A daily miasma of frivolity by two wanna-be cultural critics. Or: just, like, some good links, dude.

Tag Archives: The Civil War

Sep 17 2012
Mark Twain, probably

Invasion orders found wrapped around cigars in field led to bloodiest day in U.S. history

Invasion orders found wrapped around cigars in field led to bloodiest day in U.S. history

Christopher Sullivan, AP:

… Gen. Robert E. Lee’s secret Special Orders No. 191, detailing the Southern commander’s audacious plans for an invasion of enemy territory that would propel the Confederates to victory. Carelessly left behind as Lee’s army marched north, [a] copy was spotted in a field by the Indianans, and Lee’s name jumped out as Mitchell and Bloss read it.

When they passed their stunning find up the chain of command, Lee’s counterpart, the famously cautious Union Gen. George McClellan, exclaimed, “Now I know what to do!”

Four days later came the cataclysmic clash along the Antietam near Sharpsburg — what James McPherson, the eminent Civil War historian, has called “arguably … THE event of the war.”

The orders were found wrapped around a few cigars in a farm field. History is totally weird sometimes.

NBC News’s PhotoBlog posted images of the orders and a bunch of neato historical photos.

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Jan 20 2012
Mark Twain, probably

These here are the remnants of the H. L. Hunley, a Confederate submarine from the Civil War. Reuters has an excellent article about it:

Scientists have found the vessel to be a more sophisticated feat of engineering than historians had thought, said Michael Drews, director of Clemson’s Warren Lasch Conservation Center.

“It has the ballast tanks fore and aft, the dive planes were counterbalanced, the propeller was shrouded,” Drews said. “It’s just got all of the elements that the modern submarines have, updated.”

MSNBC’s Photoblog has a few photos of it, including the one accompanying this post, taken by Bruce Smith for the AP.

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Aug 27 2011
Mark Twain, probably

Rubbish

Rubbish

Albin J. Kowalewski contributed a piece to The New York Times’s Civil War liveblog, Disunion, on the 1861 search for a national anthem by the self-named “National Hymn Committee” of New York:

The committee wrote off the three existing contenders immediately: “Yankee Doodle” was “childish,” they said. “Hail, Columbia” was “pretentious.” The “Star-Spangled Banner” was just too hard to sing — indeed, according to the committee’s spokesman, Richard Grant White, they found it “to be almost useless.”

The committee turned to the literary public for help. From mid-May to early August, it held a contest challenging Yankee poets to compose “a national hymn or popular and patriotic song appealing to the national heart,” as George Templeton Strong, a committee member, described it. The competition would be judged blindly, and the committee retained the rights to publish and market the entries, the proceeds of which would go to the local “Patriotic Fund.” To the winner, however, the 13 committeemen promised $500 and the thanks of a grateful nation.

Punchline: it didn’t end well.

The problem was, the committee couldn’t agree on a clear winner. But not because there were so many good options — rather, it was because there were hardly any. On Aug. 9, 1861, the hymn committee announced that it couldn’t, in all fairness, choose a winner. “Although some of [the songs] have a degree of poetic excellence which will probably place them high in public favor as lyrical compositions,” it said in the New York Times, “no one of them is well suited for a National Hymn.” Strong was more blunt in private: most poems were “rubbish.”

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