Tag Archives: Civil War

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Fiction, Non-fiction

Orwell Reviews ‘That Hideous Strength,’ and News from the Wars

Leave a comment

George Orwell both liked and disliked C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength. In his 1945 review printed in Manchester Evening News, Orwell outlined the plot and mad scheme of the enemy, saying it was not “outrageously improbable.”

Indeed, at a moment when a single atomic bomb – of a type already pronounced “obsolete” – has just blown probably three hundred thousand people to fragments, it sounds all too topical. Plenty of people in our age do entertain the monstrous dreams of power that Mr. Lewis attributes to his characters, and we are within sight of the time when such dreams will be realisable.

But he disliked the supernatural elements in it. Bringing in God and demons tips the scales, as it were, “one always knows which side is going to win.” (via Andrew Snyder on Twitter)

And one other thought:

Culture War: Daniel Strand reviews Russell Moore recent book. “Losing Our Religion would be more persuasive if—instead of affecting to be a simple piece of pastoral counseling—it straightforwardly acknowledged its own agenda. Moore has an argument to make, and he wants to advance his project and defeat his opponents. But his book frames the gospel as some pure, otherworldly abstraction that has little to do with power or politics.”

More Lewis: Joseph Pollard has three posts on Lewis’s Till We Have Faces. Here is a link to all three. “While the Narnia series positively oozes with Christian symbolism and biblical allusion, in this, his final work of fiction, Lewis effectually communicates what so many thoroughly orthodox theology textbooks tirelessly aim to do: Till We Have Faces (1956) gently coaxes the reader to come to terms with both the futility of quarreling with the Almighty, and the resplendent beauty of the thrice-holy King.”

Economic Freedom: When Howard Ahmanson “heard [author John M.] Perkins speak, he heard something like his father’s message from the 1960s: free enterprise works, and small banks help people with modest incomes get mortgages so they have better homes. In India, the free enterprise message would take five more years to sink in, but in 1989 voters threw out Congress Party socialism. The result? India in recent years has been the world’s fastest-growing major economy.”

From History’s Wars: Patrick Kurp shares a few words from letters from a Civil War soldier. “Historians attribute more than half the 618,000 Union and Confederate deaths in the war not to battlefield wounds but disease: dysentery, pneumonia, malaria, typhus, chicken pox, enteric (typhoid) fever.”

Photo: Main Street, Iowa. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Uncategorized

Princess Elizabeth Gave Us the Hymn of Psalm 23

1 Comment

I heard recently that after the Civil War, Americans began using Psalm 23 in funerals and it took on nostalgia for many people. Believers were in the habit of singing psalms back then and were moving toward hymns.

When you think of a traditional melody for Psalm 23, what do you think of? Is this Crimond? The wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Philip Mountbatten in 1947 put that tune on the world stage. Donald Keddie writes:

The music director of the Royal Wedding, William McKie (1901–1984), visited Balmoral in Scotland and heard one of Princess Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting, Lady Margaret Egerton, singing a descant of Psalm 23 to CRIMOND, accompanied by Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. McKie wanted to include something Scottish in the Royal Wedding, and Psalm 23’s pastoral imagery fit the bill perfectly.

Unable to find the music for the descant and with two days to go to the wedding, McKie wrote down the music himself shorthand and taught it to the Abbey Choir. The composer of the descant, William Baird Ross (1871–1950), was later surprised to hear his arrangement on the radio broadcast.

The fame of the Royal Wedding made Psalm 23 to CRIMOND a Christian pop song of its era. The brighter, more joyful tune gave new life to the psalm. As a result, American Protestants of all denominations began singing Psalm 23 to this tune, and American Presbyterians embraced a metrical psalm from their own tradition again.

Uncategorized

For Memorial Day

1 Comment
Color Guard of the 23rd Ohio Volunteer Infantry Regiment.

Look at these guys. How old do you think they are? They enlisted them pretty young in those days, and a lot of boys lied about their ages to get in. Now they’re Civil War soldiers, an occupation Bruce Catton described as “more dangerous than anything we know about today.” No small chance of getting shot, and the risk of dying of accident or disease was twice as high.

These are the images that make us pause. Which is good. These guys paid the price so we could have the freedom to call America a racist, Nazi hell hole today.

We ought to ponder these images.

But it’s wrong, I think, to stop there. That’s what I dislike about the Vietnam War memorial in Washington. No disrespect meant – I know it’s a profoundly meaningful place for many people. But it’s the first war memorial in America that ever just said – “Men died, and these are their names.” Nothing about the aspirations they fought for. Nothing about the cause.

That’s understandable, of course. By the time the monument was built, America had decided there was no cause.

That, I think, is the greatest dishonor.

Maybe –very likely – I know nothing. I never went to war – avoided the draft for Vietnam. But I don’t believe the Narrative we’ve seen in every war movie made since Vietnam (with a couple exceptions, like We Were Soldiers), that all soldiers fight unwillingly, and take drugs and commit atrocities to dull the pain. A lot of guys reenlisted for Vietnam. I choose to believe that a lot of them did it, at least in part, because they believed in the war. Believed they were fighting to prevent the horrors that did in fact come to pass, after America abandoned its South Vietnamese allies.

One of my college textbooks stated baldly that old men start wars so that the young men will be killed, and then those old men can take the young women.

Somebody actually thought that was worth putting in a book.

Young men don’t cling to life like old men do. Young men race fast cars, and climb sheer mountain walls, and blow stuff up while drinking, because they want to face death, to show it what they’ve got. War disillusions them quickly, I have no doubt. But those young men in that picture had something more than youth. They had pride. They were warriors.

I think we should remember that when we think of them. They were not mere victims.

Uncategorized

Fall of giants

1 Comment
Col. Hans C. Heg

Today’s big news in the Norwegian-American community is sadly something we might have seen coming. The Bolshevik mob in Madison, Wisconsin, in its zeal to judge people by the color of their skin, not the content of their character, has torn down, decapitated, and drowned (in Lake Monona) the memorial statue of Civil War officer and abolitionist Col. Hans Christian Heg.

Col. Heg was born in Lier, Buskerud, Norway in 1829. He came to America with his parents in 1840, spent time in the California gold fields, and then returned to Wisconsin.

A fervent opponent of slavery (like most Norwegian immigrants), he joined the Free Soil Party, and  the Republicans after that, becoming the Wisconsin state prison commissioner. He was the first Norwegian-American to be elected to state-wide office in that state. As an abolitionist, he joined the Wide-Awakes, an anti-slave-catcher militia. He sheltered fellow Wisconsin abolitionist Sherman Booth, who had incited a jail break to free an arrested escaped slave.

My friend Mari Anne Næsheim Hall, co-author of the book, Rogalendinger i den Amerikanske Borgerkrigen (Rogalanders in the American Civil War, ©2012), writes of Heg (who was not a Rogalander) (my translation):

Later in the fall several prominent Norwegian immigrants gathered in Madison, resolving then and there to organize a Scandinavian regiment to contribute to the civil war. They recommended to the governor that Hans Heg should be appointed colonel and regimental commander…. Hans Heg was a well-known figure in the immigrant community with many friends, and of course he made use of his influence. “The country which we immigrants have made our homeland has received us with friendship and hospitality. We have the same rights as those who were born here. Let us show ourselves deserving of this, and demonstrate that we are descended from the Norse heroes.” This was part of what he said in his speeches. Hans Heg came originally from Lier in Drammen, and a monument has been raised there in his honor. We find this same impressive monument outside the capitol in Madison. The monument in Lier is actually a copy of the original in Wisconsin.

Further on:

The regiment participated in no less that 27 major battles. Losses were great, and the 15th Wisconsin was one of the units in the northern army to lose the most soldiers. But it was not in battle that the regiment suffered most. Many more actually died of disease than from southern bullets. Officially the regiment lost 33% of its full strength, but a notation attached to the regimental banner in the historical museum in Madison says that the total loss was all of 38%. It states that fully 345 soldiers of the regiment died, either in battle, of illness, or due to accidents. Col. Hans Heg was one of the many who never returned to his Gunhild, his beloved wife. He was killed in the great battle of Chickamauga, together with many other soldiers of the regiment. No fewer than 49 soldiers of the 15th Wisconsin died in the famed Andersonville death camp in Georgia….”

Non-fiction

Cherokees in the Civil War

Leave a comment

The Trail of Tears is a horrible stain on our country, but the story of the events and decisions that led to it is not straightforward. World has republished the introduction to Blood Moon: An American Epic of War and Splendor in the Cherokee Nation by John Sedgwick, a history of what the Cherokee did before, during, and after the war, distinguishing themselves above all other Native American tribes.

At first, virtually all the Cherokee sided with the Confederacy, identifying with the Southern plantation owners, and proud of the black slaves they themselves had bought to pick their cotton. And, complicit with the state of Georgia, the Union had been responsible for the land theft that had cost them their ancestral territory and packed them west in the forced migration known as the Trail of Tears three decades before.

But why did the Cherokee not stay united against a common enemy? How could they have divided against themselves? To answer this, we need go back three decades to the terrible winter of 1838 and the issue that would never go away. Removal—the cruel shorthand for the Trail of Tears—was to the Cherokee Nation what slavery was to America, an issue so profound as to be bottomless and unending.

Uncategorized

Confederacy “founded upon exactly the opposite idea”

Leave a comment

I have learned April is Confederate history or heritage month. I didn’t grow up with any conflict over this part of the history of the Southern states. The culture and even language of the South was formed in part by our close association to  that “peculiar institution African slavery,” as Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens put it, but both can still be separated from our current lives. Also I was encouraged, though I don’t remember exactly how and when, to see the war between the states as a conflict over states’ rights.

The war was over states’ rights, but the fundamental right the Confederate states fought for was the right to build their economy on slavery. So any Confederate history month should look at the whole picture, not some lost cause of glamorized Southern noblemen whose Christian ideals made our country great.

In 2016, Jemar Tisby made a month of posts for April to spotlight some points of history that may be overlooked by those celebrating the Confederacy. One of them linked to Alexander Stephens’s speech in Savannah on March 21, 1861. I will quote from it a bit more than he did.

Stephens said Jefferson was right when he said the institution of slavery was the “rock upon which the old Union would split,” but he was wrong on how he viewed that rock. “The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with,” but believed it would pass away over time. To confront it directly was too costly, so our founding fathers hoped it would be washed away though the natural course of civilization over the next few decades.

Continue reading Confederacy “founded upon exactly the opposite idea” →

Non-fiction, Religion

The Night You Were My Enemy

Leave a comment

Buried in this twenty-minute podcast of stories of Christian faith is a moving story of two soldiers and what the Lord did to spare their lives. One of the men was Ira Sankey, a singer who would go on to prepare spaces for Dwight L. Moody to preach.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Hell or Richmond,’ by Ralph Peters

Leave a comment

Hell or Richmond

For all his concerns, his heart leapt at the prospect of fighting again. Lee smelled powder the way a horse smelled oats. There were things he dared not discuss with other men, matters he preferred not to think on too much himself. He loved war, that was the wicked truth. God forgive him, he loved it. Worse, this army had become his greatest love. It was a terrible thing for a man of faith, or any man, to recognize.

I wonder if it’s possible for a novel to be too successful. Not in the marketing sense – though there are certain authors whose success, in my opinion, is unmerited – but in the artistic sense. A novel that does such a good job of fulfilling its creative goals that the experience becomes nearly unendurable for the reader. Due to the subject matter.

That was my problem with Ralph Peters’ Hell or Richmond, a fantastically successful attempt to bring to life the experience of the 1864 Overland Campaign, during the American Civil War. Like his earlier novel, Cain at Gettysburg (which I admired greatly and reviewed here), it resurrects the historical events on both the macro and the micro level. Peters is a marvelous prose stylist, and succeeds in conveying not only the sights and sounds, but especially the sensations – the weariness, the thirst, the pervasive discomforts from an infantryman’s poison ivy to an officer’s inflamed feet, to Robert E. Lee’s digestive ailments. And the suffering goes on and on, far worse than Gettysburg, which seemed bad enough – through the Wilderness and Spotsylvania Courthouse to Cold Harbor, all of them famous slaughters. Continue reading ‘Hell or Richmond,’ by Ralph Peters →

Authors, Music, Religion

The Battle Hymn of the Republic

Leave a comment

Charge!

“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

Or is it something else?

“The Battle Hymn of the Republic” is a wonderfully catchy tune that many have sung on the Fourth and even in church, because it talks about God’s truth marching forward, right? Just like “Onward Christian Soldiers,” isn’t it?

The writer, Julia Ward Howe, was a Unitarian, poet, and active supporter of abolition, women’s rights, prison reform, and education. Her public support of these issues was opposed by her husband, Samuel Gridley Howe, and put a strain on their marriage for years. He wanted her to keep her work domestic. When she published a book of poetry anonymously (but discovered a short time afterward), Samuel felt betrayed.

In November 1861, Samuel and Julia were visiting Union encampments close to Washington, D.C. as part of a presidential commission. Some of the men began singing, and one of their songs was “John Brown’s Body,” a song in praise of the violent abolitionist John Brown.

“John Brown’s body lies a-moldering in the grave
But his soul goes marching on.

“He’s gone to be a soldier in the Army of the Lord,
His soul goes marching on.”

Reverend James Freeman Clarke was touring with the Howes and remarked that while the tune was great, the lyric could be stronger. He suggested Julia write new words to it, and she replied that she had had a similar idea. Continue reading The Battle Hymn of the Republic →