Category Archives: Civil War

Raptor over Monroe

Posted on March 3, 2008 | Comments Off on Raptor over Monroe

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Not sure of the provenence of this photo, which is making the email forwardings rounds. But, in addition to the F-22 Raptor, I like the view of Fortress Monroe in the background, at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. I like to visit the fort when I’m in the area, to see the casemate in the bastion (to the left of the center one there facing the jet’s cockpit) where Confederate President Jefferson Davis was imprisoned after the Civil War. Poet Edgar Allen Poe was an artillerly NCO there before he was famous as a writer of horror stories. Monroe also was the headquarters of the army’s recruiting command, when I was in recruiting back in 1970-71. Recruiting’s HQ has since moved elsewhere.

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Posted in Civil War, Scribbles, The War

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Colonel Lee’s pet rattlesnake

Posted on February 19, 2008 | Comments Off on Colonel Lee’s pet rattlesnake

One of the best Civil War books I’ve read is Elizabeth Brown Pryor’s "Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters." Still reading, actually. The letters are new, recently found in a bank vault and released to Pryor by his descendents. The Texas chapter, "Odyssey," chronicles in his own words, his time with the Second Cavalry "in the paradise of the Texans" right before the war. Details such as his horse, Bald Eagle; feeding frogs to his pet rattlesnake; and an audience with "Ka tem a se, the head chief of the Southern Comanches" invalided by pleurisy on his buffalo robes, attended by "his wives & suitors," his shield, bow and quiver nearby, as is his war horse, ready to be slain if the Comanche chief dies to carry him to the happy hunting ground. A new Lee. A step down from the Marble Man, but a leap up in humanity.

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Posted in Civil War, Library, Texana

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Seeds of destruction

Posted on January 12, 2008 | Comments Off on Seeds of destruction

It’s always seemed to me–though you will get plenty of argument about it from the liberal multicults– that the slaveowners among the Founders knew what they were doing when they voted for a Declaration of Independence declaring that "all men are created equal." The lawyers among them, in particular, knew that slavery would be abolished sooner or later and that women (since they meant "men" in an inclusive sense) would win rights that they then didn’t have.

The notion belies the currently-popular idea that the nation was racist and sexist from the start, which Mackubin Owens notes is abetted by such otherwise harmless examples of PC as the New Jersey Legislature’s recent apology for slavery. Not that even conservatives, such as the recent Lincoln bashers, don’t like a good argument about such things now and then.

Via No Left Turns 

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Posted in Civil War, Scribbles

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Col. Christopher Claudius Pegues, C.S.A.

Posted on January 10, 2008 | 2 comments

 

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As promised, my great, great grandmother’s brother, who was captain of the volunteer Cahawba Rifles, 1861; colonel of the Fifth Alabama Infantry Regiment, 1862; fatally wounded leading the regiment in a charge at Gaines Mill, VA, May, 1862; died at Richmond, July 15; and buried in Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond. 

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Posted in Civil War, Genealogy

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The Jewish Confederates

Posted on January 8, 2008 | Comments Off on The Jewish Confederates

By one estimate, 10,000 Jews fought for the Confederacy. They’d been arriving in the South since 1700 where, a little more than a hundred years later Charleston, SC, had the largest Jewish community in North America. The city still is home to the nation’s oldest (1749) synagogue in continual use.  Many of their descendents would fight for the Confederacy, a fact touched on in PBS’s new Wednesday night series on Jewish Americans, according to the daily’s review. Among the mentioned is Judah Benjamin, a Louisiana planter, slave owner and lawyer who was the Confederacy’s secretary of state–a brilliant man who largely has been airbrushed out of American history. You can imagine why.

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Posted in Civil War

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The Year of the 6th Cav

Posted on January 6, 2008 | Comments Off on The Year of the 6th Cav

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My old Army bud Chuck Waldron and I like to recall our eight to nine months as platoon leaders in the Sixth Armored Cavalry Regt., 1968-69, before going to Vietnam as light-infantry advisors to SVN militia. Among other things we guarded Nixon’s inauguration, though me and my guys got to sit in the warm armory while he and his had to be outside in the cold.

I know he’ll be interested in this Civil War enthusiast’s plan to spend this year tracing the then-new regular Army regiment’s activities through their annual returns for 1862. I wonder when the unicorn shoulder patch was authorized? Before, or after, the regiment served here in Austin under Custer in 1865-68 as post-war federal occupiers?

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Posted in Blogosphere, Civil War, Infantry OCS, Texana, Viet Nam

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5th Alabama Infantry Regiment

Posted on January 5, 2008 | Comments Off on 5th Alabama Infantry Regiment

Enjoying Lynyrd Skynard’s 1975 “Sweet Home Alabama,” a rebuke of Canadian Neil Young’s critical 1970 “Southern Man.” Searching for the lyrics of each lead me to this site of the 5th Alabama Infantry Regiment and Band reenactment group. Which reminded me…

The history of the regiment includes my maternal great great grandmother’s brother, Christopher Claudius Pegues, who was the regiment’s commander at the  Seven Days’ battle of Gaines Mill, Virginia (also called First Cold Harbor) where he was mortally wounded leading a charge from the front.

Called Kit in the family, he was a lawyer from Cahawba, the state’s first capital (now a ghost town and state park), and an alcoholic who was his mother’s despair. After his death, he was just another hero-martyr of the bitter war, albeit one with his own ghost story. I photocopied his tintype at the state archives in 2003, enroute to my infantry OCS class’s first reunion at Fort Benning since our graduation in 1968. A reminder that I need to scan the photocopy and post it.

CORRECTION: After scanning the photocopy, I see that it is not a tintype but a photograph of a painting, probably done on wood, in the usual format of the day, i.e. the head carefully rendered from life but the costume so slapdash it is cartoonlike.

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Posted in Civil War, Genealogy

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