Hey, it’s the bicentennial of the War of 1812!

Remember that one?  Old Hickory, the White House on fire, the rockets’ red glare, and all that?  The Wall Street Journal has an interesting piece on what folks are doing to commemorate it.

Extending the American Battlefield Protection Program

…to help preserve early American sites is an idea whose time has come.  More info here.

Lincoln quoted and misquoted

I’ve been thinking about all the irrelevant and sometimes false Lincoln quotes that pop up in the news, which prompted a post over at the Lincoln Institute blog.  Enjoy!

“Insult and indignity”

You’re probably aware that a video which apparently shows a group of Marines urinating on enemy corpses in Afghanistan has been getting a good deal of attention lately.

Is there any possibility that we can connect this incident to some obscure bit of Revolutionary War trivia?  I’m glad you asked. Supposedly, in the aftermath of the Battle of King’s Mountain, some of the victorious Patriots did the very same thing to the body of Maj. Patrick Ferguson, the Scottish officer who commanded the Tories encamped on top of the ridge.

Ferguson's final resting place. Image from National Parks Traveler

Assuming it happened—I’ll get to that issue in a second—what could have prompted the militiamen to do such a thing?  Backcountry militia weren’t too scrupulous about observing the niceties of military convention, but relieving oneself on the corpse of the enemy commander still seems a little extreme.  In the eighteenth century, the bodies of dead soldiers often received callous treatment, but that generally wasn’t the case for officers, as Caroline Cox explains in her examination of life in the Continental Army.

In trying to account for the Whigs’ behavior, some commentators cite a proclamation Ferguson issued to rally the backcountry Tories when he discovered that the militiamen were on his trail.  It read in part as follows: “The Backwater men have crossed the mountains; McDowell, Hampton, Shelby, and Cleveland are at their head, so that you know what you have to depend upon.  If you choose to be p—d upon forever and ever by a set of mongrels, say so at once and let your women turn their backs upon you, and look out for real men to protect them.”  According to this line of thinking, the Whigs who urinated on Ferguson’s body were indulging in a bit of poetic justice.  What insult could be more fitting than to urinate on the body of a man who warned Carolinians that they’d be “p—d upon forever and ever” if the Whigs prevailed?

Interestingly enough, this most inflammatory part of Ferguson’s circular got watered down in later accounts. Many nineteenth-century historians who quoted it altered “p—d upon” to something more palatable to a genteel audience.  J.G.M. Ramsey and Lyman Draper changed it to “degraded,” while Washington Irving used “trodden upon.”

If you ask me, the question of what might have prompted the victors of King’s Mountain to urinate on Ferguson’s corpse is probably moot, because I can’t find any eyewitnesses who said it actually happened.  As far as I can tell, the oldest source that mentions any desecration of Ferguson’s body is a 1787 book by Banastre Tarleton, the controversial young officer who commanded the British Legion. He wrote, “The mountaineers, it is reported, used every insult and indignity, after the action, towards the dead body of Major Ferguson, and exercised horrid cruelties on the prisoners that fell into their possession.”  Tarleton wasn’t there, but he could have gotten the details from some of the defeated Tories, since many of them escaped during the march northward and made their way back to British-held territory.

None of this is to say that it couldn’t have happened; the aftermath of the Battle of King’s Mountain was notably ugly, even by the standards of the nasty partisan war that erupted in the Carolina backcountry.  Through some combination of rage, confusion, and ignorance, the Whigs continued to fire into the ranks of the surrendering Tories as the battle wound down, and during the march away from King’s Mountain they continued to plunder, beat, and slaughter their vanquished enemies.  Loyalist newspapers printed accounts of the horrors the prisoners endured, including letters from those members of Ferguson’s outfit who were lucky enough to survive the ordeal.  The controversy over treatment of the prisoners made it all the way up to the armies’ commanders; Cornwallis complained about the Whigs’ behavior in a letter to his American counterpart, who responded that if Patriots were committing outrages against British troops, they were simply giving as good as they got.

Whether or not those outrages included urinating on the body of a fallen officer, the whole episode demonstrates that debates over soldiers’ conduct in wartime aren’t new, and it probably won’t stop when the seemingly endless War on Terror finally grinds to a halt.

Brian McKnight has an article

…over at the Times blog about early Civil War battles in Appalachia.  Check it out.

Research isn’t his strong suit

Richard Rapaport shows us why hard-hitting journalists make the big bucks:

At the start of the Revolution, South Carolina informed the Continental Congress that it would refuse to sign the Declaration of Independence unless slavery was recognized. South Carolina even demanded the right to disregard an embargo on trade with Great Britain agreed to by the 12 other colonies. It was an exemption that allowed South Carolina to maintain its lucrative rice trade and remain among the richest colonies throughout the Revolution, which it largely sat out, happily occupied by the British army.

Um, South Carolina didn’t exactly sit that one out, dude.  The Palmetto State possibly played host to more Rev War engagements than any of the thirteen.  By one estimate, almost one-fifth of all combat deaths in the entire war took place in South Carolina during the last two years of fighting.  “Happily occupied” is a most inappropriate description of a state riven by bloody partisan warfare for much of 1780 and 1781.

Granted, this has little bearing on his larger point, which is that South Carolina has been and continues to be a state which is off its collective rocker.  Personally, I’ve always been of the opinion that this reputation for extremism has been overstated.  The evidence Rapaport presents—a restriction of the right of manumission in the colonial period, rampant secessionism in the mid-1800′s, and so on—doesn’t really indicate a greater degree of lunacy than that found in any other state’s history.  I’m not sure how a social scientist would account for centuries of sustained kookery on such a scale.  Some heretofore unidentified Lamarckian process—an inheritance of acquired political characteristics? Something in the water?

Oh, well.  Not being a South Carolinian myself, I suppose I don’t have much at stake in the matter.  I do travel to the Palmetto State on a fairly regular basis, and wouldn’t at all mind taking up residence there, so that probably explains why the article irked me.  That, and one other thing: Rapaport’s byline describes him as a “Bay Area writer.”  Surely San Franciscans above all people should hesitate before diagnosing an entire population with psychosis?  People who live in glass houses, etc.

A few miscellaneous Rev War items

First off, happy Cowpens anniversary.  Here’s a report on this year’s festivities.

While we’re on the subject of the war in the Carolinas, the marker for Pyle’s Defeat (or “Pyle’s Hacking Match,” as it’s more colorfully known) apparently needs some major revision.

During last night’s Republican debate, Newt Gingrich invoked Old Hickory’s backcountry boyhood: “We’re in South Carolina. South Carolina in the Revolutionary War had a young 13-year-old named Andrew Jackson. He was sabred by a British officer and wore a scar his whole life. Andrew Jackson had a pretty clear-cut idea about America’s enemies: Kill them.”  That sums up Jackson’s attitude pretty accurately, I think, although throwing in the anecdote seems a little gratuitous.

Finally, Richard Ketchum, author of a number of popular books on the War for Independence, passed away last week.

Farragut marker may get a new spot

We may be arriving at a satisfactory solution to the Case of the Disappearing Admiral Farragut Monument.  The folks in Knox County are working on an agreement that will hopefully make it possible for the marker to be set up somewhere near Farragut’s birthplace.

Unveiling the Hunley

If you’ve been waiting for a good excuse to visit Charleston, now you can get a clear and unobstructed look at the Hunley in all its nautical glory.

The occupation of Vicksburg

Didn’t this city suffer enough?

Last year’s frightening flooding of the Mississippi River didn’t do any direct damage to the site of one of the pivotal battles of the Civil War. It did bring in some undesirable new neighbors.

Park officials say a pack of wild hogs seeking higher ground moved in and are rooting up the landscape at Vicksburg National Military Park, an 1,800-acre park where thousands of Union and Confederate troops fought and died in 1863.

They fear the hogs could undermine some of the park’s 1,370 monuments, its national cemetery and trenches and earthworks on the bluffs above the river. The hogs could also startle or injure more than 1 million annual visitors.

“It looks like the world’s biggest Rototiller has gone through some areas,” park Superintendent Mike Madell said. “People think we plowed some of the areas they’ve been in.”

Maybe they’re just trying to throw up earthworks:

“It’s an all-out war on them,” he [Jim Walker of the Mississippi Department of Wildlife Fisheries and Parks] said. “But hunting will never get rid of them. They can breed three times a year and a sow can have eight to 10 pigs each time. You do the math.”

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue…as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”