Americans as Insurgents and Counterinsurgents

Via Brad Plumer, a new paper for Cato by Dr. Jeffrey Record on the US military's counterinsurgency problem. Specifically, Record argues that effective counterinsurgency strategies run against deep-seated elements of American military culture ("the American way of war") and that the defense establishment is essentially incabable of learning lessons about how to do this better no matter how many times the problem is pointed out to them. Record's conclusion is that whenever possible -- and it's usually possibly -- we should simply avoid embarking upon actions that are going to put us in the position of waging counterinsurgency warfare. Fascinatingly, Rich Lowry calls the paper "excellent" while also saying he doesn't "agree with [Record's] bottom-line that we should give up trying counter-insurgency campaigns altogether." Then I wonder what he thought was excellent about it?

At any rate, if I may make a slightly idiosyncratic point about this, I think that at least some of the American military's cultural aversion to counterinsurgency is related to the strong Southern cultural influence on the US Army and to the peculiarities of the American Civil War.

In a lot of ways, the Confederates were in a structural situation where you would expect to see insurgent or otherwise "unconventional" warfare. But by-and-large it didn't happen. Instead, the CSA amassed formal armies that quite agreeably attempted to defend Southern cities from capture by meeting the forces of the numerically, financially, logistically, and technologically superior union on the field of battle. They succeeded at this for a while but eventually the Union commanders succeeded in rendering the CSA military's positions untenable at which point the CSA surrendered in a gentlemanly fashion. What's more, at least according to the predominant story, the South's most celebrated commander, Robert E. Lee, went so far as to believe that the South's political goal -- secession -- was wrong. Nevertheless, like a good professional he went about doing the business of war as best he could and, by all accounts, proved rather good at it.

This was basically an odd dynamic to emerge. The American military keeps expecting other numerically, financially, logistically, and technologically inferior foes to behave in that manner, but it's a rather daft thing for a numerically, financially, logistically, and technologically foe to do. It essentially dooms you to failure.

By contrast, the South in a lot of ways would have been very well-positioned to wage an unconventional strategy. The CSA land area was positively enormous. What's more, though the CSA population was distinctly smaller than the Union population, the ratio was very favorable to the South by the standards of counterinsurgency dynamics, and basic proficiency in firearms and the like was widespread among the CSA's white, male population.

The trouble is that insurgency couldn't possibly have achieved some of the major political goals of the CSA leadership -- namely maintaining slavery and the plantation economy. Insurgents could have made it impossible for the federal government to effectively govern the South, but wouldn't have been able to maintain the apparatus of repression necessary to shore up the socio-economic system. You couldn't fade away into the hills (or wherever) while simultaneously keeping control over the South's black population, who would have run away, rallied to the Union cause, etc., etc., etc. just as they did wherever CSA territory came to be occupied by the Union. By contrast, surrender actually proved reasonably effective as a method of maintaining the plantation economy and, if not slavery, white supremacy.

That, however, was a very unusual dynamic having a great deal to do with the specifics of the situation. The whole experience -- and, in particular, the tendency toward idolization of Lee and other Confederate commanders -- teaches a very misleading series of lessons about what sound military strategy is and how you can expect wars to go.

Comments

[Waging war Confederate Style]'s a rather daft thing for a numerically, financially, logistically, and technologically [inferior] foe to do.

Posted by dj moonbat | September 8, 2006 12:32 AM

Didn't someone else already make a pretty good case that Hezbollah is roughly analogous to the KKK? And that the terrorist counterinsurgency the South waged under the friendly rein of Johnson was so successful as to be quickly unnecessary?

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | September 8, 2006 12:36 AM

"At any rate, if I may make a slightly idiosyncratic point about this, I think that at least some of the American military's cultural aversion to counterinsurgency is related to the strong Southern cultural influence on the US Army and to the peculiarities of the American Civil War."

I'm not sure if you're right or wrong about this, but it's a pretty interesting theory.

Posted by Petey | September 8, 2006 12:41 AM

You got 40 feet of bridge for a 50 foot chasm, my friend. What you now need to do is explain how this peculiar southern military strategy then permeated back through VMI & West Point to influence the US Army for the next 150 years. Saying that the Army tends to see insurgencies as unseemly and cowardly actions doesn't really carry the argumentative freight you've loaded up. But 40 feet is still mostly across the chasm.

Posted by Spencer | September 8, 2006 12:51 AM

What about the wars against the Plains Indians and later the Mexican border raiders? These happened after the Civil War and seem like classic insurgency/counterinsurgency type fights (at least for their time period). I think the American sports scene is what ruined us for counterinsurgency. All of our games are very structured and have a strong moral element attached to "fair play".

Posted by poofla | September 8, 2006 1:06 AM

I give this post a 7.5 on the good insanity scale.

Posted by ogged | September 8, 2006 1:17 AM

The Indian wars is an interesting example. From biological warfare (smallpox infected blankets) to ethnic cleansing (Trail of Tears) to genocide (Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and all that), we defeated the Indians with tactics that by today's standards would be war crimes. I suppose the Indians were lucky that the New Testament sort of made the practice of crucifying insurgents politically incorrect.

In the last 100 years, the only nation that has succeeded at counterinsurgency is Nazi Germany. They had France so beat down that the Wehrmacht was there mostly to defend against Allied invasion. And what does success get you? The architects of that campaign ended up at Nuremberg.

Posted by beowulf | September 8, 2006 2:03 AM

It seems to me that the south was able to fight a pretty good "insurgent" war for a good 100 years after Lee surrendered, seeing as reconstruction was finally completed in, say, 1965? Also, the activities of the klan and various white noncooperation with northern troops post war could be seen as something similar to "those camel fuckers in iraq", we've managed to get rid of the leadership, but there's plenty of people who still hate us. The South even manged to weasel their way out of getting northern troops to withrdraw in 1877, looking forward to another 85some years of denying blacks civil rights.

Posted by Matt Z | September 8, 2006 2:14 AM

Yeah, the reason why the US has not succeeded in counterinsurgency in Iraq is not because it's extremely difficult to do, but because we've got Southern rubes in the military!

Your point about the War of Northern Aggression is equally ridiculous. For one, the South kicked the shit out the North for the majority of the war using conventional warfare and forcing the North into the immoral strategy of Total War. Secondly, the insurgency that followed the defeat of the Confederacy resulted in the assassination of Lincoln. And finally, the South reveres it's guerilla fighters as well as it's conventional generals. Read up on the Swamp Fox sometime or watch the movie The Patriot.

Posted by Just Karl | September 8, 2006 2:36 AM

Matt,

You need to add a reddit button. And you need to permit the selction of the text in your article. Having that disabled is annoying and unprofessional.

Posted by patience | September 8, 2006 3:06 AM

Interesting idea.

Still, I would say that the Civil War was close to sui generis as as that oxymoron, a civilized war. It was mostly waged by Victorian gentlemen on both sides.

Posted by Steve Sailer | September 8, 2006 3:25 AM

This "War of Northern Aggression" nonsense cannot stand. If that's to be accepted as a reasonable, but contrarian, way to refer to the American Civil War, that so must this: The War of Southern Treason.

You need to STFU, "Just Karl", and think about what sort of twisted mind glorifies ANY of the seditious, traitorious efforts of the CSA.

Posted by matsut | September 8, 2006 4:21 AM

Your point about the War of Northern Aggression is equally ridiculous. For one, the South kicked the shit out the North for the majority of the war using conventional warfare and forcing the North into the immoral strategy of Total War.

Actually, his description is dead on.

"attempted to defend Southern cities...They succeeded at this for a while but eventually the Union commanders succeeded in rendering the CSA military's positions untenable"

And spare us this myth of Southern military genius. The early Southern victories were largely defensive actions on their home turf. Southern attempts to invade the North resulted in Antietam and Gettysburg. Then Grant and Sherman took the gloves off, and the South has been bitching ever since.

Posted by gswift | September 8, 2006 5:15 AM

Still, I would say that the Civil War was close to sui generis as as that oxymoron, a civilized war. It was mostly waged by Victorian gentlemen on both sides.

There's a number of other wars from around the same time - Crimean War, the Austro-French War of 1859 (I don't think the Piedmontese fought that war and its aftermath in a terribly gentlemanly way, but the French and Austrians certainly did), Schleswig-Holstein War of 1864, Austro-Prussian War, maybe the Franco-Prussian War (although the French vaguely tried a semi-insurgency after Sedan.)

Looking in the 19th century, one can definitely find examples of effective insurgencies - notably the Spanish operations in the Peninsular War. But most fighting really was conventional, and this wasn't just a thing arising out of the special circumstances of the Confederacy. My understanding is that technology also tended to be against insurgency in this time period.

Posted by John | September 8, 2006 5:37 AM

It's also worth noting the successful American anti-insurgent campaign in the Philippines in the first decade of the last century.

Posted by John | September 8, 2006 5:38 AM

"From biological warfare (smallpox infected blankets) * * * we defeated the Indians with tactics that by today's standards would be war crimes"

The single historical "smallpox infected blankets" incident I can find documented was perpetrated by a British general, Lord Amherst, before American Independence. If you have a documented incident of American troops doing that, I'd be interested to see it.

Posted by rea | September 8, 2006 7:15 AM

I don't buy this idea. The south certainly glorifies Nathan Bedford Forrest, who fought quasi guerilla-style cavalry campaigns before going on to found certain fraternal southern organizations. Or I guess the lastest Confederate-glorifying line is that Forrest didn't really found the KKK, or it became too commercial, so he left, man, or something.

You some about John Singleton Mosby, too. And your forgetting all about Missouri and Kansas, where first the abolitionists and then the confederates waged insurgencies. The south itself probably fought guerillas more then the north, in trying to keep many of the Appalachian parts of the confederacy from seceeding from sucession. They had to occupy East Tennesee to keep it in the Confederacy and it apparently wasn't safe to travel while Confederate in many of the Unionist places in the south.

Posted by witless chum | September 8, 2006 7:23 AM

Also worth noting the successful Vietnamese counterinsurgent operation against Montagnard guerrillas post-1975.

I would have to agree that the argument that Southern culture prevents our military folks from understanding insurgencies - i.e., secret private militias which fight in the shadows and don't mind causing civilian casualties - has some big flaming crosses and a lot of strange fruit to explain away.

One might do better to argue that if the Civil War renders the US military incapable of understanding counterinsurgency, it is because our military still inherits too much from the North, not the South. Specifically, the Union Army's successful pioneering of total warfare, the thorough annihilation of the enemy's economy and society. And total warfare is a strategy which can only be employed where the enemy presents an existential threat, and is generally recognized as being really evil and having started the war. The heirs of this Northern technological total-warfare military culture are easy to recognize, e.g. in the Strategic Bombing Command, where Robert McNamara got his military experience. That strategy worked very well in World War II (though it was arguably also responsible for war crimes.) It has been useless everywhere else.

Posted by brooksfoe | September 8, 2006 7:31 AM

The single historical "smallpox infected blankets" incident I can find documented was perpetrated by a British general, Lord Amherst, before American Independence.

There was an American militia officer involved, who haled from the Lower 13, although the incident happened in Canada.

Posted by David Tomlin | September 8, 2006 8:41 AM

The funny thing is, the Confederates might well have won a conventional war against the Union, if they could have governed themselves.

The Union was focused on the war in Virginia. Lee might easily have held McClellan in Virginia with a holding force while Johnston kept the Mississippi in the hands of the Confederacy. McClellan could have been trusted to soak up most of the Union resources for several years, and Johnston might well have taken Missourri, Kentucky and Tennesee, as well as maintaining the flow of supplies from Texas and Arkansas, during that time.

If, during that time, the Confederacy had vigorously exported cotton and imported arms, Britain and France would have probably recognized the Confederacy, enabling the northern Copperheads to force a divided peace.

As for what really happened, first-person accounts by southerners about the south at war are often the best sources. One excellent collection is Henry Steele Commager's The Blue and the Gray, which should be available at a price anyone can afford.

Posted by serial catowner | September 8, 2006 8:52 AM

So Just Karl,

How exactly do your claims of the South "kicking the shit out of the North" match up with Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and the Kentucky and Tennessee campaigns, all of which took place largely in the middle of the war. In the West, the North rolled over the South pretty consistently from the second year of the war.

Posted by franck | September 8, 2006 8:57 AM

Several of these comments follow Matt is assuming that the inability of the US military culture to come up with effective counterinsurgency techniques in a few recent wars is due to the fact that some or all Americans have in the past been reluctant to engage in insurgent warfare themselves, and therefore don't understand it. I would suggest a different cultural impediment is at work.

Americans, including its soldiers and military command, overwhelmingly regard the purpose of American military forces as the defense of the United States. We send our soldiers abroad to defeat an enemy who is attacking us. The enemy is seen as someone who has the ability to project force across oceans and across our borders, and we go abroad to destroy that enemiy's capacity or will to continue the attacks.

Anti-insurgent campaigns, on the other hand, are seen as inherently the tactics of imperial powers who go abroad to subdue a foreign population. By hypothesis that population does not have the capacity to project force at distance; otherwise they would not rely on the hardscrabble techniques of insurgency. Insurgency is by and large a defensive technique, and therefore preparing to fight it is a low priority in the thinking of military planners, the Congress and the public. The European empires - the thinking goes - might have needed to rely on the sordid techniques of counterinsurgency, but why would an honest, upright, democratic American soldier need to master the arts of going abroad to subdue weaker populations?

Now, granted, the reality of American action in the world does not quite match the ideal; and it can certainly be argue that the United States behaves like an imperial power, even though very few Americans see the US as an imperial power, and fewer still embrace that role. But the anti-imperial conception of America, and the strictly defensive purpose of its armed forces, are still powerful components of the American self-image. Perhaps someone can instruct me otherwise, but I don't think the fine young Americans at West Point are taught to view the United States as an imperial power.

It is notable that in the aftermath of Iraq, and the consequent desire to look to the past for lessons about successful counterinsurgency campaigns, people have been drawn to the example of the British empire and other European empires. I have to believe that most real Americans still feel a shiver of disgust in suggestions that we model ourselves on the very force that plays the role of nemesis in our founding myth.

All this said, the US did, for many years, wage effective counterinsurgency campaigns against Native Americans - did it not? - when the conquest of the West was on the agenda, and ruling the continent was seen as an exception to the defensive purpose of the armed forces. I would suggest the more recent cultural attitudes have more to do with the end of the Indian wars, the closing of the frontier, and the sense that America's manifest destiny had been fulfilled, rather than anything stemming from Southern behavior in the Civil War.

As far as the reluctance of the US to rely on insurgency itself as a technique of warfare, I see no such general reluctance. The United States has both funded and trained insurgencies throughout the Cold War, so it clearly understands how they work. Of corse, these actions were often viewed as aiding countries in defending themselves against Communist aggression.

Posted by Dan Kervick | September 8, 2006 9:10 AM

Didn't someone else already make a pretty good case that Hezbollah is roughly analogous to the KKK?

I believe that was Josh Lyman in the post-9/11 episode of The West Wing. :)

Posted by Ryan | September 8, 2006 9:20 AM

Specifically, the Union Army's successful pioneering of total warfare, the thorough annihilation of the enemy's economy and society.

I think we can all agree that it wasn't total enough.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | September 8, 2006 10:24 AM

This is a pretty silly column. Are you saying that somebody from, say, Masachusetts would have a better understanding of how to fight an insurgency than someone from Mississippi? Why? I would think that what little weight could be placed on geography would give the edge to southerners, what with their huntin' and fishin' and NASCAR and dip. And what evidence do you have that the US Army is still refighting the Civil War? More likely, we're still getting ready to fight the Soviets, aka The Threat.

The far better explanation is that when you have (or is it "are"?) a hammer you see the world as a nail. We have the rest of the world completely outclassed in terms of firepower, and so that's what we use. We shock and awe.

Posted by ostap | September 8, 2006 10:33 AM

I think Matt's theory falls short for all the reasons others have pointed out. However, I think the root cause of his error is that he is operating from a perspective of the Civil War which is heavily influenced by the mythology of the "lost cause." This pernicious and distorting influence still permiates popular understanding of the conflict despite the efforts of historians to dispel it's misty hagiography.

The elevation of Robert E. Lee to the status of sainthood is a primary example. For those interested in a dispassionate, critical assessment of his career and influence, I would suggest the book "Lee Considered: General Robert E. Lee and Civil War History" by Alan T. Nolan as a corrective to the standard Confederate apologist hugger mugger.

As others have noted, contrary the sentimentalized legends of a "gentleman's war" or the "war between brothers", neither the Confederacy nor the pre-war secessionists shrank from irregular warfare when they thought it suited their interests. As for the vaunted rejection of partisan resistance after the collapse of the the Army of Northern Virginia, which turned out to be more apparent than real as the history of reconstruction shows, this was less an expression of gentlemanliness than a recognition that the results of such a policy would have only deepened the disaster that the Southern States had brought down on themselves.

By its final year the war had become the "grim, remorseless, revolutionary struggle" that Lincoln had predicted. It is evidence of the continuing influence of "lost cause" mythology that the popular understanding of the war places this development entirely on the Union side. In fact, the developement was generalized, as any examination of actual events, as opposed to roseate sentimentality, would show.

Consult the Ft. Pillow massacre carried out by troops under the command of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the burning of Chambersburg, PA at the order of Jubal Early, the Battle of the Crater where confederate troops charged into battle with the cry of "Capture the whites and kill the niggers.", or the standing orders of the Confederate high command that any white officers captured while leading black troops were subject to summary execution and the consistent refusal of Confederate commanders to guarantee the safety of captured black soldiers. In the memorable phrasing of Gen. John Bell Hood at the battle of Alatoona pass: "I can guarantee the whites. The blacks will have to take their chances."

In short, any overt resort to partisan warfare at the end of conventional hostilities would have likely continued this trend toward increasingly ruthless and brutal reprisal with all material advantage and preponderance of force favoring the Union side. Wiser heads in the Confederate military doubtless understood this and chose formal surrender as the less disasterous course.

If we are going to draw lessons from our history for the present, they must be drawn from the facts of that history rather than romantic longings.

Posted by W.B. Reeves | September 8, 2006 10:45 AM

patience: you can select text -- it's just hard to see the selection because it turns to an only slightly different color..

Posted by JJ | September 8, 2006 10:45 AM

I believe that was Josh Lyman in the post-9/11 episode of The West Wing.

Might be. But I'm thinking of a blogger, and possibly an academic. He wrote it in the last month or so, after the...whatever we're calling the Hezbollah-Israel thing.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | September 8, 2006 10:50 AM

beowulf wrot: "In the last 100 years, the only nation that has succeeded at counterinsurgency is Nazi Germany. They had France so beat down that the Wehrmacht was there mostly to defend against Allied invasion."

I guess it depends on what you mean by counter-insurgency, but various South American nations defeated Communist insugents in the '60s and '70s. I think these are very instructive. Essentially, the Communists succeed in Cuba, which scares the living shit out of the South American elites. Fortunately for them, Che writes a book on how to conduct an insurgent war, which is probably more successful as an ironic manual for fighting counterinsurgency.

The problem was that the methods needed to succeed in counterinsurgency are brutal. It took fascist governments manned by a combination of technocrats and sadists to crush the insugents. The problem was that in Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, the guerrillas were defeated but the fascists just stayed in power, murdering and torturing persons who were no particular danger to their respective countries; people who had wrong political opinions or knew the wrong people or just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

That is what frightens me so much about the President's explicit support of torture as an anti-terror (and thus anti-insurgent) tactic. Aside from it's fundamental immorality, history shows that torturers don't stop torturing just because they've defeated their enemy. Because then you have to take care of all the people who seem like they might become enemies, or who are symathetic to the enemies, or who knew enemies, or who look like enemies...

Posted by RWB | September 8, 2006 10:54 AM

When did we beat the Phillipenes insurgency? After the Civil War, right?

Posted by Al | September 8, 2006 11:22 AM

Is (or has) there ever been an army keen on waging a counter-insurgency warfare? It sounds all dynamic and interesting but in actual fact it is so plain boring that one can actually go insane. Generally, people tend to get very creative when bored. Russian soldiers and the resistance fighters in Afghanistan, for instance, had high addiction rates to opium and hash.

Posted by Ali | September 8, 2006 1:24 PM

Beowulf: the French Resistance was not created as a guerilla army and by policy did not make a habit of killing German soldiers, because of the effective countermeasure of shooting large numbers of innocent hostages. The Resistance concentrated on propaganda, intelligence, and sabotage. London refused to supply heavy weapons to the impatient local Resistance groups. You only got guerrilla action just before or after D-Day; the massacre at Oradour in June 1944 was a reprisal for maquisard attacks. It would be wrong to think of the Wehrmacht as fighting a true insurgency in France. There was one in Yugoslavia, another in italy after the collapse of Mussolini, and possibly another in Greece. I don't think the German army was particularly successful in crushing them.

Posted by James Wimberley | September 8, 2006 4:44 PM

I think this is interesting speculation but not very accurate. I recall hearing (although I can't quite remember from whom) that the Army considers the Indian Wars to be their formative institutional experience, much more so than the civil war. And in addition to the war in the Phillipines, didn't the marines fight a number of counter-insurgency campaigns in the Caribbean and central America before WWII? My own speculation---which is all that it is---is that our armed forces, and especially the army, have rewarded soliders who are good bureaucrats for a long time. And the skills that makes a soldier an effective bureaucrat are not the skills that make him an effective counter-insurgent. were the formative institutional experience for the Army.

Posted by FTJ | September 8, 2006 7:25 PM

"...Your point about the War of Northern Aggression is equally ridiculous. For one, the South kicked the shit out the North for the majority of the war..."

Nice. I think the Southern infection isn't gentlemanly at all. It's lingering redneck pride about having kicked the shit out of somebody.

Whether or not it's the right person doesn't matter. Our national pride has been offended, somebody has to pay and anyone who looks Middle Eastern enough will do.

We have a foreign policy based on soothing a wounded ego. That's the infection that makes counterinsurgency fail.

Posted by Frank | September 9, 2006 2:35 PM

Unfortunately for my Yankee reactionary friends, the facts back up my Rebel assertions.

Union Battle Deaths: 140,414
Union Wounded: 281,881
Union Total Casualties: 422,295

Confederate BD: 74,524
Confederate W: 137,000
Confederate TC: 211,524

So it's pretty clear that Confederates kicked the shit out of the Yankees. A Yankee soldier was worth almost exactly 1/2 of a Rebel soldier.

But to Matt's point that the South should have allowed an invading force to occupy their homes and lands in order to fight a insurgency, when they were quite obviously capable of defending themselves in a conventional manner and repelling the invaders, it's poor logic based on his snobbish view of Southerners as racist. Insurgencies are defined by prolonged (decades long) asymmetrial warfare. The South rightly believed they had the advantage in conventional fighting and were looking to use it to repel the Northern invasion and inflict unsustainably high casualties on the North.

Posted by Just Karl | September 10, 2006 12:03 PM

Another conflict to look at in this context is Napoleon III's "Mexican Adventure" (1862-1867) when he tried to establish a friendly regime in Mexico. The French army was much superior at conventional fighting compared to the Mexican (in spite of the 5 de Mayo setback at Puebla), but never managed to control the whole country against determined Guerilla opposition.

After the end of the US Civil War, US support for the Mexican doomed the French enterprise.

Posted by khr | September 11, 2006 6:59 AM

"The South rightly believed they had the advantage in conventional fighting and were looking to use it to repel the Northern invasion and inflict unsustainably high casualties on the North."

This is not enough of an explanation why the Confederates did not fight a Guerilla war. There are enough historical examples where a country tried to defend itself agaisnt invasion by conventional means, failed, and continued the fight in Guerrilla fashion. The Peninsular War is just such an example.

Posted by khr | September 11, 2006 7:55 AM

There are enough historical examples where a country tried to defend itself agaisnt invasion by conventional means, failed, and continued the fight in Guerrilla fashion.

This is not Matt's proposition. Matt is suggesting that the South should have foregone a conventional defense in favor of an immediate insurgency.

Instead, the CSA amassed formal armies that quite agreeably attempted to defend Southern cities from capture by meeting the forces of the numerically, financially, logistically, and technologically superior union on the field of battle.

Posted by Just Karl | September 11, 2006 10:06 PM

I read the following comments and had a hard time stopping laughing:

rea: "The south certainly glorifies Nathan Bedford Forrest, who fought quasi guerilla-style cavalry campaigns before going on to found certain fraternal southern organizations. Or I guess the lastest Confederate-glorifying line is that Forrest didn't really found the KKK, or it became too commercial, so he left, man, or something."

ostap: "Consult the Ft. Pillow massacre carried out by troops under the command of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the burning of Chambersburg, PA at the order of Jubal Early, the Battle of the Crater where confederate troops charged into battle with the cry of 'Capture the whites and kill the niggers.'"

Since it is obvious that neither of the folks who posted these comments ever actually read history and have remained satisfied with propaganda it is right that FACT should rear its ugly head.

In 1871 at the height of Radical Reconstruction William Tecumseh Sherman chaired a Congressional investigation into the Ft. Pillow "Massacre" which also bled over into investigating the Klan.

Before the committee convened Sherman was asked the purpose of the investigation and was quoted as stating, "We are here to investigate Forrest, charge Forrest, try Forrest, convict Forrest, and hang Forrest." That made it pretty clear where they were headed and what they believed they could do.

What resulted was the finding that there was no "Ft. Pillow Massacre"...that there were isolated incidents along the riverbank which Forrest stopped as soon as he reached the scene. The Federal Official Records includes a report from a Union Lieutenant of Colored Artillery in which he credits the burning of Union barracks to another Union Lieutenant, states that there never was a surrender, and fails to make any mention of any "massacre" eventhough he was taken prisoner.

The FOR also includes a receipt from the Acting Commander of the U.S. Steamer Silver Cloud which acknowledged receiving from Forrest's command the most seriously wounded of the defenders of Ft. Pillow - including 14 United States Colored Troops.

Hardly the act of someone committing a "massacre."

Incidentally, that same Congressional committee concluded that Forrest's name was used in forming the Klan but that he had no involvement with the Klan other than working publicly and privately to have it disband.

So an 1871 Congressional committee and Sherman were the source of rea's "Confederate-glorifying line?"

Now to provide real history regarding the Battle of the Crater:

"George L. Kilmer, an officer of the Fourteenth New York Heavy Artillery, went into the crater with the first wave and reported afterward that when the USCT moved forward to charge the fort, some of white soldiers refused to follow them. Pandemonium broke out when the black soldiers could not continue the assault and started to retreat and come back into the crater. 'Some colored men came into the crater and there they found a fate worse than death in the charge . . . It has been positively asserted, that white men [Union] bayoneted blacks who fell back into the crater.'" - "The Sable Arm." Dudley T. Cornish, New York: Longman, Green & Co., 1956, p 274

History is an interesting topic...too bad that rea and ostap are so unfamiliar with it.

Posted by colkelley | December 9, 2006 11:45 AM