Firelock76Butler wasn't exactly a great general, but a pretty good lawyer just the same.
Firelock,
No doubt you know of General Butler's Order 28 where he stated that if any New Orleans woman insulted one of his soldiers she would be treated as "a woman of the town plying her tread." That put an end to the overt insults but it did not endear him to the ladies of New Orleans.
New Orleans was, at the war's beginning, the single most important port to the Confederacy. Yet it was almost completely undefended which is why it was taken by the Union early in the war.
Best regards, John
Oh yeah, I've heard of Butlers Order 28. The plain fact of the matter was the ladies of New Orleans weren't behaving in a very ladylike manner. The last straw was when one of them dumped a chamber pot on Admiral Farragut as he was standing on the sidewalk with General Butler. That was too much for old Ben. It would have been too much for me too, had I been there. The insults and harassment stopped PDQ, but of course the ladies of New Orleans never forgot or forgave.
The best insult from a southern woman to a Union soldier has to be the following: During the post-war Union occupation of Richmond an old woman tripped crossing the street. A Union soldier very gallantly helped her up and carried her packages home for her. "Thank you, young man," she said, "That was very kind of you. If there's a cool place in Hell I hope you get it!"
Firelock76 "Thank you, young man," she said, "That was very kind of you. If there's a cool place in Hell I hope you get it!"
I lived in New Orleans for 7 years back in the 70's and I would be willing to return there to live although many things have changed since Katrina. For one thing, its population is about 2/3 of what it was. But New Orleans has its own personality. It is not typical of the south or typical of any place except for New Orleans. Frankly, I'm surprised New Orleanians gave the Yankees such a hard time back then. I would have thought them too cosmopolitan for that. But I guess I'm wrong. But things do change in time. This Yankee always found the people of New Orleans very gracious and I have nothing but good memories.
John
PS. Even today New Orleans has a lot of railroads. It also has a port. The St. Charles Avenue Streetcar line is the oldest street railway in the country. I'm sure General Butler's men rode on it.
John WR Paul, I tried searching for Hodges book. Unfortunately neither my library nor any library in a 4 county interlibrary loan system has it. I agree with you that Clark get repetitious. That's why I provided the paragraph which sums up his idea. John
Paul,
I tried searching for Hodges book. Unfortunately neither my library nor any library in a 4 county interlibrary loan system has it. I agree with you that Clark get repetitious. That's why I provided the paragraph which sums up his idea.
John, Amazon lists it used in paperback for $6.98, I think. (I don't quite understand all their pricing strategies.) I got it on Kindle, but it has quite a few illustrations which don't show up too well on the screen.
_____________
"A stranger's just a friend you ain't met yet." --- Dave Gardner
"Beast" Butler also had the knickname "Spoons" Butler. He had ordered all silverware confiscated to be melted down for the war effort.
Paul of Covington "Beast" Butler also had the knickname "Spoons" Butler. He had ordered all silverware confiscated to be melted down for the war effort.
Well, that's the story. Since the ladies of New Orleans were telling it I kind of doubt its veracity. I'll admit, could be true.
Thanks for the information but I think I will have to pass this book up.
The book has 64 pages and is fairly general according to the reviews. It does have many outstanding illustrations. That suggest to me a hard back would be better in this particular case.
The paper back for $6.68 comes from the UK. Minimum shipping is $17. Actually a more expensive book from the US would be cheaper because then shipping is $4.49.
But all things considered I think I have to look to my budget. These days I'm on a fixed income and really have very little extra.
Paul of Covington "Beast" Butler also had the knickname "Spoons" Butler.
No doubt Ben Butler was unpopular with the ladies of New Orleans. He did a lot for the poorest people, seeing that food was shipped in to prevent starvation and providing poor relief. He also improved sanitation which meant that deaths from yellow fever were greatly reduced but this too probably benefited poor people disproportionately. Personally, he was an abolitionist and I suspect he had little sympathy for those who disagreed with his abolitionist ideals.
Thanks for the information, John
I heard about "Beast" Butler when I was a small boy growing up in South Carolina. I had always understood that it was a common practice, not limited to one instance, of dumping chamber pots on any "blue-belly" who pased beneath a window at an opportune time to empty a pot. I also heard about his confiscating the silver spoons. There was a song, only a part of which I remember--"Picayune Butler's come to town, Anht anh, anht anh...."
Johnny
DeggestyThere was a song, only a part of which I remember--"Picayune Butler's come to town, Anht anh, anht anh...."
It's a sarcastic adaptation of a song about an entirely different Butler* -- here is the original:
Picayune Butler
I am looking for the Ben versions now. (There is always "Beauregard's Bells" but that's a bit different; it's about collecting all the bells in the city to make cannon...)
(*actually two of them, but that's another story irrelevant here)
EDIT: Bad news again for South Carolina: it appears that Butler anticipated the problem, and had a bandmaster prepare a version of the tune for his entry into New Orleans!
"Irvin Seward3 was in the Union Army as a musician and the story goes that at the capture of New Orleans he was called on to write the score of a tune that the Commanding General wanted played as the troops marched into the city. It was a popular tune but the band had never played it, in fact he had written it just from hearing it whistled."
Footnote to this says it was confirmed in a book written by Butler himself after the War. Wily Ben outsmarts the bints again!
Perhaps New Orleans should take down the statue of General Pierre G. T. Beauregard and replace it with a statue of General Ben Butler.
John WR Perhaps New Orleans should take down the statue of General Pierre G. T. Beauregard and replace it with a statue of General Ben Butler.
My maternal grandfather, who was born in April of 1862, was given a middle name of Beauregard; he did not like the name. And, his oldest sister saved the house from being burned in early 1865 by refusing to leave the house when the sergeant of the invading force ordered the house to be burned; he rescinded the order.
As long as we're wandering all around the original subject, and speaking of Gen.Beauregard, some of you may not know that after the war, in 1866 he leased the New Orleans & Carrolton Railroad (present St. Charles line) which was on the verge of bankruptcy. He proceeded to make improvements, double-tracking the downtown section, ordering new lightweight cars to replace heavy double decker "horse-killers", and experimenting with different means of propulsion such as ammonia and fireless locomotives. He also devised a cable car system which employed an overhead cable to pull the cars, which ran sucessfully, but was considered too costly to install over the whole route. There was a lawsuit against Hallidie a few years later which was settled by compromise-- Hallidie got the west coast and Beauregard got the rest of the country.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulofcov/8473108670/
This is from "The St. Charles Streetcar" by James Guilbeau
Johnny,
I'll follow your advice and be careful of what I say the next time I get to the Crescent City. I plan to move back there and live in a shack between the levee and the river.
Thanks for the historical note about the St. Charles Avenue Street Car Line. It is, after all, a Confederate railroad.
I had the opportunity to go back and look over Angus Sinclair's Development of the Locomotive Engine (now available as a scanned free download, everyone should 'own' a copy). There I was dramatically reminded of something that I had essentially forgotten that may be relevant to this discussion.
Where was the first REAL common-carrier railroad operated by locomotive built? (B&O doesn't count here, it was built to horse-railroad standards and didn't get effectively built to any distance for 20 years...)
Largely responsible for this was E.L.Miller, who is also attributed with the successful locomotive designs (where at least one famous Northern 'name' in the early field failed more or less miserably). Years later than that, he developed a traction increaser that was perceived as being of such value to Matt Baldwin that he bought the patent outright.
So in part we may have to look elsewhere than engineering or competence to discover the problems or issues with Southern railroading. Some of those have already been mentioned early on in the discussion. One other name is missing that I can't explain, though, and that is Hermann Haupt. Had there been even one 'officla' Southern counterpart, there was enough infrastructure (at Tredegar and in Birmingham alone!) to have neatly kept Southern railroading going as necessary for war aims -- assisted materially by that famous characteristic of the 'War of Northern Aggression' that it was, in fact, invasion of familiar ground by people largely unfamiliar with it. New line construction -- well, far more aailable manpower, and far less need to pay cash for it (note: Mr. Wimberly et al., I'm not broaching that certain taboo word directly).
I squarely attribute the problem to the states' rights formulation of the Confederacy, rightly or wrongly. Where there is no perceived interest in 'national' or more precisely 'Confederal' improvements, you will see precisely the 'not-MY-problem' sort of behavior that wrecked the coherence of the Southern railroad system. And this is particularly ironic in light of the quite-recent-at-that-time economic disaster to small enterprise throughout the South that followed Jackson's elimination of non-ruinous-interest credit and subsequent depression. You can get all Beardian and talk about a 'planterocracy' interested in nothing but preserving its peculiar institutions at everyone else's expense... but that's not all there is to it.
I am forced to a conclusion: that the general arrogance regarding Southern intellectual and social supremacy, even extending to a racial basis in the years just before the War, were largely to blame for the problem. By the time it became apparent that the 'miracle' of the Revolutionary War was not going to be repeated by Southern yeomanry... things were too far gone for anyone short of a Haupt to even start to fix. And, there being no Haupts or Millers to do what was needed ... well, we all know.
Just a few things, Overmod. As far as Tredegar Iron Works is concerned they COULD produce railroad supplies (not locomotives, however) but the problem was they were totally involved with war production. "We can make anything you want" General Joseph Anderson, owner of Tredegar said, and he was right, but they couldn't make EVERYTHING at the same time. With the demands for cannon and other ordnance, to say nothing of armor plate for the ironclad fleet, something had to give, and unfortunately it was railroad equipment and supplies.
I don't know much about the Birmingham works so I can't comment on it, but I wouldn't be surprised if the same was true.
Certainly there was the Southern arrogance of "one Southerner can whip ten Yankees", but that was limited to the popular press and opinion. The professional soldiers knew better.
And their expecting a repeat of the Revolutionary War, well, they drew the wrong conclusions. General Washington figured out pretty early that as long as he maintained an army in the field and protracted the war as long as he could the expense of fielding an army 3,000 miles from home would surely wear the British resolve to win. Oh, he'd fight when he was sure of a win, but he'd never risk it all on one throw of the dice. In a nutshell, Washington knew time was his friend.
Well, time was NOT the friend of the Confederates. While their ability to build an industrial plant almost from nothing was a great achivement, they could never hope to meet the North's industrial output, or the Norths almost endless supply of manpower. If they were going to win, they had to win it quickly, and I think the "stars" of the Confederate Army knew that, but they just couldn't quite pull it off. (Was this the "hand of God" here? I'm not religious, but sometimes I wonder.) Oh, I should point out the Northern US wasn't the industrial powerhouse it would become, not yet. In 1861 75% of the North's GDP was still in agricultural products. However, the base for industrial expansion was there, just waiting for a big infusion of cash to get it going. Industrial America was born with the Civil War.
I may have rambled a bit but it's been a looooooooooooooooong week on the job. I'm tired.
I'll say one more thing: When I was in the Marines all my best friends were Southerners, guys from Georgia, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Texas. Who'd have thought a Yankee would have hit it off so well with those guys? Thank God I wasn't a professional American soldier in 1861. I can't imagine what it was like to look across a killing zone and see a best friend on the other side. What a tragedy. What a waste.
OvermodI squarely attribute the problem to the states' rights formulation of the Confederacy, rightly or wrongly. Where there is no perceived interest in 'national' or more precisely 'Confederal' improvements, you will see precisely the 'not-MY-problem' sort of behavior that wrecked the coherence of the Southern railroad system.
Overmod,
Jefferson Davis, who knew the problems if anyone at all knew them, said the Confederacy "died of a theory." And it seems to me you say pretty much the same thing.
Davis certainly had a hard row to hoe. He had to create a government from nothing. And when he did he had states threatening to secede from the Confederacy. When Abe Lincoln decided to suspend habeas corpus he was able to do so; Davis could not possibly have done so and he similar problems. But for all of that he seems never to have tried to organize the railroads he did have into any kind of coherent system.
Firelock76 Well, time was NOT the friend of the Confederates. While their ability to build an industrial plant almost from nothing was a great achivement, they could never hope to meet the North's industrial output, or the Norths almost endless supply of manpower. If they were going to win, they had to win it quickly, and I think the "stars" of the Confederate Army knew that, but they just couldn't quite pull it off. (Was this the "hand of God" here? I'm not religious, but sometimes I wonder.) Oh, I should point out the Northern US wasn't the industrial powerhouse it would become, not yet. In 1861 75% of the North's GDP was still in agricultural products. However, the base for industrial expansion was there, just waiting for a big infusion of cash to get it going. Industrial America was born with the Civil War.
It is not clear to me that time was not the friend of the Confederates. It seems to me that it was but many Confederates failed to see that. In order to win the Union had to occupy and subdue hundreds of square miles of hostile territory. All the Confederacy had to do was to avoid loosing. Had they -- had Robert E. Lee -- played for time he would never have marched into the North. He would have stayed in the South and fought a defensive war winning battles but not at the cost of his men. He was too aggressive and willing to exchange some loss of men for a greater Union loss of men. In they sense he never understood Henri Jomini. And so from the time he began his manpower was constantly eroded until Gettysburg when many of his men were lost. Lincoln did have an advantage in that he could replace his losses but that advantage was not without its costs. It wasn't just immigrants who were sacrificed for the war; plenty of native born Americans were too and there was a lot of weeping over lost sons and brothers and fathers. Northern songs like "We shall meet / but we shall miss him / There will be / A vacant chair...." and the last sad verse of "When Johnny comes marching home again" attest to the war weariness and the sense of loss. Had the Confederacy dragged that out I think they would have won.
PS
At the war's beginning the Union was an agrarian mercantile society and not an industrial society. Industrialization did begin with the Civil War and it produced a new country that did not exist when the war began.
But the Confederates did not really need industry. They could get everything they needed from Britain and they did. It took a long time for the blockade to take effect. The trouble was that the Confederates let their railroads run down to the point where they couldn't get get supplies to their troops in the field.
Hi John! (Don't know where I got this burst of enegy from.)
I did some checking on Jomini. His theorys of warfrare weren't published until 1838. Lee graduated from West Point in 1829, Jeff Davis in 1828, and Joseph Johnston in 1828 as well. Now I can't say these men NEVER read Jomini, but they didn't read him when they were cadets. Just what kind of influence it had on them seems hard for me to guess.
At any rate Jomini got it wrong when he was trying to devine Napoleons "secret" of warfare, which surprises me he since he served under "Boney". Clausewitz got it: The object is to destroy the enemys army, which is what Napoleon always tried to do. While the army exists, the state exists. Destroy the army, you destroy the state. In the end that's what happened to the Confederacy. Johnny Reb carried the Confederacy on his back fo four years, and when his back was broken, well...
When I said time was the Confederacy's enemy I thought carefully. If you step back and look at the "big picture" of the Civil War you can see that the South started losing almost from the beginning. Slowly in the west, Southern territory was being nibbled away, both up and down the Mississippi, in Tennessee, in Arkansas. While the Virginia theater of operations was getting all the PR, the South was losing ground in the west that eventually would prove a devastating loss.
Also, every bullet and shell fired was a matierial loss. Every iron cannon that wore out was a loss, iron guns couldn't be re-cast. Slowly their matierial resources were being whittled away. And it goes without saying every dead or crippled Johnny Reb was a loss from a manpower pool that was small to begin with that couldn't be replaced. Throw Abe Lincoln into the mix, who was patient and willing to wait until Doomsday to defeat the Rebs if that's how long it took.
It's a tribute to the Confederate soldier he kept the dream alive as long as he did.
Allerlei:
There was no Birmingham until 1871, though Elyton was founded in 1821 and was absorbed into Birmingham. I am not certain when it was discovered that all three raw materials for iron manufacture (iron ore, limestone, and coal) were found in the area (the only such place in the world), but I do not believe that there was much done to make use of them until after the War.
As to friendships existing between the belligerents, there indeed were many. After General Lee surrendered, General Longstreet rode over to see General Grant, and the two men embraced one another. There were instances during the war when long-time friends , especially officers, faced one another in battle. And, there were enmities within families when one member fought on one side and another fought on the other side. Ambrose Bierce wrote a horrible story about such a situation, in which a young man in Virginia saw his father, a day or two after he had left home to fight on the side of the Union, and shot him.
There was one loss in my family in that war; my maternal grandfather's oldest brother, a student at The Citadel, died of typhus in camp without ever having been in battle. I know of one loss in my wife's family; a uncle of her great-grandfather, (I think he was in an Ohio regiment, though another uncle was in an Illinois regiment), died in a hospital in Nashville (the record we have does not give the cause of his death).
Incidentally, my wife, the daughter of an Ohioan and a Pennsylvanian, born in Evanston, Ill., always married "a blue-eyed John from South Carolina." Her first husband (great-grandson of Johann Niernsee, who designed the State House (except for the abomination of a cupola that sits at the top) in Columbia) was born in Columbia and grew up in Georgetown, D.C., and I was born in Tampa and grew up in South Carolina.
Firelock76At any rate Jomini got it wrong when he was trying to devine Napoleons "secret" of warfare, which surprises me he since he served under "Boney". Clausewitz got it: The object is to destroy the enemys army, which is what Napoleon always tried to do. While the army exists, the state exists. Destroy the army, you destroy the state. In the end that's what happened to the Confederacy. Johnny Reb carried the Confederacy on his back fo four years, and when his back was broken, well...
Perhaps a better description of Napoleon's 'secret' was that, in order to destroy a large allied force, effectively mass and maneuver so as to beat each PART of it sequentially, and take advantage of any discoordination of command in that allied force.
That 'lesson' was quite adequately demonstrated by a number of the Confederate leaders, including Jackson and Lee. Again, it helped that they were fighting in 'known' country. Be interesting to see exactly how much example of contemporary war training West Point was providing at the time, and whether Jackson et al. were influenced by an early form of 'case-based reasoning' when looking at where Napoleon actually succeeded, and where he failed -- and why.
After making my last post last night, I found a map that shows the railroads existing in Alabama in 1865. The only railroad in the Elyton vicinity was the South and North Alabama, which then ran from Calera to Oxmoor (about seven miles south of Elyton).
You could go from Tensaw (east of the Tombigbee River), near Mobile, to Atlanta on the Mobile and Great Northern Railroad (change at Pollard), the Alabama and Florida Railroad (change at Montgomery), the Montgomery and West Point Railroad (change at West Point), and the Atlanta and West Point Railroad. The M&WP at that time also went from Opelika to Columbus, Georgia (this line later became part of the Central of Georgia). The map indicates a line into Columbus from the east, but gives no information as to its origin (possibly Macon).
You could also go from Blue Mountain (southwest of Jacksonville) to Meridian, Mississippi, on the Alabama & Tennessee River Railroad (change at Selma) and the Selma & Meridain Railroad. The A&T connected with the S&N Alabama at Calera, so Elyton did have rail connections with Meridian which made it possible to continue on to Jackson and Vicksburg.
The Mobile and Girard (which never came from Mobile) extended from Girard, on the M&WP, just across the Chattahoochee from Columbus, to Union Springs.
The Mobile and Ohio could take you north from Mobile through Meridian to Columbus, Kentucky, where you would be ferried to a connection with the Illinois Central.
And, of course, there was the Memphis & Charleston, which connected Cahttanooga and Memphis, using trackage rights over the Nashville & Chattanooga east of Stevenson. At Decatur, the Tennessee & Alabama, Central Railroad came down from Nashville, which had the Louisville & Nashville.
Railroads had been planned, and some constructed, to connect centers of commerce, and not just to connect agricultural areas with ports.
Here's an interesting Confederate railroad story: A Confederate officer home on leave wrote to a friend "Hell on Earth isn't the battlefield, it's being trapped in a railroad coach with a screaming infant for six hours! My God, it was worse than Gettysburg!"
Sounds like some things don't change, do they?
Wayne,
My information is that Dennis H. Mahan began teaching at West Point in 1824 and he taught Jomini's theories. Also, at this time, it was only theories out of the Napoleonic wars that were taught at West Point. I think Henri Jomini began writing long before he finished his main work.
Please understand that I myself have never studies Jomini or any other kind of war strategy. I don't dispute that he advocated destroying your opponent's army. However, preserving your own army was even more important. Without your own men you would not be able to fight at all. This led to a lot of moving troops around to gain a superior position. Once it was clear that one side had the superior position the other side would withdraw to avoid loosing troops and the battle was over. The key to a superior position was inside lines. A war theater was seen (ideally) as a section of a circle with battle lines being concentric circles. Whoever had the inner section (interior lines) had shorter distances to march and thus had an advantage. However, Christopher Gabel points out railroads made the advantage of interior lines obsolete.
I agree with your assessment of the war in the west. New Orleans fell early one and the Mississippi north of Vicksburg shortly after that. The Confederacy was divided. And I agree that Confederate losses could not be replaced while Union losses could be. Material losses couldn't be replaced because of poor management. However, losses of Confederate men could never be replaced. That is why I question Lee's aggressiveness. I think he was too willing to sacrifice his men. While he gained victories with that sacrifice he eroded his ability and the Confederacy's ability to continue the fight.
And Abe Lincoln. Lincoln was an unknown both to the Confederates and the British. They thought that William Seward, who was known, would actually be in charge. Seward would have been willing to negotiate a peace and was in fact negotiating a peace early in 1861 until it became clear to him Lincoln would never agree to it. Had Lincoln not been president I think the Confederates would have succeeded with at most a short war and perhaps no war at all.
Keep your energy level high, John
John, I agree with your assessment of Lincoln. Has he not been president there's a good possibility Confederate independence would have been a reality. Any other in the White House would have had to respond to the attack on Fort Sumter, as Lincoln did, but as the war dragged on with one Union defeat after another (in the East, anyway) and the general war-weariness setting in there's no guarantee another man wouldn't have said "Oh, the hell with it! This war's not worth it! Let them go and good riddance!"
I've said it before, in his own quiet way Lincoln was the most implacable enemy the Confederates had. He wasn't going to quit, at least not until he won the war or lost re-election.
Now here's an interesting thing. If the Democratic Party's presidential ticket in the election of 1860 hadn't been split three ways between Steven Douglas, John Breckenridge, and John Bell, Lincoln wouldn't have been elected at all. All three together gathered more votes than Lincoln did. Lincoln wasn't even allowed on the ballot in several Southern states! A straight Lincoln-Douglas match-up would have seen Douglas in the White House. How things would have turned out then is anyones guess.
Wayne
Firelock76Sounds like some things don't change, do they?
Perhaps you'll bear with me for my own military story. I was a medic assigned to Walter Reed Hospital. My First Sergeant had a very gruff manner and all of us were intimidated by it. One day I went to the Post Barber Shop for a haircut. There was the First Sergeant with his son who was 3 or 4 fighting and screaming at the idea of a haircut. And the Sergeant was reduced to begging his son to be quite because it was not going to hurt.
Oh yeah John, I've seen it myself. Tiger on the job, pussycat at home. Some things NEVER change!
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