Memorials

down the Powhattan, aka the James, from City Point fishing pier, with the Benjamin Harrison Memorial Bridge in the mist

In 1864-65, two hundred boats a day coursed this water, delivering supplies for the Union lines around Richmond and Petersburg.  General U.S. Grant presided over it all, from his little cabin.

I know: remembering the soldiers of the Civil War hardly gives us a blithe and bonny patriotic Memorial Day, dear reader.  Forgive me.  History inevitably makes things complicated.

Let’s start with the original memorial:  the Mass.

What if the written documents of the New Testament never got collected?  What if the scriptures of the Old Covenant had been lost?  What if Rome had fallen before St. Peter ever got there, and the memories of all the ancients died when they did?

Not so outlandish, really.  The native people used to call the James River by a different name.  But their memories–of empires, triumphs, defeats, dynasties–those memories have all but vanished from the face of the earth.

But: Even if not a single book survived from the age of ancient Rome, we would still remember Jesus, because of the Mass.

Some people remember the Vietnam War.  During his visit to Asia last week, President Obama said he remembered when that war ended, when he was 13 years old.  Who remembers why that war was fought?  I think the Vietnamese exiles around the world probably remember better than anyone.

Because Catholicism involves people in the world, institutions, property, alliances, family ties, and stuff like that, we cannot exactly claim ideological purity, so to speak.  What we can claim is that we have remembered Jesus, through thick and thin, by celebrating Mass.

When the president visited Hiroshima, it served as an occasion to rehearse an argument that runs like this:  dropping nuclear bombs on Japan brought the end of World War II.  If we had not dropped The Bomb, the war would have lasted much longer, and many more people would have died.  Therefore, we did the right thing.

This is what you call “consequentialism”–the moral justification of inherently immoral acts by invoking anticipated results.  Consequentialism is the refuge of people hell-bent on doing something they manifestly should not do, but who try to find a reason to do it anyway.  Consequentialism neglects the one, all-important fact:  God runs history, not us.  Our job is to do good and avoid evil.  Dropping bombs that you know will kill countless innocents–women, children, old people sitting in their rocking chairs:  E-V-I-L.

Anyway, may all our beloved dead rest in peace!

Someday, when people pray for us, in languages different from any which we currently know, using new and different names for the places familiar to us–when they pray for us, we can hope for divine mercy through their prayers.  Provided it’s the memorial of Jesus, a Mass.

April 1865. by Jay Winik

My dad married a Northerner. But he could hardly be accused of having been one himself. The year I turned twelve, our family spent the muggy summer evenings reading aloud to each other Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi. Huck and Jim already had become close friends to the imaginations of my brother and me, not to mention Aunt Sally and Tom Sawyer.

Yes, the Washington I grew up in had become the post-WWII ‘capital of the free world.’ But I never loved my hometown for that reason. I loved, and love her still, for the same reason that Robert E. Lee loved Virginia.

The land you come from deserves and demands your loyal affection, whether that particular land lies thick with trees and hedgerows or with streets and buildings. I never had any serious interest in the halls of national and international power near the places to which I delivered pizzas during high school.

Marion Barry meant more to me during the 1980’s than Ronald Reagan ever did. During the Grant administration, they debated moving the U.S. Capitol to Kansas. If they had, I wouldn’t love Washington, D.C., any differently than I do. My hometown, south of the Mason-Dixon, originally a swamp bordered by two slave states.

Just trying to explain why the month of April, 1865, fills me more with a sense of tragedy than triumph.*

Also, the end of the Civil-War Sesquicentennial, now upon us, fills me with guilt, because I haven’t paid more attention to it. And with sadness that it’s over.

Anyway: If you share any of these feelings, or if you simply seek a short, readable book with which to begin your acquaintance with Civil-War history, read April 1865 by Jay Winik.

Petersburg Crater and Grant vs. Lee

Funny thing about the lovely trails through Virginia’s Civil War battlefields: the trees grow now in a photo negative of the way it was during the war. Now, there are many, many more trees. What was farmland then is now woods. But the one fort in the Petersburg, Va., siege line that offered shade in 1865 (Fort Stedman), site of the Confederacy’s last hurrah, languishes now without a single tree.

…I hardly like to think about the battle at the “Crater,” where Pennsylvania miners dug under the picket lines and blew a little Confederate fort sky high, only to see thousands of Union soldiers routed in the ensuing attempt to push through the Rebel line.

…You will have to forgive me for failing to blog the sesquicentennial like I should. I missed the 150th of Gettysburg last summer. Now the anniversary of the Overland Campaign will soon arrive.

150 years ago next month, Pres. Lincoln promoted General U.S. Grant and brought him to the eastern theater of the war. In and of itself, this marked the beginning of the end.

Because Grant, as we have celebrated before, understood how the war would be won.

Now, who am I to offer glittering generalities? But: As I strolled along the eroding siegeworks that have been lovingly preserved east of Petersburg, I thought, “There really is something to the idea that the Northern and Southern minds crystallized in these two men, Lee and Grant”–who faced each other across the creeks flowing into the Appomatox from June, 1864, to the end of March, 1865.

Grant at City Point

Lee: Dashing, infinitely more charming and romantic; too courtly to give direct orders to his old friends (of whom he had dozens); too realistic to risk anything less than everything, whenever he could–the man George Washington would have understood, and loved, and wished he could have been more like…

Grant: breathtakingly humble in his realistic understanding of what needed to be done; bone-crushingly organized; genuinely opportunistic–not only more decisive than any other Union general, but, IMHO, more genuinely resourceful and deft even than the fox Lee. Grant, the master of a colossal, utterly efficient industrial machine, conceived by his mind (the model of the ensuing Gilded-Age barons in this respect). Grant, humane in the unprepossessing, scientific manner of an MIT professor.

Grant knew he couldn’t lose any other way than by beating himself. He patiently and stoically refused to do that. (Many wars and battles of many kinds, I would say, get won this way.)

Grant of course wanted the war over sooner rather than later. Fate had conspired against him: The war could have ended in June, 1864, when Grant surprised Lee by moving his army south of Richmond en masse. But timorousness got the better of his vanguard.

So the general did his U.S. Grant thing. Assessed it all cooly and prudently. And won nine months later.

Many of us like to idealize the Civil War as a series of decisive, Napoleon-like battles, with heroic officers leading charges, a la Joshua Chamberlain at Gettysburg. But when Grant took the Union helm, 150 years ago, that came to an end. And WWI-style fighting began. The most–really the only–beautiful thing about the Civil War in 1864 is Grant’s prudent and laborious mind.

Sites Near I-95

“They come from another age. The Age of Virginia.” (The Killer Angels)

Can a guy have fun tramping around the nooks and crannies of greater Richmond in search of Civil-War sites with epic historic significance? Listening to Coldplay on the way to the Cold Harbor National Historic Battlefield Park?

Yes.

War Begins in Earnest

A dyed-in-the-wool Easterner has a hard time featuring the idiosyncratic watercourses of the Ohio River basin.

We natives of the original thirteen have been raised to understand the earth to curve a certain way. But, west of the Appalachians, the ground slopes differenty. The water moves in inexplicable directions.

Who can comprehend the way the Cumberland or the Tennessee Rivers amble over the surface of the earth? Only God, the ancient Cherokee, and–perhaps–“Unconditional Surrender” Grant.

Did you think that we would let the sesquicentennial anniversary of the Battle of Shiloh pass unmentioned? The turning point of William Tecumseh Sherman’s life? Hardly. We would hardly blow it off, Holy Saturday or no.

The fighting Bishop took part. Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston died, as did 13,046 other men. The United States had never known a bloodier day.

But eight bloodier days were yet to come during the ensuing three years.

Loving Oneself in Nineveh

Twenty years since Paul Simon’s Rhythm of the Saints got a Grammy nomination. One-hundred fifty since Grant and the Union occupied Nashville, Tennessee. Multiple millennia since Jonah preached in Nineveh…

The people of Nineveh repented. (Luke 11:32)

The people of Nineveh repented. What sins had they committed?

Ghosts of Kennesaw + Why

Another link between Atlanta and NYC: Two identical names get a lot of public use. Robert Fulton (steamboat inventor) and Johann DeKalb (Lafayette’s protégé, a German who fought in George Washington’s Continental Army). Both of these last names get barked out by countless municipal employees and traffic reporters in New York and Atlanta: Fulton and DeKalb counties in Georgia, Fulton Street in Manhattan and DeKalb Avenue in Brooklyn…

…William Tecumseh Sherman, commanding three armies, marched south from Chattanooga, Tenn., bent on wreaking destruction. The war had entered its fourth year. The pre-war South no longer existed. The city of Atlanta had grown almost four-fold since 1850, full of sweaty factories cranking out the war machine.

Uncle Billy

Uncle Billy: 43 years of age, under the command of the highest ranking U.S. military officer since Washington, 41-year-old Ulysses S. Grant.

One hesitates to refer to this duo as the Two Towers, a la Sauron and Saruman. But without question the Union command stood united in the spring of 1864 like it had never been.

Can we imagine these two stony, understated, and straight-talking generals–a new breed, really, with no courtly trappings to speak of–can we imagine the two of them having a mutual understanding between them: “Okay. Enough. Let’s finish this thing off for the old ape” (the president).

Joseph Johnston, Leonidas Polk, John Bell Hood, and Co.: They had no thought of prevailing against Sherman’s armies. Outmanned and outgunned more than two-to-one.

But, imagine this! ‘If we can only hold them until the presidential election in the fall. If we can only get Lincoln knocked out of office, then it’s a whole new ballgame.’ (American politics hasn’t changed too much in 37 election cycles.)

Anyway, Polk (our old friend the Bishop-General) baptized Johnston and Hood as Sherman made his way south towards them. Grim? Fatalistic? No. Praise God. We all die, after all.

Johnny Reb had been renewed and rejuvenated by Johnston’s attentions to him, especially when an extra whiskey ration came down the line following a huge early-spring snowball fight…

…Kennesaw Mountain Battlefield Park attracts more visitors than any other Civil War site, 200K more per year than Gettysburg. But a lovely morning reveals that the Kennesaw count may be inflated by Cobb-county soccer moms slipping away to get some exercise on the short and scenic trail up the mountain.

This sunny Atlanta suburb, though, has a lot of ghosts.

I beheld that which I cannot describe, and which I hope never to see again. Dead men meet the eye in every direction…To look upon this, and then the beautiful wild woods, the pretty flowers as they drink the morning dew, and listen to the sweet notes of the songsters in God’s first temples, we were constrained to say, ‘What is man, and what is his destiny, to do such a strange thing?’*

The Fighting Bishop breathed his last here, felled by a shell as he reconnoitered. The battles on the mountain and in the nearby plains came to a draw. But Sherman kept out-maneuvering Johnston and backed him up to the Chattahoochee. Jefferson Davis did not like Johnston’s “retreat,” nor his lack of a clear plan. So Richmond suddenly put Hood in command instead.

…Taking a break from our regularly scheduled programming, I now provide, for anyone interested, an explanation of the four reasons why I love the Civil War (special hat tip to the dearly departed of Smith Mountain Road)…