Take 2: How did the Lincoln Republicans morph into the Obama Democrats?

In the aftermath of the movie Lincoln and President Obama's re-election, two people at Our War book discussions asked me how, on issues of equality and inclusion, the party of Lincoln became the party of Obama. For help I turned to my historian friend Michael Birkner and recorded his thoughts in an earlier blog post.

David M. Kennedy, Stanford professor emeritus. 

Because this has been one of the most popular posts on the Our War blog, it occurred to me to ask the same question of another historian friend, David M. Kennedy. David won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in history for Freedom from Fear: America in Depression and War, 1929-1945, and we subsequently served together for several years on the Pulitzer Prize board.

Here is David's response:

"Passing the torch of leadership on the issue of racial equality from Republicans to Democrats is one of the Great Train Robberies of American political history.

"The party of Lincoln abandoned the cause of safeguarding black civil rights as early as the 1870s, as the great southern historian C. Vann Woodward documented so well in works like The Strange Career of Jim Crow, Origins of the New South and Reunion and Reaction. The Democratic Party, anchored for a century in first the slave and then the Jim Crow South, likewise showed no interest in the issue until well into the 20th century.

"Then a series of developments –  owing especially to brave leadership by the likes of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson – committed the Democrats to the support of African-American civil rights during the Depression and post-World War II eras. Civil rights leader Andrew Young once rightly said that the opening chapter in the 20th century's largely successful civil rights struggle was the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority during  FDR's fabled 'Hundred Days,' because it put the federal government in the business of catalyzing the modernization of the largely rural, agricultural South.

"In 1941, FDR also issued Executive Order 8802, creating the Fair Employment Practice Committee to protect black workers in defense industries. That action has been compared with Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation as one of the most consequential federal initiatives ever taken specifically on behalf of black Americans – and the first one in seven decades.

"Harry Truman followed with an executive order integrating the armed forces, and Johnson secured passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965, major milestones in the long struggle to secure full citizenship for black citizens. Johnson predicted that his embrace of the civil rights agenda would cost his party the political loyalty of the South for at least a generation – an accurate forecast that helps explain the ascendancy of a newly invigorated Republican coalition since the 1960s.

"Now that Hispanics have surpassed African-Americans as the largest minority community – and as the nation heads into a demographic future in which no racial or ethnic group will constitute a majority – Republicans are once again confronted with the moral as well as political implications of being identified as the party of white Americans only."

Thank you, David.

Happy surprises

At the Library of Congress last summer, when the woman seated at my table took a sharp audible breath, I glanced over to see why. She turned to me and said what a wonder it was to behold the letter that lay on the table before her. She invited me to take a look.

Dr. Esther Hill Hawks, Manchester abolitionist 

I was busy with my own work, poring over the fat scrapbooks of Esther Hill Hawks, an abolitionist doctor from Manchester who had served as a military surgeon for black regiments and a teacher of freed slaves. In 1976, long after Hawks’s death, the notebooks had been rescued from the trash heap. Because of this lucky circumstance, Hawks is a character in several chapters of Our War.

But the researcher beside me was beaming, and I couldn’t resist finding out why. A moment later I was holding in my hands a warm personal letter from George Washington to Thomas Pinckney, a Revolutionary War veteran from South Carolina who later served as Washington's U.S. minister to Great Britain. It was indeed a thrill.

If you’re a diligent researcher, you’ll have your “Aha!” moments. You find the missing link you were looking for. A wild goose chase pays off. You see “Confidential” scrawled at the top of a letter and mutter, “Not anymore, pal.”

On town meeting day 150 years ago, New Hampshire held a gubernatorial election with national consequences. It pitted Ira Eastman, a Democratic judge, and Joseph Gilmore, a Republican railroad man. The Republicans so feared an Eastman victory that they put up a third-party candidate, pro-war Democrat Walter Harriman, to siphon votes away from Eastman.

I wanted to tell the story of this election in Our War. I found what I think is an innovative approach, which I laid out in an earlier blog post. A key character in the campaign was William E. Chandler, the young Republican firebrand who ran Gilmore’s campaign. Chandler also happened to be married to Gilmore’s daughter.

Today I want to share with you two notes I found in the Chandler papers at the New Hampshire Historical Society. Other researchers, notably Lex Renda in Running on the Record, have used them, but I can’t tell you what a happy jolt it is to come upon such candid material in a politician’s papers.        

William E. Chandler

I don’t know why Chandler saved the two notes. Since both men lived in Concord, neither do I know why they exchanged their thoughts in writing. Perhaps Gilmore was ashamed of the decision he had reached and afraid to bring it up in person. Perhaps Chandler was busy elsewhere but wanted to answer Gilmore instantly.  

Both notes were written on March 2, 1863, eight days before the election, Gilmore’s in the morning, Chandler’s in the afternoon.

Here’s Gilmore:

“I find my health is such that I must not undertake to have anything more to do with political matters and you will excuse me from anything of the kind. I am going to take it fair & easy as Judge Eastman & Walter Harriman [do,] and if elected well and good and if not just as well.”

Why did Gilmore suddenly get cold feet? Maybe he didn't think he could win and decided a losing campaign wasn't worth any more time, money or effort.

Here’s Chandler’s response to his father-in-law:

“If you propose to stop working I do not. You shall be elected Governor and the State saved. If you do not go to Boston I must have the money some way.

“I want you to raise me Five Thousand Dollars which I shall put into the campaign. I have $2000 in Valley Bank stock which I want the money upon. The House on Merrimack Street is worth $1500 and my office Furniture and Library $1000 more. I want Two Thousand Dollars temporarily and will execute the securities, immediately.

“I will either die, leave the state or bankrupt myself to elect you governor.

“Yours truly W.E. Chandler”

So Chandler was willing to risk his stock, his house and his furniture and books on behalf of his father-in-law's candidacy. In the event, he didn't have to: Gilmore came up with the money. Maybe it was the house that did it. After all, Gilmore's daughter lived there, too. 

A kick in the pants at Chancellorsville

Private Jared M. Davis of the Fifth New Hampshire Volunteers loathed his colonel, Edward E. Cross. The feeling was mutual.

Thomas L. Livermore, author of Days and Events.

A clue to the nature of this enmity appears in one of the most vivid memoirs of the war: Days and Events, by Thomas L. Livermore of Milford, a young man who flourished under Cross. (Yes, I borrowed Livermore’s title in Our War’s subtitle – Days and Events in the Fight for the Union – as homage to this good soldier and his book.)

Houghton Mifflin published Days and Events in 1920, half a century after it was written. The published version blanked out certain names (––––) to avoid embarrassing comrades-in-arms, but often the identities of the anonymous men can be discerned from information Livermore gives. Jared Davis’s performance at Chancellorsville earned him a ––––.

As usual, Cross wanted to attack there on May 3, 1863, after Stonewall Jackson's famous flanking movement. Cross believed General Joseph B. Hooker needed only to reinforce John W. Geary’s division, which was in battle line next to the Fifth New Hampshire, to turn the tide. Instead, Hooker withdrew his army.

It was during the rearguard action near the Chancellor House that the encounter between Cross and Davis occurred. Livermore witnessed it – and participated in it – as Davis’s company commander.

Livermore believed Davis had avoided all the Fifth’s previous fights – Fair Oaks, the Seven Days, Antietam, Fredericksburg. He made it his mission to get Davis to do his duty at Chancellorsville. But when the shells began to fly, there lay Davis, hiding behind an empty cracker box. Livermore found this funnier than an ostrich sticking its head in the sand.

Cross was not amused. When he spotted Davis, he rushed over and kicked him, shouting: “You will disgrace my regiment.”

Not long afterward, an artillery shell obliterated one of Livermore’s men, and a fragment of it or another shell wounded Davis in the left arm. “I seized him by his other arm and supported him,” Livermore wrote. “I thought that as long as I had induced him to go into this battle I would help him out.” He brought Davis to an ambulance, and Davis’s arm was soon amputated above the elbow.

Jared M. Davis, after the war, wears his
veteran's medal and 5th NH clover.

Cross’s kick still smarting, Davis was home in Concord two months later. He wrote from there to Ira McL. Barton, his original company commander and a fellow Cross hater. In part because of a drinking problem, Barton had been in Cross’s doghouse throughout his brief tenure in the Fifth. Even worse, during the Fifth’s first battle at Fair Oaks, Barton’s company had fired on a New York regiment not once, but twice.

Cross had been shot at Gettysburg on July 2 and died there just after midnight. While many mourned his loss, he had made many enemies, too – men like Davis and Barton and politicians who loathed Cross’s harsh Democratic views. Here is what Davis wrote to Barton on July 7 (Lancaster was Cross’s hometown, and the Chase mentioned was Cross’s  brother-in-law, Dexter Chase):

“The body of Col. Cross passed through here to day for Lancaster. Chase was not here and nobody to look after it, so it did not stop here. No one went from here with it. The good news continues to come in but you will see it in the Boston papers.”

Davis’s pension reports say the stump of his arm was left in such a state that he could not wear an artificial limb. He was pensioned at the highest rate, which rose over the years to $55 a month. He died at the age of 64 on July 4, 1903, of what the records called chronic gastroenteritis and cerebral apoplexy. By then he had been an invalid for years, cared for by his wife Nellie. In 1912, when Nellie was 70 years old and paralyzed, Congress approved an increase in her monthly widow’s pension – her only income – from $12 to $20.

Davis’s letter is in the Barton papers at Dartmouth’s Rauner Library.

In 2005, the New Hampshire Historical Society displayed another item from Davis: a flag he donated to the society with a note from him saying the flag had once belonged to a member of the Fifth New Hampshire at Andersonville, the notorious southern war prison. According to the Fifth’s roster, five members of the regiment died at Andersonville – four substitutes (from Ireland, Germany, France and Massachusetts) and one original member, Charles H. Godkin of Plaistow, N.H. No other Fifth soldier is listed as having been imprisoned there.

A tale of two wars -- and two poets

Edward Thomas

Matthew Hollis begins his new biography of the poet Edward Thomas at the end. In a half-page account before the narrative begins, he describes Thomas’s death during a British offensive at Arras, France, on Easter Monday of 1916. It was an odd death, even by World War I standards, a clean death. Thomas was filling his pipe when “a shell passed so close to him that the blast of air stopped his heart,” Hollis writes. “He fell without a mark on his body.”

People often ask how I became interested in the Civil War. The answer is more complicated than the one I usually give. The British poets of World War I played a role in it, but I seldom go into that. I think of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Rupert Brooke and Thomas. They went to war and, through their poetry, attempted to capture its essence. I first encountered them when I was in my teens and read them hungrily when I was a soldier myself.

This reading led me to the prose of the war, which continues nearly a century later. There are so many good books: the memoirs of Graves (Goodbye to All That) and Vera Brittain (Testament of Youth; her diary, Chronicle of Youth, is equally poignant); the Regeneration trilogy by Pat Barker, which includes some of the poets as characters, as well as Barker’s more recent books, Life Class and Toby’s Room; and Paul Fussell’s stunning The Great War and Modern Memory, which, while capturing the horror of the war, also serves as a literary guide to it.

Because my wife Monique is a native Belgian, over the years I have been able to couple my reading interest with journeys to many of the major Western Front battlefields, monuments and cemeteries. She was my good soldier-companion on trips to Verdun and the Somme, Ypres and Passchendaele. We have been to the American cemetery at Belleau Woods and visited dozens of cathedrals and chapels where the war dead of French villages are remembered.

By now you’re probably asking: What does this have to do with the Civil War? On the simplest terms, the American Civil War and World War I are connected in many ways even though they occurred half a century apart. People expected both to end quickly, but both stretched on and on, taking on a life of their own and causing enormous carnage. Both spawned wonderful, honest writing in the service of truth.

In some ways the Civil War was a dress rehearsal for the trench warfare of World War I. I realized this years ago when I saw the remains of the trenches at Cold Harbor near Richmond. The idea was reinforced when I read the papers of Frank Butler, a New Hampshire officer on the 18th Corps staff, and the letters and diary of Capt. Oscar D. Robinson of the Ninth New Hampshire Volunteers. Their experiences during the siege of Petersburg are detailed in Our War. For soldiers in the trenches before that city in 1864-65, life was not so different from what soldiers bore in the muddy ground before no-man’s-land at Ypres 50 years later.

All wars share many characteristics, but these two seem especially linked to me.

Robert Frost

I must add that Owen, Sassoon and the other World War I poets ignited in me the embers of a love of poetry that Mim Houk, my high school English teacher, kindled during my youth. It is this love that brought me to Hollis’s new book, which I highly recommend to anyone with similar interests. It’s called Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas.

For a New Hampshire reader, All Roads has special significance: Thomas’s best friend in poetry was Robert Frost. Frost and his family sailed for England in 1912 after he sold their poultry farm in Derry. Without Frost’s prodding and encouragement, Thomas might never have turned to poetry after years of freelance reviewing and travel-writing. Hollis tells the story of the two poets’ friendship and recounts with delicious suspense Thomas’s discovery of his poetic gift.

A tragic day for New Hampshire

The tragic story of the Fourteenth New Hampshire regiment in the third battle of Winchester on Sept. 19, 1864, is one I chose not to tell in Our War. In part I thought the book had enough battle smoke without it. I also found no letters about the battle from soldiers of the regiment. That doesn’t mean there are none, but by late 1864 newspapers published far fewer letters from local soldiers down south than they did earlier in the war.

Today my wife and I walked across the battlefield and figured out where the Fourteenth fought. It was an exhilarating experience in part because the battlefield is so well marked and because it was a bright sunny day. The third Winchester field is a project of the Civil War Trust, a nonprofit devoted to the preservation of endangered battlefields, and its partners. These organizations have preserved 575 acres of the battlefield. The many miles of trails through it are well planned and maintained, and the markers along the way chronicle the battle with clarity.

As much as I like the stone monuments at Gettysburg, Antietam and elsewhere, there is something deeply satisfying in seeing a battlefield without postwar adornments. Key points of the Winchester battlefield were called First Woods, Second Woods and Middle Field. These seem vague and unhelpful until you survey them from the rolling farmland where the armies clashed. Among other such useful information, small trail-side plaques tell where the woods actually began in 1864 as opposed to where they begin now.

We also visited the U.S. National Cemetery in Winchester. Tens of men from the Fourteenth New Hampshire lie buried there around a simple obelisk. Others have well-preserved gravestones.

The curious thing about the cemetery is that it is separated by a fence and road from a Confederate cemetery -- a city cemetery where people continue to be buried. The Union soldiers lie to the north, the rebel soldiers to the south. Confederate flags sometimes stand at the graves of the rebel dead.

Stay tuned for a more detailed post, with pictures, telling the story of the Fourteenth at Winchester and our visit to the city. Sept. 19, 1864, was a sad day for New Hampshire, but at least those who died here sacrificed their lives in a victory. 

A taste of Union army fare among friends

Though not much loved, hardtack was a staple of the soldiers' diet. 

Fall, winter and spring, Jim Kinhan and Ginny Mierens put on a weekly themed lunch for senior members of South Congregational Church in Concord. As I learned this week when I was guest speaker at the lunch, theirs is a creative endeavor.

Because my topic was New Hampshire in the Civil War, Ginny made a meal consisting of foods the soldiers ate: hardtack, old-fashioned mac and cheese, ham and apples, cucumbers cooked in a gravy of vinegar, fat, onions and flour, and a cabbage seasoned with tomatoes, onions and rendered salt pork. (The "tack" in hardtack, by the way, is British naval slang for "food"; the "hard," as we learned, needs no explanation.)

Ginny made strong coffee, enriched with chicory, and for dessert we had gingerbread.

If the Union soldiers ate this well, someone at my table remarked, no wonder the North won the war.

Edward E. Sturtevant

This group was the perfect audience for my talk. It happens that the first volunteer from New Hampshire, Capt. Edward E. Sturtevant, brought several of his recruits to South Congregational Church on the Sunday after President Lincoln’s call for the first 75,000 northern troops of the war.

Henry E. Parker, the pastor, noted their presence from the pulpit. He had been at the church for 11 years by then and had witnessed many scenes of personal and even public grief. But, he said, the tears he saw in his congregation this day sprang from “emotions the like to which were never felt here.”

The 40-year-old Parker went to war two months later as chaplain of the Second New Hampshire Volunteers. Sturtevant served out his three months with the First and then joined the Fifth. Both are important characters in Our War, and it was fun to weave their back stories together in my talk.

The two left behind many rich letters about their experiences before and during the war. Parker’s letters are available in an impressive web archive assembled by Lawrence Brown.

Here are two letters from that archive, both written by Franklin Pierce. Before his presidency, Pierce served on the South Church pastor search committee that called Henry E. Parker.

Henry E. Parker

In the first letter, written three months before the war opened, it is easy to see the pro-southern sympathies that made Pierce a target of Republicans. The “Clay” he refers to is Clement Claiborne Clay, a U.S. senator from Alabama who resigned his seat in January 1861.

Andover Mass

Jany 23, 1861

My Dear Sir—

I return here – with Mr Clay’s pleasant letter, which Mrs Pierce read with satisfaction. I did not write to him – Indeed I had no heart to do so. The telegraphic column Monday morning announced the retirement from the Senate of the Senators from Alabama, Missi, & Florida. To us, the departure of Gov. Fitzpatrick, Gov. Davis, Mr. Clay & Mr. Mallory was one of the most painful steps of this fearful march. They were all sincere, union loving men and feel, with their constituents, that they have been driven out by long continued aggression and vituperative assault, on the part of those from whom they had a right to expect fair dealing, if not paternal regard. It would be a great mistake to receive the fact that some of them retired in tears as evidence of weakness or selfish apprehension. Few men of truer patriotism, more varied learning or higher statesmanship have ever filled the vacated seats. Besides this so far as Mrs Pierce and myself are concerned they were our tried esteemed personal friends. The gun-powder talk and military preparations at the North are producing their natural results in the border slave labor states. I presume you have seen the slip which I clip from one of the evening papers. My cough continues to be more or less troublesome and wearing but I think it will pass away in a few days.

With Kindest regards to Mrs. Parker & the children

Yr. friend

Franklin Pierce

This second letter was written three days after the first Bull Run battle. Chaplain Parker took care of many wounded men on the field that day, but for all the carnage he witnessed, he was even more dismayed by the Union army’s headlong retreat to Washington. The Col. Marston mentioned in the Pierce letter is Gilman Marston, the congressman who commanded the Second New Hampshire. He was shot in the shoulder during the battle but recovered. Most of Parker’s  letters about his war experience were written to his wife Mary. The Parkers had a one-year-old son.

Concord

July 24, 1861

My Dear Sir—

The accounts yesterday and the day before would seem to indicate that the return of the Federal Army from Bull’s Run to Washington was unexpected and rapid. I hope it was not too much for your rather delicate health and that this new phase of life may on the whole rather contribute to physical vigor than otherwise. I was glad to see by the telegram yrday that Colo’ Marston's wound is less severe than was at first supposed. Will you present my kind regards to him –

I made a pleasant call on Mrs Parker, yesterday – She was looking well, but the little boy has been suffering a good deal from teething – but I should not give you domestic items as Mrs P. intended to write last evening or today. Have you met Dr Gurly and Dr Sunderland or either of them at Washington? I have great respect for them both and if you see them I wish you would present me to them most kindly –

Yr. friend

Franklin Pierce

Thanks to Jim and Ginny for setting up such a great event. And thanks to the South Church audience for your interest and good questions.

One of the most sacred places on the Gettysburg battlefield

My friend Dave Sullivan sends this photograph to complement my post the other day on the unidentified New Hampshire soldiers at Gettysburg. The task of finding and identifying the bodies after three days of fighting there was monumental. Most likely all the men buried here were killed on July 2, 1863, and served in the 2nd, 5th and 12th New Hampshire regiments. As anyone who has ever been to the battlefield knows, the section with the mass graves by state is one of the most moving places there.