![[Under Construction]](images/undercon.gif) |
|
Richards
Riff Raff. . .
* *
* *
Commander’s Dispatch -
by Commander
Mark Morgan
Last month circumstances
dictated dropping the monthly sesquicentennial
review. This month, we’ll return to the
format with a review of some of the major events of May 1862.
For starters, Union
Major General George McClellan’s “Peninsula Campaign” was well underway at
the start of the month. The still new
Army of the Potomac’s movement
northwest out of Fortress Monroe and Hampton marked
he first major offensive by Union forces under McClellan and, as per usual,
the goal was the capital of the Confederate States of America, Richmond.
However, in mid-April the Yankees ran into a surprising amount of
resistance at a Confederate defensive
line commanded by Brigadier General “Prince John” Magruder, which slowed
their advance.
This gave the equally new Army
of Northern Virginia under the command of General Joseph E. Johnston a
chance to retreat up the peninsula past Yorktown and he took it, heading
northwest on 3 May 1862. Johnston already held a reputation for caution and
conservation of forces; seeing as his scattered army of 43,000 faced roughly
121,000
wellequipped Northerners, his caution was
understandable. While McClellan took his time establishing a siege of
Yorktown, Johnston moved out while his cavalry under Brigadier General JEB
Stuart fended off Union horse soldiers led by Brigadier General George
Stoneman.
The two armies finally saw a
large-scale engagement on the 5th,
when two Northern division –
Brigadier General
Joe Hooker’s 2nd
Division/III Corps and
Brigadier General Phil Kearney’s 3rd
Division/III Corps
–
and a the 1st
Brigade, 2nd
Division/IV Corps under Brigadier General
Winfield Scott Hancock hit the Southerners under Major Generals James
Longstreet and DH Hill in the vicinity of Williamsburg, Virginia. Total
Confederate losses were about 1000 killed, wounded or missing; the
Northerners lose 456 killed, 1400 wounded in action and 372 missing.
While battered, the Army of
Northern Virginia remained intact and continued its fighting retreat towards
Richmond. Down in Norfolk, the prospects for the Confederates took another
negative turn on the 9th,
when the Southerners evacuated and abandoned the city and Norfolk Navy Yard.
With their position untenable due to the large number of Yankees across
Hampton Roads (and the very real prospect of the fall of the national
capital, Richmond), they burned ships, arms and equipment and departed. On
11 May, CSS Virginia
met its end; she drew too much draft to
go up the James River and wasn’t
seaworthy enough to attempt an escape from the Roads, so her skipper, Flag
Officer Josiah Tattnall, ordered her
destruction. Early the morning of the 11th,
the crew set fire to the ship’s magazine
and Virginia
detonated, off Craney Island west of Norfolk.
On the plus side, on 8 May 1862
at McDowell in the Shenandoah Valley, 6000 Union troops commanded by Brigadier
General Robert Schenk fell on 10,000 Southerners led by Maj. Gen. Thomas J.
“Stonewall” Jackson.
Apparently quickly figuring out
the error of his ways, General Schenk broke off the fight and headed for
Franklin with Stonewall’s
troops in hot pursuit. Roughly two weeks
later, on the 23rd,
Stonewall’s men routed a small Union
force at Front Royal over a two-day running battle.
Jackson’s incredible
pursuit of the retreating Union army up the Valley Pike culminated on the 25th
with the Battle of Winchester.
Now totaling 16,000 soldiers, Stonewall’s “Foot Cavalry” roundly defeated
8000 Yankees led by Major General
Nathaniel P. Banks, a political general who had previously served as Speaker
of the House of Representatives. Banks
–
who gained the nickname
“Commissary Banks” for his remarkable ability to regularly lose
to Jackson, in the process leaving behind large
numbers of wagons filled with supplies
–
left behind 1700 captured and missing and high-tailed it to Williamsport,
Maryland. As a result, the Federal government started assigned ordering in
additional forces for the defense of Washington, D.C.
Back down on the
Peninsula, things looked grim for the Southern defenders of Johnston’s Army
of Northern Virginia. While the
artillerymen of Fort Darling scored a solid victory over five Union ships
–
including USS
Monitor
– on 15 May during the Battle of
Drewry’s Bluff on the James River, the successful defense of Richmond
looked doubtful. However, it if came to it, the
Southerners planned to go down fighting.
On 31 May 1862, at Seven Pines/Fair Oaks, Virginia,
Confederate patriots led by Brigadier General Joe Johnston turned and
attacked Union forces commanded by Brigadier Generals Erasmus Keyes and
Samuel Peter Heinzelman south of the Chickahominy and nearly drove them from
the field with severe casualties. Unfortunately, the timely arrival of Union
reinforcements under Brigadier General Edwin Sumner turned the tide and the
Southerners were forced to pull back during the night. Doubly unfortunate,
General Johnston was severely wounded, collecting a bullet in his right
shoulder and shrapnel in his chest.
In Richmond, President Jefferson Davis immediately summoned
his senior military advisor and placed him in command of the Army of
Northern Virginia, replacing the wounded General Johnston. The new
commander, not particularly well thought of as a combat leader due an
earlier disastrous campaign against Northern forces in western Virginia,
gathered his staff and moved to Seven Pines.
On 1 June 1862, General Robert E. Lee, late of staff duty in
Richmond, assumed formal command of the Army of Northern Virginia.
Finally, I will point out the
single largest, most momentous event of April 1862 was the Battle of
Pittsburgh Landing/Shiloh,
Tennessee.
Respectfully,
Mark Morgan, Cmdr.
They sent my Tax Return back!
AGAIN!!!
In response to the question: "List all dependents?"
I replied -
"12 million illegal immigrants;
"3 million crack heads;
"42 million unemployable people on food stamps,
"2 million people in over 243 prisons;
"Half of Mexico; and,
"535 fools in the U.S. House and Senate."
Apparently, this was NOT an acceptable answer.
Submitted by Toni Blaeser
The history of the
middle finger
I never knew this
before, and now that I know it, I feel compelled to send it on to my
more intelligent friends in the hope that they, too, will feel edified.
Isn't history more fun when you know something about it? Before the
Battle of Agincourt in 1415, the French, anticipating victory over the
English, proposed to cut off the middle finger of all captured English
soldiers. Without the middle finger it would be impossible to draw the
renowned English longbow and therefore they would be incapable of
fighting in the future. This famous English longbow was made of the
native English Yew tree, and the act of drawing the longbow was known as
'plucking the yew' (or 'pluck yew').
Much to the bewilderment of the French, the English won a
major upset and began mocking the French by waving their middle fingers
at the defeated French, saying, See, we can still pluck yew! Since
'pluck yew' is rather difficult to say, the difficult consonant cluster
at the beginning has gradually changed to a labiodentals fricative F',
and thus the words often used in conjunction with the one-finger-salute!
It is also because of the pheasant feathers on the arrows used with the
longbow that the symbolic gesture is known as 'giving the bird.'
IT IS STILL AN APPROPRIATE SALUTE TO THE FRENCH TODAY!
And yew thought yew knew every plucking thing!
Submitted by Toni Blaese
* *
* *
Paul Krugman’s 'Civil War' Fantasies
by
Thomas J. DiLorenzo
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
Recently by
Thomas DiLorenzo:
The
Political Economy of Government Employee Unions
When James M.
Buchanan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1986 the first
thing he said at his George Mason University press conference was that
the award "does not make me an instant expert in everything." Buchanan
was well aware – and amused – at how previous recipients of the award
had made fools of themselves by viewing the award as a license to
pontificate about anything and everything, whether they knew anything
about the subject or not.
No such modesty
and sense of reality occupies the mind of a more recent Nobel laureate,
Paul Krugman. As a New York Times columnist he has always done
what all New York Times columnists do – pretend that he does in
fact know everything about everything. A case in point is his March 29
New York Times blog entitled "Road to Appomattox Blogging." After
mentioning how the Times has a special "Disunion" blog to
commemorate the 150th anniversary of the start of the war,
Krugman gives a hilarious, elementary-schoolish rendition of his "take"
on the "Civil War."
Krugman said he
has always been infatuated by the "symbolism" of Lee’s surrender at
Appomattox, with "Lee the patrician in his dress uniform," compared to
General Grant, who was "still muddy and disheveled from hard riding."
Krugman is apparently unaware that in 1860, on the eve of the war,
Robert E. Lee was in his thirty-second year as an officer in the United
States Army, performing mostly as a military engineer. He was hardly a
"patrician" or member of a ruling class. Grant, by contrast, was the
overseer of an 850-acre slave plantation owned by his wealthy
father-in-law. The plantation, located near St. Louis, was known as
"White Haven" (which sounds like it could have been named by the KKK)
and is today a national park. (On the "White Haven" Web site the
National Park Service euphemistically calls Grant the "manager" of the
slave plantation rather than the more historically-accurate word
"overseer").
In 1862 Lee freed
the slaves that his wife had inherited, in compliance with his
father-in-law’s will. Grant’s White Haven slaves were not freed until an
1865 Missouri emancipation law forced Grant and his father-in-law to do
so. The fact that Lee changed clothes before formally surrendering did
not instantly turn the 36-year army veteran into a "patrician," contrary
to the "all-knowing" Krugman’s assertion.
Krugman goes on
to assert that the North’s victory in the war was a victory in "manners"
by a region that "excelled at the arts of peace." Well, not really. What
the North "excelled" in was the waging of total war on the civilian
population of the South. The Lincoln administration instituted the first
federal military conscription law, and then ordered thousands of
Northern men to their death in the savage and bloody Napoleonic charges
that characterized the war. When tens of thousands of Northern men
deserted, the Lincoln administration commenced the public execution of
deserters on a daily basis. When New Yorkers rioted in protest of
military conscription, Lincoln ordered 15,000 soldiers to the city where
they murdered hundreds, and perhaps thousands of draft protesters (See
Iver Bernstein,
The New York City Draft Riots). It also recruited thousands of
European mercenaries, many of whom did not even speak English, to arm
themselves and march South to supposedly teach the descendants of James
Madison, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Jefferson what it really meant to be
an American. Lee Kennett, biographer of General William Tecumseh
Sherman, wrote of how many of Lincoln’s recruits were specially suited
for pillaging, plundering and raping: "the New York regiments were . . .
filled with big city criminals and foreigners fresh from the jails of
the Old World" (Lee Kennett,
Marching Through Georgia, p. 279).
The North waged
war on Southern civilians for four long years, murdering at least 50,000
of them according to historian Jeffrey Rogers Hummel. It bombed cities
like Atlanta for days at a time when they were occupied by no one but
civilians, and U.S. Army soldiers looted, ransacked, and raped their way
all throughout the South. The "arts of peace" indeed.
As for the war being
a victory of "manners," as Krugman says, consider this: When the women
of New Orleans refused to genuflect to U.S. Army troops who were
occupying their city and killing their husbands, sons and brothers,
General Benjamin "Beast" Butler issued an order that all the women of
that city were to henceforth be treated as prostitutes. "As the officers
and soldiers of the United States have been subject to repeated insults
from the women . . . of New Orleans," Butler wrote in his General Order
Number 28 on May 15, 1862, "it is ordered that thereafter when any
female shall, by word, gesture, or movement, insult or show contempt for
any officer or soldier of the United States, she shall be regarded and
held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation."
Butler’s order was widely construed as a license for rape, and he was
condemned by the whole world. Ah, those Yankee "manners."
Krugman celebrates
the victory of "a democratic nation" (the North) in his blog. But during
the war the North was anything but "democratic": Lincoln illegally
suspended the writ of Habeas Corpus and imprisoned tens of thousands of
Northern political critics without any due process; shut down hundreds
of opposition newspapers; deported Congressman Clement Vallandigham of
Ohio for criticizing him; threatened to imprison Chief Justice Roger B.
Taney for issuing the (correct) opinion that Lincoln’s suspension of
Habeas Corpus was unconstitutional; censored all telegraphs; rigged
elections; imprisoned duly elected members of the Maryland legislature
along with Congressman Henry May of Baltimore and the mayor of
Baltimore; illegally orchestrated the secession of West Virginia to give
the Republican Party two more U.S. senators; confiscated firearms in the
border states in violation of the Second Amendment; and committed a
grand act of treason by invading the sovereign states of the South
(Article 3, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution defines treason as "only"
levying war against the states, or giving aid and comfort to
their enemies).
Krugman is right
about democracy in a sense: Democracy is essentially one big organized
act of bullying whereby a larger group bullies a smaller group in order
to plunder it with taxes. The "Civil War" proved that whenever a smaller
group has finally had enough, and attempts to leave the game, the larger
group will resort to anything – even the mass murder of hundreds of
thousands and the bombing and burning of entire cities – to get its way.
After all, in his first inaugural address Lincoln literally threatened
"force," "invasion" and "bloodshed" (his exact words) in any state that
refused to pay the federal tariff, which had just been more than doubled
two days earlier. He followed through with his threat. This is "the kind
of nation I believe in," says Paul Krugman.
April 8, 2011
Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send
him mail] is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland
and the author of
The Real Lincoln;
Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe
and
How Capitalism Saved America. His latest book is
Hamilton’s Curse: How Jefferson’s Archenemy Betrayed the American
Revolution – And What It Means for America Today.
Copyright © 2011 by
LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly
granted, provided full credit is given.
|
