suppose, that is serving not Cooper’s great narrative arc, but the political axe his wishes to grind. For indeed, in the end, Cooper will use this Indian to nail home the theme he began with, namely that liberty, proclaimed loudly and stridently, is often anything but.

“How is it with the pale-faces? They say they are free when the sun rises; they say they are free when the sun is over their heads; they say they are free when the sun goes down behind the hills. They never stop talking of their being their own masters. They talk of that more than they read their Bibles. I have lived near a hundred winters among them, and know what they are. They do that; then they take away another’s wigwam. They talk of liberty; then they say you shall have this farm, you shan’t have that. They talk of liberty, and call to one another to put on calico bags, that fifty men may tar and feather one. They talk of liberty, and want everything their own way.”

Liberty, both Susquesus and Cooper seem to be saying, to the white man, is something he takes a full measure of for himself, but leaves nothing behind for his neighbor.

+ + +

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.