Regular readers of The Strawfoot know how much I cherish Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery.  This past Saturday I was walking the grounds aimlessly when I came across the final resting place of Major General George Crockett Strong.  General Strong was wounded during the attack on Fort Wagner in July 1863 and died in New York a few weeks later.  Yes, this was the battle depicted in Glory.

Strong finished fifth in the West Point class of 1857.

The storming of Fort Wagner, lithograph by Kurz & Allison Source: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Earlier this week the New York Times wrote about a Confederate general interred in Green-Wood, Robert Selden Garnett.  According to the Times:

Robert Selden Garnett, the first general killed in the Civil War, was buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, but his family did not want visitors to the cemetery to know it.

Named brigadier general in 1861, Garnett briefly commanded Confederate troops in western Virginia before being shot dead in the battle of Corrick’s Ford on July 13, 1861.

According to research by the cemetery, one of his last cries on the battlefield was “Three cheers for Jeff Davis!”

But that Confederate pride did not follow Garnett to the grave.

Union forces turned over Garnett’s body to his family, who buried him in Baltimore. Four years later, the family decided he should lie in Brooklyn alongside his wife and son, who had died before the war. They exhumed Garnett’s remains and secretly re-interred him in Green-Wood, leaving his grave unmarked for fear of anti-Southern sentiments.

If you are able, I hope you get the opportunity to visit Green-Wood.  There has never been a better time.

I wouldn’t recognize rapper 50 Cent if he walked past me on the street, which being that we both live in New York City is a distinct possibility.  Be that as it may, tonight at 9:00 pm VH1 is airing 50 Cent: The Origin of Me.  In the documentary the Queens native travels to South Carolina to trace his roots.  In the words of the producer:

The basic idea was to connect the “genealogy chic” movement with a younger audience than watches Henry Louis Gates’s ancestry shows on PBS, and to bring hip-hop-generation African-American stars face-to-face with the legacy of slavery.

I have seen a few snippets and the results are interesting indeed.

The institutionalization of Jim Crow became complete one hundred and fifteen years ago today.  It was on May 18, 1896,  in Plessy vs. Ferguson, that the Supreme Court declared “separate but equal” constitutional.

Homer Plessy

(Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons; Source: Mytwocents)

Hey everybody,

As I have mentioned before here at the Strawfoot I often wonder if the people of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries could have imagined the world they bequeathed to us.  Sarah Brown is a case in point:

You’ve seen Sarah Brown on-stage if you ever went to Antone’s in the ’80s or early ’90s. She was the house bass player when Antone’s was a blues club, period, and so she backed everyone from Big Joe Turner and Sunnyland Slim to Buddy Guy and Albert Collins and Otis Rush. For almost 30 years, Brown has been one of Austin’s most valuable and visible side musicians.

But something only her closest friends knew until recently is that Brown, 59, is a descendant of John Augustine Washington, the youngest brother of George Washington. Although Brown is a blood relative of our first president, George Washington, she’s not a direct descendant, as George and Martha Washington had no children. Nor did John Augustine’s son Bushrod Washington, who inherited Mount Vernon and became a Supreme Court justice.

“Being a blues musician, it just wasn’t relevant to me to be a Washington,” said Brown, a Michigan native who has lived in Austin since 1982. The Washingtons she was committed to follow in the tradition of were Dinah and Walter “Wolfman” Washington, not America’s first family. “Our grandmother told us that we must amount to something in our own right because whatever blue blood we had was thin,” Brown said. George Washington is her great-great-great-great-great-great-uncle.

Alas I never visited Antone’s during my years in Texas, but I fondly remember R.L.’s Blues Palace in Dallas.

Having been a volunteer in museums in New York City and elsewhere I can testify that many of the most compelling exhibitions are on display in smaller, less obvious institutions.  Right now such an exhibit is taking place at the Merchant’s House Museum on the Lower East Side.  Over the years I had walked past the museum on my way to the subway after visiting the record stores on St. Marks Place.  (That should give you an idea of how old I am.)  Until last Saturday, however, I had never been inside.  The museum is sponsoring New York’s Civil War Soldiers – Photographs of Dr. R. B. Bontecou, Words of Walt Whitman through August 1, 2011.  Unfortunately photography was not permitted in the museum, or I would have some pictures to share.  The Burns Archive, owner of the images, does have its own blog.  A book is in the works.  It is one thing to read that there were 10,000 casualties in this or that battle; it is another to see many of these “statistics” in flesh and blood.

Merchant’s House Museum garden, May 2011

This small museum is an ideal excursion when coupled with another endeavor.  In our case that was the Union Square Green Market, where we got bread, cheese, and cider for lunch afterward.  Visit if you can.

I have always been ambivalent at best about reenacting.  When done well I suppose it can be a useful learning tool.  A demonstration of Civil War artillery carried out by guys in jeans and sneakers would look pretty silly for one thing.  Moreover, everyone deserves a hobby and a chance to relax and have fun however he or she prefers.  Personally I avoid reenacting for the same reason I avoid historical fiction.  The past is another place and any attempt to recreate it is futile.  We should do everything we can to understand the past on its own terms; we just shouldn’t succumb to the conceit that can return to it.  My biggest concern, though, is that some reenactors may be hiding behind the minutiae of camp life, clothing, and whatnot as a means to avoid the tough stuff of history.  Glenn W. LaFantasie has a thought provoking piece on the subject.

(Hat tip Morris Hounion)

The other day I posted about aging veterans and linked to an article about the last two known living uniformed service personnel of the First World War.  I say last “known” because it is conceivable that a tommie, doughboy, ANZAC, or other veteran of the Great War may still be living without our knowledge that said person was a soldier in the conflict.  Amazingly two days after the article appeared one of the two people mentioned has passed on.  Australian Claude Stanley Choules died yesterday in Sydney.  He was the final combat veteran of the Great War.  This means that the last known surviving World War I uniformed service person is Florence Green, who was a waitress with the Women’s Royal Air Force in the months just prior to the Armistice.

Stories of aging veterans have intrigued me for as long as I can remember.  I can recall watching Wimbledon with my sister in the early 1980s during the Bjorg/McEnroe/Connors era and seeing the elderly World War I veterans sitting together in their designated section.  There were fewer every year.  Aging soldiers are compelling, ironically enough, for their ordinariness.  The generals of the Great War, middle-aged during the conflict, died off in the 1930s and 1940s.  The same of course happened with the Second World War, when generals like Eisenhower (1969), de Gaulle (1970), and Montgomery (1976) passed on in the decades after the war.  Robert E. Lee died in 1870, just five years after Appomattox.  The young enlisted men of any conflict obviously live decades longer until, inevitably, the millions become thousands who become hundreds and then dozens until eventually there are a mere handful left.  Then the man who went over the top at the Somme or made it all the way to the Angle during Pickett’s Charge becomes noteworthy precisely because he is one of the last remaining to tell the story.  The few who live into true old age become anachronisms, living symbols of another time.  We are seeing this happen now with World War II veterans, who are roughly the same age today as Civil War veterans in the 1910s and 1920s.  Knowing that in a few short decades they too will be no more makes me feel old and a little sad.

Happy Easter and Passover, everybody.  The Hayfoot and I went to the Cloisters last week and I thought I would share a few pics.

That is the George Washington Bridge in the background.  As you can see spring wasn’t in full bloom, but it was nonetheless beautiful.

Enjoy your Sunday.

Hey everybody, it’s early Sunday afternoon.  I just got back from a brisk walk in Green-Wood Cemetery.  I was not there looking for Civil War graves per se, but with over 3,000 Union—and numerous Confederate—soldiers interred there it is inevitable that one will come across them.  Above is Captain Henry H. Holbrook, an officer who survived the war, died several decades later, and now rests next to his parents here in Brooklyn.  It is not a contest but I have always believed New York State had the greatest number of Civil War dead with 46,000 killed—more than 10% of the war’s total.  This should not surprise us given that according to the 1860 census New York was the most populous state North or South.  Pennsylvania and Ohio were the second and third most populous.

There is an interesting piece in yesterday’s WSJ about current efforts to tally the Civil War dead.  Such disputes have been going on since the guns fell silent and are likely to continue as more records are digitized and made available to scholars and the general public.  Arguments like this are part of a larger phenomenon—all too human to our nature, I suppose—in which people’s claims to history come at the expense of others’.  Most bitter regarding the Civil War have been the disagreements between Virginians and North Carolinians.  Tar Heels have often felt short-changed by history, believing that Virginians, all the way up to Lee himself, have gotten credit as the expense of North Carolina.  This is why we now call Pickett’s Charge the Pickett-Pettigrew-Trimble Charge.  It’s important to work harder to better understand the Civil War and its meaning to us today.  Still, one cannot read something like this without a small touch of amusement.

Enjoy your Sunday.