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.

Seward, Tubman and Montgomery

 

These splendid statues by Dexter Benedict are still looking good, almost three years after their installation outside the main branch of the Schenectady public library in 2019. The wife (who took the photo) and I were in town yesterday to go to the opening night of Stephen Sondheim's "Merrily We Roll Along" at the Schenectady Light Opera Company (running through March 27 -- check it out).

William H. Seward is best known for the U.S. purchase of Alaska in 1867, but his long, admirable  record as a statesman is most distinguished by his service in Abraham Lincoln's Cabinet. He graduated from Union College in Schenectady, and in later life was a friend and ally of Tubman's. Other statues of them both, separate but not far from each other, now stand in Auburn, NY.

Another friend and ally of Tubman's was Col. James Montgomery, whose African-American 2nd South Carolina Regiment was guided and assisted by Tubman and other Black civilians on the Combahee River raid, which liberated almost 800 slaves. The Civil War service of both Tubman and Montgomery is, in my opinion, often overlooked by historians and students who focus on their prewar anti-slavery activities. But they freed far more enslaved people on June 1-2 1863 than in all the rest of their careers, and their contributions to the Union war effort are the most significant things they did.

Casemate will publish in April 2022 my biography of Montgomery. See more at their website here.

Casemate is also reissuing as a paperback my 2013 biography, General Gordon Granger: The Savior of Chickamauga and the Man Behind "Juneteenth". (See here on their website.) 

And my 2018 historical novel The Last Circle of Ulysses Grant is still available here from Square Circle Press.

New book, new start for this blog

Casemate will publish in April 2022 my biography of James Montgomery, the Kansas abolitionist and Civil War soldier. See more at their website here.

Casemate is also reissuing as a paperback my 2013 biography, General Gordon Granger: The Savior of Chickamauga and the Man Behind "Juneteenth". (See here on their website.) 

And my 2018 historical novel The Last Circle of Ulysses Grant is still available here from Square Circle Press.

So after a two-year gap I will be restarting this blog, and setting up talks in person and/or online to promote the new book and the old ones. See you around, I hope.

"Ben Butler" in Albany

Well, the Civil War-era political general is in Albany County, NY, at the Curtain Call Theatre in Latham through February 8. It was sold out on preview and opening nights last Thursday and Friday, but we got in Saturday and found the play ("Ben Butler" by Richard Strand) well done.

The theater is about eight miles north of the state Capitol where Butler, despite being from Massachusetts, would have found himself at home. And the play's depiction of him as a canny lawyer and flexible politician, whose cleverness in 1861 made a real and positive (albeit somewhat accidental) contribution to freeing the slaves and winning the Civil War, might well appeal to Albany's fixers and bureaucrats, politicians, staffers, journalists, lobbyists and assorted hangers-on. If they can view him positively, so might the view in their own mirrors improve.

Butler was a general who failed to learn from his own military failures, and a politician whose stock is going up these days, although even going back to the first impeachment trial he got some positive along with the negative reviews. As for this production, I haven't seen any reviews yet, but give it a recommendation here.

Joe Gaffney, 1925-1945

December and January being the 75th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge, I break from the Civil War for this personal post about my uncle, US Army PFC Joseph W. Gaffney, who was killed in action on January 21, 1945.

The above photo and most of the non-personal information comes from a blogger called Joey van Meesen or Joedemadio. Actually, it is from a museum in Diekirch, Luxembourg, not far from where the photo was taken on January 19, 1945. That's about 30 miles southeast of Bastogne, Belgium, where the 101st Airborne Division had been besieged in December. 

The American soldiers advancing in the snow are from the Fifth Infantry Division, a day after they crossed to the north side of the Sauer River. Private First Class Joe Gaffney was in its 10th Regiment, at the eastern end of the line. The operation took several days, running into "strong opposition from the enemy" near Bettendorf, which is northeast of Diekirch and close to the German border.

The division had been fighting since D-Day on June 6, before Gen. George Patton's Third Army was activated in Europe. It was transferred from First to Third Army at the beginning of August.

 I don't know when Joe Gaffney joined the Fifth Infantry Division, but he must have been there on December 23 when it started attacking northwest in the Echternach-Beaufort area, 40-odd miles southeast of Bastogne. The successful attack indirectly helped lift the siege of Bastogne by engaging the southern flank of the Germans' westward advance, south of the Sauer River. The January action north of the river was part of the American counter-offensive.

The reason I don't know when Joe joined the campaign in Europe is that it's not just veterans who may not want to talk about their wartime service, but also bereaved families. The people who knew Joe, especially my grandmother, didn't want to talk about his war record, or about the achievements of Patton or Franklin Roosevelt or anyone else they might have connected to his death. Her usually good-humored and loving face would grow bleak if someone brought up the topic, which they quickly learned not to.

My favorite aunt Mary Gaffney, a high school English teacher most of her life, served stateside during the war in the US Marine Corps. She also believed in peace on Earth, good will toward men. Her military service meant, as she had requested, that her ashes could be interred next to Joe's in 2014 at Long Island National Cemetery. A Catholic priest was there, along with my aunt Theresa and her husband Jerry Pinto, and some other kin including my cousin Joe Gaffney (son of Joe's younger brother Frank) and his mother, Helen Gaffney Rothermich. 

Joe was younger than Mary, born on June 8, 1925. He was drafted on August 14, 1943. They were from Brooklyn, the children of Irish immigrants. Theresa, Jerry and Helen all died this year, the last of their generation. 

My daughter Molly is a currently serving US Army staff sergeant who recently returned from a deployment in Iraq and has done two in Afghanistan, where Helen had written to her. She provided me with the blog link and much of the information behind this post, and came from Fort Carson, Colorado, to Helen's funeral in Connecticut. Molly's husband Jason Eller, who is now out of the Army, did three tours in Afghanistan. They were both part of the Obama surge in Kandahar, serving with the same 101st Airborne Division which, over Christmas 1944 in Bastogne, was relieved by Third Army. 

Thomas W. Olcott

This painting by Walter Launt Palmer, currently on view at the Albany Institute of History and Art, dates from 1878, i.e. 13 years after Appomattox. It shows the interior of the Ten Broeck Mansion in Arbour (or Arbor) Hill, Albany, NY, where the prominent banker Thomas W. Olcott sits reading in his library. Olcott's prosperity is obvious, and this 2017 post by Dr. Kathleen Logothetis Thompson, from the Civil Discourse blog, shows the important behind-the-scenes role he played from Albany in recruiting and supporting Union soldiers during the war. Such prosperity and power exercised by many men like Olcott, is part of the reason why the Union won the war.

Jim Lane's Suicide

As can be seen at left, I'll be participating in a debate on assisted suicide in January 2020 at Union College in Schenectady, NY -- which has nothing to do with the Civil War. (See here on my other blog for more details.)
But when you're writing a book, as I am now a biography of Col. James Montgomery, other topics seem to connect to it, and it occurs to me I don't really understand why the Kansas soldier-politician Jim Lane, then serving as a US senator, killed himself in 1866.
Lane was linked to Montgomery in the Bleeding Kansas troubles in the late 1850s. When the war came in 1861, Lane was Montgomery's commander in their first campaign, in Missouri. It was a trail of brutality, especially at Morristown and Osceola, not reflecting well on either of them. But they served through the war, Montgomery as a soldier and Lane in politics, and their side won. Montgomery then went back to his farm, family and faith, while Lane had been re-elected to the Senate.
Sure, Lane had political problems in 1866 -- siding with President Andrew Johnson had angered his radical Republican supporters. But that's hardly enough motivation for suicide. Lane's successor, another Union veteran named Edmund G. Ross, famously cast the crucial Senate vote to acquit Johnson in his impeachment trial in 1868. That got Ross lauded as one of the heroes of John F. Kennedy's 1956 book Profiles in Courage. It also got him defeated for re-election, but years later he served as territorial governor of New Mexico. Unlike Lane, he didn't seem to be battling personal demons.