"Now the turret and its two 11-inch Dahlgren cannon, the Monitor’s steam engine and condenser are being preserved in the state-of-the art Batten Conservation Laboratory, placed in special baths that leach the salt and stabilize the objects for future display–by 2025. Museum-goers can peer into the tanks from catwalks just beyond the lab’s windows."
Next time you’re in Norfolk, VA, go see the Monitor Center museum, or visit the site now.
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Posted in Civil War
Tagged Monitor Center museum, Norfolk, USS Monitor, VA
Wooden-soled shoes? Probably never heard of them. They were Robert Creuzbaur’s invention, before he turned to a design for an underwater torpedo tube. The early Texas surveyor and draftsman, won a patent in 1863 for both his shoes and his torpedo tube, which he called an underwater cannon. It would be the chief armament of his Sea King, an iron-plated wooden gunboat whose underwater gun might sink the wooden warships blockading the Texas Gulf coast and the coastline of the rest of the Confederate States of America.
The Confederate Navy wasn’t impressed with his boat or his weapon. Their report to the Confederate Congress in 1862, "…by a number of eminent naval officers…stated ‘that nothing has been done to prove the alleged claims to the speed, invulnerability, and efficiency of the vessel in either or all of which we have no confidence.’"
So much for the early submarine. The same year, 145 years ago Thursday, saw the ironclads Monitor and Merrimac (also the Virginia) fight to a draw in Hampton Roads. By the time Creuzbaur got his shoe and torpedo tube patents, North and South were betting on iron ships, but not underwater cannons for sinking wooden ones. After the war, Cruezbaur moved to New York where, besides investing in the inventions of others, he faded into an obscurity not even Google can penetrate.
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Tagged early torpedo tube, Robert Creuzbaur, Sea King, Texas
This photo of the Gettysburg battlefield at AndrewOlmsted.com reminds me that the first time I got near the place was in the early 1950s when I was seven or eight. I was in the backseat of the family car driving south from somewhere, and my father was trying to detour to it over my mother’s objections. His grandfather fought there in the Mississippi Brigade and he’d never seen it. He may have seen it later, but not that day. I didn’t get there until the battle’s 125th anniversary in 1988, the year he died of cancer. I was struck by how old the Union monuments were and how new and few were the Confederate ones. The South, of course, was too poor after the war to build monuments to lost battles. So Mississippi’s larger-than-life statue of a private "clubbing his musket" over the body of his unit’s color bearer didn’t appear until 1973. I don’t recall who built it, but I notice on the base of the Lew Armistead marker above–commemorating the Virginia general’s effort in Pickett’s Charge– that it was made in New Hampshire. This morning I saw a timely essay on the five extant copies in Lincoln’s hand of his Gettysburg Address, whose 250-word definition of democracy still rings in my head. My generation may have been the last one required to memorize it in school. "Four score and seven years ago…"
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Posted in Civil War
Tagged Armistead, Barksdale, Gettysburg, Longstreet, Mississippi Brigade
Get out your American history book to figure out the headline. Let’s just say, in 19th century Southern American vernacular, the war on terrorism could be about to go up the spout. Appeasement of dictators, group hugs and singing kumbaya with the French and the EU could soon be the order of the day.
"Okay, the House has flipped. How about the Senate? We seem to be moving into darker territory with every quarter-hour."
And impeachment–don’t let’s forget impeachment. The Democrats sure won’t. The American people seem either to want Bush’s head on a pike, or a standoff between him and Congress. It looks like they’ll be getting one or the other before next summer. Then, while the cat’s preoccupied with all those congressional hearings and subpoenas, the Jihadis can play.
Hysterical? Unwarranted gloom? Maybe. Bruce Bartlett at RealClearPolitics thinks so.
"Indeed, I think that Democratic control of Congress has the potential to rejuvenate Bush’s presidency, just as Republican control gave new life to Clinton’s."
We’ll know in a few months, when the investigations show trials begin.
UPDATE On the other hand there’s Ralph Peters best-case prediction of what the party of Michael Moore will do. I think he’s way too optimistic. I also don’t see the point of sending more troops, which is not the way to fight an insurgency. But he’s right about the Iraqis having to get off their butts and eliminate Mookie and his thugs.
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Posted in Civil War, Iraq, The War, Troops
Tagged Copperheads, Democrats, impeachment, Iraq, Jihad, Mark Steyn
One last glance back at our week in the Shenandoah Valley where Richard Torovsky, my former Vietnam associate (and a Citadel graduate who is also Mr. Boy’s godfather), is president of the New Market Rotary Club, which meets Wednesdays here. RT also is co-owner of the Reveille Vineyard, at nearby Quicksburg, which celebrated its first marketable crop this year. Yay.
New Market’s battlefield park and museum are worth anybody’s visit, or just explore it on the Web. The story of the young VMI cadets who marched 80 miles in three days to help the Confederate Army defeat the invading Yankees is inspiring enough.
I was somewhat put out to discover the museum’s purported cataloguing of all Confederate veterans does not include my paternal great grandfather, Pvt. Edward Parker Stanley of the 13th Mississippi Infantry Regiment. It was part of Griffin’s/Barksdale’s/Humphreys’ Mississippi Brigade, which was in Stonewall Jackson’s “foot cavalry” in 1862. But otherwise the museum is a stirring experience.
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Posted in Civil War, Genealogy, Rancho Roly Poly
Tagged 13th Mississipi Infantry Regiment, Edward Parker Stanley, New Market, Richard Torovsky, Rotary Club, Virginia, VMI
Reading the civil war memoir Fighting for the Confederacy, by Longstreet’s chief of artillery, Brig. Gen. Edward Porter Alexander, I seem to have come across the IDF’s plans for the Hez:
"The first of all maxims for the conduct of a campaign is to oppose fractions of the enemy’s army with the whole unit of your own…," Alexander wrote. "The second great axiom in the art is if possible to act against your enemy’s communications, without exposing one’s own."
Or, in the IDF’s case, airstrike Hez’s headquarters in Beruit, etc., and hit the airport and the major highways to cut their communications, before launching en masse to oppose "the fractions" in the South.
"The simple fact that no army can subsist for long without daily supplies of food & ammunition from the rear," Alexander continued, "indicates at once the vital importance of keeping its communications to the rear free from interruption."
All the disruption between the rear and the South — possibly leading to the extinction of the Hez fighter — could be why Syria and Iran are calling for a ceasefire.
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Posted in Civil War
"Archaeologists and others working to restore the submarine recovered six years ago from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Sullivans Island have found evidence the forward hatch may have been opened intentionally on the night the sub sank."
The question is was the hatch opened before the Hunley sank, or as it began to sink and the crew tried to get out?
Via Strategypage, which I don’t blogroll only because many of the sites on the blogroll already do.
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Posted in Civil War
Tagged archeologist, Civil War, Hunley
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 