News: National Park Service Faces Challenge of Instituting a History Park for Reconstruction

Obama names five new national monuments, including Southern civil rights sites, Juliet Eilperin and Brady Davis, Washington Post, January 12, 2017  EXCERPTS

President Obama declared five new national monuments Thursday, ranging from a Birmingham, Ala., church bombed by segregationists to the coniferous forests of Oregon. He has now used his executive authority more than any other president to protect iconic historic, cultural and ecological sites across the country.

Three new monuments in the South, all of which have bipartisan support, exemplify Obama’s push to expand America’s shared national identity through the narrative it tells with its public lands. Two of them, in Birmingham and Anniston, Ala., were sites of violent acts perpetrated against African American children and an interracial group of civil rights activists. The third, in Beaufort, S.C., commemorates the period between the Civil War and the push for segregation in the 1890s when freed slaves worked to establish schools and communities of their own.

In a statement, Obama noted that the monuments “preserve critical chapters of our country’s history” and reflect his long-standing effort to “ensure that our national parks, monuments and public lands are fully reflective of our nation’s diverse history and culture.”

Northwestern University history professor Kate Masur, who pushed for designation along with University of California at Davis history professor Gregory Downs, said in an email that the site will illuminate “one of the most important and most misunderstood eras of our past.”

“The Reconstruction era was the nation’s first effort to grapple with slavery’s lasting impact, when millions of former slaves began forging lives in freedom, and when the nation remade the Constitution to better protect citizenship and individual rights,” she said.

Top Image:  brick church stands in the Penn Center historic site on South Carolina’s St. Helena Island. The center, the site of one of the nation's first schools for freed slaves, on Thursday was designated as a new national monument. (Bruce Smith/AP)
Bottom Image: Map of Beaufort, SC designated sites. 

Full Text located at Washington Post, January 12 , 2012

New And Noteworthy: Appomattox--A Defeat? A Victory? The End of The War?

Appomattox: Victory,  Defeat, and Freedom At The End Of The Civil War, Elizabeth R. Varon, Oxford University Press, 2014, 305 pp., 1 map, 33 b/w illustrations,  end notes, index, $27.95.

Francis August Schaeffer, a 20^th century American theologian, philosopher, and pastor, held to a  particular approach to answering the questions of the age.  His illustration of ‘the universe viewed from two chairs’ promoted the examination of worldviews.  Appomattox: Victory, Defeat, and Freedom At The End Of The Civil War, offers a discussion of two worldviews; one typified by Robert E. Lee and one typified by Ulysses S. Grant. 

In popular culture, ‘The Brothers War’ comes to an end at Appomattox Courthouse, April 9, 1865.  The very dignified Robert E. Lee surrenders to the very muddy Ulysses S. Grant.  Lee is accompanied by one other staff officer; Grant brings about a half dozen generals and their staffs.  At the surrender ceremony Lee, like during the war, is vastly outnumbered. Varon’s work views the surrender ceremony  from two chairs: Lee’s and Grant’s personal interpretation of the surrender. 

For Varon, Grant’s terms for surrender created one spirit of Appomattox; Lee’s interpretation of the terms created another spirit of Appomattox.  Grant’s view understood the surrender as offering reconciliation; Lee’s view understood the surrender to recognize that he was overwhelmed by numbers but unbowed.  Lee felt Grant understood this.  Grant’s terms were not his usual unconditional surrender terms; Lee’s soldiers left the surrender site with some of their arms, their horses and food in their stomachs.  

Grant’s and Lee’s understandings are contested by Andrew Johnson, northern Peace Democrats and Copperheads, moderate Republicans and radical Republicans, the war’s white and black veterans.  Should Reconstruction become the war waged by non-military means and achieve a racial reformation of the South?  Varon states and supports the argument that war left most questions set forth in 1860 unanswered and created new problems.  The author is explicit in stating that the political problems of 1860 were not solved upon the surrender of the Confederate armies. 

Both Lee and Grant believed they transcended politics on April 9, 1865. For northern soldiers and politicians, individual courage and God’s cause of justice won the war.  For southern soldiers and politicians, individual courage and the rightness of their cause was not enough to fend off the immigrant hordes in the Federal army which supplied by the North’s vast agriculture to deliver food and industry’s capacity to deliver armaments.  

The familiar story of Appomattox is opened up by Varon and in it she sees a variety of interpretations which the participants held.  The author offers both an event based and a worldview based telling of the surrender and its immediate implications.  Confederate, Federal, and African-American veterans, civilians, and politicians on both sides are well described in their own words.  Using a narrative style that is accessible to most readers, Varon presents both worldviews with sharp details.  Appomattox: Victory, Defeat, and Freedom At The End Of The Civil War is superb.

New---Conterinsurgency from the Civil War to Iraq

A Question of Command: Counterinsurgency from the Civil War to Iraq, Mark Moyar, Donald Kagan (Foreword), Frederick Kagan (Foreword),Yale University Press, 368 pages, October 2009, maps, photographs,appendix, notes, bibliography, index, $30.00.

"According to the prevailing view of counterinsurgency, the key to defeating insurgents is selecting methods that will win the people’s hearts and minds. The hearts-and-minds theory permeates not only most counterinsurgency books of the twenty-first century but the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, the U.S. military’s foremost text on counterinsurgency. Mark Moyar assails this conventional wisdom, asserting that the key to counterinsurgency is selecting commanders who have superior leadership abilities. Whereas the hearts-and-minds school recommends allocating much labor and treasure to economic, social, and political reforms, Moyar advocates concentrating resources on security, civil administration, and leadership development."

"Moyar presents a wide-ranging history of counterinsurgency, from the Civil War and Reconstruction to Afghanistan and Iraq, that draws on the historical record and interviews with hundreds of counterinsurgency veterans, including top leaders in today’s armed forces. Through a series of case studies, Moyar identifies the ten critical attributes of counterinsurgency leadership and reveals why these attributes have been much more prevalent in some organizations than others. He explains how the U.S. military and America’s allies in Afghanistan and Iraq should revamp their personnel systems in order to elevate more individuals with those attributes."

"A Question of Command will reshape the study and practice of counterinsurgency warfare. With counterinsurgency now one of the most pressing issues facing the United States, this book is a must-read for policymakers, military officers, and citizens." [Text Source: Jacket Flaps]

CWL: There are two chapters, The Civil War and Reconstruction, with immediate interest. Forty-five pages on focusing on Missouri, Arkansas during the war and Missouri, Texas and Arkansas during Reconstruction. The author details the strategy and tactics of Brigadier Genral Robert F. Catterson, a very aggessive and successful counterinsurgency commander in Arkansas who led the state militia units that destroyed the Ku Klux Klan by 1868.