147th Anniversary of the Battle of Antietam

Today marks the 147th anniversary of the Battle of Antietam (Sharpsburg if you’re a southerner).  Antietam was the bloodiest day of the American Civil War and resulted when Confederate General Robert E. Lee attempted to invade the North.  Antietam was tactically a bloody draw, but the North considered it a victory because Lee had to leave Maryland and return to southern soil to continue the war.  There were 23,000 casualties between the Union and Confederate Armies, making it the bloodiest day of the Civil War.

More importantly than stopping the southern invasion, the Union “victory” at Antietam gave President Abraham Lincoln the “great victory” he needed to declare the slaves in the southern states free.  He issued the famous Emancipation Proclamation just days later.

One of the tragedies of the Battle of Antietam was when General Ambrose Burnside marched his soldiers across a narrow bridge.  Naturally this allowed the Confederates to pick his men off, when it turned out he could have simply marched his men across the shallow creek.  These sort of blunders were typical of the early Union war effort.

On an interesting side note, Antietam seems to be one of those battles even non-history buffs recognize, though few casual readers know about.  The entire battle would have been a rousing success for Lee had some Union soldiers not discovered his Special Order No. 191 in a cigar tin at an old campsite.

Because of this event, Antietam is often picked as a jumping off point for alternate historians who write about the South winning the Civil War.  Harry Turtledove’s How Few Remain is one of these alternate history books.  By simply postulating what could have happened had Special Order No. 191 not been found, Turtledove imagined an entire series of novels covering an alternate time-line running right up to the 1940s.  Admittedly, Turtledove isn’t the most gifted writer, but the stories are worth reading, especially the earlier ones.  How Few Remain details a second war between the Confederates and the Union in the 1880s over the South’s acquisition of Mexican states to stretch from sea to shining sea.

At any rate, today is the 147th Anniversary of the Battle of Antietam.  Take a moment to remember the 23,000 killed, wounded or missing during that bloody September 17th.

Terror on the Sea-Flower

I only recently learned about the incident I’m about to write about.  It surprised me that something like this is hard to find information on (even using a Google search you have to dig down a bit to find any real information).

At any rate, the story of the sloop Sea-Flower is one of ineptitude, suffering and even cannibalism.  The America-Irish Historical Society put out a book called The Recorder, the fist volume of which details the Sea-Flower’s fateful voyage.

Early on in the voyage undertaken in 1741 Captain (and minority owner of the Sea-Flower) Ebenezer Clark died and the second in command fell ill.  “Thus,” The Recorder says, “began a reign of suffering, wretchedness and misery that has seldom been surpassed in the annals of ocean voyages.”

The trip took longer than was anticipated, partly due to being held up by problems with the Sea-Flower herself.  At some point, drinking water and food ran out, leaving the 106 passengers (indentured servants headed for the New World) desperate for sustenance. Many people died of starvation.

The emigrants from Ireland, the poor souls contracted to be indentured servants for five to seven years in order to pay for this passage to the New World, began to eat the bodies of the deceased.  They were cutting up a seventh when a man-of-war, the Success, pulled up alongside and fed what The Recorder called “well-nigh crazed survivors.”

The survivors were found to be near death and in need of attentive care.  A group of selectmen in Boston arranged for them to be cared for in a hospital on Rainsford’s Island until the majority owner of the Sea-Flower, Joseph Thompson of Connecticut, arrived to pick up the boat’s papers.

The nightmare voyage lasted from July 10th, 1741 to October 31 of the same year.

The Sea-Flower’s role in history was not finished with this scene.  Another sloop of that name would take part in the important attack on the fort at Louisbourg in 1745.  Admittedly, I’m not sure yet if they were one and the same ship.  The Sea-Flower that took part in the Louisbourg battle was owned by a Jonathan Sayward.  It is possible that Sea-Flower was simply a popular name, as another sloop of that name appears in records between 1714 and 1717.

Americans Don’t Trust News Anymore

The Pew Research Center released a poll about media bias and accuracy. It comes as no surprise that Americans simply don’t trust the media anymore, but now we have more recent numbers to discuss and it isn’t pretty for the press.

Only 29% of Americans say the news get the basic facts right, which problem even beyond the typical arguments over bias.  How can a news agency do any good to anyone if they can’t get the basic facts right?  This number is way down from the 55% of Americans who felt the press covered stories accurately in 1985.

Disturbingly, only 18% of Americans feel the news is fair and covers all the angles of  a story.  A further 60% feel that the press intentionally makes their articles politically biased.

Previously a bastion of Republican ideology, the increases in dissatissfaction with the press over political bias in the news is due to a large increase in Democrats and Independents who feel the news is biased.

It’s hard to believe that even four years ago the media tried to defend itself as independent and fair.  Now, a simple Google search of “Media admits bias” brings up 867,000 hits.  A random sampling of those 867,000 reveals that most of those are stories about various industry officials and news outlets admitting various biases over countless issues.

It certainly seems we as a society are reverting back to the “yellow journalism” of the past.  Without a large, popular, respected institution reporting the news, the political discourse will continue to get worse and voters will continue to make ill-informed decisions down the road.

It’s true that democracy needs a civil society to thrive, but it also needs fairly accurate news reporting to create well informed citizens.   This Pew Research poll shows that the media is not doing their job.  Can the Internet news sites pick up the slack?  Certainly places like the Politico and Drudge Report are more popular, but they sometimes give in to bias in order to generate page hits. In my mind that is more acceptable because online it’s easy to verify what you read with other websites and find out the real story.

But hey, until the mainstream media gets their act together, there’s always Factcheck.org.

Edwin Stanton – Tyrant or Hero? Part 1

Surprisingly little in-depth work has been written about Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, during the post-war period.  Stanton, for those of you who don’t know about him, successfully ran the war effort from the Cabinet-level, working tirelessly day and night to help the military fight the war.  He was certainly not perfect, but it seems Edwin Stanton has gotten a bad reputation over the years, partly due to his handling of officers during the American Civil War and his status as the defender of the administration.

At times he worked tirelessly to root out those officers he felt were sympathetic to the Confederacy, which apparently made him no shortage of enemies.  Virtually all of his associates it seemed had referred to Stanton as a tyrant at some point in their lives, and it is true that his natural inclination was to control.

Edwin Stanton, however, may have been something other than a tyrant.  He may have been an American hero.

His endless source of energy that kept him working all night kept the wheels of the Union war effort going.  Edwin Stanton was a key player, along with General Ulysses S. Grant, in bringing the war to a successful conclusion for the North.

Stanton’s true heroic nature would emerge in the years following the end of the Civil War, especially in the hours after Lincoln’s assassination.  During that tumultuous night of terror and confusion, it was Edwin Stanton who held the United States together in the face of possible guerrilla fighting.  As Jay Winik in his excellent book April 1865 points out, at no point was it certain that the South would stay defeated.  There was always a lingering fear that officers like Nathan Bedford Forrest and other raiders would drag out the war.  And without a President to lead the United States, and Jefferson Davis still at large, there was no telling what could happen.

Edwin Stanton stood firm in the face of all of this.  On April 14th, 1865, Abraham Lincoln was murdered by John Wilkes Booth.  Booth had originally planned to decapitate the entire U.S. government by taking out Secretary of State William Seward, Vice President Andrew Johnson, and yes, even Edwin Stanton.  Stanton was saved by a malfunctioning doorbell that hadn’t been fixed.  The conspirators’ failure to kill Stanton would doom their effort to destroy the Union leadership.

Edwin Stanton learned about Lincoln’s assassination while he was checking up on the injured Seward, and went immediately to the building where Lincoln was being placed across from Ford’s Theater.  Washington, D.C. was abuzz with rumors that the Confederates were regrouping, and Stanton relentlessly sent out a steady stream of memos and letters to Vice President Johnson, General Grant, and other officials.  In this moment, Stanton truly was a tyrant, and by acting so saved the Union.

Edwin Stanton

Stanton ordered Ulysses S. Grant back to Washington and put the military on alert.  He paved the way for a smooth transition of power to Vice President Andrew Johnson, getting all the Cabinet members to agree to stay on or resign as Andrew Johnson saw fit.

Henry L. Dawes noted that “After Lincoln’s death the government had no other head than Stanton.”

Coming out of the assassination crisis, Edwin Stanton emerged as the strongest figure in American politics.  Stanton’s famed stubbornness and demanding nature would come back to haunt him as he would once again be called on to defend the nation in his battles against President Andrew Johnson and his Reconstruction policies.

One of the books I would highly recommend (despite its obvious bias) is Edwin McMasters Stanton: The Autocrat of Rebellion, Emancipation, and Reconstruction by Frank Abial Flower.  It was written in 1905 and actually is available FREE from Google Books, right here.

Recommended Reading:

1. Flower, Frank Abial.   Edwin McMasters Stanton: The Autocrat of Rebellion, Emancipation, and                 Reconstruction. Akron, Ohio: Saalfield Publishing Company, 1905.
2. Thomas, Benjamin P. and Harold M. Hyman. Stanton: The Life and Times of Lincoln’s Secretary of War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962.

Why I Love History Classes

Well, classes are back in full swing, and things are getting pretty busy.  This is my last semester as an undergrad so I’m pretty excited to get everything out of the way, namely a random science class (Astronomy) that I need to graduate.  You know how it goes.

The thing that I love about college is that you can always get such great material for article topics.  For instance, I have a major research paper due for a research class that will be on United States diplomatic history in the first half of the 20th century that will give me lots of ideas.  For another class I have a paper due that will be a military biography of a famous general analyzing them through the prism of several criteria established for military leadership.  I haven’t settled on a particular general yet, but the topic could open up some doors as well.

I’m also writing some tutorials on history and am getting wait-listed on a tutoring website (though there is no need for history tutors there right now) so maybe eventually I can help some students out there.

Color Photos of Russia From World War I Era

Newsweek ran a story recently about some pictures taken by a Russian photographer from 1907-1915.  Traveling through Russia, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii had devised his own method for taking color photographs that included taking a picture with three colored plates.  If you’re interested more in the methodology and the story behind it, I highly recommend taking a peek at Newsweek.com, it also contains the rest of the photo gallery. Prokudin-Gorskii’s photos can also be found at the US Library of Congress (which originally purchased these photos but had to wait until this decade to digitally restore them).  Their collection is named “The Empire That Was Russia.”

I love stories like this, and once you take a look at these pictures I think you will, too.  The black and white photos we’re used to are nice and everything, but when you see Prokudin-Gorskii’s images in full color (it looks like these pictures were taken yesterday) it will really hit home that these were real people living through some amazing events.  Here’s one of the pictures, just to whet your whistle:

The Emir of Bukhara

I know nothing about this particular Emir, but boy, he sure looks a little slow in that picture, doesn’t he?

Another Fantastic Civil War Veteran Video

This is one of my favorite videos of Civil War Veterans.  It’s a montage of clips from the 75th Anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, where President Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivers a speech and unveils the veterans monument.  Something about seeing these people on video makes the Civil War seem not so long ago.  It really brings home that these were real people, not just paintings or stories told in history books.

Video of American Civil War Veterans

A very cool video of the 75th Anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, attended by survivors of both the Confederate and Union Armies in 1938:

A Short History of Congo-Brazzaville

Early History of the Congo Basin

The Congo Basin lies in the middle of Africa, and has been the site of legends and adventures for the outside world. It is the “dark heart” of Africa, and the first known people to live in the region were the pygmies, or small people. As they were elsewhere, the pygmies were overtaken by more mainstream Africans, the Bantu-speaking people. These included the Bakongo, Bateke, the Sanga, and others. They came to the Congo via trade routes, and kingdoms began to compete for influence, resources, and territory.

The Bantu kingdoms of the Congo made their mark on Africa by profiting from the slave trade, shipping slaves from the Interior to the European traders and explorers along the Atlantic coast. Kingdoms like the Kongo and the Teke rivaled each other and used the slave trade as a way to cut into the other kingdom’s sphere of influence.

When the Europeans began to cut back on and ultimately ban the slave trade, the Bantu kingdoms collapsed. Not much exists of their history for the next few hundred years.

The French Arrival in the Congo

The French took over the region in 1880 out of competition with King Leopold’s brutal Belgians. The Belgians controlled what was known as Zaire, and the French controlled the other people of the Congo. Treaties in the last decades of the 19th century established French control over the African people there. The territories the French ruled were re-organized into a federal system known as French Equatorial Africa and would remain this way for the first half of the 20th century.

Congo-Brazzaville openly supported the Free French movement, and served as the symbolic capital of de Gaulle’s France during the Second World War.  From 1956 to the late 1960s Congo-Brazzaville gradually gained independence from France, following the Brazzaville Conference of 1944 and reforms in 1956. Out of the power vacuum left by France’s departure, political parties and re-awakened ethnic strife plagued Congo-Brazzaville.

Congo’s first president, Fulbert Youlou was overthrown in 1963 and replaced with a military puppet. The Prime Minister of this administration would later prove important in Congo’s recent history, a man by the name of Pascal Lassouba. Following another military takeover in 1968, the country plunged into Marxist-Leninist corruption and instability. When the USSR fell the country moderated its behavior a little, introducing multi-party democracy in 1992.

The chief rivals for the next five years or so would be Pascal Lassouba and Sassou-Nguesso. Lassouba would be president following the elections of 1992, but his attempts to rig the elections in 1993 and 1994 caused a serious crisis. Though resolved through an international arbiter, tensions between Lissouba and Sassou-Nguesso erupted in 1997.

The Congo-Brazzaville Civil War

The Civil War that followed destroyed Congo-Brazzaville, and with Angolan help, Sassou-Nguesso took over the country. He promised reforms and freedom and stability in the years to come, setting a timetable for these reforms to begin around 2001. They went into effect on schedule. A new Constitution was passed, amnesty was granted to virtually all opponents, though Lissouba’s was delayed a few years. New elections re-instated Sassou-Nguesso in office, and the refugees that fled the fighting had begun to return by 2007.

As of now, Congo-Brazzaville is recovering economically and is experiencing years of political stability and peace. The reforms seem to be working, and each new day seems to bring more promise for Congo-Brazzaville.

Sources:

www.hatford-hwp.com

www.britannica.com

www.state.gov.

www.state.gov.

The History of Child Soldiers

When we think about child soldiers in today’s world, we commonly think of them being used in Africa, that continent to which society often ascribes its fears. In reality, the use of child soldiers has been the norm for thousands of years, all over the world, and some forms are even used today in advanced nations like the United States and United Kingdom. In the past, flagrant abuse of children has not been isolated to that eternally suffering continent.

The Spartans of Ancient Greece built an extremely militaristic society, with boys as young as seven being taken from home and brought up with military training. The Spartans were survivors, and they raised warriors as a way to ensure their supremacy against Greek rivals, including hated Athens. Young warriors were the key to survival for a small city-state. They were relied upon to bolster the numbers of military forces, and even in today’s world small kingdoms and nations use child soldiers for the very same reason.

In the early years of human history, the violent nature of existence ensured that the military would be the most popular and attractive industry. There was seldom a problem in recruiting (or kidnapping) children into the armed forces. The great need to call up military forces quickly revealed the desirability of child soldiers. With adult males often gone abroad, youth were counted on to protect the home city and families. The smaller children who were unable to wield heavy weaponry were used as scouts and spies.

In the 1300s the Ottoman Turks kidnapped young Christian boys and essentially brainwashed them into being loyal to the Sultan, the ruler of the Ottoman Empire. Hard-trained, these boys became the elite military unit in the Middle East, and perhaps Europe. They were called Janissaries. Interestingly, Islam prohibited the use of Muslim boys under the age of 15 in war, but made no such protections for Christians or Jews.

In Europe and the Americas children were used mostly in support roles. The drummer boy became an iconic figure in American military history, and the British Navy frequently used small boys as aides in their fleets. It wasn’t until the 20th Century, when the horrors of warfare were more widely spread and felt was there a mainstream desire to protect children in war. A movement aimed at protecting the youth gained popularity under the pioneering efforts of Eglantyne Jebb and from then on the international community gradually took steps to eliminate the use of children as warriors.

Sources and Recommended Reading:

Human Rights Watch: Child Soldiers.

Hammarberg, Thomas. 1990. “The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child – And How to Make It Work.” Human Rights Quarterly Vol 12 No 1.

Originally posted here.