Civil Warriors

Real men and women do Antietam.

(Photos by J.M. Cooke)

More on last week’s adventure to come.

Missed this on Strange Maps until now. The dots represent 1860 cotton production (each dot equals 2,000 bales). The shaded counties represent voting results in the 2008 presidential election.  The correlation is fascinating.

For details, see From Pickin’ Cotton to Pickin’ Presidents on Strange Maps.

It would be interesting to see the same overlay with previous elections — at least those since the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

I’ve begun a Facebook album devoted to photos of the process involved in updating Gettysburg: A Battlefield Guide.

The second example involves Sickles’ July 2 decision to advance his III Corps from lower Cemetery Ridge to higher ground on Houck’s Ridge, the Stony Hill, and the Peach Orchard / Emmitsburg Road.  Nowadays I take people to a boulder a few yards west of the monument to Battery B, 1st New York Light Artillery, on a knoll about 150 yards north northwest of the intersection of Wheatfield Road and Sedgwick Avenue.  I point to the Pennyslvania Memorial to the north, identify it as being roughly the location of the II Corps left flank, and explain Meade’s instructions to Sickles to tie in with the II Corps and extend its line southward.

Then I simply ask them to tell me where they would have placed the III Corps line.

The knoll is pretty much the only elevated terrain until you reach Little Round Top about 500 yards to the south.Interestingly, despite its fame as the key to the Union line, few people respond that Sickles ought to have extended his line due south from the Pennsylvania Memorial and anchored his left flank atop Little Round Top.  There are three problems with that solution:  First, it is obviously to much ground for only two divisions to hold (it helps that by this time the audience knows the fate of Barlow’s decision to occupy Blocher’s Knoll).  Second, between the knoll and the Pennylvania Memorial the ground is not a ridge but more of a depression.  Third, Houck’s Ridge is only about 800 yards to the west (visible in the upper left of the photo below).  By this time in the staff ride, the audience knows enough to grasp that the ridge dominates the sector Sickles was supposed to occupy and would make a splendid platform for Confederate artillery.

If you turn around, the ground immediately east of Sedgwick Avenue appears to be slightly higher than the line from the Pennylvania Memorial to the knoll.  But it isn’t that much better, and about 50 yards behind it is Taneytown Road, a major line of communication.  So the obvious solution is to anchor the line from Houcks Ridge and extend it north to tie in with II Corps.

In short, the audience usually solves the problem much as Sickles did, and once informed that the ground at the Peach Orchard is higher still — and fully 40 feet higher than their present position — they begin to see why Sickles would be tempted to advance the III Corps still further.  They certainly understand why Sickles had a problem significant enough to warrant bringing it to Meade’s attention.  Throw in the facts that Meade blew him off, that until three days previously Meade and Sickles had been peers, and that at Chancellorsville the III Corps had gotten clobbered by Confederate artillery on dominating terrain to its front, and Sickles’ decision begins to look reasonable.  Not correct, but far from idiotic.

One other thing:  until the above thought experiment is complete, I pointedly avoid telling the audience that Sickles was a political general and a former New York congressman, that he was a notorious womanizer, the had shot his wife’s lover and got off on a plea of temporary insanity, and so on.  The stories are too much fun to omit altogether, but if you tell the audience at the outset, you prime them to assume that Sickles’ decision was foolish.  The whole thrust of the narrative points in that direction.  If you wait to the end, you give Sickles his day in court.  And you can bring up an issue that may have played a role in the way the story plays out:  that the conservative, scrupulous Meade probably regarded Sickles as a degenerate and Sickles regarded Meade as a prig, and that consequently the two men lacked a relationship in which they could problem solve in an atmosphere of mutual respect and trust.

Part 1 – Part 2

It’s been a decade since Bison Books published Gettysburg: A Battlefield Guide. And although it’s done well over the years, the fact remains that it needs to be updated, if only because the starting point for the tour — the Visitor Center — is now in an entirely different place.

Tomorrow Brooks and I link up at Gettysburg to assess what revisions are required and/or desirable. It seems to me that the task divides into three parts:

1. Changes to the tour route and directions; e.g. the directions to Stop 1 obviously need revision.

2. Changes to the view shed; e.g., a large number of trees have been felled (and for that matter, planted) to restore the woodlands to their 1863 appearance.

3. Changes in interpretations of the action; e.g., Smith’s Battery on Houck’s Ridge is now thought to have been deployed atop the ridge, for counter-battery work, rather than at the edge of the Triangular Field, for anti-personnel work (no knowledgeable person believes the site of the unit monument is correctly located).

I’d also like to incorporate a concept that over time has become central to the way I conduct staff rides. When discussing a command decision, I like to go to the part of the field from which a given decision makes the most sense. I’ve noticed that the terrain makes a powerful argument in the minds of participants. Two quick illustrations:

Ewell’s decision to attack neither Cemetery Hill nor Culps Hill is usually discussed from somewhere on Seminary Ridge as a component of Lee’s assessment of the July 1 outcome and his plans for July 2. Given the historical tendency to regard Ewell as a chump, forcefully underscored by the film Gettysburg and Michael Shaara’sThe Killer Angels, the audience is primed to consider the decision a mistake.  It isn’t really feasible to go to the exact ground from which Ewell made his decision, but his choice becomes more understandable if you stop on East Confederate Avenue just beyond East Middle Street, near the intersection with Lefever Street:

From here you can see Culps Hill in the distance. But more importantly, you are forcefully reminded of the presence of the town and the problem of making an attack through it.

Because the town has expanded since 1863, the issue actually applies more to Cemetery Hill than Culps Hill. Nonetheless, it becomes impossible to overlook the way the streets would have channeled any attack, forcing the regiments to advance in column until they reached the town’s outskirts and then to deploy into line of battle within musket range of the Federals. That’s not the only consideration — there’s also the fact that the divisions of Rodes and Early had been used up in the afternoon attacks and that Johnson’s Division only reached the field near dusk. And it doesn’t mean Ewell did the right thing (though I happen to think he did). But it does mean that his decision appears far more reasonable from this vantage point than it would from Seminary Ridge, where the audience is looking west toward open fields.

Part 1 – Part 2

I don’t know why it never before occurred to me to shove a camera down the muzzle of a 3-inch ordnance rifle, but the effect is kinda cool.

Hey, they used to have one at the Crater.

. . . (as has often been said, with a slight variation here by AOTW’s Brian Downey), almost always beats a good day in the office. This adage was once again proven correct a few weeks ago when I was in Virginia assisting Chris Stowe and Bob Kennedy at our Fort Lee campus in the execution of an Appomattox Staff Ride. I brought over to Petersburg with me Terry Beckenbaugh and Chris Keller to round out the instructional team and we spent a wonderful day following Lee’s Retreat and discussing the events of April 1865 with the officers. (The day started out really rainy, but I actually like that. “If it ain’t raining,” as my colleagues at USMA and CGSC often say, “you ain’t training.”) The sequence of stands was: Five Forks, Sutherland Station, Amelia Court House, Hillsman House, Kershaw Ridge, Cumberland Church, Lee’s last HQ, Final Battle, and McLean House.

Some photos, courtesy of one of the members of my group, Frank L. Veith:

Getting soggy at Five Forks:

Setting up at Amelia C.H.:

Tactics instructor Brian Berg bringing material from his course into the discussion near the Hillsman House:

Discussing the final battle just outside Appomattox C.H.:

Here’s the list.

Cross-posted from Blog Them Out of the Stone Age

On Tuesday my elective course, “American Insurgencies: The Struggle For Black Liberation, 1865-1965,” met for the first time. I have eight students: five African Americans and three whites, as well as an African American faculty member who is sitting in on the class as time permits. We have just ten three-hour sessions in which to cover a pretty wide swath of material. Nonetheless, I budgeted time for us to introduce ourselves to one another — though most of us were already at least slightly acquainted. I also asked everyone to talk a little about their personal experiences with race and racism. I figured it was sort of the elephant in the room, and that talking about it would enhance our discussions down the line.

I was right — a lot more right than I thought. The lesson plan went right out the window. We wound up sharing our thoughts and experiences for the entire three hours. I gave hardly a thought to reining in the exchange. It was so obvious that everyone had a lot to say and welcomed the chance to say it. I intend to adhere to my rule that what happens in seminar stays in seminar, so I won’t get into any details. But my overall impression was of the huge, lingering, bewildering weight of race, that persists in spite of all the progress we have made.

Now back when this earth was a silver blue jewel
And back when your grandfather’s father was young
Men of these shores made and gave up their lives
Pulling up fish from the sea

While down in the African slavery trade
Stealing young men to cut sugar cane
Rum to New Bedford and codfish from Maine
They were building a wall that will always remain

Oh, the crown and the cross the musket and chain
The white man’s religion, the family name
Two hundred years later and who is to blame?
The captain or the cargo or the juice of the sugar cane

The doryman he knows when the riptides will run
He sets out his nets and he sits in the sun
He thinks of his family and drinks of his rum
And he waits for the codfish to come

It’s the same god-damned ocean that keeps them alive
It will swallow you up, it will let you survive
It will heal you and steal you and take you away
Like a note in a bottle with nothing to say

Now back when this earth was a silver blue jewel
And back when your grandfather’s father was young
Men of these shores made and gave up their lives
Pulling up fish from the sea

– James Taylor, Jimmy Buffett and Timothy Mayer; from the album Dad Loves His Work, by James Taylor (1981)