Old Newspaperman Returns from New York

 

This is only Civil War related because I was speaking last night to the Civil War Forum of Metropolitan New York, an hospitable and appreciative bunch who put me up at the Bentley Hotel and fed me an excellent meal at Draught 55 restaurant. Join them if you live down thataway, and sign up for their upcoming bus trip to West Point.

Forgoing sightseeing, I have parked myself at the Moynihan Train Hall, the old post office building (with the iconic slogan carved around its top) where my grandfather Joseph Gaffney worked for many years. (His son, my uncle, was killed at the Battle of the Bulge.)

In September 1985 I had a memorable meeting with Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (after whom the station is named) at the tiny office of the Glens Falls Unit of the Albany local of The Newspaper Guild, which was seeking its first contract at The Post-Star, where I worked as a reporter. I also was chairman of the Guild unit. We organized most of the paper, and our first and only contract won the first ever benefits for its mailroom employees. Moynihan showed up in cagey support, and I tip my hat to him in the great beyond.

 

Casemates in Review

A layer of sod in the wall helped protect this barracks against cannon balls, according to one of the excellent guides I talked to Friday at Fort Stanwix National Monument in Rome, NY. It's a 1970s reconstruction of the Revolutionary War fort commanded by Col. Peter Gansevoort (who was grandfather to the writer Herman Melville). Fort Stanwix successfully resisted a British siege in August 1777, which contributed to the American victories 110 miles east at Saratoga in September and October. That northern campaign was the turning point of the war (and Benedict Arnold played a key role at both locations).

 I think the sod is why they call it a casemate:

Casemate also is the name of the publisher of my two nonfiction books. (The historical novel The Last Circle of Ulysses Grant is published by Square Circle Press.) Those two biographies, of James Montgomery and Gordon Granger, have received a good joint review by Ben Powers in ARGunners Magazine -- which I appreciate.

The patient wife and I stopped at Fort Stanwix on our way back from Syracuse, where she snapped my picture pontificating (not singing an operatic aria) to the Onondaga County Civil War Round Table.

My next scheduled speaking gig is Monday evening in Manhattan at the Civil War Forum of Metropolitan New York.

Grant and Juneteenth

 The Friends of Grant Cottage blog has put up a post by me today on Ulysses S. Grant and Juneteenth which can be found here.

Tomorrow evening, I'll be in Syracuse to give a talk to the Onondaga County Civil War Round Table. Details here.

Sojourner Truth's Grandson Served with Montgomery

 

In this 1863 photo of Sojourner Truth (in the Library of Congress), she holds in her lap a photograph of James Caldwell, her 19-year-old grandson who was a soldier in the 54th Massachusetts. Another soldier in that regiment was Lewis Douglass, son of another famous Black abolitionist, Frederick Douglass.

Caldwell was apparently captured at Grimball's Landing, SC, on July 16, 1863, just before the regiment was temporarily removed from Montgomery's brigade command. He was exchanged in early 1865, before the war ended. How the rest of his life went is unknown, according to blogger Tim Talbott.

I found out about Caldwell last week while visiting a new state park named after Truth near Kingston, NY, where I gave my first talk for the new biography of Montgomery to the Ulster County Civil War Round Table. It was their first in-person meeting since the onset of Covid, and held in the county's legislative chamber. The next gigs (during which I'll throw in some Granger and Juneteenth, and maybe a little Grant) are May 19 to the Onondaga County Civil War Round Table in Syracuse, and May 23 in Manhattan to the Civil War Forum of Metropolitan New York.

I had never been to Kingston before, and had not realized a) that the British burned it in 1777 in a late, ineffectual effort to aid General John Burgoyne, and b) that George Washington's headquarters was not there but a considerable distance south, in Newburgh. Apparently, I have a lot to learn.

General Grant and Literary Imagination (revised)

The photo by Joe Alper shows Bob Dylan, his girlfriend Suze Rotolo and Lena Spencer in January 1962. I noticed it last night on a wall at Caffe Lena (founded by and named after Spencer) in Saratoga Springs, NY, where Dylan performed that month and the previous June.

I was at Caffe Lena for a staged reading of a new play, Grant's Ghost by Warren Schultz, whom I'd never met before. Our mutual friend Larry Levine was one of the actors. The play is about the death of Ulysses S. Grant in 1885 on Mount McGregor, a few miles north of Saratoga Springs. I liked it and said so, with particular praise for the "ghost" character, Grant's father Jesse -- though I inevitably had a few nits to pick.

Oddly, in the late 1990s I also started writing a play about more or less the same things, which almost 20 years later I turned into a novel, The Last Circle of Ulysses Grant. The rather more celebrated playwright John Guare wrote about the same general subject in 2002 in A Few Stout Individuals. His play is set in New York City before Grant's final days, while my novel takes place both there and on Mount McGregor. 

My other two Civil War era books are biographies, of James Montgomery and Gordon Granger, and I know some history buffs and students of warfare who are suspicious of historical fiction. But an imaginative sympathy is required for both kinds of writing.

Consider the great Russians (whom I am obviously not measuring myself against). Of course there is War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, but I'm thinking of another novel which I'd barely heard of until my cousin Steve Pinto gave me a copy about a year ago: Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. It's the best book I've ever read about World War II, taking in the Nazi Holocaust and Soviet forced labor camps, and told through gripping, tragic, empathetic, fictional stories that resound with truth.

Six decades and a Nobel Prize on, Dylan remains a profoundly creative artist. And Grant, born 200 years ago today, who wrote one great book at the end of his life, is still an inspiration.

My first speaking gig for the new Montgomery book is 7 p.m. this Thursday (tomorrow) at the Ulster County Civil War Round Table in Kingston, NY.

Frederick Douglass on Free Speech in Wartime

Frederick Douglass gave a speech at Cooper Union in New York City on February 6, 1863,  and published the text in March in his own abolitionist newspaper Douglass' Monthly.

It is, among other things, a magnificent defense of free speech in the middle of America's most costly war (to this day), when the Union cause in that war remained very precarious. It was written by a man who as an enslaved youth had taught himself to read in Maryland, before escaping North in 1838.

The speech was titled "The Proclamation and a Negro Army." Its context is the new light of Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which coincided with increased Copperhead agitation against the president, the war and the anti-slavery movement. 

Douglass said:

"Parties have to some extent changed sides on the subject of free speech. The men who would a few years ago mob and hang Abolitionists for exercising the sacred right of free thought and speech, have all at once become the most urgent for the largest liberty of speech. And I must say, detestable as are the motives that have brought them to the defense of free speech, I think they have the right in the controversy. I do not know where I would limit the simple utterance of opinion. If any one is base enough to spit upon the grave of his mother, or to shout for Jefferson Davis, let him, and do not lock him up for it. ...

"Fortunately for mankind, error is a bad reasoner. It can fight better than it can reason. ... Such is my confidence in the potency of truth, in the power of reason, I hold that had the right of free discussion been preserved during the last thirty years, had the Northern parties and politicians been half so diligent in protecting this high constitutional right, from the first ruthlessly struck down all over the South, as they have been in framing laws for the recapture of poor, toil-worn and foot-sore slaves, we should now have no Slavery to breed Rebellion, nor war, black with dismal terror, to drench our land with blood, and fill our dwellings with sorrow and mourning. Slavery would have fallen as it fell in the West Indies, as it has fallen in the Free States, as it has fallen in Russia, and elsewhere, and as it will fall everywhere, when men can assail it with the weapons of reason and the facts of experience."

 

The Missing Stories from Civil War Era

The Tuskegee Airmen obviously didn't fight in the Civil War, but the U.S. armed forces were still segregated when Clarence Dart served in the 1940s. His extraordinary war record and subsequent life are described briefly above, in a display from a current exhibit at Brookside Museum in Ballston Spa, NY, called "Black Experiences in Saratoga County 1750-1950".

That life, as you can see, extended well after 1950, including a long and fruitful marriage, and service to causes such as the Charlton School for Girls, the Salvation Army and the Methodist Church.

Lieutenant Colonel Dart was duly (if belatedly) recognized by museums, media and elected officials from the state Senate to Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. 

But little is known about the vast majority of African-American troops in the Civil War who were led by officers such as James Montgomery, Gordon Granger and U.S. Grant. (That last link goes to a novel about Grant's last months, partly set in Saratoga County, which Brookside currently has for sale. Brookside is also sponsoring an April 6 Zoom program with Ben Kemp portraying Grant's eldest son Fred.) 

The new federal holiday of Juneteenth comes from Granger's order of June 19, 1865 in Texas, proclaiming Emancipation and, in his words, "an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves". Unlike Montgomery, Granger had not been an early abolitionist. President Grant, by the end of his second term, was not able to secure Reconstruction as a permanent guarantee of the equal rights which had been pledged. But the freed slaves, most of them illiterate, and their descendants held to an accurate understanding of this history. As a result, spurred by nonviolent Black leadership of the mid-20th century civil rights movement, the promise of Juneteenth was largely fulfilled.