Book Review 414: Twilight on the South Carolina Rice Fields

TWILIGHT ON THE SOUTH CAROLINA RICE FIELDS: Letters of the Hayward Family 1862-1871. Edited by Margaret Belzer Hollis and Alan H. Stokes. 427 pages, illustrated. South Carolina $39.95.

Cotton was King in the old South but rice was more profitable. It was not as important because the area where Carolina rice could be grown was restricted to the portions of tidal creeks between southern North Carolina and northern Florida where the rising and falling water could be used to flood and drain Fields. Only brackish water suited.

By building levees, sluices and gates the planters could grow wet rice. The greatest difficulties were first, labor; second, malaria; and third, coastal storms and runoff from upcountry.

When Nathaniel Hayward died in 1855 he owned about 2,000 slaves, the most of any American. His plantations were divided among several sons who could not stand each other. One, Barnwell "Barney" Hayward, was the author of most of the letters in this collection.

As it opens in 1862 he is preparing to marry a second wife, Catherine "Tattie" Clinch. We do not have many of her letters, only a few written to her stepmother and sister as she prepared to marry at the very late age of 35.

From these highly affected and silly letters it is difficult to get any sense of her, but she sounds like an airhead. Her husband's letters to her, which make up the bulk of the book, don't show much respect for her brain, either, at least not until a crisis in 1869.

Barney and Tat wrote each other twice a week when they were apart, which was for most of their marriage. Letters to him were not saved.

His letters to her during the war are of only marginal interest, though they do set up the character of Barney as a querulous, somewhat childish, pompous and fashionable young man. A good deal of what was wrong was wrung out of him by the stresses of postwar life.

Unfortunately for us, there are no letters from the end of the war, when he returned to Tattie from the army until 1867 except a few business letters. One lists 200 people who had been his slaves and were still on his land.

1865 and 1866 were turbulent, dangerous years when freed slaves tried to find a footing and former masters trying to figure out how to get labor from them in an atmosphere of terror and uncertainty from bands of deserters turned into bandits, guerrillas and ax-grinders using the trouble to settle old scores.

Not much got planted in these years. My ancestors were rice planners somewhat to the north of the Haywards and my great-grandmother starved to death in 1866. The Haywards were somewhat better off than the Thompsons but only just.

Here is where the real interest of the letters lies. We don't know what Barney's experiences were or how his thinking evolved but by 1867 he was treating his ex-slaves differently from almost anyone else in the rice country. Instead of cash wages he was sharecropping plus giving his workers a "square" of riceland to plant for themselves.

According to his letters to Tattie he had more and more reliable workers then any other planter, including his brothers and cousins, although in 1867 almost all were women. He set up a store -- two stores eventually -- on his plantations because his workers wanted cloth and some food delicacies.

This rings true because that was exactly the experience the Bolsheviks had with the Russian peasants in the 1920s.

(The Bolsheviks had a very hard time with the cloth and the dainties but they did teach the children of the peasants and sometimes the peasants themselves to read, which was a thing the South Carolina landowners never dreamed of -- at least not until 1877 when they had to appeal to black voters.)

As things settled down Barney began to be able to bring in crops of rice and he began writing of visions of re-establishing his family's wealth by planting more and more rice. In the meantime he almost cheerfully sold off the family silver to pay the bills, though by 1868 it was touch and go whether he would go bankrupt.

Capital from speculators in Cincinnati plus some securities from his wife's family saved him.

In 1869 he made a pretty good crop but then it all went smash. Tattie died in 1870 of a long, painful illness, according to her obituary, that never appears in Barney's letters. Barney died the next year of causes unspecified although there is a letter from Saratoga, a health resort, in which he says he is determined to get well "this time."

It seems likelybthat at least part of his troubles were from malaria.

Carolina rice was finished anyway. It had been on the decline from the 1850s when European colonial powers began driving exports from Indochina and other parts of Asia. After the war more progressive farmers in the Midwest begin growing rice in Louisiana, east Texas and especially Arkansas and by 1913 rice was gone from Carolina.

But the laborers lived on. In 1927 the first Pulitzer Prize for fiction was awarded to Julia Peterkin for "Scarlet Sister Mary," a story about people we now call Gullah-Geechee. Barney's letters do not do too much to personalize the 200 or so African-Americans who continued to live on his land but they do provide a bit of insight into the distinct culture that Peterkin fleshed out and that inspired another Hayward -- DuBose, author of "Porgy."

One anecdote involves some young blacks on bird-scaring duty when Barney shot a marsh hen over the water. He told the kids to go get it and the boys raced off ,but the one girl present did not move. Hayward told her there was nothing wrong with getting her dress wet and, according to him, she splashed in as joyfully as the boys. We don't have their side of the story. The water must have been cold.

The Haywards and the Thompsons and the other white people are long gone from the rice country, but the African-Americans are still there weaving their famous sweetgrass baskets and farming. Today Georgetown, the center of the rice district, is no longer malarial and attracts wealthy retirees who are pouring tons of money into restoring the houses of America's richest planters.

The anti-Harry Hopkins

Whenever I think we have learned the absolute bottom limit of Republican depravity, along comes someone like Robert Marbut.

RtO has often quoted Harry Hopkins that, "People don't eat in the long run, they eat every day."

In 2012, [Marbut] pushed the Florida city of Clearwater to stop “renegade food” donations from churches and other charitable organizations. At the time, he characterized Clearwater as the second-most enabling city in America.

“No one has got out of homelessness just because they got fed,” he told the Tampa Bay Times. “That has never happened.”

 He never read Matthew 40:25, or if he did, it didn't impress him.

MORE DEPRAVITY

It comes in different guises.

William Barr is about my age and it is been a puzzle to understand why at this stage of his life he decided to remake himself is a toady, liar and pliant tool of a despicable political demagogue.

It's funny how information flows. Not long after posting about Marbut's depravity, I opened a solicitation letter from the Center for inquiry which quoted from the speech Barr gave at Notre Dame recently.

He said:

In short, in the Framers' view, free government was only suitable and sustainable for a religious people who recognized that there was the transcendent moral order antecedent to both the state and man-made law and to have the discipline to control themselves according to those enduring principles.

And he said:

How does religion promote the moral discipline and virtue needed to support free government?

First, it gives us the right rules to live by. The Founding generation were Christians. They believed that the Judeo-Christian moral system corresponds to the true nature of man. Those moral precepts start with the two great commandments  -- to Love God with your whole heart, soul, and mind; and to Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself.

But they also include the guidance of natural law -- a real, transcendent moral order which flows from God's eternal law -- the divine wisdom by which the whole of creation is ordered. The eternal law is impressed upon, and reflected in, all created things.

And he said:

I think we all recognize that over the past 50 years religion is been under increasing attack.

On the one hand, we have seen the steady erosion of our traditional Judeo-Christian moral system and a comprehensive effort to drive it from the public square.

On the other hand, we see the growing ascendancy of secularism and the doctrine of moral relativism.

By any honest assessment, the consequences of this moral upheaval have been grim.

Virtually every measure of social pathology continues to gain ground.

In 1965, the illegitimacy rate was 8%.  In 1992, when I was last attorney general, it was 25%. Today it is over 40%. In many of our large area urban areas it is around 70%.

Along with a wreckage of the family, we are seeing record levels of depression and mental illness, dispirited young people, soaring suicide rates, increasing numbers of angry and alienated young males, an increase in senseless violence and a deadly drug epidemic. 

(Did you hear the dog whistles?)

And he said:

If ever there was a need for a resurgence of Catholic education -- and more generally religiously affiliated schools  -- it is today.

I think we should do all we can to promote and support authentic Catholic education at all levels.

I heard such jeremiads 60 and more years ago at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic Church. Father Shwa did not believe them then though he made money off of them; and Barr does not believe them now though he makes money -- power, too -- off of them.

The Center for Inquiry fact checks Brar but I'll pick just one zinger:

As to out of wedlock births, the two states with the highest rate are Mississippi and Louisiana, which are among the top states for church attendance.

If we hadn't seen Barr lie was such a straight face to Congress about the Muellar report we might be surprised at how easily he lies to the Catholics at de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture.

I recommend that you fast forward to the 17 minute mark and contemplate carefully who he describes over the next few seconds.

Earlier I said information comes in curious coincidences. I learned about Barr's reverence for the moral uplift provided by religion and particularly his Roman Catholic religion just a few hours after learning that the Roman Catholic bishop of Buffalo had been forced to step down when he was discovered to be protecting child rapists and lying to the lawful authorities about it.

Ah, yes, the good ol' days of Judeo-Christian ascendancy when our moral preceptors were rapists on the same scale as senators of Imperial Rome. Who wouldn't want to go back there?

Retirement is about as much punishment as the bishop is going to endure. I doubt he will miss any meals.

It is -- even to someone like me who knows more about the history of the Catholic Church than  almost any Catholic -- surprising to watch them ignore great crimes. They do not ignore small ones.

For the great moralist Barr has hitched his wagon and reputation to, we must suppose he thinks he is a leader in the field of morality -- a lying, fornicating, cheating, stealing, irreligious scoffer at the law, married (for the moment) to a racist model for lesbian pornography.

Just the people to teach children "the discipline to control themselves."

An opening for the god-botherers

For years Evangelicals have been trying to push their version of moral law into the secular space. But there moral law is bulky and persons who respect the Constitution have noticed the plot.

What if the Law we're more compact? Perhaps then they could sneak it into the courthouses and schoolrooms without causing such a fuss.

Well, it is more compact than it used to be. No one who grew up among evangelicals, as I did,  believes their preachment's because they don't believe them. Do as I say not as I do is the 11th Commandment; or perhaps the Zeroth Commandment of the evangelical Christian.

Until fairly recently evangelicals tended to stay out of the political sphere; meddling, they thought, interfered with the main goal of Salvation. However, for a generation now the holy joes have been baptized -- full immersion not just dunking -- in politics.

This has clarified values immensely. We now have numerous public actions and firm declarations about what evangelicals regard as moral behavior. Let us see how much of the Decalogue remains.

1. “I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt not have any strange gods before Me.”
   Possible keeper. This would depend on whether you think that making fun of the Lord your god amounts to putting a strange God before him.
   
   
2. “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.”
   Definite keeper. Trump has a potty mouth but is not a blasphemer.
   
   
   
   
3. “Remember to keep holy the Sabbath day.”
   Possible keeper, depending on your opinion of golf.
   
   
4. “Honor thy father and mother.”
   Keeper.
   
   
5. “Thou shalt not kill.”
   No longer in effect. No surprise here; rightwingers have never liked this one.
   
   
6. “Thou shalt not commit adultery.”
   Bwaaaaah-ha-ha!
   
   
7. “Thou shalt not steal.”
   The Catholic Church, whose Decalogue I borrowed, elaborates: "Embezzlement, fraud, tax evasion, and vandalism are all considered extensions of violations of the Seventh Commandment." No longer in effect.
   
   
   
   
8. “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.”
   No longer in effect.
   
   
9. “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife.”
   No longer in effect.
   
   
10. “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods.”
     No longer in effect.
    
    
    There now, not such a burden even when carved in stone.
    
    
    
    
    

Meet the Little Russians

It is not comfortable to have Ukraine as an ally. It does not make any historical sense to demand it be reunited with Crimea. History does not support the idea that Ukraine is embracing western values, at least not the western values that we want to have embraced. Ukrainians twice greeted German invaders with bread and salt, then promptly set about murdering Jews.

Political Ukraine is in fact a creation of German despotism.

On the other hand, we must feel sorry for the Little Russians, a people who, along with the White Russians, have suffered as much as any ethnic groups over the past century.

Considering that we are now fixated on the country, it is remarkable  how little we know and have ever known about it.

Ukraine first entered the consciousness of Americans and western Europeans when it fell victim to a terrible famine engineered by the tsarist bureaucracy in 1892. That led to the creation of one of the first international efforts to succor a starving population.

That step into modernism has been almost completely forgotten, leaving even so well educated a person as Skipper unable to find a report of it on the Internet. Which goes to show the advantage of having a library of real books printed on paper.

I'm still opening the boxes of books from our move from Hawaii and I just found my copy of Chambers Encyclopedia of Universal Knowledge published in 1889, before the famine, before the large immigration of Little Russians to the United States and before the world had any special reason to care about these Russian provinces more than any others.

Following is the entire article in Chambers. It isn't long it and  does not mention the important fact -- never mentioned in the context of today's disputes -- that Ukrainians and Russians do not share a religion.

If Americans know anything about Ukrainians, it is that they paint over-the-top Easter eggs, and if they think about it perhaps they imagine that Ukraine is like Great Russia in its obsession with rituals with Easter rituals.

So it is, but there is a religious divide nevertheless. In the western provinces including Lwow the majority of the population adheres to the Ukrainian Greek Orthodox Church which is in union with Rome. The membership today is something over 5 million, small in a state with 44 million inhabitants.

The eastern districts, the ones being invaded by Russia, are generally Russian Orthodox now.

 It is not only a national war, a cultural war and an ethnic war. It is a religious war.

Here is all that Chambers had to say:

UKRAI'NE (Slav. a frontier country or March),  the name given in Poland first to the frontiers towards the Tartars and other nomads, and then to the fertile regions lying on both sides of the middle Dnieper, without any very definite limits. The U. was long a bone of contention between Poland and Russia. About 1686 the part on the east side of the Dnieper was ceded to Russia (Russian
U.); and at the second partition of Poland, the western portion (Polish U.) also fell to Russia, and is mostly comprised in the government of Kiev. The historic Ukraine forms the greater part of what is called Little Russia (a name which first appears about 1654), which is made up of the governments of Kiev, Tchernigov, Poltava and Kharkov.

Book Review 413: Soul by Soul

Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market, by Walter Johnson 283 pages, illustrated. Harvard, $98.32.

In every slave state except one, slaves were personal property and when bought or sold left no more traces in the legal records than the sale of a mule. In Louisiana, slaves were real property and transactions had to be recorded by a notary.

That combined with the fact that New Orleans was the largest slave market left a large body of evidence about what day-to-day life in the slave pens was like.

All slave states had a sort of lemon law -- called redhibition -- that allowed buyers up to a year to force a seller to take back a defective slave or pay compensation for a dead one. Louisiana's redhibition law with more favorable to buyers than most, generating another mass of legal papers, especially in appeals to the state supreme court.

These along with other evidence including slave narratives constitute the evidence for Walter Johnson's "Soul by Soul", a history that treats the slave trade as a "technology of the soul."

In another arresting image, Johnson repeatedly describes slave owners is being "made by slaves," and he provides plenty of evidence that this was so. People who participated in the trade were categorized by society by how they did so.

Buyers claimed to have good eyes that would detect hidden injuries or diseases or bad attitudes like "propensity to run away." Buyers also needed to be able to detect the tricks of the traders.

They were also judged by the kinds of slaves they sought to acquire, whether field hands, house servants or drivers to conduct a carriage and four. A man with no slaves announced his intention to move into a new level of society when he acquired one slave; and if he said he did so to relieve his wife of daily chores, that was a signal that she was to move into a more genteel realm.

Despite the increasingly frantic defense of the propriety of slaveholding as the 19th-century wore on, the business of slave trading continued to have a low social status. Genteel slaveholders often pretended to have nothing to do with it even if they needed to acquire or dispose of slaves. Johnson exposes this pose for the sham it was.

Everyone possessing slaves participated in the trade in some way, including women who were never seen inside the slave pens  -- buildings with blank brick walls 30 and even 40 feet high..

The black laborers themselves were desperate for information with little advantage in acquiring it. Johnson shows that slaves did exchange information, on their home farms, during the long journey south and in the pens in New Orleans. They needed to know the character of who was thinking of buying them, where he was taking them and what he intended to do with them. Work in the cane fields was virtually a sentence of death.

To some extent slaves were able to manipulate buyers, as by showing a propensity to run away if they were destined for a remote plantation and preferred to remain in the city. Sometimes they were able to prevent the breakup of their families, although not often.

There were 4 million slaves in America and in the National Period (1800 to 1860) about 2 million changed ownership with 600,000 entering the trade, which was almost entirely from the declining agricultural states of Maryland, Virginia and Kentucky to Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, east Texas and the parts of Louisiana that had not earlier been given to sugar.

The hunger for slaves in those districts was inexhaustible and what was wanted most were prime field hands -- healthy, strong young men to clear the land. It was a smaller market for trained house servants -- cooks, laundresses, seamstresses, hairdressers and the like; and a much smaller market still for the most expensive slaves, "fancy girls" sold as sex toys.

Some of these beauties went for more than $5,000 when a prime field hand fetched something over $1,000.

Children were hardly wanted that all even though it was usual to put them to work at age 4 or 5. It was thought that they did not repay the cost of feeding and clothing.

It was an information society before the Internet. Traders in the pens attempted to present slaves as individuals, marketing one as a good driver or another as an experienced hairdresser, but their long supply chain forced them to come up with a grading system that was entirely impersonal.

In some court cases, expert witnesses claimed to be able to assess the value of a slave they had never seen simply on the basis of a grade that had been given by some trader who they also had never seen.

The slave pens in New Orleans were an irresistible magnet for visitors from the North, from other parts of the South and from overseas who left pen portraits, watercolors, sketches and oils of what they thought they saw. It may be doubted how well they understood. Even the people in the trade seem scarcely to have understood what was going on, with the slaves in the worst position of all to know.

In "Soul by Soul" at least part of life of the trade has been recovered.

A candidate for fragging

About 35 years ago I had a job interview at the New York Times. I was asked what I admired about the paper and what I disliked.

I said I thought it devoted way too much space to East Side socialites and that I most admired the reporting of Tom Friedman. I was thinking of his work from Lebanon in those days.

No one said anything, but when I brought up Tom Friedman's name there were scowls on the faces of my interviewers. Later a friend at the times told me that the managing editor who asked the question wanted nothing more in the world than to become a member of East Side society.

I wasn't offered a job there.

In the '90s Friedman wandered off into areas that did not interest me and I have not paid much attention to him in a long time, but he had column in the Times today that was absolutely right.

 How can Pompeo think he’s got what it takes to make the hard decisions needed to lead a nation as president, and send soldiers to war, when he can’t make a clear-cut easy decision to protect one of his own diplomats from being smeared by people acting outside our system.

It is a good thing that Mike Pompeo did not graduate at the top of his class in 1969 the way William Taylor did. Had Pompeo commanded an infantry company in Vietnam in those days he'd have had a grenade thrown into his tent.

The wheels on the bus go round and round

I went to pick up my grandchildren from school today. There was a long line of yellow buses out front, and at the end of it was a sodden pile of blue gabardine. A closer look revealed it to be Rudy Giuliani.

Where's Rudy?

If Alexander Chalupa did the things that Republicans are accusing her of, why isn't she being prosecuted?

Release the kraken!

At today's hearings on impeachment rightwingers made much of their demands to call their own witnesses, demands largely rejected by Chairman Schiff.

It was not the most carefully thought out attack on the inquiry. Claire McCaskill, onetime Democratic senator from Missouri, asked why aren't they demanding to hear from Rudy Giuliani?

Zing!

Panem et circenses

I don't recall anything the least bit entertaining about the Clinton and Nixon impeachment scandals.

The Clinton one was stupid and sordid from start to finish and no one could have been anything but disgusted by the typical bicycle seat-sniffing Southern Baptist sex creep Ken Starr. Anyone who grew up among Southern Baptists, as I did, knew he would eventually be exposed although it took nearly 20 years.

I cracked a smile then.

As for Nixon, the only opportunity to smile came when some bright young thang with a microphone in her hand asked Sen. Sam Ervin if he didn't think that Nixon's offenses were the greatest crisis the nation has ever faced. Sen. Sam's eyebrows danced as he said that, no, he thought the Civil War was more serious.

The Trump impeachment, though, is a laff riot.

We have Rudy Giuliani the influence peddler masquerading as a cyber security expert butt dialing reporters and locking himself out of his iPhone.

The sanctimonious Jim Jordan being exposed as another Republican sex creep.

And Michael Flynn's new wrinkle on the insanity defense, in which he tells the judge: "Your Honor, my lawyer is crazy."

And so much more. My sides hurt from laughing.

Shoah 'nuff down South

Heckler's veto.

Not knowing your enemy

The left continues to fail to recognize the pure evil of America's right-wing. A little after 10 o'clock last night, opinionators on both CNN and MSNBC were saying it would be difficult for Republicans to personally attack Lieut. Col. Vindman, a decorated Purple Heart Army veteran.

As I switched off the television I said to myself, that's just silly. Trump and his evil little cheerleaders love to attack veterans and especially men who served in combat in Vietnam. Rober Mueller most notably, but he is far from the only one.

Before I woke this morning Fox was already sliming Vindman.

I am old enough to remember McCarthyism. I did not understand at that time what was going on, but I watched it in action. The opinionators are too young to remember McCarthyism but that's no excuse for not studying it. What we're going through now is McCarthyism pure and simple.

Epater les bourgeois

The Republican game of keep away when Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Laura Cooper was due to testify to the House of Representatives takes us back to the very beginning of fascism.

Fascism originated in France as the Action Francaise. Its first tactic -- long before the Italians introduced of castor oil and the Germans staged torchlight parades -- was to run wild in the French parliament. The young fascists scoffed at the grave democrats, pulling their mustaches.

A democratic legislature is helpless against such tactics. It does not matter if it can be shown that the rowdies are hypocritical, uninformed or stupid -- and the GOP mob was all three. If the level heads don't react, they lose. If they do react ,they're down in the gutter wrestling with the hotheads.

Either way they are diminished and their institution is wounded.

As I have said before, I do not believe that the Trump fascists are consciously copying the tactics of the French, Italian and German fascists. For one thing, most -- but not all, some probably studied political science -- are too ignorant to know in detail how the French, Italian and German fascists operated.

No, this is a matter of attitude. The same childishness leads to similar conceptions. It is very characteristic that a  schoolyard bully like Trump would come up with this sort of meanness.

The rot in the Republican Party has gone very deep. It wasn't just the 25 most immature members of Congress. A number of others spent Thursday accusing the Democrats of running a 'Soviet' style of hearings.

This is McCarthyism pure and simple.

'i think he clarified it'

I'll say.

The bland, public lie that everyone knows is a lie is a trademark of the fascist in public life. I was reminded of Goering's refusal to recognize von Papen in the Reichstag on Sept. 12, 1932.

The bland pretense that the lie is truth is the  trademark of the fascist spear-carrier.

Snakes on a plane

Going to Turkey to lick Erdogan's boots. I guess Pompeo doesn't really want to be president, despite reports that he does.

Pence ditto.

Trump really has a genius for humiliating people around him.

* * *

Reports say we bombed our own base in Syria, in order to deny munitions to the Turks or the Arabs or the Russians or the Iranians or whoever gets there first. I hope theAir Force aimed this time, but I doubt it.

I am reminded of the burning of the Navy's oil tanks at Cavite Navy Yard as the Japanese attacked Manila. That, too, came under the leadership of a first-in-his-class graduate of West Point. At civilian colleges, graduating first usually indicates smarts, but at West Point not so much.

The lieutenant who torched the tanks at Cavite wondered for weeks whether he would be commended or court-martialed. (In the background as I type this, Adm. Stavridis is saying that the bombing has the flavor of the skedaddle from Saigon.)

I'm pretty sure no one will be commended for this week's attack.

* * *

Wonkette has been rather dull over the summer but the collapse of Trump seems to have perked up the humorists:

UncleTravelingMatt •

If the Kurds are more of a terrorist threat than ISIS, maybe we shouldn't have double-crossed them.

Priorities, priorities

From a Washington Post report on Rudy Giuliani's latest divorce. I don't care about it and read it only because I had thought the split was completed long ago. Can't keep up with the Giulianis and the Kardashians at the same time, I suppose.

For the first time in his life, Giuliani was really rich.

He was merely rich before — the divorce settlement gave Hanover more than $6 million — but now he was raking in serious bucks, commanding $100,000 per speech and private jets to fly in style. His bride accompanied him on all his trips; they required extra accommodations for staff — and an extra airplane seat for Judith Giuliani’s designer purse, which she was unwilling to put on the floor, according to news reports.

The purse, one supposes, flew first class.

The party of geldings

There are more castrati in the Republican Party than there were in the Sistine Chapel choir during its whole history.

History at my doorstep

In the context of arguments about the Second Amendment, RtO has noted more than once that the "well regulated militia"for which the amendment supposedly was written has never existed.

The only effective function that the militia has ever carried out has been to shoot workers on behalf of employers.

I did not know when I bought my house in Maryland that my front door is less than a thousand feet from the site where the first combination of militia firepower and modern technology was used to rob and imprison workers.

The Old Main Line of the Baltimore & Ohio Rail Road (today CSX) runs along the north bank of the south branch of the Patapsco River. My house is at the top of that ridge. This was the first efficient railroad in the New World.

In spring of 1831, the line was just reaching Sykes Mill (today's Sykesville, although the town was moved to the north side of the river after a flood washed the village away in 1868) about 25 miles from Baltimore. The contractor absconded owing his workers about $11,000; that is, for the entire winter's work. The workers demanded that the company make them whole or they would tear up the work they had done.

The B&O's agent paid over $2,000 in order to get back to Baltimore, where he got a warrant to raise a posse. Only one man (Jerome Bonaparte's ex-father-in-law, as it happened, a director of the railroad)  responded. This delegation approached the 135 workers to "negotiate."


Not to pay the men for the work they had done for the railroad. When the men declined to work for free. . . , I will let Edward Hungerford carry the story from there. It's in volume one of his official history "The Story of the Baltimore & Ohio Rail Road 1827-1927:

"The time had come for government to show its strong hand. To Brig. Gen. Steuart the sheriff now turned over his warrant, and at 10 o'clock that very evening more than 100 volunteers from the militia boarded a special train bound for Sykes Mill. (This undoubtedly was the first troop movement by train not only on the Baltimore & Ohio but anywhere.) Despite many delays the soldiers reached Sykes Mill at early dawn, found the rioters wholly unprepared for their coming, arrested 50 of them, including Reily, and the trouble was over . . . . A new contractor came in finish Lyon's job.  Whether his workmen were ever fully paid is not in the record."

We can be confident and saying that they were not.

Hungerford also does not say that the militia were drunk but you can but they were. The workers, Irish immigrants, were hotheaded but not daft enough to fight it out with hammers against the hundred drunken soldiers armed with bayonets and muskets.

A riot on the B&O, not the one in 1831, which was not the first and certainly not the last

Book Review 412: Bad Doctors

BAD DOCTORS: Military Justice Proceedings against 622 Civil War Surgeons, by Thomas P. Lowry and Terry Reiamer. 126 pages. National Museum of the Civil War Medicine Press paperback.

In 1861 as the nation headed toward dissolution and war the surgeon general of the army lay in a coma, the result of a stroke. Such was the idiocy of the military mind that he could neither be retired nor replaced.

The tiny scattered army would've had difficulty in any event even with leadership. There were hardly any physicians, no field ambulance service, no system of procuring medical supplies, no hospitals -- really no nothing.

There was not even any agreed concept of standard care. In the United States of those days there were numerous competing systems of medical care, all of them more or less humbug.

By a curiosity of history, the small city of Frederick in Maryland was and is the center of the problems of Civil War medicine. In 1862 and '63, it was the closest considerable settlement to the south of the two bloodiest battlefields of the war, Antietam/Sharpsburg  and Gettysburg. The wounded were collected in Frederick to be treated in numerous buildings suddenly declared to be hospitals.

A small private museum, the National Museum of Civil War Medicine, is housed in an old building within walking distance of several of these hospitals. Its staff has compiled some studies along with the exhibits about the conflict. "Bad Doctors" (which seems to be available only at the museum store) presents a curious picture.

About 6% of the surgeons inducted into or hired by the Union Army were court-martialed. "Bad Doctors" presents a precis of the proceedings as well as a few short chapters on extraordinary cases.

Such is idiocy of the military mindset that the famous disasters of medicine in the Crimean War just a few years earlier had no impact on the thinking or preparations of American officers. Combat should have focused their minds, but they still were more concerned with the heinous offense of officers messing with enlisted men than they were with officers who neglected, starved, mistreated or otherwise abused the men they were supposed to care for.

Part of this indifference no doubt can be laid the lack of consensus on what a standard of care was. Thomas Lowry and Terry Reimer note that in one way the Confederate soldiers were better off than the Union soldiers. The Confederacy faced all the problems the Union faced with fewer resources. But that included lack of access to calomel and other poisons that were commonly used as medicines in those days.

Southerners tried to make do by turning to traditional herbal remedies and not far from Fredrick in Keedysville, Maryland, at a branch of the museum, the Pye House which was the headquarters of Gen. Meade at the Battle of Antietam, volunteers are recreating a medicinal garden of the war. Some of the remedies produced there were less dangerous than calomel but not necessarily safe either.

Somewhat surprisingly, despite so many factors working against success, the two American armies, although they were much larger than most armies of former times, managed for the most part to avoid the typhus and other epidemics that have decided so many previous campaigns. The work of the United States Sanitary Commission -- a Civil War innovation hardly mentioned in Bad Doctors presumably accounted for this.

Lowry and Reimer conclude that on the whole Union doctors did a pretty good job considering. The numbers court-martialed for eating with the enlisted men, drunkenness, thievery, treachery etc. was not out of line with the numbers involved in later supposedly more enlightened times.

Whether military medicine really did get better, as they assert, is a matter for debate. My uncle Hugh was badly wounded and France in 1918. The army doctors wanted to cut off his leg. He refused because they were all drunk and he got away with it because he was an officer.

Records of the courts-martials sometimes show that the defendants were heroes, dedicated healers accused of peculation and theft who were actually working outside failed army logistical protocols in order to get enough food or medicine to keep their patients from starving and dying.

At other times, clearly incompetent doctors were forced back on the army by state governors who had great influence on an army organized my regimental volunteers raised in individual states.

At other times it appears that courts martial were convinced that a surgeon was incompetent or ineffective but kept him on because there was no one else. The sample is too small to permit a statistical study but judging by the percentage of colored troops in the army against the percentage of doctors who were in colored regiments and court-martialed, it looks like black troops had a hard time finding even incompetent medical help.

Their death rates, much higher than those of white troops, suggest the same thing.

Here is the book's notation of a surgeon chosen at random: Jacob Quick of the 22nd New Jersey Infantry which shows the kind of information available in "Bad Doctors":

"Refused to attend a private suffering from a 'severe purging of blood,' cursed him, told him to wait until morning. Guilty. Fined one moth's pay. Second trial: cursed and attacked his colonel and stole meat and potatoes. Acquitted."

They had learned at the Museum was that by the Civil War you rock. Battlefield surgery had ended. Soldiers no longer had to bite the bullet Wally sawbones cut off a limb 95% civil War Battlefield surgeries use ether as an anesthetic.

Today the American military has its own medical schools operating within a scientific background that permits of an actual standard of care and a budget that is essentially infinite. It also has responsibility for the dependents of soldiers, which was not the case in 1861-65.

Military medicoes are only somewhat slightly better prepared to handle these responsibilities than in 1861 as anyone who has had to depend on Tri-Care will attest.

Trump speaks truth

According to The Washington Post:

 President Trump told two senior Russian officials in a 2017 Oval Office meeting that he was unconcerned about Moscow’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election because the United States did the same in other countries

On CNN, one of the Post reporters on the story, Shane Harris, said that obviously is not true. But it is true.

No country has subverted more elections than the United States although its usual practice has been to allow elections to go forward and then if democrats are elected to destroy the democracy.

American interference in other countries' elections got going shortly after World War II in France and Italy. It continued under every administration except Carter's, but it wasn't just a matter of subverting democracy.

Democracy was not all that common so as often as not subversion of democracy took the form of supporting despotisms: Indonesia, Greece, Turkey, South Africa, South Vietnam, Spain, Portugal, Paraguay, many more.

From time to time brown people did attempt to start democracies. This usually caught America off guard since it does not believe brown people are capable of governing themselves.

When that happened democracies had to be overthrown in Haiti, Guatemala, Iran, Dominican Republic, Chile.

America didn't allow for democracy at home either. I came to political consciousness in the 1950s in Georgia which no one would describe as a democracy. Then or now although there have been some attempts in that direction recently there.

A few days ago I listened to most of Trump speech at the United Nations. He always speaks from the bully pulpit though in the common use of the word bully not Roosevelt's. He blustered about Venezuela. American policy has not been now or previously been to support democracy there. insofar as the current government has a policy it's the old familiar one of propping up a puppet with little or no popular support.

Imagine if the United States had supported democracy in Venezuela in the '50s or '60s. Perhaps it could have become a democracy by now. But actions have consequences and supporting the destruction of democratic movements makes it all the harder for any to break through subsequently.

The earliest international policy of which I have any clear memory was the 1956 Hungarian revolution. As Trump spoke about Venezuela I was mindful of what happened to the democrats in Hungry.

Hungry has never been a democracy. It was fascist and then it was occupied by Russians. At Our Lady of Perpetual Help church we prayed for the liberation of Cardinal Mindzenty in the name of democracy. Mindzenty was not a democrat, he was a reactionary Catholic.

Having failed to detect or support any genuine democrats, when the revolution broke out the United States was in an impossible position. Because of the McCarthyites and the Catholic lobby it could only support the reactionaries if it supported anyone. But the people in streets throwing Molotov cocktails against Russian tanks were -- at least some of them -- democrats.

 

The United States would not support them but Eisenhower had the Voice of America encourage their reckless resistance. With words only.

Today the United States talks about democracy in Venezuela but any actual democrats there have been hung out to dry.

Chock full o' nuts

Sykesville, the little town where I live, got its start with water mills for flour and lumber. Fire and flood put an end to that but in 1894 the state opened a lunatic asylum here.

This was the biggest employer until the '80s when most of the hospital shut down. Maryland has been trying with almost no success to find new enterprises for its 600-acre campus.

Today downtown has a feed store, a distillery, three saloons, two creameries and -- very unusually for such a small place -- a bookstore.  All very small businesses.

Over by the hospital there's a county lockup, a drug treatment center that looks more like the prison than the prison does and a huge building with a sign you can see from the highway: Northrop Grumman.

While it's not exactly a state secret what goes on there the company does not advertise it and nobody in town seems to know. I asked the mayor. He didn't know. I asked the man who runs the town museum. He didn't know. I asked te head of maintenance at the lunatic asylum next-door. He didn't know.

Visitors are discouraged:

When the building opened in 1997 it was announced that the company would work with electronic sensors whatever that means. Here's what it means now.

So it's still lunatics.

As the United States prepares to leave Afghanistan in defeat, it's worth asking ,was it reasonable to think that $10 trillion was sufficient to support a military operation in a country with 25 million people. One might have thought that was more than enough, but when you're spending $1 billion on mind reading and rail guns, $10 trillion doesn't go that far.