The Civil War’s First July 4th: Lincoln and Congress.

In his message to an extraordinary session of Congress 150 years ago, President Abraham Lincoln built his administration’s case for going to war against his own countrymen. Presenting these words – if you haven’t read them in a long time, you ought to read them now, today – is no different than other American Presidents in other national crises. This, however, was the first time.

Lincoln reviewed the circumstances leading up to his post-Inaugural decisions. He recapped the surrender of Fort Sumter to elements of the rebellious states. He pointed out: In this act, discarding all else, they have forced upon the country, the distinct issue: "Immediate dissolution, or blood.’’

He said to the US Congress:

This issue embraces more than the fate of these United States. It presents to the whole family of man, the question, whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy – a government of the people, by the same people – can, or cannot, maintain its territorial integrity, against its own domestic foes. It presents the question, whether discontented individuals, too few in numbers to control administration, according to organic law, in any case, can always, upon the pretences made in this case, or on any other pretences, or arbitrarily, without any pretence, break up their Government, and thus practically put an end to free government upon the earth.

He said to the US Congress, and to the free people of this nation, that the war is:

…a People’s contest...a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men...”

Although much has been written about this message, the great commanders and the great battles have gotten far more ink. Also, 6,500 words long…it’s not going to be recapitulated here, on this 4^th of July.

Yet Lincoln’s message is as detailed and layered a presentation of US government aims as has ever been presented. Never let the fact that this message is a century and a half old blind you to the facts of its sophistication, its nuance and its sheer argumentative force.

The President calls for the enlistment of 500,000 men – Congress authorizes that call. Seventeen days later, Confederate troops defeat the Union Army under Irvin McDowell at First Manassas southwest of Washington. Federal troops fall back into Washington and Lincoln realizes the war will be a long one: “It’s damned bad,” he comments.

This brief series of initiating events is hard to think about today. In wishing you the best possible 4^th of July, after a tumultuous year in our country (and a redeeming one, in my opinion), I ask you again to read Lincoln’s 6, 500 words. They are about freedom, about the preservation of our way of life. They are about (in Lincoln’s fine turn of phrase), “the unanimous firmness of the common soldiers, and common sailors.”

The message is, most of all, about “the patriotic instinct of the plain people” of America. Happy Independence Day.

The Formal Surrender of the Confederate Fortress City of Vicksburg,

Mississippi, occurred on this day 147 years ago. Happy 4th of July.

General Ulysses S Grant, USA, to General John C Pemberton, CSA:
     …the useless effusion of blood you propose stopping…can be ended at any time you choose, by unconditional surrender of the city and garrison. Men who have show so much endurance and courage as those now in Vicksburg will always challenge the respect of an adversary, and I can assure you will be treated with all the respect due prisoners of war.

General Grant to General Henry W Halleck, USA:
     The enemy surrendered this morning. The only terms allowed is their parole as prisoners of war.

General William T Sherman, USA, to General Grant:
     I can hardly contain myself. Surely I will not punish any soldier for being “unco happy” this most glorious anniversary of the birth of a nation whose sire and father was a Washington…This is a day of jubilee, a day of rejoicing to the faithful.

General Grant to General Sherman:
     When we go in [to Vicksburg] I want you to drive [Confederate General Joseph E] Johnston from the Mississippi Central railroad; destroy bridges as far as Grenada with your cavalry; and do the enemy all the harm possible.

General Sherman to General Grant:
     Already my orders are out to give one big huzza and sling the knapsack for new fields…Sunday and July 4 are nothing to Americans until the river of our greatness is free as God made it.

Admiral David Porter, USN, to General Grant:
     I congratulate you on getting Vicksburg on any honorable terms.

General Grant to Colonel James B McPherson, USA:
     I want the Negroes to understand that they are free men.

President Abraham Lincoln to General Grant:
     My Dear General, I do not remember that you and I have ever met personally. I write this now as a grateful acknowledgement for the almost inestimable service you have done the country. I wish to say a word further. When you first reached the vicinity of Vicksburg, I thought you should do, what you finally did – march the troops across the neck, run the batteries with the transports, and thus go below; and I never had any faith, except a general hope that you knew better than I, that the…expedition…could succeed. When you got below, and took Port Gibson, Grand Gulf and vicinity, I thought you should go down the river and join Gen [eral Nathaniel P] Banks; and when you turned Northward East of the Big Black [River], I feared it was a mistake. I now wish to make the personal acknowledgement that you were right, and I was wrong. Yours very truly…

NOTE: Passages appear in Grant Moves South, Bruce Catton, 1960. Painting of the 4th Minnesota Regiment by Francis D Millet, in the collection of the Minnesota Historical Society.

…and Indians!

A number of recent vacation photos that Frank White the Photographer shared with me enter the realm of that quote by Milton Glaser, “I am still astonished.” (I don’t ever want to be blasé about Indians.) Frank wrote:

Jo-Anne and I are back from our road trip. It was great! We went to Corinth on our way to Shiloh, and of course we had to stop at Elvis’s birthplace in Tupelo. The highlight of the trip was the reenactment at Fort Niagara. This was the largest to date. There were over four thousand re-enactors; soldiers plus wives and children.

J and I had never been to one of these before and were amazed at the attention to detail. They lived in tents for three days, all furnished as in 1759.

There were six phases to the siege, the first being the Wilderness Battle, where the French came out of the fort to fight the British in the open field. Labelle Famille was an ambush by the British when they discovered that French re-enforcements were on their way to the fort. This battle occurred about two miles south of the fort, lasted approximately twenty minutes and was a massacre.

White’s photos are here – excellent to see them. This photo of an Indian re-enactor, particularly, stopped me.

Copyright © 2009, Frank White Photography. All rights reserved. See also Niagara's 4th.

Niagara’s 4th

Happy Independence Day.

Twenty years before the American Revolution, Britain and France fought for control of North America in a conflict known as the French and Indian War.

In July 1759 a British army, accompanied by almost 1,000 Iroquois allies, laid siege to French-held Fort Niagara. After 19 days, the fort’s walls had been breached by artillery fire, and a French and Indian relief column was defeated just a mile from the fort in a bloody morning battle. On July 25, the French surrendered the fort, ushering in an era of British control of the Great Lakes.

Today Old Fort Niagara is a National Historic Landmark and New York State Historic Site that welcomes more than 100,000 visitors every year. It offers a unique collection of original military architecture and fortifications from the 18th Century and the 19th Century, as well as living history events and programs, historical exhibits and collections, archaeology, and education.

Six years after Fort Niagara fell some citizens of Boston created the first Liberty Tree. Farmers going to market discovered that an effigy had been hung a big elm tree in Deacon Elliott’s grove. The hanged figure represented Boston merchant Andrew Oliver who’d agreed to collect a new “Stamp Tax” levied on the colonists by Parliament to pay for that war.

American colonists really, really resented having to pay the Mother Country for warring on their behalf (this kind of thing probably sounds familiar to you). That Liberty Tree was the first sign there was going to be trouble between America and Britain. It was one of the earliest conceptual expressions of liberty itself.

Thinking liberty led to independence and the document with the word in its title. As soon as it appeared in 1776, the talking heads of the day started arguing about what liberty, freedom and equality really meant. But the writer of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, was typically ambiguous – he wrote that the text was intended “to be an expression of the American mind, and to give that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.”

Now it’s two-and-a-half centuries since the siege in upstate New York. Jo-Anne and Frank White the Photographer are in Youngstown celebrating the 4th of July and the 250th anniversary of the Fort Niagara battle. Frank has promised to send holiday snaps. Meantime I’ll sponge the ones you see here. And Barbara and I will be celebrating with Sam and Georgia Akers in the Heights.

Whether you’re in Houston or Youngstown or Paris or Baghdad, let’s join in observing the 4th. Listen to the Declaration of Independence, that “expression of the American mind,” right here. Let it stir you up.

We have the liberty to enjoy the widest range of freedoms in the world. Today, we commemorate the independence that gave us that liberty.

Happy 4th of July.

Vacation photography by “Klare and John” Shober posted on Panoramio, from whence I borrowed them.

Silson’s 4th

After various, more somber 4th of July posts (here, for example), something lighter’s in order. There’s always time for splashing your feet in the backwaters and bayous of History.

You could call today’s post Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Jewelry.

“Glitzy” writes the Amazing Adornments blog. If Glitzy were writing this, you’d probably be able to find who really designed the brooch pictured above, which came up immediately when I Googled “Independence Day Pins.”

In a US patent (#D124416) granted 31 December 1941, Victor Silson portrayed a pin with the Declaration of Independence, Independence Hall, an inkwell and a goose quill pen:

Be it known that I, Victor Silson, a subject of the King of Great Britain, residing in the city of New York, county of New York, and State of New York, have invented a new, original, and ornamental Design for a Brooch or Similar Article…

The pen I mentioned is present in the Silson patent drawing; it’s missing from the pictured example.

I thought the timing was important (just after Pearl Harbor) until I started digging. Silson, it turns out, was a prolific 1930s-40s producer of brooches and pins, military and otherwise. He designed, patented and produced hundreds of brooches, including a handsome series of three locket-pins – one each for the Army, Navy and Air Force – and received patents for these, #D124114-116, in 1940.

The Army pin features a canteen in front of a crossed sword and musket. The locket is inside the canteen. The best views of these are at the N&N’s Vintage Costume Jewelry website.

It’s Silson’s name on the patents. But among vintage jewelry enthusiasts, William Spratling was a well-known Mexican silversmith who was employed by the Silson firm, a “very esteemed jewelry company.”

Glitzy, I’m curious: Is it Silson’s 4th of July design or Spratling’s?

I’ll drop a line to your blog and ask you straight out…I think there’s a neat story here somewhere. Happy 4th of July, y’all.

Photo courtesy of Amazing Adornments.

Imboden’s 4th

“O God I why can't I die!”

“My God, will no one have mercy and kill me!”

“Stop! Oh! For God's sake, stop just for one minute; take me out and leave me to die on the roadside.”

“I am dying! I am dying! My poor wife, my dear children, what will become of you?”

Confederate General John Daniel Imboden commanded a cavalry brigade that arrived at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on the afternoon of the 3rd of July, 1863 – too late to take part in the battle that had raged for three days.

On the following day, the 4th, Robert E Lee ordered General Imboden and his cavalry brigade to protect the train of Confederate wounded as it retreated toward the Potomac River, to escape into Virginia.

The column moved out at 4PM. It stretched for miles. Imboden recorded the cries of the severely wounded Confederates in his train as it made its way west, first, toward Chambersburg; then south to Williamsport on the Potomac.

While Imboden retreated, the Confederate garrison of Vicksburg, Mississippi, marched out of their entrenchments, stacked their arms and furled their flags. The victorious Union army marched in and took possession the city which had been under siege since 22nd May.

President Lincoln, when he was informed of Vicksburg’s surrender, exclaimed, “The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea.” In the east, Imboden successfully evacuated his train, “probably ten thousand animals and nearly all the wagons of General Lee’s army under our charge, and all the wounded, to the number of several thousand, that could be brought from Gettysburg,” to Virginia on the 9th of July.

Today, 144 years later, we remember heroes and courage, national independence and American freedoms. And sometimes, the awful price we’ve paid for those freedoms.