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.

Another New Tubman Statue in Upstate New York

This lady with a lamp was put up late last year across from Auburn, NY, City Hall, next door to the house of Harriet Tubman's friend William H. Seward. His statue is a little farther down South Street, and her home, on land she bought from him in 1859, is farther down from that. It is now a National Park Service site. (The statue, unfortunately, is on the property of a new Equal Rights Heritage Center opened recently by New York State. The displays at the state site, as I discovered on a visit yesterday, unhistorically and heavy-handedly try to link the modern movement for abortion rights to the activism of 19th-century women such as Tubman.)

Another statue went up recently in Schenectady, NY, of Tubman and Seward together.

Since, as I was arguing the other day, it is generally a bad idea to tear down historical statues, and a better one to provide context and new memorials to tell the story of the Civil War, I am glad to see these representations of Tubman, and do not regard them as politically correct window dressing. 

Her voluntary wartime service is not as well known as her work on the Underground Railroad, but is just as important and admirable. In one 1863 raid in which she participated on the Combahee River in South Carolina, which was commanded by Col. James Montgomery (whose biography I am currently writing), more than 750 slaves were freed. That is at least twice and probably several times as many enslaved people as the total number she had brought to freedom before the war. 

This tiny (under five feet), illiterate, epileptic (the apparent result of a head injury inflicted by an overseer in her youth), middle-aged, dark-skinned black woman, born and raised in slavery, provided valuable intelligence on multiple occasions to Montgomery and other Union officers, risking her own life and freedom in so doing. She also served additional roles through most of the war to Union soldiers and freed slaves, primarily as a nurse but also as laundress, cook and mentor. After the war, she farmed and did other work in the Auburn area, eventually opening an infirmary and a home for the aged on her property. 

Stonewall Jackson and William McKinley

I took this photo at Stonewall Jackson Lake a couple of days ago, on September 16. It is in north-central West Virginia, where Thomas J. Jackson was born and had to endure a very hard childhood -- although West Virginia did not exist at that time. It was actually Virginia where Jackson was born and raised, and to whose flag he rallied in 1861, unlike most of his near neighbors who rejected the Confederacy and welcomed the 1861 victories of George McClellan and William Rosecrans which paved the way for the new state of West Virginia. But the white population was divided in all the border states, Union Kentucky, Maryland and Missouri, as well as Confederate Virginia and Tennessee, with some going north and some south. The divisions remained after the war.
There is controversy now about Confederate memorials, including two statues of Jackson in West Virginia, one of which is outside the state Capitol in Charleston.
While some Confederate memorials are or were obviously problematic, for example the one that endorsed "white supremacy in New Orleans, and while it is odd that one of the great Confederate generals hailed from what became a Union state and is now memorialized at its Capitol, I do not endorse tearing it down. I think Jackson fought for the wrong side, and like the rest of us was a flawed human being, but that does not negate his admirable qualities.

In defense of the Jackson memorials, consider the case of a soldier from the other side, who volunteered as a private in the Union army at the age of 18 soon after the start of the war. William McKinley's first campaign, under Rosecrans, was in Jackson's home territory, helping West Virginia become a state. The next year, his 23rd Ohio regiment took heavy casualties at the battles of South Mountain and Antietam. He served though the rest of the war, ending up a brevet major, and from 1897 until his assassination in 1901 served as president of the United States. The highest mountain in North America was named after him by the US government in 1917, but in 2015 was changed back to Denali, which Alaskan Athabascans had called it. And in 2019, the city of Arcata, California, for no good reason tore down a statue of McKinley.
I think they should have kept McKinley's statue and his name on the mountain, and don't object to memorializing Jackson or Robert E. Lee. By all means add new statues of other people, along with context to old ones if necessary, but avoid heavy-handed propaganda. (See my September 20 follow-up post about Harriet Tubman.) James "Pete" Longstreet, a courageous ally of Grant's in Reconstruction, is one Confederate general who could do with more memorializing.
 If the US government wants to get into the act, they might consider removing the name of a personally obnoxious and militarily incompetent Confederate general from what Wikipedia informs me is, by population "the largest military installation in the world" -- i.e. Fort Bragg in North Carolina. (Its population not long ago included a couple of my grandchildren who were born there.)

But I probably shouldn't encourage them, or we'll have to rename Washington, DC and state, not to mention the United States of America and anywhere else associated with a dead white male who cannot pass the ever expanding purity tests which are ever more comprehensively dictated by the lemon-sucking commissars of woke narcissism. 

Erastus Corning and Mark Twain

The most famous Corning Tower is the Albany skyscraper, the centerpiece of Empire State Plaza, which is named after Erastus Corning 2nd, the long-serving 20th century mayor of Albany. But the city of Corning in the southern tier is named after another Erastus Corning, steelmaker, banker, politician and railroad king, whose son, also named Erastus, built a monument to him there 11 years after his death.

The original Erastus, like many New York Democrats, had an ambivalent attitude toward the Civil War, but prospered by it. His spendthrift son did not serve in the war. The son's grandson, for whom the Empire State Plaza tower is named, did serve in World War II. He later betrayed his constituents and benefited his own insurance company by letting Nelson Rockefeller build the Plaza on which his Tower stands.

Not far from Corning, NY, is Elmira, where on the graceful grounds of Elmira College sits the Mark Twain Study, a building which used to be attached to Twain's summer home nearby. Twain wrote most of his best work there, free from distractions. Olivia Langdon was from a wealthy abolitionist family in Elmira, graduated from Elmira College in 1864, and married Samuel Clemens in 1870. Clemens (Twain) famously deserted from a Confederate militia company and wisely avoided most of the Civil War by Roughing It out West, where he laid the foundation of his literary career. He is a character in The Last Circle of Ulysses Grant.

 

Local Histories

Saw this at McGeary's last night, in downtown Albany, NY. The Irish translates, Who never retreated from the clash of spears -- though it was bullets and shells with which the regiment's soldiers contended at Malvern Hill, Antietam, Fredericksburg and many other engagements unto the 21st century.

McGeary's hosts Skip Parsons' Riverboat Jazz Band on the second Monday of the month. They make fine music, and the joint has good hospitality, ale and food. 

It is also located next door to the home of the teen-age Herman Melville (on the left in the photo below, while that's my wife in the doorway of McGeary's). Melville's family was of Scottish and Dutch heritage, with both of his grandfathers prominent in the American Revolution. He lived in Albany until the family fell on harder times and they had to move to nearby Lansingburgh. As an adult, he could not support his own family as a novelist or lecturer, nor as a Civil War poet, so in 1866 embarked on a 19-year career as a customs house clerk in New York City. As he approached retirement from there, he may have bumped into a more recent employee, Vladimir Krzyzanowski.