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Malarial mosquitoes helped defeat British in battle that ended Revolutionary War


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Students from Highlander Charter School in Providence, Rhode Island, wait to tour the Rotunda on Capitol Hill. The students sit in front of "Surrender of Lord Cornwallis," depicting the surrender of the British army at Yorktown, Virginia, in 1781, which ended the last major campaign of the Revolutionary War. (Melina Mara - Melina Mara/The Washington Post)

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By J.R. McNeill
Monday, October 18, 2010; 3:57 PM
Major combat operations in the American Revolution ended 229 years ago on Oct. 19, at Yorktown. For that we can thank the fortitude of American forces under George Washington, the siegecraft of French troops of Gen. Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, the count of Rochambeau - and the relentless bloodthirstiness of female Anopheles quadrimaculatus mosquitoes.

THIS STORY
Malarial mosquitoes helped defeat British in battle that ended Revolutionary War
Map: The Plan of the Investment and Attack of York in Virginia
Graphic: The Malaria Lifecycle
Those tiny amazons conducted covert biological warfare against the British army. Female mosquitoes seek mammalian blood to provide the proteins they need to make eggs. No blood meal, no reproduction. It makes them bold and determined to bite.

Some anopheles mosquitoes carry the malaria parasite, which they can inject into human bloodstreams when taking their meals. In eastern North America, A. quadrimaculatus was the sole important malaria vector. It carried malaria from person to person, and susceptible humans carried it from mosquito to mosquito. In the 18th century, no one suspected that mosquitoes carried diseases.

Malaria, still one of the most deadly infectious diseases in th

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
The 150-Year War
By TONY HORWITZ
Published: October 30, 2010
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MY attic office is walled with books on Lincoln and Lee, slavery and secession. John Brown glares from a daguerreotype on my desk. The Civil War is my sanctum — except when my 7-year-old races in to get at the costume box. Invariably, he tosses aside the kepi and wooden sword to reach for a wizard cloak or Star Wars light saber.
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Lou Beach

DISUNION
The Times is introducing a new online series that follows the Civil War as it unfolded. Read the first installment by Jamie Malanowski.
I was born in a different era, the late 1950s, when the last Union drummer boy had only just died and plastic blue-and-gray soldiers were popular toys. In the 1960s, the Civil War centennial recalled great battles as protesters marched for civil rights and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. declared from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, “One hundred years later, the Negro still is not free.”

Today the Civil War echoes at a different register, usually in fights over remembrance. Though Southern leaders in the 1860s called slavery the cornerstone of their cause, some of their successors are intent on scrubbing that legacy from memory. Earlier this year in Virginia, Gov. Robert F. McDonnell proclaimed April to be Confederate History Month without mentioning slavery, while the state’s Department of Education issued a textbook peddling the fiction that thousands of blacks had fought for the South. Skirmishes erupt at regular intervals over flags and other emblems, like “Colonel Reb,” whom Ole Miss recently surrendered as its mascot. The 1860s also have a particular resonance at election time, as the country splits along political and cultural lines that still separate white Southern voters from balloters in blue Union states.

But as we approach the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s election, on Nov. 6, and the long conflict that followed, it’s worth recalling other reason

FILM
Tracing the Arc of a Tragic Folk Singer
By BOB BAKER
Published: December 22, 2010
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IF Kenneth Bowser, a New York documentary filmmaker, succeeds in his crusade to rehabilitate the 1960s protest singer Phil Ochs, he’ll have his daughter to thank.
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“Phil Ochs: There but for Fortune” is a documentary examining that 1960s folk singer, who committed suicide in 1976.
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Zev Greenfield/Milk & Honey Productions.
Kenneth Bowser, director of the Ochs documentary.
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Phil Ochs in 1967.
Mr. Bowser was a teenager during the Vietnam War when he discovered Mr. Ochs, a brilliant, quirky and erratic artist who, plagued by mental illness and alcoholism, committed suicide in 1976 at the age of 35.

Mr. Bowser, who has made PBS documentaries about the directors John Ford and Preston Sturges, began thinking about making a film about Mr. Ochs some 20 years ago. In his vision, the documentary would show how Mr. Ochs had been wrongfully “written out of the history books,” unfair treatment for a man whom Mr. Bowser considers the best protest singer who ever lived — and the most relevant recording artist of the 1960s. A mention of Bob Dylan, whose protest songs disappeared early in his career as he turned his gifts to the surrealistically personal, is an easy way to inflame Mr. Bowser. While Mr. Dylan was recording “Maggie’s Farm,” Mr. Ochs was recording a war-resistance anthem called “I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore.”:

Oh I marched to the battle of New Orleans

At the end of the early British War.

Young land started growing

The young blood started flowing

But I ain’t marchin’ anymore

Mr. Bowser and other voices — Pete Seeger, Peter Yarrow (of Peter, Paul and Mary), Joan Baez and Tom Hayden — pepper the film with praise for Mr. Ochs’s history-driven, pamphlet-style songs: forceful, angry and cleverly absurd lessons about society’s evil and unfair circumstances; Tom Paine with a guitar.

Whether Mr. Bowser can breed another

MOVIE REVIEW
Aspiring to Musical Power and Glory
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: January 4, 2011
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To say that the 1960s folk singer Phil Ochs dreamed big is to understate the huge scope of his ambition. As recalled in Kenneth Bowser’s respectful, nonmaudlin documentary portrait, “Phil Ochs: There but for Fortune,” Ochs moved to New York in the early ’60s intending to be the best songwriter in the country. After meeting Bob Dylan, Ochs was forced to revise his opinion of his own potential to “second best.”
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First Run Features
Phil Ochs, pictured here in 1965, is the subject of a documentary about his downward-spiraling career, “There but for Fortune.”
Related

Tracing the Arc of a Tragic Folk Singer (December 26, 2010)
Even before Ochs discovered folk music and left-wing politics through Jim Glover, his fellow student at Ohio State University, he was in the thrall of larger-than-life cultural symbols, from Elvis Presley to western movie stars like John Wayne and Gary Cooper, who embodied the concept of a world-saving hero. Not coincidentally, the folk music movement in its early days had the same messianic sense of its own importance.

The Dylan-Ochs connection, however friendly, had its tormenting underside. While Ochs worshipped Mr. Dylan (who is not interviewed in the film), his idol refused to pay him much respect. Ochs’s typical songs were specific topical commentaries gleaned from poring over newspapers and magazines. Even when Mr. Dylan was addressing current events, he remained suspicious of politics as a songwriting platform and soon moved on to become the superstar that Ochs wanted desperately to be.

Ochs, who committed suicide in 1976 at 35, never understood that there was a limited audience for brainy musical editorials composed in a rigid singsong mode and sung in a droning, nasal voice with a modest range and faltering intonation. If his verses were finely wrought, his singing conveyed an emotional distance from t

January 16, 2011, 8:00 PM
Declining War, Rejecting Peace
By JAMIE MALANOWSKI

Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

TAGS:

ALABAMA, JAMES BUCHANAN, SOUTH CAROLINA, WILLIAM SEWARD
Jan. 12-18, 1861

Two sides that were on the brink of hostilities a week ago took a step back from the edge. Yet neither seems willing to move towards peace.

President Buchanan received two emissaries from Charleston this week: Lieutenant Hall of Major Anderson’s command, and Isaac Hayne, the attorney general of South Carolina, representing Governor Pickens. Although a temporary truce is in effect in Charleston, both men came speaking the language of war — possible war, impending war, the initiation of hostilities. Lieutenant Hall conveyed Major Anderson’s desire for direction; Anderson would have used his guns to protect the Star of the West, but because he lacked instructions except to avoid provoking a conflict, he withheld fire. Hayne came to present a letter from Governor Pickens demanding that Fort Sumter be handed over to South Carolina, and warning that refusal would mean war.

But when the men spoke words, Buchanan heard a clock.

There are now fewer than 50 days remaining in the Buchanan administration, and the president’s principal objective is to depart from office on March 4th with the country at peace; or, if not at peace, at least not actively at war. There is a truce currently in effect and, with skill and luck, it might last until the new man takes over. And so Buchanan’s policy is to play for time.


Library of Congress
A caricature criticizing the secession of several Southern states from the union during the last months of the Buchanan administration. Little Bo-Peep represents the union and the wolves the European powers. CLICK TO ENLARGE
Hall’s report offered a key piece of information: Anderson had adequate supplies for the immediate future and was not requesting more men or material. Unless and until Anderson did so, Buchanan realized, the status quo could be maintained. After all, he wouldn’t repeat hi

January 14, 2011, 9:00 PM
The Bear Wars
By ADAM GOODHEART

Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

TAGS:

ABRAHAM LINCOLN, CALIFORNIA, GOLD RUSH, SECESSION, THE CIVIL WAR
Stockton, Calif., Jan. 16, 1861

Three thousand miles distant from the palmetto secession flags of Charleston and the “Don’t Tread on Me” banners of Savannah, another ensign of disunion flew – briefly – over American soil. This one appeared on an ordinary Wednesday above the town of Stockton, Calif., in the gold-mining district east of San Francisco.

Historical accounts are strangely silent about who raised it. But at some point during that day – Jan. 16, 1861 – citizens looked up to see it waving from the masthead of a surveying schooner moored in the Mormon Slough, a small body of water in the heart of the town. According to the next morning’s edition of the Stockton Argus, the silk banner depicted a “huge grizzly bear” standing amid a “wild mountain scene.” In one corner was a single white star on a blue background – similar to many of the secession flags back east. And across the top were the words “PACIFIC REPUBLIC.”


Library of Congress
Another version of the Bear Flag was adopted as California’s state emblem in 1911, after secession fever had safely dwindled.
This was not the first time that such a flag had been raised in the Golden State. Indeed, the original Bear Flag had appeared in 1846, when Anglo-American settlers in the then-Mexican state of California declared their independence, just prior to occupation by American forces. Four years later, the territory was admitted to the Union as a free state – despite the efforts of Southern leaders like Jefferson Davis, who argued in the Senate that slavery was part of California’s natural destiny: “It was to work the gold mines on this continent that the Spaniards first brought Africans to the country. The European races now engaged in working the mines of California sink under the burning heat and sudden changes of climate, to which the African race are altogether better adapted

January 3, 2011, 8:59 PM
Caught Sleeping
By ADAM GOODHEART

Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

TAGS:

ABRAHAM LINCOLN, ALABAMA, JAMES BUCHANAN, SOUTH CAROLINA, THE CIVIL WAR
Near Mobile, Ala., Jan. 4, 1861

They struck at daybreak. Armed men seemed to drop out of the morning air, landing with soft thuds on the lawn, like ripe fruit falling from a tree. By the time Capt. Jesse Reno realized what was going on, he was already overrun. One party of attackers had scaled the rear wall of the arsenal compound with ladders, leaping to the ground from atop the 14-foot parapet. Others forced open the main gate.


Library of Congress
Capt. Jesse Reno.
The surrender was bloodless; Captain Reno, the dozen men under his command, and their wives and children could scarcely have resisted this onslaught of hundreds. And they had been taken unawares – quite literally caught sleeping. An attack had seemed impossible: the state of Alabama was still officially within the Union, after all.

But it was useless now to demand explanations, much less to protest. The 35-acre Mount Vernon arsenal and barracks – located just north of Mobile and perhaps the most valuable military post in the state of Alabama – was now in rebel hands. Even more important, so were the contents of its storerooms: 20,000 stand of arms, 150,000 pounds of gunpowder, assorted cannons and other munitions of war.

This was no rash assault by a few self-appointed vigilantes. The governor of Alabama, Andrew B. Moore, had ordered it personally, telegraphing the state militia colonel at Mobile that he was to make the seizure without a moment’s delay. The city’s proudest volunteer companies – the finest troops the cosmopolitan port could muster – were dispatched on the mission: the Mobile Rifles with their dark-green coats and white-plumed hats; the scarlet-uniformed Washington Light Infantry; the German Fusiliers; the francophone Gardes Lafayette.

The occasion for this sudden attack, according to later newspaper reports, was the unexpected appearance in Mob

January 14, 2011, 8:30 PM
The Hellcat
By TED WIDMER

Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

TAGS:

ABRAHAM LINCOLN, FIRST LADIES, MARY TODD LINCOLN
It was not quite a full-blown temper tantrum, but Mary Todd Lincoln’s outburst during a mid-January shopping trip raised eyebrows at a time when her husband did not need any more problems. And it signaled that the president-elect would have his hands full governing his own household, on top of everything else.

For him, the early weeks of 1861 were consumed with cabinet-making and the last remnants of the amiable politicking that had characterized so much of his time in Springfield. He still received many visitors, and the journalist Henry Villard marveled that “probably no other President-elect was as approachable by everybody.” He greeted friends and neighbors, and told his jokes, and tried to act like the person they had known for years. (Villard records the unusual spectacle of Lincoln laughing at one of his better punchlines: “A high-pitched laughter lighted up his otherwise melancholy countenance with thorough merriment. His body shook all over with gleeful emotion, and when he felt particularly good over his performance, he followed his habit of drawing his knees, with his arms around them, up to his very face.”)

Yet as March 4 drew closer, and secession loomed larger, it was becoming clear that his life had changed forever. He could not keep up with the huge volume of mail. Some of it was disturbing — crude drawings of skulls and bones, a sketch of Lincoln’s head in a noose; an actual noose itself. The crowds of office-seekers and thrill-seekers were relentless, and he began to restrict their access to him. In many ways, he was already becoming the president, well before the March 4 transfer of power. On Jan. 19, a Mexican diplomat came all the way to Springfield to pay his respects, a sign that the rest of the world was not so far from the prairie. Lincoln’s two assistants, John Hay and John Nicolay, were acting as the White House gatekeepers they

January 10, 2011, 9:00 PM
Abe Lincoln and Filibuster Fever
By TOM CHAFFIN

Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

TAGS:

ABRAHAM LINCOLN, FILIBUSTER, NARCISO LOPEZ, THE CIVIL WAR, WILLIAM WALKER
These days the word “filibuster” brings to mind long-winded debates and congressional paralysis. But in January 1861, a very different use of the term occupied the mind of Abraham Lincoln.

Descended via the Spanish “filibustero” from the Dutch “Vrijbuiter,” filibuster at first referred to English buccaneers, pirates who sailed in search of Spanish gold and silver. But by the mid-19th century, it had come to mean irregular armies from the United States bound for foreign lands and those who joined them. Some enjoyed nod-and-wink approval from federal or state officials, but most acted without governmental authority, even in outright defiance of Uncle Sam.

Although some of America’s first filibusters invaded Canada, by the time Lincoln arrived in national politics most were headed toward Latin America. Political and pecuniary motives drove the filibusters and their political supporters; so did a taste for glory. Then and later, many people saw them as a sort of steroidal expression of America’s expansionist drive. Indeed, the mid-nineteenth century’s popular press romanticized men like Narciso López, William Walker, Henry A. Crabb and Joseph Morehead as “adventurers,” and the public devoured tales of their exploits.


Library of Congress
Filibusterers under William Walker during his occupation of Nicaragua, 1856. CLICK TO ENLARGE
What, then, prompted Lincoln to worry about filibusters in early 1861? It was a Jan. 6 letter from Pennsylvania Rep. James T. Hale. Like other Lincoln allies, Hale wrote to suggest legislative actions in the face of Southern secession, primarily compromises that might stanch the Union’s bleeding. Hale encouraged Lincoln to support variants of measures that had been associated with the recently defeated Crittenden Compromise. That compromise included a constitutional amendment that would

January 6, 2011, 9:00 PM
First South Carolina. Then New York?
By JOHN LOCKWOOD and CHARLES LOCKWOOD

Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

TAGS:

ABRAHAM LINCOLN, FERNANDO WOOD, NEW YORK CITY, THE CIVIL WAR
In the wake of South Carolina’s vote to secession in late December 1860, Americans both North and South anxiously wondered which state would be next to leave the Union. Little did they realize that the next call for secession would come not from a Southern state, but from a Northern city — New York City.


Library of Congress
Mayor Fernando Wood
On Jan. 7, 1861, two days before Mississippi became the second state to secede, Mayor Fernando Wood delivered a message to the Common Council, the city’s governing body, proposing that New York assert its independence as a “free city” by “disrupt[ing] the bands which bind her to a venal and corrupt master” — that is, the Union. Wood wanted the city, then comprised only of Manhattan Island, to become an independent city-state, akin to the seaport free cities of northern Germany. Indeed, he suggested that New York City’s founding charter — which established that “New York be, and from henceforth forever hereafter shall be and remain, a free city of itself” — already guaranteed its independence.

Wood’s call for secession was hardly surprising. A Democrat, he had been elected in 1859 on a vocal pro-Southern platform in a three-way election against a Tammany Hall Democrat and a Republican. What’s more, pro-Southern and pro-independence sentiment was widespread in New York, particularly among the merchant class. Their pro-independence stance was partly a matter of economic opportunism: New York was not only the richest and most populous city in the country, but it was also the critical source of federal tax revenue in these days before income taxes. In 1860, ad valorem taxes — tariffs on imported goods collected at ports — provided $56 million of the $64.6 million of federal revenue, and more than two-thirds of imports by value passed through New York. Secession

January 8, 2011, 8:00 PM
Loose Lips (Almost) Sink Ships
By ADAM GOODHEART

Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

TAGS:

ABRAHAM LINCOLN, FORT SUMTER, ROBERT ANDERSON, SOUTH CAROLINA, THE CIVIL WAR
Charleston Harbor, Jan. 9, 1861

Capt. Abner Doubleday rose early and went up to the parapet of Fort Sumter, scanning the surrounding waters with his telescope. He had seen something flashing out there the night before: a pilot boat signaling that a vessel was approaching Charleston Harbor in the darkness.

Since their move into the fortress two weeks before, Doubleday and his comrades in the small Union garrison had been looking out over that harbor in despair, as the besieging Carolinians were joined by volunteer units from across the Deep South. “If we ascended to the parapet,” he later recalled, “we saw nothing but uncouth State flags, representing palmettos, pelicans and other strange devices. No echo seemed to come back from the loyal North to encourage us. Our glasses in vain swept the horizon; the one flag we longed to see was not there.”

Library of Congress
The Star of the West enters Charleston Harbor, from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper.

But now, in the morning sunlight, he suddenly saw that longed-for flag, the familiar Stars and Stripes. It was coming across the harbor, fluttering atop the mast of a large merchant steamer making her way up the channel. Doubleday quickly realized which vessel it was. He and the other officers had learned of this steamship and her top-secret mission to Fort Sumter the day before – from an article in a newspaper.

A week earlier, President James Buchanan, prodded into action by the general-in-chief of the Army, Winfield Scott, had at last decided to send reinforcements and provisions to the beleaguered Sumter garrison. Scott had urged that every possible step be taken to keep news of the expedition from getting out. Instead of using a Navy vessel, he chartered an ordinary steamship, the Star of the West. She was to clear New York Harbor as if bound on a regu

December 21, 2010, 9:00 PM
The Narrowest of Loopholes
By ADAM GOODHEART

Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

TAGS:

CHARLESTON, FORT SUMTER, ROBERT ANDERSON, SECESSION, SOUTH CAROLINA, THE CIVIL WAR
Charleston Harbor, Dec. 22, 1860


Library of Congress
Fort Sumter as seen from the ramparts of Fort Moultrie, published in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, Jan. 26, 1861. CLICK TO ENLARGE.
For two nights the sentinels had watched the patrol boats as they passed back and forth like prowling sharks. The small steamers cruised with their lamps doused, paddlewheels turning slowly, hulls and wheelhouses silhouetted against water lighted by the reflection of the waxing moon.

Across the water loomed a larger shape, high and square. To members of the small, beleaguered Union garrison at Fort Moultrie, it represented all that they longed for: safety. Honor. Perhaps even, in the end, victory. With the secession of South Carolina two days earlier, the noose around them had tightened; the Carolinians now officially regarded them as alien interlopers, a foreign force upon the sovereign soil of their state. The Union commander, Maj. Robert Anderson, had done his best to buttress Moultrie’s inadequate defenses, but this seemed little more than shoring up a sand castle against the rising tide.

Meanwhile, the garrison’s officers and men gazed longingly from their low battlements at the other federal citadel: Fort Sumter. It sat on its own artificial island – a sturdy pedestal of granite boulders, hewn from New England quarries – just inside the narrowest part of the harbor’s mouth, alongside the main ship channel. Though the fort was still unfinished after decades of fitful progress, Sumter’s 360-degree view of the surrounding water made it almost impregnable to sneak attack, and its high brick walls were much more formidable than Moultrie’s. Designed to protect the port from enemy fleets, its armament included a fearsome array of heavy mortars and columbiads, the bulbous 10-ton cannons that could hurl a heavy pro

December 25, 2010, 6:00 PM
The Night Escape
By ADAM GOODHEART

Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

TAGS:

ABNER DOUBLEDAY, ABRAHAM LINCOLN, CHARLESTON, FORT SUMTER, ROBERT ANDERSON, THE CIVIL WAR
Charleston Harbor, Dec. 26, 1860

The rowers strained at their oars, gasping with exertion, their breath visible in the chill night air. By good fortune, the water lay almost flat, with just the slightest rolling swell, and each pull drew them several lengths farther on.

None of those men knew that their brief but perilous transit would end up changing American history. Their only thought was of swiftly and silently reaching their destination, barely a mile across the channel: Fort Sumter.

In the second of the three longboats crouched Capt. Abner Doubleday, scanning the moonlit harbor around him. Ahead, in the lead boat, he could make out an unmistakable figure, hawk-like with its beaked nose and enshrouding cloak, clutching something tightly under one arm. This was the garrison’s commander, Maj. Robert Anderson. For weeks, as hostile secessionists drew an ever-tighter cordon around their tiny Union force, Doubleday had speculated endlessly about his close-lipped superior’s intentions. Did Anderson plan to stay put in their pathetically indefensible little citadel at Fort Moultrie, docilely awaiting orders from Washington, until the enemy overwhelmed him? Was the major, a known apologist for slavery, scheming to betray his loyal men to the rebels? Or could he – as Doubleday fervently hoped – be plotting somehow to slip the trap and make a run for the far more secure position that Sumter offered?

The moment of truth had arrived only an hour or so earlier, back at Moultrie. As the sun set over Charleston Harbor, the officers had gathered for their customary late-afternoon tea with the commander. Arriving slightly late, Doubleday greeted his comrades and was met with distracted silence. Then Anderson rose and approached him.

“I have determined to evacuate this post immediately, for the purpose of occupying

December 29, 2010, 9:00 PM
The General’s Dyspepsia
By ADAM GOODHEART

Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

TAGS:

ABRAHAM LINCOLN, CHARLESTON, JAMES BUCHANAN, ROBERT ANDERSON, THE CIVIL WAR
Washington, Dec. 30, 1860


Library of Congress
General Winfield Scott
America’s glorious champion of 1812 and 1848, the hero of Lundy’s Lane and Chapultepec, was feeling more than a bit out of sorts. This in itself was not unusual. Winfield Scott, the 74-year-old general-in-chief of the Army, fought daily battles now not with redcoats or Mexicans, but against dropsy, gout, rheumatism and dyspepsia. His massive frame – six feet five inches in height and more than 300 pounds – was like a crumbling fortress besieged by the inexorable forces of time.

Yet the general’s present indisposition was of a metaphysical nature, too. As he gingerly arose that morning and looked about him with bleary eyes, the world itself seemed out of joint. Summoning an aide, he hastily dictated a message to President James Buchanan. It began:

Lieutenant General Scott begs the President of the United States to pardon the irregularity of this communication.

It is Sunday; the weather is bad, and General Scott is not well enough to go to church. But matters of the highest national importance seem to forbid a moment’s delay, and if misled by zeal, he hopes the President’s forgiveness.


“Matters of the highest national importance”: an understatement, if anything. Three days earlier, on Thursday morning, the entire country had been rocked by the news that Maj. Robert Anderson had – unexpectedly and without orders – moved his small force of federal troops into Fort Sumter. Their mile-long journey across Charleston Harbor had been the first official gesture of resistance to secession. Now the Carolinians were howling betrayal, protesting that President Buchanan had broken his solemn pledge not to permit any such provocation.

What was to be done now with Anderson and the 80-odd men of his garrison? This urgent question vexed the highest levels of

January 5, 2011, 9:00 PM
James Buchanan’s Activist Blunder
By WILLIAM W. FREEHLING

Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

TAGS:

ABRAHAM LINCOLN, JAMES BUCHANAN, SOUTH CAROLINA, THE CIVIL WAR
President James Buchanan’s critics rightly condemned him during the secession crisis of 1860-’61 — but they did so for exactly the wrong reason. The naysayers blasted the president for passiveness in the face of disunion, for failing promptly to reinforce endangered federal forts in the South. True, the president retreated from sending reinforcements — except for a few critical days around the New Year. At that moment, a sudden burst of irresponsible activism shrunk his record of passivity to comparative unimportance.

In October 1860, before any state had seceded, Buchanan’s chief general, Winfield Scott, urged him to send troops, food and armaments to vulnerable military outposts located on potential rebel terrain, including the forts around the harbor in Charleston, S.C. Scott’s plea swelled into a popular clamor as South Carolina’s declaration of secession neared. According to the logic for a preventative federal move, consolidating and resupplying the forts would call secessionists’ bluff, isolate South Carolina from other Southern states and devastate disunion sentiment inside even that flighty state.


Library of Congress
James Buchanan, ca. 1860
Buchanan rightly doubted this logic. He feared that federal military intervention might throw other slaveholding states into South Carolina’s unyielding hands. He knew that beyond South Carolina, most Southerners questioned whether President-elect Abraham Lincoln posed a real threat to slavery, and thus doubted the expediency of disunion. But most doubters also accepted the right of secession, and thus would deplore federal military enforcers’ menace to white citizens’ liberty. Fury at a president who deployed military “coercion,” thereby allegedly “enslaving” southern citizens, would be immense. Dispatching reinforcements before any state beyond South Carolina had

December 21, 2010, 5:45 PM
Dancing Around History
By BLAIN ROBERTS and ETHAN J. KYTLE

Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

TAGS:

ABRAHAM LINCOLN, CHARLESTON, SECESSION, SOUTH CAROLINA, THE CIVIL WAR
“Today it is hoped we shall get the old Lady South Carolina out of the crowd without damaging her hoops or tearing her dress,” wrote planter John S. Palmer to his wife on December 19, 1860. Likening secession to the social graces required of southern belles, Palmer captured the mood of Charleston, where the state secession convention had recently convened.

The citizenry, poised to tear a nation apart, was planning a grand party. The following afternoon, Palmer and other delegates who had assembled in the South Carolina city voted 169 to 0 for secession. That evening thousands flocked to Institute Hall in downtown Charleston to witness the formal signing of the “Ordinance of Secession.” Afterward “cannon were fired,” reported the Charleston Mercury, “and bright triumph was depicted on every countenance.”


Blain Roberts
Protesters outside the Secession Gala in Charleston. S.C.
On Monday, exactly 150 years later, Confederate enthusiasts sought to relive the festivities with an elaborate Secession Gala. Three hundred celebrants—dozens decked out like cavalier planters and Lady South Carolina—packed Charleston’s Gaillard Auditorium to celebrate the fateful vote. One could almost be forgiven for thinking the whole town had gone back in time.

Outside the ball, though, more than a hundred people staged a downtown march, capping off an afternoon of protest that included police-guarded demonstrations at local hotels and a candlelight vigil. The protesters, mostly black, carried signs reading “Don’t Celebrate Slavery and Terrorism” and “It’s not About Heritage.” “Slavery is what you defend when you have a party, a celebration, get drunk, holler loud, act like a rebel, and talk about how you’re celebrating your heritage,” said NAACP leader Reverend Nelson B. Rivers III. “No matter how you dress it up, it is still

December 20, 2010, 9:00 PM
States’ Rights, but to What?
By PAUL FINKELMAN
Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

TAGS:

ABRAHAM LINCOLN, SECESSION, SOUTH CAROLINA, THE CIVIL WAR
One hundred and fifty years ago today South Carolina declared its independence from the United States. The move had been in the offing since early November, when Abraham Lincoln’s election led the state’s leaders to fear that Washington would begin to restrict slavery in the territories and in their own state. That was the proximate cause, at least; there was more to it. Beyond the election, South Carolina was no longer happy in a union with the free states, where northern opponents of slavery were allowed to openly denounce the “peculiar institution” in Congress and in their home states.

It’s true, then, that South Carolina seceded over states’ rights: though, as neo-confederates are loath to admit, the specific right in question concerned the ownership of human chattel. One of the South’s persistent complaints was the northern states would not vigorously cooperate in the return of fugitive slaves and that the free states allowed antislavery organizations to flourish.

In other words, for South Carolina, slavery and states’ rights were not mutually exclusive; in fact, they were the same thing. Today too few people understand the intricate legal history that connects slavery to states’ rights — and as a result a needless debate continues, 150 years after secession began.



Library of Congress
The standards in Fugitive Slave law were weak, and many Northerners feared it would lead to kidnapping. CLICK TO ENLARGE
As most people know, until the adoption of the 13th Amendment in 1865, owning slaves was constitutionally protected. But the Constitution also protected the slave-owners’ right to have escaped slaves returned: the Fugitive Slave Clause of Article Four, Section Two of the Constitution declares that “No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of a

November 11, 2010, 5:53 PM
A Senator Secedes – Reluctantly
By ADAM GOODHEART

Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

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ABRAHAM LINCOLN, JAMES HENRY HAMMOND, SECESSION, SOUTH CAROLINA, THE CIVIL WAR
Charleston, S.C., Nov. 12, 1860

Almost everyone in Charleston, it seemed, had gone wild for secession. Flags with the state symbol, the palmetto tree, flew on every street, and even from ships in the harbor. Abraham Lincoln was burned in effigy. News agents throughout the city vowed never again to sell Harper’s Weekly – the most widely circulated magazine in America – when they saw that its post-election issue featured a large woodcut of the president-elect.


Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly
Mass meeting at Institute Hall, Nov. 12, 1860.
That night, several thousand people packed the floor and galleries of Institute Hall on Meeting Street; one witness wrote, “every part of the building was crowded to suffocation.” Many noted with satisfaction that members of the state’s social and financial elite – previously somewhat resistant to the swell of revolutionary fervor around them – were present tonight. Presiding over the assemblage was Judge Andrew Gordon Magrath, who, on the day after Lincoln’s election, had walked out of his courtroom to become a secessionist hero, the first of numerous federal officials in the state to resign his office in protest. “The Temple of Justice, raised under the Constitution of the United States, is now closed,” he had theatrically informed the jury before slipping off his robe and departing.

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Now, in Institute Hall, spectators “rose to their feet, threw up their hats, and cheered until hoarse,” a newspaper reported. Their cheers grew even louder when Magrath announced that Senator James Henry Hammond – the very embodiment of South Carolina’s political establishment – had just cast his lot w

January 12, 2011, 9:30 PM
Last Chance for Compromise
By SUSAN SCHULTEN
Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

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ABRAHAM LINCOLN, CRITTENDEN COMPROMISE, SLAVERY, THE CIVIL WAR

The New York Times
Kentucky Sen. John Crittenden proposed this geographical “solution” to the slavery crisis. Click on the map to learn more about Crittenden’s plan.
The term “compromise” has paradoxical connotations. We applaud the “spirit of compromise” but shame those who have “compromised their principles.” This dual meaning captures the central problem of our nation’s early history. From the three-fifths compromise embedded in the Constitution, to the Missouri Compromise of 1820 (which divided future Western states between slave and free), to the Compromise of 1850 (which, among other things, created the Fugitive Slave Act), slavery demanded a series of adjustments in order to satisfy two increasingly antagonistic sections.

INTERACTIVE MAP
The Crittenden Compromise
Learn more about the senator’s “solution” to the slavery crisis.

The election of Lincoln and subsequent secession of South Carolina prompted another flurry of compromise proposals designed to halt the momentum of secession. The most important of these came in December, when Kentucky Sen. John Crittenden and his colleagues attempted to create peace between the two sections through a package of amendments and acts that came to be known as the Crittenden Compromise (see map for details). Scholars depict the deal, which was all but dead by early January, as unrealistic and doomed from the beginning because of opposition from President-elect Lincoln. But though the proposal failed–and in part because it failed–it offers a valuable window onto the complex political landscape that winter.

Crittenden hoped to achieve a lasting peace—not just a truce—through a geographical and constitutional “solution” to the slavery crisis. First and foremost, as shown on the map, Crittenden restored the Missouri Compromise line that had been nullified in 1854 by the Kansas-Nebrask

December 29, 2010, 9:30 PM
The Messianic Schoolmaster
By TOM CHAFFIN

Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

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ABRAHAM LINCOLN, FREDERICK DOUGLASS, SLAVERY, THE CIVIL WAR, WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON
At 55 years old, William Lloyd Garrison — president of the American Anti-Slavery Society and arguably the nation’s most prominent abolitionist — was balding, square-faced and bespectacled. With his genteel manners and formal sartorial tastes, including black suits and severe black cravats, he could be mistaken for a conservative schoolmaster. But appearances masked a steely resolve capable of soaring to messianic heights.


Library of Congress
William Lloyd Garrison
In December 1860, like most northern opponents of slavery, Garrison reacted sharply to reports that South Carolina had left the Union. And like most enemies of slavery, he viewed South Carolina’s act as an extra-legal transgression that defied the Constitution. Even so, the reaction of Garrison and his fellow staunch abolitionists to South Carolina’s act differed drastically from mainstream anti-slavery opinion: they welcomed it. Indeed, in the weeks after South Carolina’s secession, the issues of Garrison’s bimonthly newspaper, the Liberator, provide a focused lens on the vanguard of abolitionist thought on the eve of the Civil War.

Garrison was one of the mid-19th century’s most famous agitators. A religious man heavily influenced by Quakerism, he rejected violence; even so, his rhetoric was so fiery that Southern states routinely blamed him for inciting slave revolts. As far back as 1831 — the year he began publishing the Liberator — the Georgia legislature offered a $5,000 reward for anyone who could bring the editor to Georgia so that he could be prosecuted for seditious libel. Physical and legal threats against him only increased over the years.

For all his fame, Garrison had long been an outlier. Most Americans on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line considered him an extremist. In fact, it had been, in large part, Garrison’s rejection of