"Confederates in the Attic"

This is a good (i.e. not as horrifying as it could be) book to learn about the Civil War, but a very depressing one for understanding the current state of the union. Tony Horwitz covered muh ground in this one again.

• Soon after my return, the Walt Disney Company unveiled plans for a Civil War theme park beside the Manassas battlefield. This provoked howls of protest... It seemed as though the black-and-white photographs I’d studied as a child had blurred together, forming a Rorschach blot in which Americans now saw all sorts of unresolved strife: over race, sovereignty, the sanctity of historic landscapes, and who should interpret the past.
• They sought absolute fidelity to the 1860s: its homespun clothing, antique speech patterns, sparse diet and simple utensils. Adhered to properly, this fundamentalism produced a time-travel high, or what hardcores called a “period rush.” <> “Look at these buttons,” one soldier said, fingering his gray wool jacket. “I soaked them overnight in a saucer filled with urine.”
• “It’s an ice-breaker at parties,” he said. <> For Robert Lee Hodge, it was also a way of life. As the Marlon Brando of battlefield bloating, he was often hired for Civil War movies.
• So half-blind and hobbled by the ill-fitting brogans—boots weren’t always molded to right and left in the Civil War
• Losing weight was a hardcore obsession, part of the never-ending quest for authenticity. “If you look at pension records, you realize that very few Civil War soldiers weighed more than a hundred thirty-five pounds,”
• After fifteen minutes, someone shouted “spoon left!” and the pack rolled over. Now my back was warm but my front was exposed to the chill air. I was in the “anchor” position, my neighbor explained, the coldest spot in a Civil War spoon.
• If he caught ticks and lice, so be it. “If that happened, I’d feel like we’d elevated things to another level,” he said. “It would suck, but at least I’d know what it was like to scratch my head all day long.”
• “You know what they call North Carolina,” Ed Curtis added. “‘A vale of humility between two mountains of conceit.’” He smiled. “Of course that’s a conceited thing to say about yourself. But at least we’re humble about how much better we are than anyplace else.”
• Do you know one reason North Carolinians are called Tar Heels?... Because Lee said we stuck in battle.
• “A lot of people like me first got deep into Confederate history in the late seventies, when genealogy really took off,” she explained. <> Ironically, Alex Haley’s novel Roots helped trigger this trend,
• Actually, Gettysburg was the rare clash in which the Confederates weren’t badly outmanned. If the battle proved anything, it was that Lee could blunder and that Northerners could fight as doggedly as Southerners. Reading through the rest of the Catechism, I began to hear echoes of defeated peoples I’d encountered overseas: Kurds, Armenians, Palestinians, Catholics in Northern Ireland. Like them, Southerners had kept fighting their war by other means.
• Then I got to thinking about Salisbury’s prison.” Her voice lowered, the way a twelve-year-old’s does when she’s about to say something awful. “You know how some prisoners killed themselves at Salisbury? They drank potty water.” She grimaced.
• the peninsula tip on which the heart of historic Charleston rested. This square mile or so was the most agreeable piece of urban real estate I’d yet visited in America. The low skyline, hurricane-swept flora and well-spaced buildings gave Charleston’s streets the sun-flooded brilliance of a Van Gogh landscape, with architectural coloring to match.
• at Charleston’s huge visitors’ center, the introductory slide show opted for a passive construction of events: “Shots were fired on Fort Sumter and Charleston was plunged into the dark days of the Civil War.”
• “Then she said, ‘I’m dying now, so if you want my granddaddy’s uniform it’s upstairs in a closet.’” <> Wells pointed at the uniform and said, “It’s very valuable because it has pants. Few pants survived because the soldiers just wore them till they gave out.” I asked what became of the old lady. “Oh, she still calls me from time to time, to check on grandpa.”... Every item in the museum seemed to carry a similarly Gothic tale, told with the same blend of decorum and dirt that left me guessing whether Wells meant to praise or skewer her subjects.
• esteemed men in Charleston,” she said. At least outside the house. The two men lived together and both survived to ninety-five. “So my grandmother had to take care of these two ancient men, her husband and father, arguing about the War until the end of time. You know that lady had her hands full.”
• It seemed strange to me that women had been so much more active than veterans in hallowing battlefield glory. But Wells, who once served as the UDC’s historian, felt the women were honoring themselves as much as their menfolk.
• Westendorff pointed at a sprawling mansion with a peeling front and rotted shutters. “That’s typical of old Charleston money,” he said. “Too poor to paint, too proud to whitewash.”
• A famous shrine to Denmark Vesey still stood, though few people recognized it as such. After the failed revolt, Charleston erected a well-fortified arsenal to guard against future insurrections. This bastion became the Southern military college known as the Citadel (or “the house that Denmark built,” as some blacks called it). The Citadel was now best known for guarding against women, who were struggling to gain admission to the school at the time of my visit.
• White Southerners descended from freedom-loving Celts in Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Northerners—New England abolitionists in particular—came from mercantile and expansionist English stock... The North, meanwhile, deployed its industrial might and numerical superiority to grind down the South with Cromwellian efficiency. A military historian and neo-Confederate guru named Grady McWhiney put it best: “Southerners lost the War because they were too Celtic and their opponents were too English.”... The North’s triumph, in turn, condemned the nation to centralized industrial society and all the ills that came with it.
• Or had some wise Daughter of the Confederacy, upon receiving the statue, prudently chosen to keep it under wraps rather than risk a riot by unveiling it before all those “staunch old vets”? <> Surely, Ward said, someone must have noticed a problem when they unpacked the crate. “It was probably done the Southern way,” she hypothesized. “Whispered about in homes but kept quiet so that no one would be embarrassed.”
• Anyway, it’s the big people I’m against, the ones pulling strings.” He reached for tofu. “Just because a race is bad doesn’t mean everyone who belongs to it is. There’s one black I respect a lot.” Walt riffled through his library again. “This guy,” he said, handing me a picture of Louis Farrakhan speaking at a Nation of Islam rally. “He thinks mixing the races is wrong, that blacks and whites should go their separate ways. And he’s down on Jews, too.”
• “I need to know the whole book of knowledge. Like if someone asks, ‘Why do we hate Jews?’ I didn’t know before, but I found out. It was Jews that put Christ on the cross.” <> If she passed the exam—and avoided Klan infractions, such as committing a felony or sleeping with a black man—Velma would don a satin hood and robe for the cross-burning ... “It’s a good look,” she said. “But we’ve had a lot of events lately. The cleaning bills will kill you.”
• she said. “Blacks don’t really have anything against the flag. They just don’t want us to have it. They want the best jobs, the biggest money. Now they want this. If we lose the mascot, it’ll just be a matter of time before we lose everything.” Her voice quivered with rage. “Don’t put us where they used to be.”... Chapman had learned something else from blacks: the idiom and tactics of civil rights. She and her supporters had launched a school boycott,
• Michael’s new Confederate profile appeared to comfort his relatives, giving a larger meaning to what had seemed a senseless death, and drawing the family into a world beyond the provincial confines of Todd County... The Klan also sent its condolences, even offering the family help in writing thank-you notes.
• David ran his finger along a list of rebel ancestors: one captured, another shot dead at Gettysburg, and a private “killed in action, 24th May, 1862.” His age was listed as nineteen. <> “Just like Michael,” David said. He wiped his eyes. “They say that war ended a long time ago. But around here it’s like it’s still going on.”
• The Yankees unleashed another volley. I clutched my belly, groaned loudly and stumbled to the ground. O’Neill flopped on his side like a sick cow, bellowing, “I’m a goner, oh God, I’m a goner.” Then he spotted his brother from New Jersey, lying in the grass nearby. “Hey Steve, they got you, too! Just like the Civil War, brother against brother!” <> Bishop sprawled with his eyes wide open, Fright Stuff dribbling down his chin. Another man lay on his stomach, convulsed with laughter. He was wearing foam earplugs, the type they give you on airplanes. I wondered how I’d report the scene to Rob Hodge. Died and gone to farb heaven.
• So it helped to carry two outfits, in case the other side needed your services. Reenactors called this “galvanizing,” the Civil War term for soldiers who switched sides during the conflict. <> “The rebs have to take turns shooting us because there’s always more of them,” a Union reenactor, John Daniel, told me.
• a cataloguing of words with alleged Civil War origins: hooker from Joe Hooker, the Union commander famed for his tolerance of female camp followers; sideburn from Ambrose Burnside, the Union general with bushy muttonchops; tampon from tompion, a wooden plug used to protect rifle barrels from dirt and rain;
• “Wow, you see him get popped? He’s a natural. C’mon.” We rushed over to the wounded youth. I checked his pulse while Rob cradled his head. “Great hit,” Rob said, sloshing gin down his throat. “I liked the bouncing around. Looked like a nerve wound. You ever heard of the Southern Guard?”
• This, too, was an aspect of the twentieth century that reenactors were fleeing: a heterogeneous society still raw with historic wounds and racial sensitivities. In principle, remembrance of the War could be a way to probe these scars, many of which trailed back to the 1860s. But reenactments did precisely the opposite, blandly reconciling North and South in a grand spectacle that glorified battlefield valor and the stoicism of civilians.
• The difference between North and the South in the War is that there was no stigma attached to the Northern man who paid two hundred dollars to not go to war, or who hired a German replacement. In the South you could have done that, but no one would. You’d have been scorned.” <> Foote’s retroactive allegiance to the Confederacy surprised me. It was the honor-bound code of the Old South. One’s people before one’s principles. The straitjacket of scorn and stigma. “It’s a bunch of shit really,” Foote conceded. “But all Southerners subscribe to this code to some degree, at least male Southerners of my generation.”
• Foote also admired Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Klan’s first Imperial Wizard, a slave trader before the War, and a rebel commander who allegedly permitted the slaughter of surrendering black troops at a battle called Fort Pillow. Foote regarded Forrest as one of the “two authentic geniuses” of the War (Lincoln being the other). A daring cavalry commander, Forrest was the only soldier on either side to rise from private to lieutenant general in the course of the War, and his lightning tactics later inspired Rommel’s use of blitzkrieg in World War II... it is not known generally that he dissolved the Klan when it turned ugly.”
• Shiloh, like many other battlefields, doubled as a lovers lane after dark. <> I stood in the gloom, shivering and feeling suddenly silly. My breakfast companion was right; what was I doing here at four-whatever in the fucking a.m.? If tramping through the woods before dawn was so damned transcendent, why hadn’t Shelby Foote accepted my invitation to come along?
• Henry Stanley was but one among a cast of future celebrities at Shiloh. The Union generals included Grant (then still an up-and-comer shadowed by rumors of alcoholism), his deputy William Tecumseh Sherman (who had recently returned to the army after a nervous breakdown) and Lew Wallace, later to become author of Ben Hur. Also on hand were John Wesley Powell (who lost an arm here, but still navigated the Colorado River and Grand Canyon after the War), William Le Baron Jenney (a future Chicago architect and “father of the skyscraper”), and a young soldier named Ambrose Bierce, whose morbid short story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” would become a staple of junior high reading lists.
• As Scott Sams pointed out, Shiloh had two pasts: the actual battle, and its remembrance by those who fought there. “In our youth our hearts were touched with fire,” wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes, twice wounded in battle. “We have felt, we still feel, the passion of life at its top.”
• Shiloh’s isolation, though, hadn’t spared it a growing problem at battlefields across America. The boom market in Civil War relics had unleashed scores of treasure hunters who scavenged after dark with metal detectors. Rangers now patrolled the park with night-vision goggles and had once nabbed two men toting over 130 artifacts.
• the reality of how horrible the War really was,” he said. “You read surgeons’ reports and learn that a big problem wasn’t just missiles, but also bits of clothing and leather and grime and flesh that got blown into wounds. The teeth and bone from others ahead of you could be deadly projectiles, too.”
• I later learned that Civil War scholars were rethinking numerous battles and questioning the reliability of long-revered sources. After Gettysburg, for instance, Robert E. Lee—presaging the doctored body counts in Vietnam—fudged his report on the debacle and the appalling casualties he sustained. Lee also ordered George Pickett to destroy his scathing report on the disastrous charge that bore his name.
• an obvious circumstance I’d somehow missed. The early 1960s coincided with the Civil War centennial. Battle reenactments began in earnest; hundreds of Civil War books were published; war-related games, toy cannons and other mass merchandise abounded as never before. This helped explain why Wolfgang’s father returned home with Civil War trinkets. It also shed light on my own childhood fixation, which I’d tended to view, in a self-congratulatory way, as the eccentric passion of a boy born in the wrong century. Perhaps I’d been the opposite, a creature of twentieth-century commercial culture who had simply latched onto a product line current at the time.
• For Wolfgang, as for many Germans of his generation, fascination with war was freighted with a much more complex self-doubt. “It is not easy to grow up with the knowledge of belonging to one of the most destructive people in world history,” he said. “I think some of the Confederate reenactors in Germany are acting out Nazi fantasies of racial superiority. They are obsessed with your war because they cannot celebrate their own vanquished racists. Most of these people are Bavarians, of course.”
• When drugs weren’t available, soldiers bit bullets during surgery. Gerache showed me a minié ball scarred with teeth marks. “Soldiers bit so hard that they’d throw their jaws out. So it was determined that two bullets were better, one on each side. That way the bite was more even.”
• “The biggest killer in the Civil War wasn’t the rifle but the microbe,” he said. “These medicines killed a lot, too.” He ticked off the potions and tinctures in the medical wagon of a Civil War physician, including silver nitrate, castor oil, turpentine, belladonna, opium, brandy, and quinine. “Only one came close to curing anything, which was quinine for malaria.”
• By mid-1863, generals had overcome their earlier disdain for digging in. Shovels proved as crucial as guns, with the two sides gouging 60,000 feet of zigzag trenches. Also, civilians suffered alongside soldiers, enduring heavy bombardment and near-starvation during the siege. Vicksburg, in sum, offered a preview of the sort of grinding, total warfare that Grant and Sherman would later wage in the East—and that European armies would pursue with even greater savagery in the twentieth century.
• The doctor who examined Cashire discovered what the Illinois veteran had so long concealed; Cashire was a woman, an Irish immigrant née Jennie Hodgers. Hodgers was eventually sent to an insane asylum and forced to wear women’s clothing until her death in 1915. <> “I left Cashier the fearless boy of twenty-two at the end of the Vicksburg campaign,” one former comrade wrote after visiting her at the asylum. “I found a frail woman of seventy, broken, because on discovery she was compelled to put on skirts. They told me she was as awkward as could be in them. One day she tripped and fell, hurting her hip. She never recovered.”... The museum also told of 400 other women who went to war disguised as men.
• “We only had an hour or so at major sites and a few minutes at minor ones,” Rob said. “So the whole War just washed over us at warp-speed.” Fatigue heightened the thrill. “It was dreamy, religious, a holy trek.” He and Joel read liturgically from soldiers’ diaries and memoirs; at some battlegrounds, they scooped up clods of sacred dirt. It was Joel who had dubbed their ecstatic pilgrimage the “Civil Wargasm.”
• “The Gasm’s a Bohemian thing, like a Ken Kesey bus tour, except that we’re tripping on the 1860s instead of the 1960s.”... Actually, the Gasm struck me as a fusion of the two decades: a weird brew of road culture, rancid pork, and the quest for the elusive “period rush,” the phrase hardcores used to describe the druglike high of traveling through time.
• Ambrose Bierce’s first impression of Virginia as a young Union private in 1861. “Nine in ten of us had never seen a mountain, nor a hill as high as a church spire,” Bierce wrote of his Midwestern regiment. “To a member of a plains-tribe, born and reared on the flats of Ohio or Indiana, a mountain region was a perpetual miracle. Space seemed to have taken on a new dimension; areas to have not only length and breadth, but thickness.”
• “These are some of the best shots you’ll ever see of bloated people,” Rob said. “See this guy with the puffy eyelids and the mouth all puckered? Classic bloating. The lips can’t close, so they swell outward, in an O. Or they can curl in. See, here’s an innie, there’s an outie.”
• Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., who had traveled to Antietam in search of his wounded son, glimpsed the pacifist message inherent in Brady’s stark portraits of the dead. “The sight of these pictures is a commentary on civilization such as the savage might well triumph to show its missionaries,” he wrote. For the first time, Holmes realized, mankind possessed images that stripped war of its romance and revealed combat for what it really was: “a repulsive, brutal, sickening hideous thing.” <> The military certainly understood this; after the Civil War, it censored photographs of American battle dead for almost eighty years.
• glimpses of Jackson’s famed idiosyncrasy. This was a man who was fearless in battle, but so hypochondriacal that he believed eating a single grain of black pepper was enough for him to “lose all strength in my right leg.” He was a stern Presbyterian who frowned on public dancing, yet loved doing the polka with his wife in their parlor. A Virginian who owned six slaves, he broke state law by teaching blacks at Sunday school. He was also a merciless taskmaster who pushed his men ceaselessly and shot deserters without remorse,
• Such yeoman often resented the plantation gentry, who could be exempted from military service if they owned twenty or more slaves, a loophole that prompted the famous Southern gripe: “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.”
• “You assemble your family around you and sing hymns and you are brave and stalwart and tell the little woman that she has been good to you and not to cry. And you tell the children to be good and mind their mother, Daddy’s fixing to go away. That was called making a good death, and it was very important.” <> Jackson’s death wasn’t just good, it was sublime.
• Grant later acknowledged that the assault was the worst blunder of his military career. But he compounded the slaughter by leaving hundreds of wounded men howling in the hot June sun. In one of the most callous episodes of this or any other war, Grant and Lee dickered for days over the terms of gathering the wounded from between their lines. Grant didn’t want to lose face by requesting a formal truce; Lee, who had none of his own troops in the no-man’s-land, saw little reason to give in...
• Southernness branded Richmond in another, spookier way. The city was a vast cenotaph of secession, with tens of thousands of rebel graves, countless monuments, and the remains of Confederate bulwarks, armories, hospitals, prisons, old soldiers’ homes. Confederate history formed such a rich humus beneath modern Richmond that the past sprouted in odd, forgotten spots, the way glimpses of pharaonic grandeur could suddenly appear amidst the chaos of twentieth-century Egypt.
• It was here, too, that the Union pulled off the boldest engineering feat of the War. Seeking to break the deadlock, Pennsylvania coal miners burrowed a 500-foot tunnel beneath a rebel salient. Then they detonated four tons of gunpowder, literally blowing the defenders sky-high. But the Union assault that followed quickly degenerated into a gruesome folly. Advancing troops plunged straight into the huge pit the blast had created, allowing Confederates to gather round the rim and fire down at the helpless, close-packed Federals. The Union force lost 4,000 men before retreating. <> The Battle of the Crater, as it became known, left a hole 170 feet across and 30 feet deep that remained clearly visible today.
• The cemetery held enough Gothic characters to fill a Flannery O’Connor story, at least the way Olgers described them. There was a great-grandfather shot through the wrist in the War who was later hospitalized “for itch,” Olgers claimed. “The hole in his arm was so big that my daddy used to stick his finger in it as a child.”
• In fact, Lee surrendered only the 28,000 men under his command, leaving another 150,000 or so rebels in the field. The last land battle didn’t occur until a month later, at Palmito Ranch in Texas; it resulted, ironically, in a Southern victory. The last Confederate general to capitulate was Stand Watie, a Cherokee who surrendered his Indian troops on June 23rd. Meanwhile, a Confederate cruiser called the Shenandoah kept seizing Union whalers in the Bering Sea until late June and remained on the loose until docking at Liverpool on November 6, 1865, a full seven months after Lee’s surrender.
• my favorite passage on the Civil War, from Faulkner’s novel Intruder in the Dust. In one impossibly long sentence, Faulkner captured both the drama of the stepping-off and the nostalgic might-have-been that had lingered in Southern imagination ever since. <> For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are loaded and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances…. yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago; or to anyone who ever sailed even a skiff under a quilt sail, the moment in 1492 when somebody thought This is it: the absolute edge of no return, to turn back now and make home or sail irrevocably on and either find land or plunge over the world’s roaring rim.
• The HPA even had a political action committee, or PAC, to funnel money to sympathetic candidates. <> “The heritage movement is a brand-new industry,” Collins said, hoeing into rice and beans. “It’s like Lotus was ten years ago, producing spread sheets while others produced software. Now, Lotus will sell you a database. We’ve created a niche, too. A niche of the civil rights industry. Our niche is Southern heritage.” <> Collins also had learned to appropriate the idiom of civil rights and of liberal groups combating discrimination. “We’re chosen people, surviving many atrocities,”
• “Quality,” Dresch said. “Taste. When I started in business I thought the cheapest stuff would sell best. But the opposite is true because the Confederacy is dear to people’s hearts. I’ve sold forty thousand license plates since 1992.”
• Melly had since visited Tokyo several times and now spoke Japanese well enough to make small talk with admirers. “Once I was speaking Japanese to a tourist in Atlanta and a woman gasped, ‘Oh my gosh, the Japanese have even bought Scarlett O’Hara!’”
• What Talmadge had done was become a hostess again, this time for pay, feting businessmen and foreign tourists with dinners at her alleged Twelve Oaks. Her set-menu “Magnolia Supper” included Scarlett Carrots, Rhett Butler biscuits and abra-Ham Lincoln. “The social secretary for Ladybird Johnson taught me to name dishes,”
• Betty had a poor sense of direction, and after a week-long search by car and small airplane she still couldn’t find the barn. It was only through a canceled rent check for the shelter that she finally tracked Tara down.
• So, like Betty Talmadge, Bridges kept waiting for a wealthy “Windie,” as cultish fans of the book and movie were known, to buy his possessions and put them on permanent display.
• I also learned that the actress who played Prissy ended up on welfare in Harlem; that Nazi Germany banned the film because it romanticized resistance to occupation; and that Clark Gable had false teeth and breath so malodorous that some actresses resisted kissing him.
• In fact, given that 400,000 men were captured during the War, almost twice the toll of combat dead, the fate of POWs was arguably the most neglected aspect of the conflict. <> “This may sound sexist,” Joslyn said, “but my theory is that men like the Civil War because it’s an action story, they’re caught up in the battlefield drama. The prisoners are an emotional side of the War. Women are attracted to all that raw feeling, we understand it better, it brings out a mothering instinct.”
• Confederate guards herded 41,000 Union prisoners into a log stockade unsheltered from Georgia’s harsh sun and heavy rains. The pen was designed for a third the number of men it eventually enclosed. This left prisoners in the summer of 1864 with an average of twenty square feet of living space on which to pitch their “shebangs,” A-shaped hovels fashioned from overcoats, blankets and whatever else the prisoners could scrounge.
• Pointing to several belching smokestacks in the distance, Sanchez said the surrounding landscape was now mined for kaolin, a chalky mineral used to make Kaopectate. “You had thousands of men dying of the runs right on top of one of the world’s richest lodes of anti-diarrhea medicine,” he said.
• Nor did the tragedy of Andersonville end with the camp’s closing in the spring of 1865. Almost three weeks after Appomattox, an overloaded steamship called the Sultana blew its boilers on the Mississippi River, drowning or burning alive an estimated 2,000 passengers in the worst maritime disaster in American history. Most of the casualties were freed prisoners from Andersonville, on their way home at last.
• “She’s a real, sure-enough country lady,” Raybon said. “She dips snuff and keeps a little spittoon in her sweater pocket. And she tells it like it is.”
• William was eighty, but he possessed one asset most younger men lacked: a decent, steady income. As a Confederate veteran, he drew a $50-a-month pension from the state, more than many sharecroppers earned in a year, particularly during the boll weevil-wracked years of the 1920s.
• “I might’ve once,” she said. Alberta had gone to a box supper with the old veteran soon after their marriage, and men began bidding for her box. “I wasn’t but twenty, weighed a hundred fourteen pounds back then. I had that long hair. Boys were biddin’ and biddin’ on my box. But Mister Martin didn’t like that. He thought they were making fun of him and he was jealous, thought they might spark with me or somethin’.” So they took Alberta’s box down from the table and put up someone else’s. After that, she and William stopped going to box suppers. <> “I did win one contest,” Alberta added. “I was in a nursin’ home for three months after Charlie died, had a nervous breakdown. I had to rock in a rocker and the one that rocked longest won. I went five hours rockin’. The prize was five dollars.”
• As Jackson went on, a few people in the audience began softly weeping. Then she urged the audience to remember the martyrs and “the cause for which they fought.” I realized I’d heard all this before. Honor the young foot soldiers. Take a stand for our rights. The litany of heroic deeds and fallen martyrs. It was the same mournful refrain that ran through dozens of Confederate observances I’d attended.
• It was a rousing tune, but I sensed a mournful cloud hanging over the room. The civil rights celebrants seemed caught in the same ghost dance as so many whites I’d met, conjuring spirits from an exalted past of heroic sacrifice, halo-crowned martyrs, and unfulfilled dreams.
• “What about it?” Jamal said. “These Southern crackers were farm boys and slave hunters, so of course they were whipping those nerds from up North. Lincoln had to free the slaves so he could use them as soldiers.” <> We went back and forth for half an hour. In essence, the students were saying that the Civil War had nothing to do with race or slavery—much the same argument made by neo-Confederates who saw the War through the prism of states’ rights.
• The Civil War, as I’d seen on countless battlefields, also marked the transition from the chivalric combat of old to the anonymous and industrial slaughter of modern times. It was, Walker Percy wrote, “the last of the wars of individuals, when a single man’s ingenuity and pluck not only counted for something in itself but could conceivably affect the entire issue.” This was true not only of generals, but also of men like Jedediah Hotchkiss, a geologist and map-maker who scaled mountains to survey enemy positions before plotting several of the South’s most triumphant maneuvers. Today, the same task would be performed by spy satellites and drone aircraft. <> The Civil War was human-scaled in another essential way. Most of the War was fought across a pastoral, preindustrial landscape... Soldiers and leaders also framed their experience in vivid rural imagery. Jefferson Davis feared that lowering the draft age to seventeen would “grind the seed corn of the nation.” In 1864, Grant ordered Sheridan to so despoil the Shenandoah Valley’s farmland that “crows flying over it for the balance of this season will have to carry their own provender.”

"Life Between the Tides"

Apparently I almost read this a year ago. One of my favorite lessons in 3L was about tide pools (whence the word 'limpet' entered into my English vocabulary), and Adam Nicolson's descriptions give a much much more detailed tour of those wonders.

• The sea is not made of water. Creatures are its genes.
• In the 1850s, when Victorian Britain fell in love with the seaside, the rock pool became the heart of a kind of nature- worship which saw in its riches and calm a reassuring vision of creation.
• But there are ironies in choosing the shore as a theatre for reassurance. Even if its changes are dependable and rhythmic, it is thick with variability. A tidal coast is filled with that paradoxical quality: reliable unreliability, both closed and open-ended, both familiar and strange.
• ‘The soul wants to be wet,’ Heraclitus said in Ephesus 2,500 years ago.
• A little juvenile dab, three inches from nose to tail, slides along the sea floor beside me, a ripple in every pore, moulding its body to the contours of the sand as if wedded to them, as close as possible to that miniature landscape, a creature as liquid as the sea itself, a film of life, but which, as it pauses, turns invisible, mottled like its surroundings, its greyness speckled with white, banking on a principle opposite to the hermit crab beside it: one almost stupidly visible but dressed in borrowed armour; the other soft, subtle and discreet, the diplomat of this half-world,
• zoomorphism, recognising the continuities between animal and human consciousness, the continuousness of the spectrum that runs from bacterium and virus to scientist and poet. All can exist only within the overarching embrace of the world-as-it-is,
• to know something, a person or an animal or a place, to become intimate with it, is not to know in any very conscious way but to dissolve the boundaries. To be with anything, life must overflow its brim.
• It is March, a cold dampish day with spits of rain hanging in the wind.
• If you sit and watch them in flight, the impression is that each small animal is in one place at one moment and another a second later, with no catchable transition between the two, animal-quarks living in a strange quantum-crustacean universe.
• Be amazed. It is the fizz of life itself, the sand-jumpers and weed-dancers springing into spectacular rocket-fuelled survival. The wax will keep the Orchestias damp inside. It has a melting point of about 37°C, which means the sandhoppers cannot go wandering about with any safety in full summer sunshine... Orchestia must groom to stay alive, in particular picking anything out of the joints in their legs where a speck of dust or sand could damage the connecting membranes and allow the precious wetness of what biologists call ‘the internal milieu’ to escape. To sit and watch them about their business, their multiple limbs flickering and pausing over their own bodies, keeping house, keeping themselves proper, ensuring their own continuity, is a challenge to any pre-existing idea of animal consciousness.
• see them jumping at me as an example and epitome of everything this book is about, a fragmentary illumination of the layers of understanding, skill and volition in the most unconsidered corners of life. These half-soft, semi-elastic, glossy-shelled bodies shelter a decision-making, life-perpetuating, ingenious set of selves that has evolved over the aeons.
• The prawns are just longer than the top joint of my thumb but as intricate as a space station, a machine for processing life, a micro-engineer’s fantasy of applied brilliance, as indifferent to sleekness as the most inner part of an engine or computer, all purpose, no appearance, articulated, tooled up, strange.
• In a well-developed pool you see it: beside the relatively rare and handsome queens, often tucked into the best hiding places, little male courtiers flit to and fro, shadows looking for shadows.
• Fossat’s discovery introduces a complexity into the character of the crustacean which implies a vivid and layered self: to behave like this, it must have a memory of past fearful events; be capable of a carefulness which involves projecting its existence into the future. If an animal can be anxious, it must know about the passage of time.
• A ‘metazoan’ is the word a professor of biology will use to mean anything that has lived since the great extinctions at the end of the Permian 252 million years ago. With the formal modesty usual in scientific papers, Fossat was making the great and beautiful claim that virtually all animal life on earth knows what it feels like to be alive.
• This unmeasurability means that the Mandelbrot world is a set of dizzying spirals. The closer you look, the deeper it dives.
• Any examination of anything becomes an ever-growing, ever-inward plunge into the indefinable. The slower you go, the more there is to your journey. Pause for a moment and a place will pool out around you, not as an illusion but as a fact, in details it would not have had if you had not stopped to look.
• That is true of the shore itself: it is its own book, the only full account of itself, its own luminosity. Its existence is the only true light it has.
• That clogging tooth-film on waking up is the foundation of rock-pool life. The wet surface of your teeth, as of these blades of kelp, attracts bacteria which within minutes begin to secrete sugary chemicals, the polysaccharides, that start to pullulate and fold over on themselves, making a matrix of layers that soon, in Cremona’s words, ‘becomes a complex 3D structure of holes and tunnels’.
• You can see this, and watch this and observe the relationship of gastropod to its algal and bacterial food, but the sense of vertigo, of the layers of life disappearing away from sight down into the tunnels of the microscopic, is inescapable. Every part of the world is an otherworld.
• But in attacking medium-sized winkles, the crab buys the other winkles time to escape and find a refuge. The shells of those medium-sized winkles, in other words, do not protect those individuals but, through the chemical signals their lacerated flesh sends out, the shells do protect the others.
• This biological community structure, which is entirely consistent with Darwinian principles, looks oddly like the roots of something else: the clan civilisation of the Highlands... there is a curious continuity with this winkle world. In all of them, young adults suffer so that others do not. Their death guarantees the safety of most. Their resistance is both a communal good and a mere prelude to their own dying. Can it be that a population of winkles, here in this pool, as in all others, has, merely through the forces of natural selection, developed a means of survival that relies on the death of young heroes? Does it mean that Achilles, or Oscar, Ossian’s son who in the tales was brought back here to Morvern dead from battle in Ireland, carried on his shield, are nothing but members of a biological category, which any population of any animal subject to predation will also have among them?
• the arrival of a new predator distorting the forms of the biological field around it, in the way that a heavenly body bends and tests the gravitational field through which it passes. The European crab had, in effect, changed its prey into the shape it has in European waters.
• The destruction of the cod and the collapse of their position as an apex predator in the Atlantic has led to a growth in the abundance of shrimps, lobsters, and crabs throughout this ocean. It is now a sea of claws.
• have responded as shell-dwellers and shell-wearers must: by thickening their defences and toughening their lives. But modern life has provided them with one more hurdle: the acidification of the world ocean... One-third of all the carbon dioxide that has been emitted since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution has been absorbed by seawater, turning it acid.
• An acid sea will make winkles vulnerable to crab predation, with all kinds of ripple effects spreading from that: more crabs, fewer winkles, denser algae and a disruption of the entire coastal ecosystem.
• The light was bouncing up into the wood off the sea. In a place which is so often grey and wet, mornings like this overbrim with colour. Even a distant sail, tipped like a feather on the Firth of Lorne, looked washed and perfect. The trees were like lettuces, every leaf with the light in it.
• Iris Murdoch’s early philosophy. ‘One might start from the assertion that goodness is a form of realism,’ she wrote, and repeated what Rilke had said of Cézanne: he did not paint ‘I like it’; he painted ‘There it is.’
• And of course this is something which we may also do deliberately: give attention to nature in order to clear our minds of selfish care.
• One might imagine that the most economic of crab strategies is to find the biggest mussels and crack them open for food. That is largely the human approach to eating other animals but it turns out that in common with other shell-focused predators – such as oystercatchers, which usually choose to open the smaller-than-average cockles, wanting to protect their bills from harm – that is not the case. Nature is not red in tooth and claw, but a constant and careful evaluation of the risk-reward ratios in every transaction. The greedy die young; accountants get rich.
• There seems to be a universal rule of thumb which shore crabs follow: if the width of the mussel is more than a quarter the length of the crab’s crushing claw, the crab will be forced to cut its edges rather than crush the whole animal... ‘It would seem,’ Smallegange and Van Der Meer wrote, ‘that crabs prefer to crush in the safe zone, to prevent damage and wear to the claws.’ Instinctive calculation, a capacity to measure, a sense of proportion, in the relationship of mussel width to claw length, and the understanding that life needs to continue beyond the attractions of the immediate moment: all of this is in the mind of Carcinus maenas.
• But armour makes sex difficult if not impossible and female crabs are receptive to the male only after they have moulted their old shell and for the day or two until it hardens again. They must be soft to have sex. In the crab-eat-crab world of the pool, that moment of procreation is filled with danger and so the male gathers her up, even before she has moulted, into what is called ‘a pre-copulatory embrace’.
• Some biologists have seen, very occasionally, at this tender moment, the male crab eating the outstretched claw of the female, to which she responded by continuing to stroke and touch him with her other, single remaining claw. It was thought, maybe, by the Floridian scientist who observed this horror, that the male crab was immature and did not understand the offer the female was making to him.
• As the larval, swimming form of the barnacle metamorphosed into its fixed and sessile state, it lost its eyes and began to build around it the calcareous plates that would protect it for the rest of its life. Thompson had made a second discovery as amazing as the realisation that the zoeae were young crabs. Until then, everyone had assumed that barnacles were relatives of limpets. Thompson had seen they were closer to prawns. ‘Thus then an animal originally natatory and locomotive, and provided with a distinct organ of sight, becomes permanently and immoveably fixed, and its optic apparatus obliterated
• Dr Zeng their Thomas Henry Huxley Award for original contributions to zoology, revealed something that had never been shown before: the crab larvae swam up and down the tank at completely predictable intervals of twelve hours and twenty-five minutes. These vertical journeys were timed so that the larvae were at the top just after high tide and at the bottom just after low tide.
• contorting its blue attack cells into a tiara of violence towards Bluefoot,
• All these are evolved dimensions of the anemone ‘self’. Each polyp may be genetically identical to every other, but each ‘caste’ within the clone is different in form. Different local conditions – life on the free outer edge where there are no enemies, the battlefront, the safe centre – summon different body forms from the same genetic source. Even here, in the very simplest of animals, the interplay of inheritance and environment defines the experience of life.
• Anemones, it seems, are logical polyps, capable of deference in front of the strong and assertion in front of the weak, and able in the light of those perceptions to conduct limited war. No one knows how, nor what kind of consciousness is alive in these animals. Perhaps anemones drive on to this far-reaching conclusion: there is no distinction between life and mind. Life is mind and there is no boundary in the continuum of life at which you can draw a line to say ‘Here is mind’ and ‘Here is none’. Life-and-mind is a single condition in which the living share. We are mind. We live in mind. To live is to be mind. Mind is the distinction between what lives and what doesn’t, so that thought, that stream of consciousnesses that ebbs and flows in us, is the medium of being.
• The received idea of Heraclitus is simple: πάντα ῥεī. Everything flows. All is flux. Nothing is fixed and nothing certain. Nothing can be known. There is no identity. Tides run through everything and there is no ‘still-stand’. We are afloat in a liquid world.
• when Heraclitus says that opposites are ‘the same’, he does not mean ‘identical’ but that they are deeply linked. Opposites are two parts of one substance that undergoes change according to the measure of the logos. The tide is a model of existence. High tide and low tide are not separate things. It is the same sea that ebbs and floods so that high tide is inconceivable without low tide.
• The Michigan insight was to globalise that understanding: if predators thrived, herbivores suffered and the vegetation grew. Resources did not dictate the pattern of life; competition did. Tigers made forests.
• Removal of predators leads to local extinctions. Where predators capable of preventing monopolies are missing, the system becomes less diverse. If ‘justice’, or order, in the Heraclitean sense, is the balanced coexistence of multiple forms of life, with different demands and different ways of being, Paine had shown that kind of order to be dependent on a condition of mutual strife in which no one power source could dominate all others. In a ripple of papers emerging over the following years from Tatoosh, he gave the name of ‘keystone species’ to a top predator in such a system.
• Truly to see a shoreline now is to recognise that its strife is its order, that a balanced community is dependent on power-centres in tension, the frame pulling against the strings of Heraclitus’s bow or lyre, and that the injustice and diminution of a dominant monoculture represents the absence of strife. It is a paradigm of nature opposite to the idea that living things hang happily and stably together in a set of mutually accommodated niches. It substitutes tension for stillness, flux for calm. Heraclitus is now the spirit that presides over life between the tides.
• The best butter was churned when the tide had just paused at low slack water and was beginning, in that most expressive and beautiful of sea expressions, to ‘make’, as if the tide were self-creating.
• ‘Do you think,’ he said to her, ‘that if, from the day of creation, tin plates, lettuce leaves, grains of salt, drops of oil and vinegar, and pieces of hard-boiled egg were floating in space in all directions and without order, chance could assemble them to-day to make a salad?’ ‘Certainly not such a good a one,’ Mrs Kepler said, ‘nor so well seasoned.’
• Every twenty-four hours, that rocky earth makes a full revolution within its ill-fitting sea-envelope so that each point on the coast comes in turn to luxuriate in deep sea and be exposed in the shallows, a rhythmic coming and going of the tide as if this were some teasing, planetary game of I-love-you, I love-you-not. The presence of the moon makes the water-bulge but the turning of the earth makes the tides. In the Newtonian picture, it is not the water that moves when the tide rises or falls but the rocks of the planet rotating within the skin of sea.
• In all, a single repetition of the rock sequence records the passing of about 38,000 years of the early Jurassic sea. Half of it is the limestone, about a fifth the clay and the rest the dark shales. Again and again, for millions of years, the pattern repeated, the sea came and went, deepened and shallowed, not arbitrarily but metronomically, pulsing and fluxing as a tide, one of the slowest of all the earth’s many songs.
• Gosse was the fundamentalist king of the Victorian shore. Almost alone, he had invented the view of it as a place in which to see God’s world in miniature... He recognised that the beauties of God’s nature were ‘never more great than when minutely great’,
• ‘Sacrificial killing is the basic experience of the sacred,’ the great mythographer, anthropologist and Greek scholar Walter Burkert wrote. It is one of humanity’s most powerful and paradoxical acts of connection with the natural world, dependent on a recognition of the reciprocal nature of existence. We must live in the frame of mutuality. To give is to expect to receive. To receive is to expect to give in return. ‘Sacrifice is an act of killing that simultaneously guarantees the perpetuation of life and food,’ a ‘two-sided act’ compressing into one highly charged moment ‘the encounter with death and the will to live’.
• especially in young children, largely because in children the competition between the maintenance of physical health and the growth of their bodies is at its fiercest. The stress of malnutrition shuts down the immune response to infection and it is from infectious diseases that children in a famine usually die. This connection of hunger and disease remains today the leading cause of child death worldwide.
• Starvation, near-starvation and ‘the prevalence of destitution’ returned to the West Highlands in 1806–7, 1811, 1816–17, 1837–8, the mid-1840s and the six terrible years of 1847–53. It would have been no different in all the unrecorded centuries and these are the foundational realities, the Malthusian assaults on people’s lives. As soon as visitors from the south came to see what life was like in the Highlands, the poverty horrified them.
• This enormous and violent energy of clansmen on a raid can be seen in a Malthusian light. The clan was itself an instrument of survival, an essentially warlike structure of chief, tacksmen and subtenants. The women did most of the farming, the men the fighting and cattle raiding. The clan’s lifeblood was in raiding. Stealing food in the form of cattle and destroying the lives of rivals by burning their crops was an integral part of the system. Feuding, loyalty, punishment for disloyalty, feasting, the summoning to war, the use of violence as a habitual and even theatrical tool of community cohesion – all were part of an ecology whose essential condition was the poverty of the land.
• Dùthchas is the gathering of your instincts but it is also your native place, your habitat and how you think. It is both homeland and innermost being, your right to what is yours. It is what you inevitably are. If in the hierarchical structure of a clan there are echoes of prawn life, in dùthchas there are suggestions of a kind of clonal arrangement like the anemones’. Dùthchas is what the English words ‘tradition’ and ‘place’ and ‘heritage’ all try to say. The dependence of pre-modern human life here on the products of the land and the need to resist the exigencies of the environment mean that self, family, world, survival, memory and song are moulded to each other more intimately than could be imagined in a modern, commercial and urbanised world.
• What is the answer to the question? Is human history here a branch of natural history? Is our own story merely another dimension of its ecology? In part it is:
• I can tell you, calf of my heart,
• All the stories now are as neglected as the sea-tangle itself. Neither they nor the weed are needed for the fertility they might once have brought to life here. The goddesses and the fairies are pushed away into the inert category called ‘folklore’.
• A cultural world in which meaning could cross the tideline and where the connections between sea and land, animal and human, human and fairy were vivid and continuous, has gone. The word ‘fairy’ has itself become both sweet and toxic; not the embodiment of a potent and unaccommodated spirit abroad in the world but a sentimentalised, sugar-drop version of it; not an enlargement of understanding but a retreat from it.
• Both fairy and fear banish naivety and create a balance in the mental universe of a person – or animal. Take advantage of the world, it says, and eat its fruits, but recognise the danger that lurks in strange places.
• It was a tragic clash: a modernising, globalising and eventually industrialising world at its most expansive met an essentially pre-modern society whose ways of being and thinking, its dùthchas, were subtle, evolved, rich and sustaining, but fragile in front of these demands.
• Some conducted the whole service under heavy rain; others in snow, ‘the fall being so heavy that at the close’, one minister said, ‘I could hardly distinguish the congregation from the ground on which they sat, except by their faces.’
• ‘Lament at its most extreme will always have to encounter water,’ Alice Oswald has said recently and these desperate and touching stories mark the moment when the people of this place were driven into the sea.
• This is not metaphysical, not about any other world than this. Heidegger–Steiner’s description is of this world, the world as it is, full as it is of ‘contradictory simultaneities’ and repeated chances of ecstatic encounter. Neither Plato, thinking reality is elsewhere, nor Aristotle, attached to the atomised physical, could know about it. Nor is it any form of balm, relieving one of the anxiety and difficulty of being, as the Platonic dream or the Aristotelian forgetting of wider significance, might have done.
• Here now, beside the pools, Heidegger–Steiner approached the core of the idea. The way to be in the world is ‘being-with’. To understand the presentness of all others is to exist. Being with others makes us who we are and the acceptance of others enlarges us. The co-presence of others, both given and received, becomes the frame in which knowledge is possible.
• This central concern is for more than humanity; it is care for all that is and as such is the opposite of Descartes’s idea that he is because he thinks. The world exists beyond any knowing you might have of it. ‘Knowing is not a process of returning with one’s booty to the “cabinet” of consciousness. It is on the contrary a form of being-with, a concern, a lingering alongside.’ That for Heidegger is the paradoxical condition of true liberty: knowing your life is limited, with ‘a bracing awareness of one’s finitude’ you will care for all others, coming alongside them and being-with the world in ‘a freedom which is both certain of itself and anxious’.
• Confronted with the grand crisis of nature, Heidegger provides the most powerful set of ideas: an all-pervading consciousness of the autonomy of other life; a recognition, at this most enveloping of philosophical levels, that we cannot exist unless embedded in it; the need to remain anxious at its unsettlingness, not as a failure to resolve problems but as a recognition of their reality; and our own finitude beside it.
• Making the pools was not the point. Being there while making them, what Heidegger calls ‘lingering with being’ was what was valuable, an inadvertent and marginal benefit that strikingly bears the same relationship to making something useful as the shore does to the sea itself: a revelatory edge that by definition is no good for shipping.
• These oscillations are patches in time, just as the patches on the rock are oscillations in space. Micro-tides flood and ebb across every dimension of their world. Their micro-catastrophes and micro-blooming are the guarantee of calm. Life is unsealed. There is no distinction between flux and stillness; they are one. The core of being is interplay, and its give-and-take of quick and still is the animation of life.