Union prisoners burying ground
Charleston, S.C., 1865. (George Barnard)
Library of Congress

The story, briefly, is that a Union prisoner of war camp was established in 1864 on the “Washington Racecourse,” the horse race track of the city’s high society, to house prisoners moved there from the notorious Andersonville camp. Some 260 Union soldiers died there of exposure and disease in the following months, and were buried in a mass grave.

When Charleston fell, rejoicing black Charlestonians not only staged a parade with a coffin named “Slavery” with the slogan “Fort Sumter Dug Its Grave”, but also organized to properly rebury and honor those Union prisoners. Yale University history professor David Blight, who rediscovered the story some ten years ago, described it this way (in a piece for the Newark Ledger):

Some twenty-eight black workmen went to the site, re-buried the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.”

Then, black Charlestonians in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged an unforgettable parade of 10,000 people on the slaveholders’ race course. The symbolic power of the low-country planter aristocracy’s horse track (where they had displayed their wealth, leisure, and influence) was not lost on the freedpeople. A New York Tribune correspondent witnessed the event, describing “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.”

At 9 am on May 1, the procession stepped off led by three thousand black schoolchildren carrying arm loads of roses and singing “John Brown’s Body.” The children were followed by several hundred black women with baskets of flowers, wreaths and crosses. Then came black men marching in cadence, followed by contingents of Union infantry and other black and white citizens. As many as possible gathering in the cemetery enclosure; a childrens’ choir sang “We’ll Rally around the Flag,” the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and several spirituals before several black ministers read from scripture. No record survives of which biblical passages rung out in the warm spring air, but the spirit of Leviticus 25 was surely present at those burial rites: “for it is the jubilee; it shall be holy unto you… in the year of this jubilee he shall return every man unto his own possession.”

It was the first Memorial Day, and — as Professor Blight put it in remarks on Monday — it amounted to a declaration by black Americans that the Civil War had been about slavery, and that the defeat of the Confederacy amounted to a second American Revolution and a birth of freedom for millions of former slaves.

And then the event was forgotten, at least by white Charleston.  The soldiers were reburied elsewhere, the grounds of the former race course converted to what is now Hampton Park.  Again, Blight:

[A] measure of how white Charlestonians suppressed from memory this founding in favor of their own creation of the practice later came fifty-one years afterward, when the president of the Ladies Memorial Association of Charleston received an inquiry about the May 1, 1865 parade. A United Daughters of the Confederacy official from New Orleans wanted to know if it was true that blacks had engaged in such a burial rite. Mrs. S. C. Beckwith responded tersely: “I regret that I was unable to gather any official information in answer to this.” In the struggle over memory and meaning in any society, some stories just get lost while others attain mainstream dominance.

But this particular story is lost no more.  On Monday, Memorial Day 2010, the city of Charleston took official notice of the first Memorial Day (or “Decoration Day,” in the language of the day) 145 years and one month earlier, with Mayor Riley, David Blight, and College of Charleston history professor Bernard Powers making remarks, and joining Hampton Park horticulturalist and activist Judith Hines in unveiling a plaque commemorating that first Memorial Day.  I’ve included some local TV news coverage of the events and a slideshow of the photos I took.

I happened to be there because I had corresponded with Professor Blight about my review of his 2001 book “Race and Reunion,” and mentioned that I was visiting Charleston soon for an annual rendezvous with my parents there during the Spoleto Music Festival we enjoy attending.  I added that I planned to take my daughter to Hampton Park and tell her about that first Memorial Day that he had described in that book.  Professor Blight (who appreciated my review) wrote back immediately to say that I could join him and the mayor there if I went at 3pm on Memorial Day.

So there I was, now with my wife and daughter and both parents along as well, among a crowd of around a hundred black and white onlookers.  I didn’t take notes on the speeches, but all three were excellent.  From listening to his lectures and reading his books, I know Blight is always an eloquent and engaging speaker on the subjects of histories lost and found, and on the struggle for racial equality and justice, and this Memorial Day was no exception.  I was also impressed by the other two speakers; Dr. Powers made the point how impressive the organization of that first Memorial Day was, and discussed how it fit with the history of black churches in Charleston.  As with Dr. Powers, I wish I could re-read Mayor Riley’s remarks; I knew nothing about him before yesterday either, and came away very impressed at how seriously he took the occasion, and how eloquently he conveyed his appreciation of the day’s events.

For me to visit Fort Sumter one day, reflect on the events of the first Memorial Day the next, and then participate in a kind of resurrection of that day was an experience that is hard to put into words.  I’ve always been convinced that knowing and understanding history (as best as one can) is vitally important.  But I’ve never seen so “close up” how much of a difference it can make to recover history and restore it to good use among good people.  It must have been a supremely satisfying moment for Dr. Blight, and judging by the sustained applause (and many an “mm hmm” and “amen” from the assembled crowd), a vindication and new point of pride for many in both the black and white communities of Charleston as well.

I understand Charlestonians like to say they live where “the Cooper and Ashley rivers meet to form Charleston Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean.”  Now that’s mainly meant to raise a smile.  Yet it now seems to me it may actually undersell that place — once all of it is considered.   Not “merely” an ocean, but history itself seems to form there and return there, time and again, like a needle stitching and restitching the same tapestry - with slavery, with war, with defeat, with liberty, with amnesia, and now with remembrance. It was quite an experience to witness that.

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OTHER ACCOUNTS: Reclaiming history, Derek Legette, Charleston Post and Courier 6/1/10; The first Memorial Day, Brian Hicks, Charleston Post and Courier, 5/24/09.
EDITS, 6/3: Links to Powers, Hines (video interview) added; College of Charleston, not Charleston College.

THE TEXT OF THE MEMORIAL PLAQUE:

At the time of the Civil War, Hampton Park was the site of the Washington Racecourse, which was owned by the South Carolina Jockey Club and was one of the most famous racetracks of the antebellum South. In late 1864, this site became a large open-air prison for thousands of Union troops evacuated from the Andersonville, GA prison in advance of Sherman’s March to the Sea. Before Charleston fell in February 1865, several hundred of the prisoners died and were buried in mass graves. In an effort led by African-American churches in April 1865, the dead were reinterred in orderly graves enclosed by a picket fence. Over the gate was written: Martyrs of the Race Course.

On May 1, 1865, a parade in honor of the prisoners of war who died here took place with ten thousand participants, according to contemporary accounts. Nearly three thousand were school children from the new Freedman’s Bureau Schools. The children led the parade, carrying armloads of flowers and singing patriotic songs. They were followed by women’s organizations, church leaders, Unionists, recently emancipated slaves, and Union troops, including the 54th Massachusetts. The soldiers were later buried in Beaufort and Florence National Cemeteries or in their hometowns. Annual events to honor the dead of both sides of the Civil War eventually became known as Memorial Day. The event in what is now Hampton Park is acknowledged by most historians to be the first Memorial Day in the United States of America.

Via PBS. Crossing my fingers they’ll succeed with their “top kill.” Meanwhile, here’s a look at the catastrophe for Lousiana marshlands, via Al Jazeera:

Watch CBS News Videos Online

I first saw this video in a story posted by Karl Burkart of Mother Nature News (MNN), who writes:

I never thought I would say this, but for once I actually agree with Rush Limbaugh. The right-wing radio host is attributed with calling the Gulf Oil Spill “Obama’s Katrina.” [...] Despite Obama’s half-hearted attempt at displaying anger over the government’s “cozy relationship” with BP, I believe Obama is aiding and abetting a foreign oil company as it perpetrates an environmental crime on American soil…

While I share Burkart’s simmering anger at both BP and the Obama administration, I hesitate to go as far as Burkart in suggesting that’s a quid pro quo for BP’s campaign contributions.  Granted, it’s not comforting at all to learn the video of the oil gusher had been on display in the White House Situation Room for weeks before its release to the public — and immediate calculations that the spill rate was an order of magnitude greater than government estimates.

But I think a response by the Coast Guard (appended to the end of Burkart’s article by an MNN editor) inadvertently suggests a different analysis, both of the incident itself and of the Obama administration’s responses:

…Neither BP nor the U.S. Coast Guard, who are responding to the spill, have any rules in place that would prohibit media access to impacted areas and we were disappointed to hear of this incident. In fact, media has been actively embedded and allowed to cover response efforts since this response began, with more than 400 embeds aboard boats and aircraft to date. Just today 16 members of the press observed clean-up operations on a vessel out of Venice, La….

(Emphasis added.)  Sadly, it’s not hard these days to imagine BP or Coast Guard personnel construing “embeds” as the only authorized form of journalism — we’ve all seen it before in Iraq and elsewhere.  Indeed, it speaks volumes about journalism today that the CBS crew itself acquiesced in a plainly wrong demand.

In fact, the Obama administration seems to have accepted its own “embedding” — buying the absurd notion, for example, that the underwater video of the oil gusher (one of the principal ways of gauging the extent of the disaster)  is simply “proprietary information” that is BP’s to control. It’s not just as if the United States government has ceded control of its shores, its territory, and its authority to provide for the common good and common defense.  They’ve gone and done it — in the face of the organization responsible for the the greatest environmental disaster in our country’s history .

It seems as if Obama and his administration think there’s a tension between making BP pay for the disaster response, and exercising authority and oversight over that response.  To be sure, there may be legal issues to be solved, but there first needs to be executive will to solve them, and that has seemed lacking.    As McClatchy News’s Marisa Taylor and Renee Schoof put it, BP withholds oil spill facts — and government lets it:

BP’s role as the primary source of information has raised questions about whether the government should intervene to gather such data and to publicize it and whether an adequate cleanup can be accomplished without the details of crude oil spreading across the gulf.

Indeed it has.

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UPDATE, 5/20: More from Renee Schoof and other McClatchy News reporters at the Real News Network video “Spill may be 19 times larger than BP & Gov’t say.”

Rep. Joe Sestak, riding a call for “new blood” in Washington, defeated incumbent Arlen Specter in the Democratic U.S. Senate primary Tuesday, ending the career of the longest serving senator in Pennsylvania history.

With 79 percent of precincts reporting, Sestak had received nearly 53 percent and Specter about 47 percent, according to unofficial returns. Specter conceded.
–Sestak ousts Specter in Democratic primary, Fitzgerald, Nunnally, Philadelphia Inquirer

Observed MSNBC:

“The vote also was a defeat for President Barack Obama, who supported Specter when he abandoned the Republican Party last year.”

Well, don’t do that next time, Barry.  Obama has a very bad habit of mixing himself up in primaries on behalf of DINOs (Democrats In Name Only): Specter, Lincoln (forced into a runoff against progressive favorite Bill Halter), Lieberman. If he’s wondering who he has to blame for sharing in Specter’s defeat, he should go find a mirror.

With Specter, even “DINO” is a bit charitable for a guy who sometimes forgot he wasn’t still a Republican, and who said up-front when he switched parties that his opposition to EFCA wouldn’t change.  Some warn, of course, that Sestak is no reliable progressive either; as the Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne pointed out a couple of days ago:

While Sestak does enjoy some support from progressive online groups, it’s impossible to cast the race as a left-vs.-center showdown, especially since Sestak supported Obama’s surge in Afghanistan while Specter, trying to curry favor on the Democratic left, opposed it. “We should not engage in the laborious and problematic task of nation-building,” declared the newly dovish Specter.

But how long would Specter’s new found dovishness have lasted in the absence of a challenge?  How long would any position at all ever last with Specter, who did extended Hamlet routines about FISA and the Military Commissions Act before voting for them, and supported the Employee Free Choice Act before turning against it?  The one constant thing about Specter was his desire to stay in office, and Pennsylvanians were right to vote him out of it.  When Specter switched to the Democratic Party last year, I wrote:

But the basic point is that Specter and the Democratic poobahs (apparently Joe Biden and Harry Reid chief among them) who coaxed the senator into switching sides have shoved aside the people who ought to really matter when political parties grow or shrink: the voters — yes, even the Republican “base” voters — who choose the candidates of each party, and then test their strength against each other in the general election.

On Tuesday, the voters struck back.  Democrats everywhere — even Barack Obama, even E.J. Dionne — should reflect on that and then welcome that.  And then they should stop playing games trying to get the odd Republican senator to cross party lines, and start sticking up for the people who voted them into office.  And then they should decide to trust Democratic voters instead of making deals over their heads.  Obama can start by keeping himself out of the Arkansas runoff between Lincoln and Halter.

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UPDATE, 5/18: Added my 2010 ActBlue donation page button; Sestak and Halter are my two choices so far.
UPDATE, 5/20: E.J.Dionne today: “That Specter’s support collapsed so quickly everywhere outside Philadelphia suggested how weak he probably would have been against conservative Republican nominee Pat Toomey. Party leaders who backed Specter can nonetheless be relieved that voters picked the stronger candidate for November.” Which says what about those leaders?
EDIT, 5/21: links added to stories detailing Obama’s support for Specter and Lincoln (2 stories).

I’m reading today that the volume of oil being spilled from the Deepwater Horizon disaster site may be substantially larger than government estimates first indicated.

It’s *imperative* to get the *best possible estimates* of the size of this catastrophe, and it’s imperative that BP not be allowed to obstruct that in any way, shape, or form, and indeed that those, um, ne’er-do-wells be compelled to pay for those best possible estimates. Time is of the essence; please add your voice to those urging the best possible estimates of the flow rate from that well. Woods Hole scientists and equipment should be flown there *today*.

(The URL for the article is http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/14/us/14oil.html.)

From the article (Size of Oil Spill Underestimated, Scientists Say, Gillis, NYTimes):

…BP has repeatedly said that its highest priority is stopping the leak, not measuring it. “There’s just no way to measure it,” Kent Wells, a BP senior vice president, said in a recent briefing.

Yet for decades, specialists have used a technique that is almost tailor-made for the problem. With undersea gear that resembles the ultrasound machines in medical offices, they measure the flow rate from hot-water vents on the ocean floor. Scientists said that such equipment could be tuned to allow for accurate measurement of oil and gas flowing from the well.

Richard Camilli and Andy Bowen, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, who have routinely made such measurements, spoke extensively to BP last week, Mr. Bowen said. They were poised to fly to the gulf to conduct volume measurements.

But they were contacted late in the week and told not to come, at around the time BP decided to lower a large metal container to try to capture the leak. That maneuver failed. They have not been invited again.

A scientist commissioned by NPR has used apparently similar techniques to estimate that the oil well is gushing 70,000 barrels or 2.9 million gallons of oil per day, give or take 20%. (Via Michael Whitney, “Firedoglake.”) That midpoint estimate is nearly 15 times as much as NOAA and Coast Guard estimates issued early on. I’m not saying the government is deliberately low-balling the size of this catastrophe, but they absolutely must keep working on getting a handle on it.

“Just no way to measure it.” Nice trick, when it works: we don’t measure civilian casualties we cause in Iraq, we don’t measure oil volcanoes we cause in the Gulf. This kind of willful ignorance makes it too easy to turn around and do it all again, because “who knows” what the real costs are.

And meanwhile, Congress appears more interested in getting BP off the hook than on it.

To call your own congressperson, call the switchboard at 202-224-3121 or look up the number here.

Lloyd C. Blankfein continued to defend Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s reputation on Wednesday in comments to some of the firm’s wealthiest clients.The embattled chairman and chief executive, who last week was grilled by a Senate subcommittee looking into Goldman’s role in the financial crisis, said the firm will always put clients first. He said there is also a silver lining to the civil-fraud charges leveled against the firm by the Securities and Exchange Commission: It allows the firm to re-examine how its business practices.

“Frankly, at this point we have to go with an open mind and determine what we may be doing wrong,” Mr. Blankfein told customers of its private-wealth-management business during a 30-minute conference call. “On a very microscopic level, we’re going to use this as an opportunity for a deep dive on our practices and how we run things.”

He pledged to clients that he wants Goldman to “be the leader in things like ethics, in putting clients first.”

– Blankfein Defends Goldman’s Ethics (Bruno, Philbin; Wall Street Journal, May 5)

Michael Lewis (”The Big Short”) responds with an attaboy, and action items to“create the illusion for American mortals (or as we like to call them, “The Morts”) that our business is in their interest, much less that we share anything in common“:

No. 5: Be careful not to say or do anything now that will constrain our ability, after this crisis has passed, to do whatever we want.

The other day, on your emergency conference call with our customers, you said that you wanted Goldman to be seen as a “leader in things like ethics.”

I couldn’t have put it better myself. If in the future we fail to be a leader in ethics we can point to your statement as evidence that we never intended to be a leader in ethics, merely in “things like ethics.”

Lewis vows to compile a list of “things like ethics” for Blankfein to lead in — but Blankfein’s way ahead of him: he’s talking about “things like ethics,” and that all by itself is being a “leader” in “things like ethics”!  And I like finding a silver lining in civil fraud charges against your company — it shows the kind of roll up your sleeves, getting busy with that ethics stuff we’re looking for.  Good luck with “determining what you may be doing wrong”! … That’s right: “getting caught.”

Mainly, of course, Blankfein knows that having the right buddies helps with things like ethics. Remember Obama’s “First of all, I know both these guys”? Again, it’s not actually ethics, just something like ethics — call it maybe “reputation illusion management.”  I just hope Obama hasn’t been learning too much from Blankfein about how to “put his clients first.”  This doesn’t look good, though.

“I don’t see the purpose served by bashing Kagan from the left.”

I think the answer is that it’s not really Kagan who’s being bashed from the left — after all, not many people know very much about her.  It’s the Democratic Party as a whole that’s being bashed from the left, at least that party’s upper, national echelons — very definitely including Obama.  And as it becomes more and more plain that progressives wield no influence on that administration, the ultimate purpose of that is to depose that leadership or  — taking a deep breath — to break away from that party.

By saying — by having to say — over and over and over again, “look at what Obama’s done now,” “look at what our party in Congress has done now,” there’s more and more room to consider that revolt, or that breakup.   In the meantime, people will just quietly boycott it and walk away from it.  Sure, Obama is well spoken and handsome — but do we agree with his choices?  Is this really our party?

FISA Amendment Act.  Abandoning the public option.  Offshore drilling.  Military Commissions Act.  Vast escalation in Afghanistan.  Cave-in on the Iraq surge.  Seamless continuation of the Bush administration’s disrespect for civil liberties and “war on terror” policies.  Torture goes unpunished, while its whistleblowers are persecuted and its critics silenced.  Envisioning indefinite detention.  Paltry, timid jobs programs in the midst of a terrible recession.  Paltry, timid proposed financial regulations.  Threats to Social Security.  Abandoning Dawn Johnsen. Threats of war on Iran, dressed up within nuclear nonproliferation talk.  Shameless fundraising for more Blue Dog Democrats — when the party won’t do anything with the ones it has (or to them when they defect).  The Democrats seem like the Civil War general George McClellan — always wanting more resources, and then either doing nothing with them or doing the wrong thing with them.

The national thing we call the “Democratic Party’ — the DNC, the people on TV on weekends, the mail and web presence — is unloved and often not even liked by much of its “base.”   Yet its members and functionaries often take their role and that base for granted — and then go their own way on issues like those above.  That has created real and deserved hostility.

Now comes the Kagan nomination — maybe not the worst thing in the world, but certainly not a promise of forward progress either.  As I wrote on facebook,

Once upon a time a president was elected in hopes of reversing the trend of terrible court picks like Thomas, Roberts, Scalia, and Alito. Instead, he picked Sotomayor and Kagan to the Supreme Court, and fixed a leak in the White House roof with a piece of cardboard. The End.

That comment met with some “thumbs up”s, but it and others like it have bewildered and put off friends and acquaintances too.

On Monday there was a debate on Democracy Now! about Kagan between two people I respect — my friend, neighbor, and State Senator Jamie Raskin, and Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald,* with Raskin supporting and Greenwald challenging the Kagan nomination. Substantively, I’d give the debate to Greenwald, whose point about Kagan has mainly been how remarkably thin her public track record on the major issues of the past eight years has been. When pressed, Raskin was able to suggest one promising aspect of Kagan’s writings:

Her writings about the First Amendment, I think, are absolutely first-rate and exemplary, and I think that when it comes to Bill of Rights issues, I think she will be, you know, an extremely strong justice. [...] her core position on the First Amendment is that any time that the government engages in policy whose purpose is to interfere with the right of the people to decide themselves on important questions of public policy, that the governmental interference is itself illegitimate. So, you know, rather than saying that you look simply at the effects of a governmental action, you look also at what the purpose behind the governmental action is.

Like I said, promising; without a look at those writings, I can’t say more.  I doubt we’ll learn anything more in the ‘vapid and hollow charade’ we call the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings either (Kagan’s own recommendations notwithstanding**), but it would be interesting to find out how far that attitude extends.  For example, where does Kagan believe “state secrets” — typically a refuge of scoundrels, literally since the inception of the doctrine — end, and where does she believe the public’s right to know begins?  Senators famously had the chance to learn just how thin the WMD case was in the Iraq War, even if many didn’t choose to read the intelligence estimate involved — might the public have been more diligent?

But when it came to the dominating issue of the past eight years — the use and abuse of executive power, and how to define and sanction that –  Raskin admitted, “I wish I could give more comfort to Glenn on this question than I can [...] as to the other stuff, we just have to see how it evolves and to push things as much as we can to try to restore a proper balance among the branches.” He added “I can’t bring much consolation on that point, because we just don’t know.”

Fair enough, though it’s also fair to say that’s not a ringing defense or endorsement. But it also ran Raskin right into the buzzsaw of Greenwald’s hostility during and then after the debate, so that while Greenwald had a more substantive case, he arguably lost the encounter anyway.  Greenwald linked to the debate on his blog with the comment, “Decide for yourself if he has a single substantive argument to make in her favor.“  Well, OK: Raskin did have a single substantive argument to make in her favor.  (I’m hoping to learn more from him about Kagan.)

To return to the original topic of this post: Greenwald came spoiling for a fight.  Raskin — again, a very solid progressive Democrat — may have expected more of a collegial discussion on what seemed like home ground.  He didn’t get it — but Greenwald should have tried to avoid the hostile tone he took.

And so should I, if I want to be a part of changing the Democratic Party — or of persuading others to leave it with me. Like Raskin and Greenwald, we’re on the same side, or we should be. But by the same token, even a Jamie Raskin needs to be ready with specifics when he’s tapped to defend this Democratic Party’s choices.  Being Kagan’s friend won’t do any more.  Putting off the fight to yet another day won’t do any more.  Obama wanting it won’t do any more.

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* Greenwald is also a Facebook friend of mine, though I’m not personally acquainted with him.
** UPDATE, 5/11: Not any more –Elena Kagan no longer thinks Supreme Court nominees should have to answer direct questions (Ward, Daily Caller), via Greenwald, who also links to this by GW professor Jonathan Turley: “For many liberals and civil libertarians, the Kagan nomination is a terrible act of betrayal after the President campaigned so heavily on the issue of the Supreme Court during his campaign. He is now replacing a liberal icon with someone who has testified that she does not believe in core protections for accused individuals in the war on terror. During her confirmation hearing Kagan testified that she believed that anyone suspected of helping finance Al Qaeda should be stripped of protections and held under indefinite detention without a trial — agreeing with the Bush Administration.” Wish I hadn’t written “not the worst thing in the world.”
UPDATE, 5/12: Confirmation Messes (Kagan, 1995) is where she wrote ‘vapid and hollow charade’; via Scott Horton, who praises her ‘Presidential Administration’ article, and supports her nomination despite agreeing that “Obama has missed the opportunity to appoint a worthy successor to Stevens to lead the fight against rampaging executive power.” Elsewhere, it turns out she was a student of Sandy Levinson (”Balkinization”), and he supports her too.  A major post at SCOTUSBlog provides links to and discussions of Kagan’s articles, including Private Speech, Public Purpose: The Role of Governmental Motive in First Amendment Doctrine and discusses her career in some detail.

You would be wrong.

From a Friday, May 7 press release from the Center for Biological Diversity:

Even as the BP drilling explosion which killed eleven people continues to gush hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil per day into the Gulf of Mexico, the U.S. Department of Interior’s Minerals Management Service (MMS) has continued to exempt dangerous new drilling operations from environmental review. Twenty-seven new offshore drilling projects have been approved since April 20, 2010; twenty-six under the same environmental review exemption used to approve the disastrous BP drilling that is fouling the Gulf and its wildlife.  [...]

“Salazar is playing a cynical shell game, making the public think he stopped issuing the faulty approvals that allowed the disastrous BP drilling to occur, when in fact he has given MMS the green light to keep issuing those very same approvals,” said  [CBD executive director Kieran Suckling]. “The only thing Salazar has stopped is the final, technical check off which comes long after the environmental review. His media sleight of hand does nothing to fix the broken system that allowed what may be the greatest environmental catastrophe of our generation to occur.”

“For Secretary Salazar to allow MMS to exempt 26 new oil wells from environmental review in the midst of the ongoing Gulf crisis shows an extraordinary lapse of judgment. It is inconceivable that his attention is apparently on providing BP with new environmentally exempted offshore oil wells instead of shutting down the corrupt process which put billion of dollars into BP’s pocket and millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.”

(Via Mick Arran, “Fact-esque.”) The press release provides side-by-side comparisons of the doomed Deepwater Horizon Mississippi Canyon exploration plan and a Green Canyon plan approved on May 6.  Unbelievably, some MMS functionary actually signed off on that plan with the following: “II.J. Blowout Scenario - Information not required for activities proposed in this Initial Exploration Plan.”

It occurred to me that maybe an “Initial Exploration Plan” is just about underwater geological surveying — I don’t know, a little robot sub or probe gives the seabed a whack with a piledriver and records the seismic echoes or something.  But no, the MMS-approved Green Canyon plan (.PDF, 80 p.) has sections like “Drilling Fluids” and “Oil Spill Response Discussion” — and for the latter, laconically notes “Information not required for activities proposed in this Initial Exploration Plan.” Just before that (p. 7), the exploration plan (again, this was approved late last week) asserts:

Since BP has the capability to respond to the worst-case spill scenario included in its regional Oil Spill Response Plan approved on July 21, 2009, and since the worst-case scenario determined for their EP does not replace the worst-case scenario in their regional OSRP, BP Exploration & Production Inc. hereby certifies that they have the capability to respond, to the maximum extent practicable, to a worst-case discharge, or a substantial threat of such a discharge, resulting from the activities proposed in their EP.

McClatchy Newspapers’ Marisa Taylor got the MMS side of the story, such as it is:

The exemptions, known as “categorical exclusions,” were granted by the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service (MMS) and included waiving detailed environmental studies for a BP exploration plan to be conducted at a depth of more than 4,000 feet and an Anadarko Petroleum Corp. exploration plan at more 9,000 feet.

“Is there a moratorium on off shore drilling or not?” asked Peter Galvin, conservation director with the Center for Biological Diversity, the environmental group that discovered the administration’s continued approval of the exemptions. “Possibly the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history has occurred and nothing appears to have changed.”

MMS officials said the exemptions are continuing to be issued because they do not represent final drilling approval.

They do appear to represent business as usual.  In an article for The New Republic (”The Crisis Comes Ashore“), Al Gore echoes Galvin:

Even as the oil spill continues to grow—even as BP warns that the flow could increase multi-fold, to 60,000 barrels per day, and that it may continue for months—the head of the American Petroleum Institute, Jack Gerard, says, “Nothing has changed. When we get back to the politics of energy, oil and natural gas are essential to the economy and our way of life.” His reaction reminds me of the day Elvis Presley died. Upon hearing the tragic news, Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, said, “This changes nothing.”

It certainly doesn’t seem to have changed anything for the MMS, Ken Salazar, or — assuming the buck actually stops with him — Barack Obama.

[crossposted to Planet Forward, Daily Kos]

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EDIT, 5/10: link to Green Canyon plan added.

With the end of April came also the end, for this year at least, of “Confederate History Month,” unfortunately resuscitated by Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell after a long dormancy under the previous two governors.  Amidst an outcry that apparently surprised the Regent University law graduate, McDonnell hastily reworded his proclamation with a grudging nod to the impropriety of slavery and the possible existence of other points of view on the matter of a rebellion leading to the country’s bloodiest war.

One might reasonably ask why there are no  “Union History Month” or “Victory over Treason and Slavery” celebrations — and that, more or less, is what David Blight did in his book “Race and Reunion,” published in 2001.  Covering the period from the Emancipation Proclamation to the 50th anniversary of Gettysburg — and the release of the notorious film “Birth of a Nation” — it’s a fascinating read.  It’s also  — still, going on ten years later — a useful, jolting reminder of just what was lost as remembering the Civil War became more about rehashing every last engagement, and about getting over it, past it, and around it, than about reflecting why it happened — let alone reflecting on the unfinished business of the human and civil rights of black Americans.

Click above to order this
book or others by Blight.

Reconciliation — on southern terms
Blight’s research led him to soldiers’ remembrances in periodicals of the time such as Century and Harper’s; to the annals and publications of the Southern Historical Society and the Confederate Veteran, and to the schedules and membership rolls of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.  But he also paid attention to the writings and speeches of Frederick Douglass and W.E.B DuBois, the short stories of Ambrose Bierce, and the novels of the unjustly forgotten Albert Tourgee (”only fools forget the causes of war”) or Nelson De Forest — as well as the celebration of Klan terror by authors like Thomas Dixon, Jr, or the perhaps more insidious romanticization of the antebellum South by authors like Thomas Nelson Page or Joel Chandler Harris (”Uncle Remus”).

The book tells stories you’ve still almost certainly never heard before: the first Memorial  Day (that is, “Decoration” Day) — held by black Charlestonians to honor and restore the graveyard of Union prisoners of war on the site of the city’s “Race Course,” now Hampton Park; the unveiling of Richmond memorials to Robert E. Lee in 1896, and to Stonewall Jackson in 1875; the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition of 1895, when Booker T. Washington gave his “Atlanta Compromise” speech — widely acclaimed at the time, but half wishful thinking, half sadly understandable surrender; the fiftieth anniversary of Gettysburg, but with blacks in attendance only as blanket distributors and latrine cleaners.*  The Washington Post — apparently already a runaway gusher of idiotic political commentary –  marked that occasion by noting that slavery and secession were “no longer discussed argumentatively,” but were “disposed of for all time“; moreover, slavery was something for which “no particular part of the people was responsible unless, indeed, the burden of responsibility should be shouldered by the North for its introduction” (emphasis added by Blight.)

What had happened by 1913 was a “Lost Cause” regional movement as potent, committed, and persistent as the abolition movement had been.  What’s more, it arguably had a greater reach (at least within the U.S.), in that ex-Confederates could and did safely peddle their redefinition — for that’s what it was — of the causes and legacy of the Civil War throughout the country, for good money and to plentiful applause.

The first mention of “The Lost Cause” appears to be a book of that title by one Edward Pollard published in 1866, followed by “The Lost Cause Regained” in 1868.  In the former, Pollard announced a “war of ideas”; in the latter, Blight writes,

…he counseled reconciliation with conservative Northerners on Southern terms.  Those terms coalesced in a central idea.  “To the extent of securing the supremacy of the white man,” wrote Pollard, “and the traditional liberties of the country … she [the South]  really triumphs in the true cause of the war.” (p 260).

Jefferson Davis probably generated the greatest sheer tonnage of Lost Cause argumentation in his 1200 page “Rise and Fall of the Confederate States.”  Blight notes that Davis added or echoed other parts of Lost Cause ideology: his claim that the South was simply trying to protect its rights against the “unlimited, despotic power” of the federal government; what Blight calls the “almost omnipresent” feature of Lost Cause rhetoric that (in Davis’ words), “slavery was in no wise the cause of the conflict, but only an incident.” Far from being an evil, it was a positive good for blacks who “increased from a few unprofitable savages to millions of efficient Christian laborers.” Davis, Blight writes, continued:

Their servile instincts rendered them contented with their lot, and their patient toil blessed the land of their abode with unmeasured riches.  Their strong local and personal attachment secured faithful service… Never was there happier dependence of labor and capital on each other. The tempter came, like the serpent of Eden, and decoyed them with the magic word of “freedom” … He put arms in their hands, and trained their humble but emotional natures to deeds of violence and bloodshed, and sent them out to devastate their benefactors.

Faithful service… happy dependence… strong attachment.  Southerners like Davis were strongly motivated to misrepresent slavery as the good old days of race relations; it obviously helped destigmatize the “peculiar institution,” but it also helped channel the terms of reconciliation Pollard had written about: could and should such an allegedly inferior race really be given all the keys to citizenship and equality?  Here strongly motivated Southern arguments might often win the day among relatively unmotivated Northern audiences: what good was Reconstruction really — that wearying occupation of a hostile territory, on behalf of black people many in the audience didn’t know, or particularly like, or think particularly highly of?

“Everyone was right, no one was wrong”
Blight has done an incredible service by compiling and publishing this close re-examination of the 1863-1913 period.  This is obviously not a happy tale, it’s a profoundly disappointing, even tragic one, and reading it all but turns one’s own sense of pride or joy (however vicarious and unearned) about Appomattox or the Emancipation Proclamation into ashes in one’s mouth.

Blight — a fair, thorough, and scrupulous historian and writer — leaves little doubt what his feelings are in passages like this one, describing the events of Gettysburg’s 50th anniversary:

The veterans, as well as the gazing crowds, had come to commemorate a glorious fight; and in the end, everyone was right, no one was wrong, and something so transforming as the Civil War had been rendered a mutual victory of the Blue and the Gray by what Virginia governor Mann called the “splendid movement of reconciliation.” [...]  Wilson’s “righteous peace” was far more the theme than Lincoln’s “rebirth of freedom.”  At this remarkable moment when Americans looked backward with deepening nostalgia and ahead with modern excitement and fear, Jim Crow, only half-hidden, stalked the dirt paths of the veterans’ tent city at Gettysburg.  He delivered supplies, cleaned the latrines, and may even have played the tunes at the nation’s feast of national memory.  Jim Crow stalked the streets and backroads of the larger nation as well, and he had recently arrived with a new mandate in the bureaucracies of the federal government. The Civil War had become the nation’s inheritance of glory, Reconstruction the legacy of folly, and the race problem a matter of efficient schemes of segregation. (pp. 367-368)

The “last full measure of devotion” — for something as threadbare as this?  Did it have to be this way?

For want of a Lincoln
For one thing, how contingent was all or at least much of this history on a single, tragic event?  I asked Blight this myself once, at a reading of the book at Politics and Prose in nearby DC.  It’s been a long time, but as I recall I asked something along the lines of “how much did all of this depend on Booth’s successful assassination of Lincoln?  Might Reconstruction not have been more successful with one of our greatest presidents at the helm at its outset than with one of our most inept?”

Blight said he didn’t think so; my recollection is that he didn’t elaborate much on that judgment — to one audience member, after one book reading event among many.  However, Blight does indirectly discuss this a bit more in one of his 2008 “The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877” lectures at Yale.**

Lecture 20: Wartime Reconstruction: Imagining the Aftermath and a Second American Republic,

via Academic Earth; transcript.  David W. Blight, The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877
(Yale University: Open Yale Courses), http://oyc.yale.edu (Accessed April 2, 2009).
License: Open Yale Courses Terms of Use.

Lincoln giving Second Inaugural Address, 1865***

There he says Lincoln’s aims were to do Reconstruction “as fast as possible, as lenient as possible, and as much as possible under presidential authority rather than Congress’s.” As he goes on to point out, some of this squares pretty well with the famous Second Inaugural Address — “with charity towards all, with malice towards none.” Blight naturally also mentions the “10 percent plan” whereby States would be readmitted to the Union — on Lincoln’s war time authority — for the relatively low price of 10 percent of white voters taking a loyalty oath, and drawing up a State constitution accepting emancipation.

While this all sounds like Lincoln was focused on reunion at the expense of newly freed black Americans, leniency and speed also served the goal of preventing guerrilla warfare and turning occupied territories back into States.  And Blight reminds readers of Lincoln’s plea to Douglass in mid-1864 to organize the removal of as many newly freed black Americans as possible to the safety of Union lines, should Lincoln lose the fall election, as he thought he might.

If Lincoln did not plan to forsake black Americans even in defeat, it’s hard to believe someone who declared “all men are created equal” and spoke of “a new birth of freedom” would have forsaken them after victory as much as Johnson did.  I think — of course, maybe I just wish — that faced with the same post war forces Johnson failed to master, Lincoln would have adjusted his thinking to find ways to protect newly enfranchised black American citizens both in deed and in word — to not just care for him who had borne the battle, his widow and his orphan, but also those whom that battle had freed.  Like Douglass, he would have continued to insist that the Civil War was not just a contest of strength, but a contest of ideas — a victory he had won, and one he did not propose to throw away.

But Lincoln was denied that chance.

How the Lost Cause Won
White Southerners were the primary active, restless agents of Reconstruction’s failure.  Black Americans — whether pre-war freedmen or post-war veterans — were not helpless bystanders to the failure of the Reconstruction, but no matter how motivated they were, they were clearly too politically weak to prevent it.

Any hope of pushing America beyond mere emancipation and on to full equality and suffrage rested on the shoulders of those white Americans who had sacrificed the most to gain victory: Union soldiers — particularly those who were already pro-emancipation.  By 1864,  greater proportions of Union soldiers than civilians voted for Lincoln.  Finishing the job meant destroying the power of the South; that meant ending Southern forced labor.   And while that could and did just mean emancipation only to some white soldiers, the valor of black soldiers — and atrocities against them — educated at least some Union soldiers in ways not available to civilians.

But set against that was the experience of death and carnage on a scale not seen before or, arguably, since.  The thousands upon thousands of dead are well remembered; but the living paid a price as well.  A Northern soldier describes a scene from just one battle, Spotsylvania Court House:

The most terrible sight I ever saw was the Rebel side of the breast work we fought over the other day.  There was one point on a ridge where the storm of bullets never ceased for 24 hours and the dead were piled in heaps upon heaps and the wounded men were intermixed with them, held fast by their dead companions who fell upon them contnually adding to the ghastly pile… When I looked over in the morning there was one Rebel sat up praying at the top of his voice and others were gibbering in insanity others were groaning and whining at the greatest rate… it is a terrible terrible business to make the best of it.

The Veteran in a New Field, Winslow Homer (1865).
Metropolitan Museum of Art

There’s no reason to think such instances of complete shell shock didn’t affect Northern soldiers too; that what we now call post traumatic stress syndrome didn’t encompass many more as well; that the profoundest wish of many a soldier would be to please God never ever think about what he had seen and done again.

In her fine book “This Republic of Suffering,” Drew Gilpin Faust points out that the ratio of fighting soldiers per acre of battlefield was never higher than the Civil War; to be a veteran of battles like Gettysburg or Chickamauga was almost certainly to have witnessed, meted out, and suffered carnage unlike those of any other American war, perhaps any other war in history.  Like Winslow Homer’s soldier in “The Veteran in a New Field,” back home and harvesting wheat instead of death, many veterans may have turned away from reflecting on the whys and wherefores of the war to repair their own lives and spirits.  Blight notes that one historian, Gerald Linderman, actually speaks of Civil War veterans “hibernation” period lasting from 1865 to 1880, followed by a “revival” in active remembrance of the war.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes might exemplify the form that remembrance took.   Blight: “Wounded at Antietam, horrified by what he called “an infamous butchery at the battle of Fredericksburg in 1862, and worried for his own sanity during his experiences of the Wilderness campaign in 1864, Holmes had resigned his commission before the war ended.” By 1895 Holmes would celebrate his onetime enemies as men of valor - but of his own and that of his comrades he would say this:

I do not know what is true.  I do not know the meaning of the universe.  But in the midst of doubt, in the collapse of creeds, there is one thing I do not doubt, that no man who lives in the same world with most of us can doubt, and that is that the faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause which he little understands, in a plan of campaign of which he does not see the use.

Union veterans, that is — veterans who had finished the job assigned to them and won a war.  For Confederate veterans, the need to believe the fight had been worth fighting and the cause (redefined to white supremacy) worth defending  was paramount.

Taken together, determined proponents of racial justice like Frederick Douglass or Thaddeus Stevens certainly had to do their best without the leader (Lincoln) and had to without the purposeful, political activity of many of those white men (Union veterans) who had been the main agents of the abolition of slavery and the defeat of the Confederacy.

Emancipationists turned equal rights proponents had to pursue the cause in a North that even after the victories of Atlanta and the Shenandoah Valley still only gave Lincoln 55 percent of the vote, compared to 78 percent of the soldier vote. Those soldiers, it seems reasonable to suppose, would have followed Lincoln in peace as they had in war.  To employ a metaphor suitable to the times, a powerful ironclad steamship had lost its captain, and then its power; not surprisingly, it then lost its way. 

Great accomplishments — the 14th and 15th amendments* — lay ahead at the end of the Civil War, but they also seemed to expend the remaining anti-slavery, pro-equality political capital and energy available.  As time would show, they could be circumvented and mooted by Jim Crow laws, the terrorism of lynchings and pogroms, and the accretion of legal rulings vitiating their original intent.  Frederick Douglass’s prophecy in war time — “We are not to be saved by the captain, but by the crew” was good enough during war time, and while that captain lived.  By 1875, Douglass would be asking, “If war among the whites brought peace and liberty to blacks, what will peace among the whites bring?” One suspects he knew it was a rhetorical question. There would be almost nothing left over to address the needs for help and the needs for safety of a black population increasingly at the “mercy” of surrounding whites in the South.

New Lost Causes not lost

US stamp, issued 1970.

“Race and Reunion” is a must read for anyone who wants to go beyond Civil War triumphalism and sentimentality, and begin to understand how Reconstruction could fail so badly that Jim Crow laws and lynchings ruled the South for decades upon decades thereafter — and how a treasonous rebellion of slaveholders was insistently, persistently transmuted into mainstream nostalgia for much of the rest of the country …black Americans excepted.

But the subject isn’t “just” of historical interest. Lost Causers look familiar to me: denial that their cause was unjust; denial that they’d lost; resorts to violence and threats of violence; rewriting history and textbooks to echo their claims; grievances about lost, unearned entitlements nursed for year after year.

In a sense, the Civil War’s aftermath still isn’t over.  The veneration of the Lost Cause of southern independence and the simultaneous belittlement of slavery live on directly, but these movements also look like templates for ones like the Tea Party or birthers — people who dress up their racial and political resentments in high-flown “constitutional,” “states rights,” or economic libertarian arguments.  To be sure, it’s not just a Southern phenomenon any more, but I think it’s useful to see where the disease began, and how it first flourished.

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* Blight points out in the lecture series that Ken Burns pulls a fast one in this respect: in “The Civil War” TV documentary, Burns shows black veterans alongside white ones at a Gettysburg reunion — but leaves the strong impression it’s at the major 1913 reunion, when it was actually at the (obviously more sparsely attended) 1938 one.
** The relevant segment (discussion of Lincoln’s wartime Reconstruction plans) begins around 42:00 — though you’d miss Blight’s account of the great, great 1865 letter from ex-slave Jourdon Anderson to his former master, starting at around 35:00.
*** For the the remarkable story of the discovery of this photograph, read NPR’s Kitty Eisele.

EDIT, 5/10: “and how a treasonous” line added; Stone Mountain stamp added.
* EDIT, 5/14: The 13th Amendment was passed by the House in January, 1865, though its adoption and proclamation came at the end of the year.

SOME OTHER REVIEWS AND DISCUSSIONS OF “RACE AND REUNION”: Ted Ownby (U.Miss), Virginia Magazine of History and Biography Vol 109. No. 3, Virginia Historical Society; Allen B. Ballard (SUNY-Albany), African American Review, Spring 2002 (via bNet); James Percoco, Civil War News; Joan Waugh (UCLA), H-CivWar; Eric Foner, New York Times Book Review.  Other reviews are excerpted at the Harvard University Press web site for the book.

RELATED: Ta-Nehisi Coates blog series (The Atlantic) on “Confederate History Month.” — The Harvard University Press site also provides a Google search link of the book that appears to yield complete index results for the hardback book even if some pages are displayed as “not available.”

As digby writes, “All presidents should probably make it a rule not to yuk it up over WMD and air attacks. It’s unnecessary.”

2. “Tase him!”

(also via digby)

After all, the kid ran on to a baseball field, which jeopardized… something or other. Anyway, TASE HIM!

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EDIT, 5/6: WMD link added.
UPDATE, 5/10: Credit where credit is due — the Washington Post editorial page weighs in against what happened in Philadelphia (”Police and Tasers“): “…[T]he Philadelphia police commissioner, Charles Ramsey, who reviewed video of the incident, said his officer had acted within department guidelines. That’s the problem. While Tasers have been useful in protecting officers from dangerous and out-of-control suspects, in too many police agencies the policy on using them is so loosely defined that officers can fire the weapons more or less when they feel like it.”