It might be a bit overused as an axiom, that civil wars are the bloodiest… or maybe it just seems that way because it seems to be so terribly personal. This is not some outsider, some foreigner, some alien stranger invading our neighborhood, destroying our towns and slaughtering… but our own countrymen, who speak the same language and usually share a culture and background, if not the same blood.

Just so was our own Civil War. To read of the wanton brutality and the wholesale slaughter and destruction, and the enthusiasm and energy which went into the dismemberment of our own country, and to know that many of those who led the fight had been comrades and allies not fifteen years before is to realize what a monumental tragedy it was. No wonder Abraham Lincoln looks about twenty years older, comparing photographs of him taken in 1861 and 1865. He was a melancholy and sensitive man; one wonders how the weight of the responsibility and the events of those years in office did not crush him utterly. The war over which he was able to exercise control was ghastly enough – the war on the fringes, fought by partisans in Kansas and Missouri achieved abysmal depths of senseless brutality.

Kansas had been a particularly hot center of strife even before Southern artillery opened fire on Ft. Sumter. In an attempt to kick the can of ‘free state-slave’ state a little farther down the road, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 left the decision of whether those to states be enrolled as free or slave to those who settled there. And from that moment on, each side of the free-soil/slave-state debate enthusiastically aided and abetted the settling of Kansas with settlers who were adherents of one side or the other. The ‘Border Ruffians’, from slave-permitting Missouri, and the free-soil ‘Jayhawkers’ were already at each others’ throats from 1855 on. The first sack of Lawrence, the caning on the floor of the senate by Preston Brooks of South Carolina of Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, John Brown’s raid on Pottawatomie… the Civil War began to simmer in Kansas. Back east, they needed a while to get up to full speed, when it began to boil in earnest. In Kansas, partisan bands were all ready to ride – and to plunder and exterminate.

The most brutally effective of the pro-Confederate bands in Kansas was led by an Ohio-born former schoolteacher and teamster named William Clark Quantrill. He seems to have had an unsavory reputation even before the war, being associated with a number of unexplained murders and thefts in the Utah territory while working briefly there as a teamster and free-lance gambler. The eventual co-leader of his band, William “Bloody Bill” Anderson had a similar pre-war reputation for horse thievery and murder, and a penchant for scalping his victims. He was reputed to wear a necklace of Yankee scalps into action – and was most probably a psychopath. By 1862, Quantrill and his men were considered outlaws by the Union authorities in Kansas… and Confederate commanders in Texas didn’t have all that much higher an opinion, especially after the Sack of Lawrence. Say what you would about Texas Confederates like General Ben McCullough; he may have been a tough old Texas fighter – of Indians, Mexicans, bandits and whoever else was handy – but he was still a gentleman. Plundering a civilian town, burning it to the ground and executing civilian men and boys wholesale was not Ben McCullough’s cup of tea. Neither was executing soldiers who had surrendered, as Quantrill’s men did after a fight with Union solders at Baxter Springs - but here was Quantrill and his men, looking for a place to rest and recoup, to purchase horses and generally get a break after a hard year of partisan war-fighting in Kansas. They had made Kansas too hot to hold them, and McCullough was perennially short of men to guard the far Texas frontier against reoccurring Indian raids and to round up draft evaders and deserters. To the general commanding the Trans-Mississippi Confederacy forces, Quantrill’s appearance was a gift and McCullough was ordered to make use of him to the fullest.

Although Quantrill and Anderson’s men mostly confined their Texas activities to Grayson and Fannin Counties, they left some bloody fingerprints in the Hill Country, too. Elements of their group were participants in the ‘hangerbande’ or the ‘hanging-band’ - masked vigilantes who terrorized Gillespie and Kendall Counties by summarily lynching known and suspected pro-Unionists. It was often said bitterly after the war that the hangerbande killed more settlers there than the Indians ever did. Early in the spring of 1864, the hanging-band visited the Grape Creek settlement, a loose community of farms a few miles east of Fredericksburg. A man named Peter Burg, the owner of a fine herd of horses, was shot in the back and his horses confiscated. Three other men; William Feller, John Blank and Henry Kirchner were simply taken from their houses, taken as they sat with their families at the supper table. Kirchner’s house was searched and nearly $200 dollars in silver coin taken by Quantrill’s horse-buyer. It was rumored that Blank had recently received a letter from someone in Mexico. Feller lived on a tract of land adjoining Kirchners and both had been involved in a land dispute with pro-Confederate sympathizers. These and other atrocities outraged the Hill Country German settlers – more than that, similar depredations and robberies outraged Ben McCullough and other Texas military commanders. Still, they were fighting on the Confederate side; perhaps they could go and do so where there weren’t any civilians to plunder and murder? McCullough tried to send them to Corpus Christi, to stiffen the coastal defense. No luck with that, although McCullough did his best to be rid of these uncomfortable allies.

Quantrill and Anderson had a falling out, about the time of the Grape Creek murders, and when Anderson indicated to McCullough that he would testify against Quantrill as regards certain heinous crimes, the old Indian fighter hardly wasted time. He called for Quantrill to come to his HQ for a meeting, asked him to put his weapons on the table and informed him that he was under arrest. But as soon as McCullough’s back was turned, Quantrill grabbed his weapons, shouted to his friends that they were all liable to be under arrest and departed at speed and in a cloud of dust, heading north and back to Kansas. One imagines that Ben McCullough was glad to be rid of them one way or another. Certainly they were not pursued with much enthusiasm, although their savage reputation may have had quite a lot to do with that.

Quantrill came to a sticky end, shortly afterwards – in Kentucky, having added Missouri to the list of places which he had made too hot to hold him. Elements of his wartime band lingered on, in the form of the James gang. But they in turn came to a sticky end in Northfield, Minnesota – the last little drop of blood from Bleeding Kansas.

So this is one of those historic dates that seems to be slipping faster and faster out of sight, receding into a past at such a rate that we who were born afterwards, or long afterwards, can just barely see. But it was such an enormous, monumental enterprise – so longed looked for, so carefully planned and involved so many soldiers, sailors and airmen – of course the memory would linger long afterwards.

Think of looking down from the air, at that great metal armada, spilling out from every harbor, every estuary along England’s coast. Think of the sound of marching footsteps in a thousand encampments, and the silence left as the men marched away, counted out by squad, company and battalion, think of those great parks of tanks and vehicles, slowly emptying out, loaded into the holds of ships and onto the open decks of LSTs. Think of the roar of a thousand airplane engines, the sound of it rattling the china on the shelf, of white contrails scratching straight furrows across the moonless sky.

Think of the planners and architects of this enormous undertaking, the briefers and the specialists in all sorts of arcane specialties, most of whom would never set foot on Gold, Juno, Sword, Omaha or Utah Beach. Many of those in the know would spend the last few days or hours before D-day in guarded lock-down, to preserve security. Think of them pacing up and down, looking out of windows or at blank walls, wondering if there might be one more thing they might have done, or considered, knowing that lives depended upon every tiny minutiae, hoping that they had accounted for everything possible.

Think of the people in country villages, and port towns, seeing the marching soldiers, the grey ships sliding away from quays and wharves, hearing the airplanes, with their wings boldly striped with black and white paint… and knowing that something was up - But only knowing for a certainty that those men, those ships and those planes were heading towards France, and also knowing just as surely that many of them would not return.

Think of the commanders, of Eisenhower and his subordinates, as the minutes ticked slowly down to H-Hour, considering all that was at stake, all the lives that they were putting into this grand effort, this gamble that Europe could be liberated through a force landing from the West. Think of all the diversions and practices, the secrecy and the responsibility, the burden of lives which they carried along with the rank on their shoulders. Eisenhower had in his pocket the draft of an announcement, just in case the invasion failed and he had to break off the grand enterprise; a soldier and commander hoping for the best, but already prepared for the worst.

Think on this day, and how the might of the Nazi Reich was cast down. June 6th was for Hitler the crack of doom, although he would not know for sure for many more months. After this day, his armies only advanced once – everywhere else and at every other time, they fell back upon a Reich in ruins. Think on this while there are still those alive who remember it at first hand.

Later, courtesy of Belmont Club - Another war, another June 6th, another battlefield in France -

Yet another view, cortest of Da Blogfaddah - the real ‘Greatest Generation’, and why we should pay some attention.

Once there was a country, a foreign country which hardly anyone in the US save for a handful of scholars and specialists had ever heard of, and certainly cared little about. It wasn’t a country that had contributed many immigrants to the United States – not like England, or Ireland, Germany or Italy. It couldn’t be described as a Christian country, although there was a substantial Christian element. It was just one of those faraway foreign places that Americans really didn’t give a rip about until a shooting war started there, and American boys died in quantities in locations with strange-sounding names.

So, there was a war, and American troops were in the middle of it, along with some stout allies, a war that looked uncomfortably like a civil war, with saboteurs and insurrectionists and foreign sympathizers to the side the Americans were fighting against, sneaking over the borders – there were even other nations giving substantial aid and comfort to the side that the Americans were fighting!

This country was a wrecked and traumatized place – once it had boasted a proud and independent culture, but it had been occupied and broken to the will of the conqueror, a brutal dictator that had imposed alien concepts and practices upon it, and used their young men to fight in regional wars. But the conqueror did not think much of the fighting qualities of those soldiers – and neither did the Americans, at first. Here they were, spending their lives, their blood and treasure in defense of a people who seemed hapless in their own defense. Bit by slow and painstaking bit, progress was made: soldiers were created out of seeming unpromising materiel. Sometimes it seemed that every one of these solders had to have an American soldier at his elbow, giving patient instruction… and yet, and yet, when the war ended – the country thus painfully established was still there.

And of course, being a bloody and seemingly unpopular war, with a full schedule of blunders, incompetence and atrocities – both actual and alleged – there was the usual sort of newspaper headlines. Never mind about the successes, the space and time that was bought in American blood for the inhabitants of that country to recover, to find their own feet, tend their gardens and begin to build again. Never mind all that – good news doesn’t sell. Some of this country’s home-grown politicians turned out to be of an unsavory sort, more authoritarian than truly democratic, so there was another black eye for Americans, in propping up what appeared to be hardly an improvement on what this country had before. There is always a market for bad news, the ‘gotcha’ headline and so-called important people being cut down to size.

Seeming to be such a pointless and futile effort, wasteful of American lives and treasure made that war into an entertainment staple, after all the newsy goodness had been absorbed. American soldiers were portrayed as luckless dupes or malignant martinets, the American military was incompetent, wasteful, foolish, there was no point to the war, all these sacrifices of lives, of limbs, health and happiness was for nothing. There was no point, it was all useless, and destructive… the inhabitants of that country didn’t want or need our military to be there anyway, so what was the point of fighting? Everything would be better off as soon as we departed and left them to themselves.

Except that we didn’t. The war did end – with an armistice. American troops still serve tours there in that country, on the off-chance that the fighting might resume – although after fifty years, it just doesn’t seem very likely. South Korea is prosperous, modern, bustling with industry – as different as can be from the picture it presented fifty years ago, as different as it can be from the communist-ruled North. What would the whole Korean peninsula look like, if we had chosen to leave Koreans to their own devices, fifty years ago? Starving, poor and xenophobic, at the very least, living in darkness and want, a country-sized concentration camp.

What will Iraq look like after the passing of another fifty Memorial Days? Will it be anything like Korea; a regional powerhouse of industry, cultured, prosperous and politically stable? Will Saddam’s reign of terror be something relegated to the history books, will their present war be something barely recalled by the elders, a matter of monuments to be decorated with flowers and ceremony on certain days, while two or three generations have grown up knowing nothing but peace, security and plenty? Will there have been two or three generations of American military who have served tours at a few long-established bases and garrisons, stuck in out of the way corners of the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates. Will there be American soldiers and airmen who have come away with pleasant memories and a taste for local food and some pictures of ancient ruins and modern buildings looming over them, who made friends there? Fifty years is a blink in time – but it was long enough for South Korea to pull together in the space that Americans and their allies made for them. It may yet be time enough for Iraq, too, but its not as if we’ll be able to tell until long afterwards.

For Dad, who served in Korea and came back, for Wil who served in the 8th Air Force and came back, and Blondie who served in Kuwait and Iraq and came back – but for all those who served and didn’t come back, and who made the sacrifice without even being sure of what it was about or what it was all for, even – thank you, on this Memorial Day.

Interesting take on international relations beginning with WWII, in this animated short. Seriously warped and very creative, although you might develope the munchies after watching.

Interesting post about an event that never happened… but still did a thing to our world. Scroll down to the “DMW Flashback: The Greatest March ” entry

About twenty years before our current popular culture records such an event happening.

Or not.

Oh, so it looks like the ever beloved New York Times has nobly volunteered itself to be the Piniata o’the Month for unleashing yet again – in the words of Maxwell Smart “the old Krazed Killer Veteran Story”. You know, the same old, same old pathetic round of stories that those of us over a certain age saw in the 1970s – and not just in the news but on every damn cop show; the freak who got a taste for killin’ and brought it home with him after the war. Honest to key-rist, NYTimes-people – what is your assignments editor these days smoking these days? I am a little late to joining the predictable pile-on from every quarter, which looks like it includes just about everyone short of the VFW.

At least it’s nice to know legacy media drones can do a google search these days and assemble a laundry list of whatever it was they were looking for in the intertubules. A step up from a couple of years ago, all things considered. But… and that is a big but there, almost as big as a Michael Moore butt…it is just that – a laundry list of incidents where someone who was a military veteran of a tour in Afghanistan or Iraq was subsequently involved in or thought to be involved in a murder. Or manslaughter, or something.

No context, no analysis – just OMFG, the Krazed Killer Veterans are Koming (and it’s all the military’s fault!) Look, NYTimes-people, coincidence is not co-f**king causality. Sometimes, it is just a co-incidence, and laying on a smarmy layer of sympathy and glycerin tears over the poor *sniff* innocent *sniff* widdle misdiagnosed *sob* veterans does not make your s**t-sandwich of a story any more palatable. Not to veterans and their families.

Not only can we remember this kind of story post-Vietnam, but the very senior among us can remember it post-WWII. I am reliably informed that there was even a certain amount of heartburn over an anticipated propensity for free-lance violence on the part of returning veterans from the Civil War – and no, I will be not sidetracked into a discussion of how the still-expanding western frontier managed to provide an outlet for all of those Billy Yanks and Johnny Rebs seeking post-war excitement.

My point would be that when this same-old-same-old went down post-hostilities every other damn time, the experience of military service was a bit more evenly spread among the general male population. The general reader had enough friends and relations in his immediate circle to take the whole Krazed Killer Veterans are Koming narrative with a large handful of salt. They knew enough veterans personally to not take what they read in the papers as necessarily the whole truth, and to put the sensational stories of post-war veteran crime into context. And they could blow them off as just another grab at the headlines.

But service in the military these days draws on a smaller sub-set of the population – and unfortunately that set does not include the media or cultural elite. Tripe like the NYT’s Krazed Killer Veteran – if it is not challenged and countered robustly- will soon solidify into conventional wisdom, just like it did with Vietnam veterans. And that, my little scribbling chickadees at the NY Times – is not going to happen again. Welcome to attitude adjustment, Times-folks. I can promise a real interesting and educational time for you over the next couple of days. Take notes. They will come in handy, especially for the next time you are assigned a story about military veterans.

Later: (Update from Iowahawk, too delicious to leave unlinked. Beware, NYTimes- this one is gonna leave a mark!)

Still later: And so will this blast from Col. Peters. My advice to the NYTimes writers is to load up on Midol, as well as taking notes.

I suppose it is only one of those vast cosmic coincidences that mil-blogger Andrew Olmstead would be killed in an ambush in Iraq at about the same time that George Macdonald Fraser died of cancer in his 80s. On the surface they would seem to have had nothing much in common at all – save for being writers and having similar terminating dates on their memorials. Different ages, nationalities, different professional experience and all that… but one similarity – they both were soldiers and wrote about their experiences in uniform in a way that people who weren’t military could connect to and begin to understand something about what motivates men (and women, too) to take up a lonely position on the walls.

It’s one of those elemental and primal things, I suspect – almost the first obligation of a citizen to a community is to take up arms and defend it. Most Americans, or Brits or western Europeans have lived so long in relative safety that most people feel this duty can be farmed out to specialists; no need to serve in the same way as all adult male citizens of ancient Athens served as their cities army, or the Colonial militias, or rangers on the Texas frontier needed to defend their own isolated communities. The downside to this specialization is that most citizens – most especially our political and intellectual elite have little to do with the military, or that part of their community from which the serving military is drawn. Andrew Olmstead and other military bloggers have tried over the last five years with some success to bridge this experience gap, to convey to people half a world away what it is like at the point of the spear in this war.

G.M. Fraser is most famed as the creator of Flashman, the Victorian era rogue-hero, who managed to participate in just about every important 19th century event and meet up with every prominent personality of the time – usually unwillingly and glimpsed over a shoulder as he fled with great speed, buttoning up his trousers. His memoir of his own time as a soldier in WWII. Quartered Safe out Here or the adventures of his alter-ego Lieutenant Dand O’Neill in the post-war British Army as related in the McAuslan Trilogy, is a little less known than the flamboyant and fictional Flashman but very well worth reading. The O’Neill-McAuslan stories especially are a peep into the world of a military that if you take away the superficial trappings, the specific-era technology and the very specific slang… is timeless as it is familiar.

I kind of picture Fraser and Olmstead, sitting quietly together with a bottle of especially fine Scotch in some otherworld officers’ club, swapping stories and memories and eventually getting quite merry. For they had quite a lot in common, and one of them – to judge on what they wrote about being soldiers would have been agreement with this sentiment;

Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the gate:
‘To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his Gods,

Thomas Babington Macauley – Lays of Ancient Rome

“Life in the wide world goes on much as it has these past age, full of its own comings and goings, scarcely aware of the existence of hobbits… for which I am very thankful.” – Gandalf, from “The Fellowship of the Ring”

There are some things that are so obvious that 20-20 hind-sight is not required, and Sunday, December 7th 1941 is one of them. The events of a couple of hours in the skies over a tiny Pacific Island previously known more as a tourist destination and a source for sugar and pineapples created a rift across the American consciousness, an abrupt demarcation between “then” and “now”. Very much like the effect of 9-11, a snap of a cosmically huge cracker into two pieces; you could look across to the other half of the cracker, and see that on either side of the chasm everything appeared to look just the same… but in your heart, you knew that things were not the same, and would never be quite the same again.

It was a smaller world, that America of seven decades ago, a very local, insular and insulated world, and one which moved comparatively slowly. Only the wealthiest or most adventurous traveled widely. Those who did travel did so by train, or passenger steamship in varying degrees of luxury. Passenger air travel was in its infancy, an exotic and expensive curiosity, as was television - a fancy futuristic gadget displayed at the 1939 Worlds’ Fair. People got their news from newspapers and movie news reels, from weekly magazines like “Life” and “The Saturday Evening Post”, and from the radio. Telephones were large clumsy black objects, nine out of ten on a party line, if you had one at all in your home. Urgent news came by telegram, a little slip of paper delivered by a bicycle messenger.

There was a war on, in that year of 1941; a war that been brewing for years before it finally burst into the open. Europe had been at war and China… poor fractured China, had been racked and wrecked by warlords, civil war and the Japanese for most of a decade. To Americans, it was all very tragic… but it was happening somewhere else. America of 1941 was built on a century and half of emigration by people who had consciously chosen to leave the old world with its resentments and quarrels behind. The consensus among most ordinary working Americans was that it was none of our business and best to keep out of it. A bill to draft military-age men had just barely been passed, the standing regular Army and Navy were insular little worlds all their own. The catastrophe of our own Civil War was just passing out of living memory, but recollection of World War I remained quite vivid, along with the conviction that we had been suckered into participation against our best interests. Asia’s quarrels and Europe’s quarrels were nothing to do with Americans and there was an ocean - which took better than a week to cross by ship – between us and the belligerent parties anyway.

And then one Sunday morning, under a tropical blue sky, all those happy assumptions went up in showers of smoke, explosions and flame. We may not have had an interest in the quarrels of others… but those quarrels definitely had an interest in us. And we were reminded again, those of us who forgotten or chosen to put that knowledge to one side, that the world is with us always.

A long while ago, I read an essay about the day after Pearl Harbor – can’t remember where, or by whom – but one of the memories recorded was from a person who had lived on or near the big Navaho Reservation, in the Southwest. On the morning of Monday, December 8th, 1941 – so this person recalled – every able-bodied male on the reservation over the age of seventeen showed up at their local post offices, carrying a gun and wanting to volunteer for the war… a war that had chosen them.

Two essays for this day, the eleventh day of the elevenths month: First - Austin Bay and second, my own reminiscence of my great-uncle William

Later: from Youtube, via my computer genius friend who sent it to me this morning - “A Pittance of Time“.

For no particular reason, over last weekend I was re-reading David McCullough’s account of the Johnston Flood, and was struck by the chapter which recounts the aftermath. Scores of reporters for American newspapers leaped upon the story – it wasn’t every day that a thriving industrial town gets wiped out in forty minutes flat by a sudden colossal rush of water from a catastrophic dam failure upstream, not even in the admittedly accident-prone 19th century. Among the first sensational stories reported from the wrecked city were lurid tales of gangs of Hungarian immigrants – the downtrodden and resentful minority du jour of that time and locality – looting the dead and raping the living, and of vigilante justice on the part of other survivors… all of which turned out to have been untrue. Even retractions and corrections afterwards wouldn’t squash those accounts dead in their tracks, and it reminded me of the stories of horrors in the New Orleans Superdome after Katrina; also lurid, also untrue… but widely disseminated, and even when debunked at length, with footnotes, forensic evidence and pictures… still passionately believed.

It all comes down to memes. They are a set of assumptions which have a life of their own through being repeated, especially by organs like the news media and beacons of popular culture like the entertainment industry. Thus propagated, memes are pernicious as nut-grass. No matter how many times they are debunked… still they exist, springing up sturdily in the cracks of public discourse and popular culture. Most of them do little harm, and even boost the subjects’ ego in a small way: Frenchmen are good lovers, New York is the center of American intellectual life, you get the best education at the most expensive college. Others exasperate experts by their persistence, in spite of being debunked, corrected or explained, over and over: Columbus was NOT the first European to believe the world was round, aliens from space did not build the pyramids- or any other monumental structure in the ancient world, and President Bush did not serve up a plastic turkey to the troops.

This morning the Blogfaddah linked to a discussion of l’affaire Beauchamp, which began with the lament “Isn’t it sort of disappointing that one has to spend this much time telling journalists, and journalist’s most ardent supporters, why it is important that journalists don’t lie?” Discussion immediately lurched away from examining what I thought was the point of the essay in question; why the milblog community landed on the New Republic’s fables with such energy and enthusiasm.

The answer is because it was another brick in the wall of meme under current construction, itself is an extension of the one constructed around Vietnam war veterans, which almost without exception painted them as tormented and drug-addled lost souls, riddled with guilt over having committed atrocities, and unable to make anything of their post-service lives. This meme had far more damaging results than just providing a handy stock character for movies, television and news documentaries; it impacted the lives of real veterans, essentially isolating and silencing them. Men and women who had satisfying, productive and well-adjusted lives did not particularly want to be identified as Vietnam war veterans, not if it meant being dismissed as a freaked-out looser.

That is why milboggers came unglued over Beauchamp’s and other fraudulent and malignant stories given credence by self-isolated specimens like Franklin Foer; because it’s being attempted, all over again with a new generation of veterans. Last time, it went unchallenged for decades. By my recollection it took about fifteen years for a TV show to feature a well-adjusted non-traumatized Vietnam veteran hero. It’s not going to happen again, not if we have the ability to forcefully question the individual meme-bricks before the mortar has set. Doesn’t matter that The New Republic is a small-circulation magazine or that some kind of truthiness about the brutalities of war -blah-blah-blah, or that our pop-cult gurus are too damn lazy to work up another set of clichés. This one we’re going to fight on the beach.

A more interesting line of thought is – is there something more than just intellectual laziness and the comfort of slipping into a well-worn track at work here, even if only subconsciously? Could there be something to be gained on one side of the debates about war, Islamic-inspired imperialism, the whole tar-baby of nuclear Iran, if military veterans whose service at the pointy-end-of-the-spear might have given them some particular interest or insight can be easily silenced and isolated… simply by being routinely characterized as ignorant, out-of-control redneck freaks?

Yeah, I’ve wondered about that myself, lately. Discuss among yourselves.

Lovely video and song for the troops here, forwarded by Simon and also posted at his Power and Control blog. Simon also adds this note: “The author has given permission to those currently serving in the military to share it with nine of their best buddies, wives, husbands, parents, or children.”

Think of things like this as an antidote to the current out-spew of anti-war flicks from our friends in main-stream Hollywood.

Update: Simon has been authorized by the author of to give away 1,000 free copies of the song to our men and women in the military for personal use only. However, recipients of a free copy can let anybody listen to it if they want. Members of the military can put it on their i-pod, use it on their computer, or make one CD. Details and his email addy are here

…That’s fit to print.

Or not, as the case may be. My own disillusionment with legacy media over the last three or four years has been pretty profound – not that I had them on all that high a pedestal to begin with. Being in the military media afforded enough occasions for brushing up against the big guys, either at first hand, or at second. There were enough stories filtering around the world of military broadcasting, of incredible arrogance, lack of accuracy and lack of professionalism displayed by the big names to give me a bad taste in my mouth anyway. I was already aware of the tendency for blow-dried big-name anchors and reporters to helicopter in, do an on-scene standup reading words that some lowly staffer had written for them. I already knew of how news luminaries like Peter Arnett had to back down over the bogus ‘Tailwind” story – which had made my eyebrows raise skeptically from the very first; I mean, guys handling a chemical so dangerous that a single drop on bare skin could be fatal? And not being in MOPP-gear (or the Vietnam-era equivalent) up to their eyeballs? Pull the other leg, chaps – that one has bells on it. I could cheerfully write off the cack-handed treatment of all things military by the legacy media to sheer bloody ignorance – after all, the military is a weird and wonderful world, all to itself.

What became harder to take over the last couple of years is their ignorance, credulity and bias regarding just about everything else. This list is a pretty comprehensive encyclopedia, although I am given to wonder how many bogus stories were never noticed until the rise of the internet, and the ability of astute news consumers to fact-check legacy media asses from here to the ends of the earth.

And to add one more depressing example, there is the matter of General Sanchez’s recent double-barreled blast. Of course, it was relayed to us by legacy media in the manner which we have come to expect of them; omitting the withering criticism directed at them… which formed the larger part of General Sanchez’ remarks. (linked here) Now that’s a shocker – one might think they didn’t care for criticism directed at their impartial and noble selves, so down the memory hole it goes, at least as far as the headlines are concerned.

And finally, another writer friend of mine is curious about this photograph – an AP stock photo which has been used lately in venues such as the LA Times and Newsweek in their stories about Blackwater. He is a veteran, a combat photographer and former AP editor himself – and he thinks it is a little too perfect. Well, the two Blackwater guys rushing towards the camera while the guys behind them are all sitting about, in apparent relaxation. Take a look – what does it look like to you? Firefight or lunch break? Both? Or just another example of AP faux-tography?

(Part One of several to come)

“From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.”

I have been thinking about the Civil War, lately; most particularly because I am plowing through a great tall pile of books about all aspects of that most bitter national division. I have just finished the first draft of the second book about the experiences of the German settlements in Texas, and am now sketching out the initial chapter of the third. On one hand I am hard at work filling in blanks and fact-checking, adding incidents, experiences and observations to fill out the general story. On the other, I am trying to put myself into the mind of a character who has come home from it all; weary, maimed and heartsick – to find upon arriving (on foot and with no fanfare) that everything has changed. His mother and stepfather are dead, his brothers have all fallen on various battlefields and his sister-in-law is a bitter last-stand Confederate. He isn’t fit enough to get work as a laborer, and being attainted as an ex-rebel soldier, can’t do the work he was schooled for, before the war began. Interesting work, this; putting myself into the minds of people who were seeing things as they developed, day by day and close up; without the comforting overview of hindsight

This, BTW is my way of advancing my story, of how great cattle baronies came to be established in Texas and in the West, after the war and before the spread of barbed wire, rail transport to practically every little town and several years of atrociously bad winters. So are legends born, but to me a close look at the real basis for the legends is totally fascinating and much more nuanced – the Civil War and the cattle ranching empires, both.

Nuance; now that’s a forty-dollar word, usually used to imply a reaction that is a great deal more complex than one might think at first glance. And at first glance the Civil War has only two sides, North and South, blue and grey, slavery and freedom, sectional agrarian interests against sectional industrial interests, rebels and… well, not. A closer look at it reveals as many sides as those dodecahedrons that they roll to determine Dungeons and Dragons outcomes.

There was the War that split border states like Kentucky and Virginia – which actually did split, so marked were the differences between the lowlands gentry and the hardscrabble mountaineers. There was the war between free-Soil settlers and pro-slavery factions in Missouri and in Kansas; Kansas which bled for years and contributed no small part to the split. There was even the war between factions of the Cherokee Indian nation, between classmates of various classes at West Point, between neighbors and yes, between members of families.

How that must have broken the hearts of men like Sam Houston, who refused to take a loyalty oath to the Confederacy, and Winfield Scott, the old soldier who commanded the Federal Army at the start of the war. His officers’ commission had been signed by Thomas Jefferson: he and Houston had both fought bravely for a fledgling United States. Indeed, at the time of the Civil war, there were those living still who could remember the Revolution, even a bare handful of centenarians who had supposedly fought in it. For every Southern fireater like Edmund Ruffin and Preston Brooks (famous for beating a anti-slave politician to unconsciousness in the US Senate) and every Northern critic of so-called ‘Slave power” like William Lloyd Garrison and John Brown… and every young spark on either side who could hardly wait to put on a uniform of whatever color, there were sober citizens who looked on the prospect of it all with dread and foreboding.

(next ; How they got to that point – some thoughts)

Also, the sample first chapter of Adelsverein, Vol. 3 is here

(part 1 here and part 2 here)

The execution of approximately a hundred and twenty men, women… and yes, children also… of the Fancher-Baker wagon-train party stands out particularly among revolting accounts of massacres in the old West, and not just for the number of victims. The most notorious 19th century massacres usually involved Indians and either settlers or soldiers in some combination, overrunning a settlement or encampment, or ambushing a military unit or a wagon-train and slaughtering all in or after a brief and bitter fight. Sometimes this was the overt intent of the aggressor, or just customary practice in the long and bitter Indian Wars; ugly deeds which can be given some fig-leaf of rationalization by attributing them to the heat of battle. But Mountain Meadows was carefully planned beforehand and committed in the coldest of cold blood. How it came to happen is a story almost unknown and incredible to modern ears; bitter fruit of the poisoned tree which had its roots in the persecutions of earlier Mormon settlements in what is now the mid-West. A recitation of the events and reasons for this would make this account several times as long. Sufficient to say as did the character of Dr. Sardius McPheeters, that the Mormons came to realize that they could only get along with their immediate neighbors if they had no neighbors, and they decamped en masse for the wilds of Utah Territory.

There they set about building their new city, on the shores of a salt lake at the foot of the Wasatch mountain range. Driven by zeal, missionaries for the Church of Latter Day Saints traveled and proselytized fearlessly and widely. Eager and hardworking converts to the new church arrived in droves, ready to build that new and shining society in the desert wilderness. It has been no mean accomplishment, outlasting all of the other 19th century social-religious-intellectual communes: Brook Farm and the Shakers, the Amana Colony and any number of ambitious and idealistic cities on the hill. Most of these places barely survived beyond the disgrace or death of their founder, and the disillusion of their membership.

That the mid 19th century Mormons did so must be credited to the iron will, organizational abilities and dynamic leadership of Brigham Young. President of the church, apostle and successor to murdered founder Joseph Smith, Young was also appointed governor of the Utah Territory by then president of the US, Millard Fillmore. Essentially, Utah and the Mormon settlements were a theocracy to a degree not seen since the very early days of the Puritan colonies. Young and his church continued to have a contentious relationship with the US government. Who would actually be in charge; the civil authorities represented by the US Government, or the religious establishment, personified by Young, in his position at the apex of LDS authority? Church-approved polygamy rattled mainstream Americans to no end, since many suspected that it was a wholly self-serving justification for the indulging of male lusts. (The Victorians generally entertained lively suspicions about male lusts, which would today not disgrace a university womens’ studies department.) On their side, memories among the Mormon settlers of their persecutions in Missouri, Illinois and Arkansas were still raw, even as more American settlers continued to move westwards to California and Oregon. Isolation in the far West turned out to be less absolute every year.

By 1857 rumors were flying thick and fast, shouted from every meeting place of Mormons in the Territory that an American military invasion was on the way, with the stated intention of deposing the theocracy, murdering every believing Mormon and laying waste to the settlements they had built with so much heartbreaking labor over the previous decade. And early that spring, shortly after the Bakers and the Fanchers had departed Arkansas, a popular and much-loved Mormon missionary, Parley Pratt had been murdered there by the estranged husband of one of his plural wives. As historian Will Bagley wrote in his account of the massacre, Brigham Young may have been respected – but Parley Pratt was loved. And when there were rumors passed around that some of his murderers were among the men in the Fancher-Baker train, there was stirred up a perfect storm of paranoia and millennial fears. Brigham Young had ordered that a number of outlaying Mormon colonies in California, Wyoming and Nevada to immediately withdraw, and for his people to stockpile supplies and steel themselves for all-out war.

And the Fanchers and the Bakers and all their friends and their children, their cattle herd and their wealth of wagons and property were right in the middle of it, all unknowning.

(next; how the plan unfolded… but at whose order?)

(Part one is here)

The start of the trail season, spring of 1857 saw a number of prosperous but restlessly ambitious emigrants taking the trail west, many of them linked by ties of kin and friendship: the Bakers of Caroll County, Arkansas, and the Huff and Fancher clans, from Benton County, were joined at some point along the long trail from the jumping-off place at the edge of the sea of grass by families with the prosaic names of Tackett, Jones, Mitchell and Prewitt. Alexander Fancher, the paterfamilias and trail-boss of the Fanchers was experienced in the ways of the emigrant trail, having gone back and forth several times. He and his kin intended to settle for good in California and to that end had bought not only their wives and children, but much of their portable property and savings, and a large herd (estimated at 800-1,000) of long-horned Texas cattle. Some of the party were Argonauts, intending to look for gold, but the Fanchers’ cattle were their gold, and intended to market them at a profit to the hungry gold miners in California. They had already registered a brand, for their new ranch and herd.

By 1857 the emigrant trail was not the long and desperate march through unsettled wilderness that it had been ten years before. The US Army had managed to spottily garrison and patrol the Platte River Valley, and the Mormon settlements spreading out from Salt Lake City offered one last and often life-saving chance at rest and resupply before the final calculated leap into the desert and over the sheer mountain wall of the Sierra Nevada. The Fanchers and the Bakers and the other families, numbering about a hundred and fourty men, women and children, arrived in the Salt Lake City area at the end of August, and after consultation decided that they were too late in the season to venture the northern trail, following the Humboldt River into the desert where it sank eventually into the sand, and up the long rocky climb up the Truckee River to the steep mountain pass named after the emigrant party which had so famously left their own traverse too late.

Experienced and sensible, Alexander Fancher and his fellows would not chance being trapped in the snow; not with their long train of wagons, their herd of cattle and their horses. They would take the southern route, the old Spanish Trail that lead down through the Mojave Desert, through the less precipitous passes farther south. (Roughly following present-day I-15, from Salt Lake City, Los Vegas and San Bernardino) It would be a long haul through various deserts, and a couple of hard pulls through mountainous terrain, but nothing like the cruel snows which had doomed the Donner-Reed Party ten years before. By early September they had reached Cedar City, the last outpost for resupply before descent of the Virgin River George and the long desert crossing below. They met a cold reception from the Mormon settlers there, and were not able to purchase any supplies. Doubtless shrugging it off, they moved on south and camped in a pleasant mountain valley at the foot of the Iron Mountains and adjacent the Spanish Trail.

This camping place offered generous pasturage and water, but on the morning of September 7th the emigrants began to be attacked by a large war-band of Piute Indians. Dismayingly, it soon became clear that the Indians were unusually persistent; this was no quick smash and grab ambush, a sudden screaming foray at dawn, with a handful of casualties and a few cattle or horses stolen in a few minutes. This was a deadly, concerted siege. The Fanchers and the Bakers and the others swiftly forted up, chaining their wagons together and digging hasty trenches; they held out for five days. Seven of them were killed outright, another twenty or so wounded, and dismayingly, they began to run low on ammunition, and were tormented by an inability to reach water without being repeatedly sniped at. Of two men who attempted to fetch water from the spring closest to the encampment, one was shot down, and the other escaped… but not before seeing that the man who shot them was not an Indian.

But this was not very unusual… there were brigands all over the west who pretended to be Indians as a cover for robbery and murder, and there were whispers of white turncoats among the various tribes. Still and all, when the cavalry appeared on the horizon, probably everyone in the besieged encampment took a deep breath of relief. Here was rescue at hand; well armed frontiersmen like themselves. Not actually the cavalry, for this was still Mormon territory – it was the local militia, their leaders advancing under a white flag, with good news for the emigrants.

They could leave, the militia leader said… they had been able to call off the Piutes and negotiate some kind of truce with them. But they would have to disarm and leave their wagons and cattle and horse herd, and walk back under escort of the militia to Cedar City. Oh, the children and the wounded could be taken in wagons, but everything else would have to be left behind. No doubt the Fanchers and the Bakers, the Prewitts and the Tacketts and their wives and older children did not like the idea much… but they had their lives and what small valuables they could carry on them. And so they left the wagon encampment in three parties, trusting the men who had come to their rescue. First came some wagons with the wounded, some of the women with babies and small children in it, then another group of women with the older children on foot, and then the men, each of them escorted by a militiaman.

And when a prearranged signal was given by the militia leader, they turned and executed the men, and all of the women and children but for seventeen of them who were babies or assumed to be too young to ever remember what they had seen at the place called Mountain Meadows.

(to be continued)

Ran across this a couple of days ago, via Rantburg - if World War Two had been a real-time, on-line strategy game, this how the chat-room might have appeared:

Hitler[AoE]: america hax, u had depression and now u got a huge fockin army
Hitler[AoE]: thats bullsh1t u hacker
Churchill: lol no more france for u hitler
Hitler[AoE]: tojo help me!
T0J0: wtf u want me to do, im on the other side of the world retard
Hitler[AoE]: fine ill clear you a path
Stalin: WTF u arsshoel! WE HAD A FoCKIN TRUCE
Hitler[AoE]: i changed my mind lol
benny-tow: haha

The rest is here

To: Representatives Moran, Tauscher and Porter
From: Sgt Mom
Re: Slimed in the Green Zone

1. Well, my heart pumps pure piss for your pathetic predicament and your wounded sensibilities. Traveling all the way to Iraq, to demonstrate your tender consideration for the troops serving there at the whim of the Bushchimphitler and his eeeeevil war, only to find out that they had your number, short bios and an assortment of your previously reported remarks on the war. What a shocker, eh?

2. Yep, it sure was just another example of the deep-laid plots of the eeeeevil Bushchimphitler and his crafty minions… that troops assembled to meet ‘n greet should actually have read news reports. Really… how damn stupid do you really think the average military member is? Wasn’t it enough of a warning, when John Kerry’s adlibbed comment about dropping out of college and being stuck in Iraq rebounded within twenty-four hours with this priceless repost from troops in-theater?

3. Allow me to break it to you gently, lady and gentlemen; the military mind-set, like that of the Boy Scouts worships at the high altar of preparedness. It is an essential part of the culture to swiftly acquisition and disseminate necessary intelligence about whatever task they are ordered to accomplish. Doesn’t matter if its’ taking Omaha beach, Baghdad or providing the suitable background for a collection of globe-trotting pols burnishing their credentials; be assured that they will do their homework, and come to the party with all the angles covered.

4. Trust me on this also; while there a great many in the military today are apolitical, indifferent, or otherwise un-interested in the current political landscape, many more are intensely interested. They are betting their lives, in a manner of speaking, on their ability to transform Iraq and Afghanistan into something with a closer resemblance to a functioning and fairly democratic nation. Which may yet be possible: South Korea didn’t look like much of a good bet fifty years ago and look at the place now.

5. Finally, this is a wired and interconnected world these days; military bases overseas are not nearly as isolated as they were fifteen, or thirty years ago. That you could innocently assume that what you had said to your constituents or in the halls of power would not reach the ears of those serving in a garrison on the other side of the world indicates that you have not taken this to heart. You assumed that all the good little uniformed peasantry would trot obligingly up and tug their forelocks for their betters, and never mind in the least that your previous remarks could be construed as undermining their mission. I trust that you have been enlightened.

6. Military people do vote, you know. And sometimes their votes even get counted.

Sincerely,
Sgt Mom

(Previous parts, here, here and here)

Having made it clear who was boss among the Texas Hill Country settlers, Duff and his Partisan Ranger company were withdrawn late in the autumn of 1863 and assigned to afflict the lower Rio Grande. They left smoking rubble and several decades worth of hatred and distrust in their wake. Upon his unlamented departure, a scratch company of local men, both pro-Union and Confederate alike recruited by Major James Hunter effectively protected the frontier settlements in the Hill Country. It helped that a fresh outburst of Indian raids had re-directed everyone’s priorities towards meeting a more keenly felt and immediate threat. Hunter was respected by all, and trusted by the German settlers, and sensibly confined his attentions towards protecting those scatterings of hamlets and ranches from Indian marauders and left the enforcement of the conscription laws strictly alone.

Unfortunately, continuing Confederate reversals on the battlefields in Tennessee and Virginia led to a demand for more men to feed into the Confederate Army and a renewed outcry to enforce the conscription laws in the Hill Country. One of those new decrees insisted that the volunteers in the frontier company be immediately mustered into the Confederate Army. Opposed to doing any such thing, most of those volunteers promptly deserted, and Hunter’s remaining troops turned to hunting them down. A pair of deserters were killed while resisting arrest near Grape Creek in Blanco County, and shortly afterwards a relative of one of the men killed the neighbor who was assumed to have informed on them.

Meanwhile, a detachment of state troops went searching for Karl Itz, a survivor of the Nueces massacre, who was thought to be hiding near his family home in the Cherry Spring area. Unable to find him, they seized his two younger brothers and took them to Fredericksburg on the pretext of enlisting them forcibly into the Confederate Army. Instead, the two of them were murdered by their guards in the middle of Main Street, presumably as a means sending a message to other draft dodgers and bushmen. Another running fight between troopers and bushmen left authorities with the impression that the situation was truly getting out of hand. Major Hunter was effectively kicked upstairs and local command given to an excitable and impulsive man named William Banta.

Banta soon exhibited a lamentable tendency to see enemies everywhere, encouraged by the whisperings of pro-Confederate neighbors at his headquarters at White Oak Creek, a little north of present-day Kerrville. He and a local pro-Confederate named James Waldrip were also encouraged in this tendency by the arrival of a small squad of men from Kansas, from William Quantrill’s notorious band. Fresh from assorted partisan atrocities in Kansas, they had come to Texas to purchase horses, cattle and supplies. In short order, Waldrip gathered a band of like-minded partisans together with Quantrill’s men and determined to root out Unionists, deserters, draft-evaders and any whose views of the Confederacy were less than wildly enthusiastic. They would become known as the “hangerbande” or “the hanging band”.
(more…)

The flood of enthusiastic volunteers for service in the Army of the Confederacy had slowed to a trickle. Early in 1862 the Confederate Congress drafted and passed a general conscription law, essentially declaring that every white male between the age of eighteen and thirty-five were liable for military service. Within months the upper age limits was moved to forty-five. In the last desperate year of the war it was seventeen to fifty… and if a man fell into that rather broad category, he had better have a damn good reason for not being in uniform. Of course there were outs: for a while and on both sides, wealthy men could hire a substitute to serve. There were exemptions for elected officials, and for men who owned more than a certain number of slaves. This last exemption was particularly galling, especially in those portions of the Confederacy where the peculiar institution was not much practiced, either because of inclination or economics. Nothing was more calculated to prove the truth of the bitter observation that it was a rich mans’ war but a poor mans’ fight.

In the Texas Hill Country, feelings about the draft were especially bitter. Firstly, most of the Germans had been Unionists and abhorred slavery. Secondly, a prime motivation for emigrating from Germany in the first place had been the existence of conscription there. To be forced to fight in the defense of an institution they despised, and for a political body whose very existence they had opposed was an insult past bearing. And finally, Gillespie County was very much still a part of the frontier. Fighting off war-parties of Indians was much more of an immediate concern to settlers there, than whatever difficulties the Confederacy had managed to run themselves into. And there was also that ongoing concern about raising crops and protecting families and property, since the withdrawal of the U.S. Army from the frontier forts which had protected them. The Texas State troops which had replaced them after Texas secceeded had not proved any more effective. Dissatisfaction with the Confederacy rose, as the Union blockade began to bite deeply at economic interests and most especially in those parts of Texas which had not been enthralled by the whole concept to begin with.

Gillespie and neighboring Kerr County was put under martial law in the spring of 1862, and by summer the military officer in charge essentially declared war on the Hill Country Germans. It was ordered that all males over the age of 16 must register with the local provost marshal and take an oath of allegiance to the Confederacy. Suspicion followed by repression only bred resentment and further defiance, which in turn bred violence… and resistance. Men of draft age took to hiding out in the brush whenever anyone in a uniform came around. Even companies of volunteers raised by Hill Country settlements to protect against Indian raids and freelance brigandage were looked upon by suspicion; for they had… it was whispered… only volunteered for frontier defense in order to keep out of the Confederate Army. It had already been noted by the commandant of the South Texas district that volunteers and conscripts for the Confederate Army were quite thin on the ground in Gillespie County. A company of so-called Partisan Rangers, under the command of Captain James Duff, who had been a freight-hauler and wagon-master before the war, were sent to keep order. Duf’s company set up camp near Fredericksburg, and set about establishing their commander as the most hated man in the county; amongst a long list of actions, they arrested a respected local merchant for supposedly refusing to accept Confederate currency in his establishment.

By summer, Duff ordered the arrest of any man who had not made the difficult journey into town to take the loyalty oath. In a sweep of a thinly-settled area north of Kerrville, half a dozen men who had failed to do so where arrested by Duff’s troopers, along with their families. The families were sent to Fredericksburg, to be held under appalling conditions in a cramped one-room hut, but the six men were sent under guard to Fort Mason, in northern Gillespie County, where a large body of others suspected of being Union sympathizers were being held. During an overnight camp, two of the younger men saw that their guards were sleeping, and took the opportunity to slip away. The next morning, the frustrated guards simply hanged the four others and dumped their bodies into a nearby creek. Upon returning to Fredericksburg, the guards taunted the families of the men they had murdered with accounts of what had been done. To judge by the names, only one of the six was actually a German.

Duff’s rangers waged a savage campaign against the local settlers: flogging men they had arrested until they told his troopers what they wanted to hear, wrecking hard-built settler’s homes, arresting whole families and confiscating foodstuffs and livestock wholesale. After burning her home to the ground, one woman is said to have told Duff that he must have little enough to do, since he had left her and her children without any shelter at all. Captain Duff answered that at least, he was leaving her a spring of water, to which she shouted fearlessly that if he had known how to destroy that, he surely would have done so.

Thinking that they had been offered a thirty-day amnesty by the Governor of Texas and that they had an opportunity to depart Texas unmolested, rather than take the loyalty oath, a party of sixty men gathered south of Kerrville in August of that year, led by a German settler from Comfort named Fritz Tegener. They intended to travel westward towards the Mexican border; some of them intended to (and later did) join the Union Army. But there was no such amnesty in effect, and they were pursued and ambushed by a contingent of Duff’s troopers along the Nueces River. About half of Tegener’s party were killed outright in the resulting fight, and another twenty wounded, were executed upon capture. One was taken to San Antonio and executed there. The survivors scattered; some over the border, and some to the Hill Country, where their families brought food to them as they hid in the fields outside Fredericksburg. Captain Duff refused to allow the families of the dead to retrieve the bodies. They lay unburied until the end of the war, until the remains were gathered up and placed under a monument in Comfort.

(Next: the ‘Hanging Band’… to follow. Sorry, this is complicated, and I want to put it in small, edible bites!)

More new settlers than just the Germans were making their way into Texas, in the fifteen years before the Civil War. Once that the coastal lowlands below the Balcones Escarpment could be fairly said to be settled, Texas attracted more than just the land-hungry and restless. It drew ambitious and more prosperous settlers from across the south, settlers and entrepreneurs who brought their slaves with them. These men farmed sugar and rice and built fine plantation houses, gracefully adorned with neoclassical columns and ironwork balconies; in jarring contrast to the plainer log blockhouses and cabins built by the settlers on the western and northern borders of what passed for civilization. A fissure formed among communities in Texas that mimicked the split between North and South, between free-soil men and slave-owners. This split was exacerbated by the fact that the Germans, recent arrivals all, heartily disapproved of slavery, and retained strong cultural connections to other German communities in the north. Within a few months after passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which threw the question of permitting slavery in the Western territories on those who settled there, a fresh ruckus broke out in Texas. The Act kicked up considerable bad feeling on both sides, since it was seen as allowing the peculiar institution to spread into where it had theretofore been forbidden. Many were the barrels of ink consumed, and thousands of spleens quite thoroughly vented, as adherents of free-soil and abolition expressed their disgust and disapproval.

One of those expressions took the form of a rather mildly-worded resolution disapproving of slavery, which was put up at a state-wide meeting of the various German choral societies, or “sangerbund” late in 1854 in San Antonio. German-American political and social organizations in other states had approved similar resolutions, but the vote of the Texas Germans set off a firestorm, especially among nativists and “Know-Nothings”, who were suspicious of foreigners anyway. Questions were asked, in increasingly belligerent voices, about the loyalties of the German settlers to Texas; very soon the abolitionist editor of a popular German-language newspaper would have to depart San Antonio at speed, driven out by threats of violence. The question of slavery morphed into a states’ rights issue; exactly what could the states decide for themselves was a burning question amongst the philosophically inclined. How much authority did the federal government hold when it came to strictly local issues? These and related points were vociferously disputed, even as attitudes about abolitionists hardened into a blanket detestation of anyone whose enthusiasm for the “peculiar institution” was less then wholly enthusiastic, across the South and Texas.. By the time that Abraham Lincoln was elected to the presidency as a free-soil man, Texas was aflame, literally and figuratively; although one can wonder just how much of the eagerness for war can be chalked up to the natural temperament of the Scots-Irish borderers who had an affinity for any fight going and gravitated towards it like a salmon going upstream.

Just because Abraham Lincoln was heinously unpopular across the South as president-elect did not mean that every Texan, slave-owner or not, made a mad dash for the exit and the passionate embrace of the Confederacy. There were men such as Sam Houston, a slave-owner, who were also Unionists. And there were also those who detested the “peculiar institution”… but who were strong for the abstract principle of states’ rights, even if they held no particular affection for the concrete policy of chattel slavery. And finally, there were those bedrock Texan settlers, like The Fat Guys’ ancestral kin who felt that:

a) “Texas never should have joined the union, as we were managing just fine on our own, no matter what the politicians said
b) since we did, though, we should stick to it and
c) how about a little help with these Comancheros?”

When the fighting began in the spring of 1861, the states-rights, and the pro-Confederacy factions carried the day had carried the day. Texas departed the Union and cast its lot with the Confederacy, over the objections and misgivings of a substantial minority, which included most of the German settlers.

By the second year of the war, barely a handful of men had volunteered out of Gillespie County for the Confederate Army. There were recruits a-plenty for the Home Guard, and for the Frontier Battalion, and for locally-recruited ranging companies to defend against Indian raiders sweeping in from the west and from the Plains… but a year and a half of full-out fighting in the east had already burned through those eager volunteers who had the inclination to leave their fields and families and go to fight. Halfway through 1862, New Orleans fell to the Union. Anyone could look at a map and see that the Union now commanded both ends of the Mississippi River. Perhaps many of those Texans who had doubts about the wisdom of departing the Union and joining the Confederacy now felt completely justified. And many of those who had been so eager for it now must have felt a cold little trickle run down their spines.

The Confederacy’s reaction to the Union threat would unleash riots and vigilante mayhem across the Hill Country, and in the Northern Texas settlements.

(To be continued)