Comment: Thomas Mann quote.

Literature is not a calling, it is a curse, believe me! When does one begin to feel the curse? Early, horribly early. At a time when one ought by rights still to be living in peace and harmony with God and the world. It begins by your feeling yourself set apart, in a curious sort of opposition to the nice, regular people; there is a gulf of ironic sensibility, of knowledge, scepticism, disagreement, between you and the others; it grows deeper and deeper, you realize that you are alone; and from then on any rapprochement is simply hopeless! What a fate!

Thomas Mann, Tonio Kröger

Comment: a non-essentialist subconscious mimetic impressionism.

Copyright © 2011 Bob R Bogle



The manner of mimesis in impressionist painting is at essential odds with that of the realists. I'm trying to devise a literary equivalent of impressionism in something approaching a communal subconsciousness.

Mimesis. Mimetic. Mimetic muscles expressing emotion. Smile, smile, smile. Not to be confused with memetics: memes, and memory transfer. Unit of culture. Shorthand sigla of belief infiltrating the universal unconscious proliferating like a viral outbreak. Epidemic proportions, a is to b as. Siglum. Sigla. To be distinguished from diegesis. Mimesis imitation imitator mimicry representation. A step removed or more. Tumbled down the rabbit hole from God. To reflect nature. Mirror mirror on the wall. The perilous seductions of poetry and wild art. Untamed. Spinning, hypnotizing mirrors, like some switched on Mondrian. To raise up an internally consistent reality so compelling that empathy and identification follow. Tragedy is falling. A diminution of status. One falls. Tumble down. Diegesis the narrative. Narrator. Commentary.

The Civil War, 150 Years Later | BackStory with the American History Guys

The Civil War, 150 Years Later | BackStory with the American History Guys

Three podcasts containing rather extraordinary insights into the Civil War of a sort you don't often come across. Highly recommended.

Excerpt: In a narrow boutique (wandering rocks).

Another excerpt, although perhaps you wouldn't think so.  Its origins are from a dream of a few weeks ago, but I wrote it today.

Copyright © 2011 Bob R Bogle

Bravery, or folly?  Friends in high places.  Straight-spined Jason sailed between the clashing rocks, Hera's unwavering eye on high watching him.  Hera's protection.  Right into the teeth of the Planctae.  Sprays of plankton-seething streamers of foamy sea ribbons, surging jets spurting heavenward among gnashing, grinding chondritic molars.  Release a dove into India inky storms raging on a rolling, churning dead man's sea.  Thanks a lot, the emancipated fowl of fate must have mused, eying her liberator coldly.  But he was more Odysseus than Jason, he thought, having no benefactors or well-wishers.  He worked alone.  Day after day, solitary, brow furrowed, taking up dividers and compass and charts, he sought to contrive intricate windings beneath the beetling rocks down dangerous alleyways and dark avenues toward another chance rendezvous, and he had only argyle socks for luck.  They looked foolish, but they remained hidden under the cuffs of his slacks.  Mostly hidden.

Maps filled his mind.  For the negotiation of time and space.  A thin needle slipping through fabric, or Newtonian, sailing strange seas of thought alone.  What faithful companions had he?  No heroes, only the ghosts of the accursed and condemned.  Tantalus.  Sisyphus.  Orion.  How far can the rules bend before they snap?  Seeking out random passages through a Brownian sea of strangers and ragged people.  Faces.  Prefer always morphing, interchangeable unknown gray-brown souls to friend or foe.  Intersection video mounted high on traffic light poles to freeze frame speeders red light runners and license plates.  Flatten four dimensions to two with an admissible timestamp.  To butter you like a butterfly pinned on a toasty time slice.  Spies everywhere, their bowties are cameras.  Melt into anonymity.  Draw no attention to one's self.  Now chose:  light or shadow?  Either Orwell.  Paranoia's encircling coils.  Long suburban runs and short series of arcs in poorer quarters and backtrack past the horseless racetrack where fish skeletons school in the Rialto and dart past Grant Glenn Fort Lowell, culminating for a too brief flickering moment between bookstore stacks or a glimpse from the floor level to an upper walkway in an acid bright-lit shopping mall or, just once, for two hours in the back of a cool, darkened movie theater.  Unrepeatable.  Eschew pattern.  Wander.  Stagger.  Suggestive of half-aware stragglers, but secretly sharks prowling cold waters, or police cruisers gliding through crouching, dubious fire-blackened neighborhoods.

In a narrow boutique too crammed with knickknacks and cheap novelty bric-a-brac, in a dim corner near a wheel of tie-dye scarves he stood like one of many warm-bodied tourists in the early evening dusk who had accidentally stumbled in.  Watching from the corners of his eyes.  But he only observed by degrees, teasing himself, where she was at another wheel, feet slightly apart and at an angle, unseeing him, knowing she was early.  She stood so she could see both the counter and the door.  Long strings of necklace beads were before her.  She looked down at them and was running her fingers among their abundant cascades, flowing like falling water.  Putting her hand in, moving it sideways, retracting it, the beads played along her palm, rattling down.  They were very long necklaces, a hundred of them identical, cheap, with small, round, iridescent beads, dark purple with shimmers of green and microbursts of turquoise when they caught the light a certain way.  Flashing hummingbird beads.  He was watching her, yes, her eyes downcast, but with a faint smile on her mouth.  Anticipation?  Yes, and anxiety.  Eager and jumpy.  That excitement.  The kohl-eyed girl behind the counter said something to her.  No, just looking.  That one smiled dishonestly, nodded, turned to another customer.  Was it safe?  It was safe.  He let slip the silk scarf he'd been stroking at unawares and stepped forward silently just as she was wandering around the necklace rack, turning her back to his approach, her hand still pulling lightly through the parallel columns of beads, her eyes watching the light dance on the tidal wave ripple she was making.  When his hand touched the small of her back and he said her name into her ear she started suddenly, her hand jerking back.  It snapped one of the necklaces, and hundreds of small, iridescent purple and chartreuse beads were instantly popping and bouncing across the wooden floor.  Everyone in the shop turned to look directly at the two of them.

"I'm sorry.  I'm sorry!" she said.

The severe-featured girl at the counter, eighteen or nineteen, gave her a sharp look.  "Never mind," she said, all scorn and hauteur.

He, laughing, paid for the damage.  Just a few bucks.  "Sorry for the mess."  They left together, and moments later they were apart.  Again.

A Walk Through Savannah's Civil War: Prison camps.

VIDEO: "A Walk Through Savannah's Civil War": Prison camps


Posted: December 18, 2011 - 12:02am | Updated: December 18, 2011 - 7:44am

By Richard Burkhart
In July 1864, the Savannah Daily Morning News reported that nearly 1,200 “Yankee Officers” were to be transferred to Savannah from Camp Oglethorpe in Macon.

That city was being flooded with a high number of Confederate sick and wounded from the fighting around Atlanta and needed to move the prisoners to lighten its burden. Within two weeks of Atlanta’s capture, trains carrying hundreds of enlisted Union prisoners from Andersonville, with hopes of being exchanged for Southern prisoners, were also headed into Savannah.

To accommodate this influx, two prison camps were erected on each side of Forsyth Park.

The camp for the nearly 6,000 enlisted soldiers was on the site of the city jail, while the officers were kept on the grounds of the poorhouse and hospital.

The camps were not open long, however.

By the middle of November, Gen. William T. Sherman had left Atlanta and begun his “March to the Sea.”

And, with prisoner exchanges coming to a halt, the Union soldiers were transferred from Savannah, and all signs of the prison camps were removed.

Richard Burkhart/Savannah Morning News

In 1864, Union officers were held as prisoners of war on the grounds of the Poor House and Hospital, possibly making camp under this very tree.

Ulysses S. Grant Memorial - Smarthistory

Ulysses S. Grant Memorial - Smarthistory

If you ever get to DC, make sure you set aside some time to look closely at these tremendous sculptures.

Excerpt: Old Tom's childhood.

Copyright © 2011 Bob R Bogle



A new passage from the novel.

He remembered his mother's wedding.  It was his earliest memory because she had dressed the three of them up in nice new clothes.  He didn't know where she got the clothes, but they had not fit quite right.  His collar was tight and itchy, and he was barefoot in the soft grass.  Tom remembered the green grass and a tall, funny-looking man in a long, black coat standing under a big tree with a Bible.  He thought the funny man had a splotchy red face, but maybe he'd made up that part.  And he remembered that he was holding little Mary's hand.  He never forgot that, or how the skies were dark and it started to rain and they had to run.  That was all he remembered, just that little picture in his mind.  He didn't even remember seeing his mother or soon-to-be stepfather that day.

He knew why he was holding Mary's hand.  His mother never told him to do it.  He knew to do it.  It was because Francis was close by, surely smirking.  He was always making faces, but there was never any sparkle in his eyes.  Frank's eyes always seemed flat to Tom.  Dead, like a snake's eyes.  They were the same age, but Francis was bigger, taller and fatter.  A big boy, his stepfather said.  Fat, Tom always thought.  Frank was a bad boy.  Tom didn't like him.  He was always poking at Tom and Mary, and Tom always tried to protect his little sister.

"Be nice to Frank, Tom," his mother always said in the years afterward.  "He's your brother."

They weren't brothers, though.  They would never be brothers.  And when something bad happened, who was it who got in trouble?  Tom, not Frank.

"Come here, Tom," his stepfather said, "and bring the switch."  And behind him stood Frank, smirking with his dull snake eyes.

They lived in Maryville, but it wasn't long before they moved to Iowa.  He knew it wasn't very long because he couldn't remember much about it and Mary never remembered it at all.  In Iowa they had the little farm.  Those were the best days.  His stepfather worked the farm and they had their chores.  There was always Frank to look out for, but they had a pony and they used to play and go fishing, every day it seemed.  By then there were two more little ones for his mother to watch out for, so they were on their own a lot.  And then baby Susan, always colicky and crying.

His stepfather, whom Tom thought of as Old Man Brown, was a grim, gaunt man, about twice as old as his mother.  He smelled like sweat and dirt, and his face was sunburnt with dirt on his neck and under his yellow fingernails.  His dark hair was always spiky and his beard was rough and uneven.  He spent his days in the fields but his rows were never very straight and he couldn't keep ahead of the weeds.  He never made a good crop and he cursed Tom for being too lazy and too small to help.  But usually he didn't speak to his family and was quick to fetch the switch when the children were close at hand.  You could see easily that he was Frank's father.  Sometimes when it was especially hot, or late in the evening when the sun had gone down and he couldn't see to work anymore, Old Man Brown would meet his shifty neighbor, Clogan, at Clogan's barn, which wasn't much of a barn but only some old gray boards hobnobbed together.  If you were careful you could sneak up on them behind some bushes and listen to them cussing and chewing tobacco and drinking from Clogan's jars.  Tom's mother did not like Clogan and said he was white trash, and Tom thought so, too.

When Tom was ten or eleven Old Man Brown decided to make a go of it in the West.  No one had told the children.  Tom didn't think Old Man Brown had told Clogan that they were going.  They loaded up the rickety wagon very late one night.  Tiny Susan, wrapped tight in rags, was whimpering and his mother pulled her very close to keep her as quiet and warm as possible.  It was a small wagon and they had to leave most of their things behind.  The old man was angry and tense, and he was shushing them to keep very quiet as the two horses pulled the heavy wagon out from the little farm house shack.  They didn't look back.  The night they left was very cold.  Frank sat up front between them and Tom was in the back with the smaller children shoved in among their belongings.  Though his breath puffing from the rags wrapped across his face he could see the frozen, silent stars very high above.

It was impossible to stay awake when it was so dark and cold, but in the morning when the sun came up it was exciting.  Tom had never been on such a long trip before.  Frank and he were also excited because everybody knew about the Indians.  His mother did not seem very happy about it and she pulled the baby very close whenever anyone talked about going to Nebraska.  In the morning daylight Frank ran around the wagon as it rolled along, hooting and trying to scalp everybody.

It took a few days to get there.  They came down to Missouri and through Rock Port and crossed the Brownville ferry.  Tom had never seen a river so big before, all churning thick red-brown with mud with great trees tumbling through it over and over, and he stared in amazement as the ferry went across.  "I wish we could take a steamer down this river!" he said.

"This is the river that swallowed up your Daddy," his mother said.  Susan started to cry again.

Tom kept staring at the brown churning water as the ferry moved slowly across.  He didn't speak.

At his side, Frank whispered:  "The river that swallowed up your Daddy," in a mocking baby voice, with his dull snake eyes lightless, poking Tom in the stomach.

George PA Healy: The Peacemakers.

George PA Healy: The Peacemakers.

The Peacemakers is an 1868 painting by George PA Healy. It depicts the meeting of 28 March 1865 by Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, and David Porter on the steamer River Queen at City Point on the James River near the ongoing siege of Petersburg. Here these men traced out the end of the war and the peace which they hoped would follow.

Henry Clay Bruce, 1836-1902. The New Man. Twenty-Nine Years a Slave. Twenty-Nine Years a Free Man.

Very interesting slave story in which north Missouri is prominently featured. Much takes place in the same place and time where "Old Tom" from Memphis Blues Again spent his youth.

Henry Clay Bruce, 1836-1902. The New Man. Twenty-Nine Years a Slave. Twenty-Nine Years a Free Man.

Amazon.com: Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies) (9780807825303): Stephen Kantrowitz: Books

Amazon.com: Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies) (9780807825303): Stephen Kantrowitz: Books

A reviewer of this book at Amazon says:

I'm currently reading "Ben Tillman And The Reconstruction Of White Supremacy" as part of my ongoing effort to understand the failure of Reconstruction. This is an excellent book that, as one of the reviewers has indicated, is more a history of the post-Reconstruction development of white supremacy in the United States than it is of "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman, although Tillman's life story may be said to be a perfect illustration of white supremacy. Tillman, as a "Red-Shirt" mob and militia leader, governor, and U.S. Senator,loved to brag of his successful efforts to disenfranchise Afro Americans through fraud, murder, manipulation of the laws and legal processes, usurpation of legitmate governmental authority,campaigns of terror, lies, deceits, and the dividing and conquering of any cooperative, biracial political efforts by playing whites and their fears of "negro domination" against Afro Americans and their interests. But more, Tillman did not limit his attacks to Afro Americans aspiring to realize the full benefits of citizenship: poor, landless, uninfluential whites, supporters and sympathizers for Afro Americans' increased citizenship rights, whites who disagreed with his policies and political rule, Republicans, and the federal government were all his enemies and he attacked all of them with the same duplicitous ferocity. It is all too apparent that the legacy that he left was embraced by racists and segregationists throughout most of this century in their opposition to civil rights activities.
For those interested in the "real", too long hidden history of race and race relations in this country, this book is an absolute must for their libraries.

In my view, Kantrowitz joins Leon Litwack, Ira Berlin, Eric Foner, W.E.B. DuBois, Frazier, Woodward and the other luminaries of historical writing who worked to provide an accurate, inclusive history of the peoples of the United States of America with this book. "Ben Tillman..." is a book that will fascinate, enrage, infuriate, disgust, amaze, and disturb its readers, especially those who recognize what appear to be parallels between the latter parts of the 19th and 20th centuries and the beginning of the 20th and 21st centuries regarding race and politics.

Perhaps history is circular after all. Read the book and decide for yourself.

30 January 1942, Ruleville, Mississippi: Not Robert Johnson.

Montgomery Bus Boycott: December 1955-December 1956.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott, in which African Americans refused to ride city buses in Montgomery, Alabama, to protest segregated seating, took place from December 5, 1955, to December 20, 1956, and is regarded as the first large-scale demonstration against segregation in the U.S. On December 1, 1955, four days before the boycott began, Rosa Parks, an African-American woman, refused to yield her seat to a white man on a Montgomery bus. She was arrested and fined. The boycott of public buses by blacks in Montgomery began on the day of Parks' court hearing and lasted 381 days. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately ordered Montgomery to integrate its bus system, and one of the leaders of the boycott, a young pastor named Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-68), emerged as a prominent national leader of the American civil rights movement in the wake of the action.

http://www.history.com/topics/montgomery-bus-boycott?cmpid-Social_Facebook_topics_120111

Chuck Berry: Memphis, Tennessee.

15 coffins unearthed when property owner digs for pool on edge of French Quarter.

When Vincent Marcello began planning to install a swimming pool on his French Quarter property, he suspected construction crews might find something other than dirt in the backyard. Specifically, Marcello thought workers may unearth human bones, knowing his luxury condo near North Rampart and Toulouse streets sat on part of the city's first burial grounds.

15 coffins unearthed when property owner digs for pool on edge of French Quarter | NOLA.com

Driving a 2010 Lincoln through 1860 Missouri.

Copyright © 2011 Bob R Bogle



Google Earth is so great.  Here's part of my 2010 driving route projected into 1860 Missouri:

'Midnight Rising' Takes a New Look at Life, Legend of John Brown.

Watch 'Midnight Rising' Explores Life, Legend of John Brown on PBS. See more from PBS NEWSHOUR.

Concerning Sterling Price and the nature of the novel.

Copyright © 2011 Bob R Bogle



I have recently finished reading two books about one-time Missouri Governor and Confederate Major-General Sterling Price.  These two were Robert E Shalhope's 1971 biography Sterling Price:  Portrait of a Southerner, and Thomas C Reynolds' unfinished 1867 manuscript titled General Sterling Price and the Confederacy, edited and annotated by Robert G Schultz and published in 2009.  I purchased Schultz' book at the Missouri History Museum on the cold, rainy morning of 28 March 2010, and the Shalhope book sometime later on Ebay.

Price figures prominently in the Missouri Civil War saga, and in a few decades preceding, and a synchronism entangles his life and times with those of one of the characters of Memphis Blues Again, Old Tom, as well as his distant descendant, Max Bainbridge; as such, coming to terms with Price is relevant to the novel's conception and construction.   Although Price fought for the rebels and Old Tom for the Federals, I'd long hoped to learn to admire Price.  However, the more I've read and learned about him, and the deeper I've read between the lines, the more I've come to despise Price.  I see lingering bits of him in the present, peering out gluttonously from behind the pig-eyes of the privileged occupying positions of power, they whose only allegiance is to advancing their own status at the expense of all the subordinates and underlings who are depending on them for a certain minimum degree of wisdom and guidance.  But on closer inspection in the present, as in the 1860s, we discover occasionally that presumed philanthropic impulse is sometimes simply absent.  Sterling Price was all about Sterling Price and no one else.  When he was lucky his fortunes, and those of the state of Missouri, rose; when his luck ran out he fell, heedless of, and disavowing any responsibility for, the ruination that littered his wake.  Confederate Missouri fell, too.  Whether that was lucky for the state is for others to decide, although I certainly have my own opinion.

As I've been working on the second draft of Memphis Blues Again I've come to appreciate a need to include a number of chapters set in the 1860s that will be directly intercut alongside the contemporary main thread of the story.  Among other things, these chapters will provide timely perspectives of Price's marches, as well as of the Ewing brothers on the Kansas-Missouri border, and later outside besieged Vicksburg.  Having now read these two Price books, I've reconsidered the portrait of him I'm going to paint in those particular chapters.

But also I confess that my conception of the basic structure of the novel is shifting, too.  It's occurred to me in the last couple of days, although the dissatisfaction has been growing incrementally for some time, that the novel as written is not sufficiently outrageous.  What I mean is that there is a massive impulse at work in this novel to try to get deep into the engines of history, and specifically to give a comprehensive accounting of why America is, in the present, the country that she is.  Trying to squeeze all of this into the conventional forms of the novel is a tight and constraining fit.  Anyway I've never been too good at being conventional, and increasingly I've been asking myself:  Why should I restrict my own grand vision in this novel to conform to and appease the stodgy, somnolent expectations of others?  I've been thinking lately about Herman Melville and Walt Whitman and Thomas Pynchon and especially about James Joyce.  And I remember most clearly that the idea of the novel is, after all, a rather recent human invention.  Human beings are under no obligation to shape their creativity in such a way as to accommodate the formats of the past.

In other words, increasingly I am of the opinion that in Memphis Blues Again I should not only tell the story I have to tell, but I should also have a go at reinventing this object known as the novel.  Exactly what this means I don't clearly know, yet, except that it involves nonchronological time; time as an extended solid, perhaps, so that past and present are all One Thing; all One single story; inseparable; fused.  That, it seems to me, is essential to breathing life into Memphis Blues Again.

Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again [Cat Power].

Not much of a video, but a pretty brilliant cover of the song.

Looking for Lincoln: the great emancipator or white supremacist?

An interesting documentary that tends to focus on questions of Lincoln's racism vs his white supremacism:  emotionally-charged terms whose meanings are quite divergent within the context of their times.  (Personally I try to be cautious with the word "racism," which I hold to be an imprecise term having too many different meanings that don't stand up very well at all over centuries.) I don't altogether agree with the picture that's presented here regarding the hows and whys of the Emancipation Proclamation: see my previous post on the matter.

Looking for Lincoln, Part 1
Looking for Lincoln, Part 2

Thoughts on the Emancipation Proclamation.

Copyright © 2011 Bob R Bogle



As part of an online class I'm taking on the Civil War, I wrote a little theme on the Emancipation Proclamation a short while back.  Thought I'd share it here:

The assignment is to describe "the battle and events that led to Lincoln's issue of the Emancipation Proclamation." But neither Antietam nor the preceding campaigns in Virginia of 1862 "led to" the Emancipation Proclamation in any directly causal way. It's better to think of the Emancipation Proclamation as a political act rather than a consequence guided by military events of the day. I judge that Lincoln had concluded to take this course very early in the war, but it was McClellan's softness in the Peninsula Campaign (the Seven Days ended on 1 July at Malvern Hill) which pushed him to do it now.

McClellan's lack of aggressiveness may have been intrinsic to his character. It was probably also influenced by a reluctance to see his beloved spit-and-polish army take casualties, a frame of mind antithetical to a successful military man, occasional severe damage to an army being after all central to its raison d'être. But even more corrosive of his field command ability was an incapacity to reconcile his own political views of slavery with the necessary brutality called for if the war were to be won. This internal division was at once severely debilitating to McClellan's leadership skills in the field and influential on Lincoln's future course. For Lincoln, the Peninsula Campaign fiasco provided insight into McClellan's contradictory impulses, symbolic of the overall mixed conduct of the war.

Lincoln arrived at Harrison's Landing in Virginia on 8 July to meet with the retreating McClellan, who presented a letter, impertinently (although sincere and heart-felt) advising the President of how the war should be conducted. Besides mirroring McClellan's inconsistent and warring psychic impulses in anguished tones, the letter warned explicitly that emancipation must never become a war aim. I suspect it was at that moment, or not very long after, that Lincoln determined emancipation must become a war aim, to be explicitly articulated soon, for larger historical and moral reasons, and to begin to débride once and for all these very doubts that crippled McClellan, and much of the army, and much of the country. Certain lingering pre-war sentiments, Lincoln realized, must be quickly jettisoned, and more assertive impulses in the war's conduct must be fortified and encouraged. Returning to Washington, Lincoln read his initial emancipation draft to William Seward and Gideon Welles on 13 July before presenting it to his entire cabinet on the 22nd.

The Emancipation Proclamation did free probably about 20,000 slaves immediately in parts of rebel states currently under Union control, and emancipation would proceed apace as Union armies progressively took and held Southern territory, especially following Sherman to Atlanta and Savannah. Nevertheless, the proclamation was directed at the states in rebellion (or the states of a sovereign nation, if you look at this through a Southern lens), where Lincoln's declarations were deemed irrelevant. Many now imagine it to have been of only symbolic significance. Cynical revisionists mock the irony that the Proclamation allowed slave owners living in the Union to legally keep their slaves. But these arguments, or sneers, miss the point.

Like only a few other participants in the war and its satellite occupations (people like Jefferson Davis, James Longstreet, US Grant, Edwin Stanton and perhaps William Seward come to mind), Lincoln always grasped the big picture. For all the agonies the Union endured in trying to win the war, especially in the Eastern Theater, Lincoln saw clearly that there was no reason why the North shouldn't ultimately prevail, simply as a matter of resources and mathematics, provided it did not lose the will to fight and accumulate casualties to the very end. For all the talk that continues to this day, Lincoln saw clearly that the South could never win a military victory. Its only hope, which was a legitimate hope and an authentic possibility ‑‑ and Robert E Lee understood this implicitly even if so very few Southerners ever did (or do) ‑‑ was to attempt, with military actions, to buy time to win a political victory. That is to say, the South needed to encourage the Northern public to pressure its politicians into ending the war and recognizing the CSA as an independent nation. McClellan would have settled for this approach, as he made abundantly clear during his run for the presidency in 1864.

But Lincoln would not. Lincoln knew he could win the war with military might and hold the Union together, and he would. But also, realizing he was uniquely situated in history to do so, he determined to simultaneously close the unhealing wound that had tormented the country from the beginning: the source of perpetual rancor, slavery. The Emancipation Proclamation was largely a symbolic first step, but its true impact was less in the number of slaves that it freed than its nuclear assault on the psyche both North and South. That objective was Lincoln's true target, as it is for any effective politician. Major tectonic shifts in psychological and political terrain followed, and these, unfortunately, remain by and large incomprehensible to most people in the present, for whom the Civil War means little more than: "Lincoln freed the slaves." For the North the Emancipation Proclamation initiated a long-running assault on old attitudes exemplified by McClellan's, for example. The very purpose of the war did begin to shift in the public imagination from merely preserving the Union to also ending slavery; it became a new and different war. Southerners, on the other hand, understood immediately that the Emancipation Proclamation was a "mean trick," and they were exactly right. Precisely because its states had seceded, the South now understood that it had handed Lincoln the opportunity to end slavery forever. They were trapped by their own actions. The fact that Lincoln deliberately targeted only states in rebellion for emancipation powerfully underscored this fact: the South alone had forfeited its right to keep slaves. The South now must win the war, and every day that passed made it clearer how big that challenge was.

There was no excuse for the Army of the Potomac to be driven off the Peninsula. It was not a military defeat but a form of psychological self-immolation on McClellan's part. This was made all the more obvious by Lee's withdrawing his army from its defensive position between McClellan and Richmond (had anyone but Lee done so it would have been called brash, or reckless, or even contemptuous of McClellan) to come to Jackson's aid at Manassas. Even at that late moment McClellan could have redeemed himself by pivoting and capturing Richmond, and then setting about the business of defeating Lee in the aftermath of Second Manassas, but of course McClellan did not. The credit for a great military victory on the Peninsula should not go to Lee, but scorn should go to McClellan.

Second Manassas was a fascinating battle full of honor for the South and foolishness and disarray for the Union, maybe the most forgotten of the really important battles of the war, but (regrettably!) space precludes my talking more about it here. But some small discussion of Antietam is indicated, not so much for either its concurrence with the Emancipation Proclamation or McClellan's frustrating combination of activity and dithering, but to further contemplate the effects of the changing psychology of the war.

As the Emancipation Proclamation would reverse Lincoln's original stated war aims, initiating fundamental changes in Northern psychology, so Lee's first incursion into the North sent shock waves through the collective Southern psyche. The intended goals of this incursion were to promote a Southern political victory, never a final Southern military victory, by intimidating Northerners to petition for peace, and by demonstrating to European observers a Southern resilience that might bring new allies and resources to the Southern cause. But one problem with the strategy was that it immediately gave the lie to the myth of the South being purely the recipient of Northern aggression. It became infinitely harder to make that case afterwards, and indeed many Southern soldiers refused to cross the Potomac into Maryland even after the recent string of Southern victories and the rising cachet of Robert E Lee and Stonewall Jackson: invading the North was no fight many Southerners had ever signed up for. Also, in more western states, this invasion of the North smacked of further Richmond adventurism at the expense of their own people; again, most Southerners always failed to understand that Davis and Lee were trying to win a political battle, not a military war, and so in that sense the strategy of invading the North was perfectly sound. Nevertheless, an unsettling psychological line had been crossed, as real as a geographical borderline, and how Southerners thought of the nature of the war had to change at that moment. The conjunction of the Northern incursion and the Emancipation Proclamation brought the whole war into a new phase.

Which says nothing at all about what actually happened at Antietam. I find this battle striking for several reasons other than those I've already mentioned. Of first importance is how close Sharpsburg is to the Virginia border: Lee failed to penetrate into the North to any significant degree at all, and the psychological damage in the South probably outweighs any gain among Northern pacifists or European observers. The "dirty little secret" of Antietam is how close Lee came to throwing his army away. McClellan's actions were predictably mixed, but Hooker shone, as he had on the Peninsula, and Burnside performed reasonably well, despite his notorious bad luck first manifesting itself conspicuously here. I'll conclude by pointing out that the massive casualties that took place in the Peninsula, Second Manassas, and especially at Antietam, coupled to poor performances by McClellan and Pope, finally allowed for a proper reassessment of Grant after the bloodshed of Shiloh. And so a profound psychological shift in understanding of the bloodiness of the war was setting in. By the conclusion of Antietam and the announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation, everyone on both sides was becoming much more realistic about the costs and the stakes of the Civil War.

In addition, I thought later that I should have amended what's probably an extremely important point concerning the Emancipation Proclamation, and that's the following.  A terribly important reason that slavery became such a soul-searching problem before the war was the issue of financial compensation:  slaves being expensive property, it was inconceivable that the abolitionists could have their way and the federal government not pay for each liberated man, woman and child.  Emancipation provided the solution to the problem.  By giving the rebellious South a deadline to come back into the nest or else, Lincoln sidestepped the economic quandary:  the Southern slaves would be freed without the federal government paying their owners a dime.  This is also largely why the South viewed the Emancipation Proclamation as being so treacherous:  Lincoln had found an essentially legal way to steal their property, and there was nothing they could do about it.  I think it's altogether possible that such a solution could not have been arrived at except during civil war.  To a degree the whole war can be thought of as the federal government stealing private property and wiping out a Southern political system to which the Republicans were opposed.  I'll have to think more on all these ideas.....

Robert E Shalhope's 1971 Sterling Price: Portrait of a Southerner.

Copyright © 2011 Bob R Bogle


http://www.amazon.com/Sterling-portrait-Southerner-Robert-Shalhope/dp/0826201032

I just finished reading Robert E Shalhope's 1971 Sterling Price:  Portrait of a Southerner.  When I started reading this book I was neutral on the subject of Price and mildly hopeful that I would find him admirable.  I have concluded the opposite:  Price was, for much of his life, uncommonly lucky, and he attributed his good fortune to a superior mind.  But he did not possess a superior mind or soul.  He was an obnoxious aristocrat, a bigot, and a conceited fool with an unfortunate ability to draw unfortunate men to him who would follow him to their own destruction.  I find Price to be less courageous than frequently dim-witted and manipulative.  In the final analysis his only principles were white supremacy and an unquenchable desire for personal power, as well as a few niggling obsessions concerning monetary policy.  It was only a wonder that his luck held out so long as it did; however, during the Civil War, the Missouri rebels desperately needed a symbolic hero, and there was no one other than Price available to fill that role.  It seems a shame that Price eventually died still thinking of himself as a Southern hero, and that that reputation stands unexamined with many in Missouri to this day.

I would add that Shalhope rather transparently affects a thin and sometimes almost fawning defense of his subject, sweeping aside the manner in which Price so cavalierly used and expended his various armies during the Mexican and Civil wars largely (exclusively?) to advance his own personal political aims. 

I'm going to write a chapter about Price that will appear early in the novel.  I did gain quite a lot of insight from this book into the thinking of confederate Missourians during the war.  That will help.

Jean Lafitte.

Here are a few swamp pictures I found on line from Jean Lafitte Preserve.

Another side of New Orleans.

Still working on the rewrite of the tour through the French Quarter. . . .



Enter the Vieux Carré

Copyright © 2011 Bob R Bogle



Mr Bloom moved forward raising his troubled eyes. Think no more about that. After one. Timeball on the ballast office is down. Dunsink time. Fascinating little book that is of sir Robert Ball's. Parallax. I never exactly understood. There's a priest. Could ask him. Par it's Greek: parallel, parallax. Met him pikehoses she called it till I told her about the transmigration. O rocks! The voices blend and fuse in clouded silence: silence that is the infinite of space: and swiftly, silently the soul is wafted over regions of cycles of cycles of generations that have lived. A region where grey twilight ever descends, never falls on wide sagegreen pasturefields, shedding her dusk, scattering a perennial dew of stars. She follows her mother with ungainly steps, a mare leading her fillyfoal. Twilight phantoms are they yet moulded in prophetic grace of structure, slim shapely haunches, a supple tendonous neck, the meek apprehensive skull. They fade, sad phantoms: all is gone. Agendath is a waste land, a home of screechowls and the sandblind upupa. Netaim, the golden, is no more. And on the highway of the clouds they come, muttering thunder of rebellion, the ghosts of beasts. Huuh! Hark! Huuh! Parallax stalks behind and goads them, the lancinating lightnings of whose brow are scorpions. Elk and yak, the bulls of Bashan and of Babylon, mammoth and mastodon, they come trooping to the sunken sea, Lacus Mortis. Ominous, revengeful zodiacal host! They moan, passing upon the clouds, horned and capricorned, the trumpeted with the tusked, the lionmaned the giantantlered, snouter and crawler, rodent, ruminant and pachyderm, all their moving moaning multitude, murderers of the sun. CHRIS CALLINAN What is the parallax of the subsolar ecliptic of Aldebaran? VIRAG (Not unpleasantly.) Absolutely! Well observed and those pannier pockets of the skirt and slightly pegtop effect are devised to suggest bunchiness of hip. A new purchase at some monster sale for which a gull has been mulcted. Meretricious finery to deceive the eye. Observe the attention to details of dustspecks. Never put on you tomorrow what you can wear today. Parallax! (With a nervous twitch of his head.) Did you hear my brain go snap? Pollysyllabax! Meditations of evolution increasingly vaster: of the moon invisible in incipent lunation, approaching perigee: of the infinite lattiginous scintillating uncondensed milky way, discernible by daylight by an observer placed at the lower end of a cylindrical vertical shaft 5000 ft deep sunk from the surface towards the centre of the earth: of Sirius (alpha in Canis Major) 10 lightyears (57,000,000,000,000 miles) distant and in volume 900 times the dimension of our planet: of Arcturus: of the precession of equinoxes: of Orion with belt and sextuple sun theta and nebula in which 100 of our solar systems could be contained: of moribund and of nascent new stars such as Nova in 1901: of our system plunging towards the constellation of Hercules: of the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving from immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with which the years, threescore and ten, of allotted human life formed a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity.

To see a thing from different angles; to bring it into a more multidimensional focus.  None of these pictures was taken by me.  This is me looking retropesctively for the essence of the first ten minutes of the French Quarter stroll, that part of the novel presently being edited and rewritten.

Untitled from Ernest Bloom on Vimeo.

Navigate the French Quarter block by block.

An interesting web site, although exactly how this "Christian based web site" manages to purge "morally offensive material" from thorough coverage of the French Quarter escapes me: The French Quarter AKA Vieux Carre in New Orleans, Louisiana interactive photo map walkthru for tourists and visitors

Short Shuttlesworth Bio

Fred Shuttlesworth Death: Link to Article

Fred Shuttlesworth, Noted Civil Rights Leader, Dies at 89

What Do Corporate Values Really Mean?

Copyright © 2011 Bob R Bogle

". . . .Corporate values, usually chosen by senior executives, are adopted to prevailing business circumstances and are not rooted in fundamental philosophical convictions, morality or ethics. In this sense, corporate values are often selected as a strategy to 'rally the troops,' and therefore, [are] manipulative in nature."

What Do Corporate Values Really Mean? -- Psychology Today

Although seemingly unrelated to the thrust of this novel, this very short article expresses in a nutshell some of the concerns that the protagonist, Max Bainbridge, has about modern American culture. It's a vaulable quick read that challenges mostly unquestioned assumptions about how our minds are easily manipulated without our knowledge.




Hugh Laurie: Let Them Talk

Copyright © 2011 Bob R Bogle



Hugh Laurie on a vision quest to New Orleans, and the blues and jazz that emerged there at the beginning of the last century.  This captures everything I'm trying to convey about the city in the novel.  Don't miss Hugh Laurie: Let Them Talk. Can't be too highly recommended.

Excerpt: NOLA Ferry

Copyright © 2011 Bob R Bogle



Chapter 10 was much shorter and easier to re-write than Chapter 9.  At this point the manuscript used to end at page 252; now it ends at page 370, and I still have a number of additional earlier chapters to write and insert.

Besides some general editing, the most important aspect of the current revision is to generate a scene-by-scene list of everything that happens in this novel.

Almost always when I write a novel, or a short story, or anything, I have a pretty good idea of what the characters are about and mostly what has to happen before I start writing.  For example, I'm starting to think right now about the next novel I want to write.  I know the grand story arc, and I know the kinds of characters to be involved in the story.  By the time I finally start writing it I'll have most of these details plotted out in some detail.

That's not how I wrote the first draft of Memphis Blues Again.  With this book I knew the setting time and place in extreme detail, and I knew some of what was to happen with the characters, but I knew none of the characters in much detail.  By the time I'd finished the first draft the characters had evolved quite a lot.  So when I'm re-writing I often have to change the dialog, to re-express concepts in words that my later conceptualizations of these people would actually use.  Occasionally I lift whole lines out of the mouth of one character and give them to another.  That sort of internal consistency thing.

This first draft manuscript is chock-full of complex ideas.  And because it was written in this free-form way, free from a guiding storyboard, as it were, or perhaps without a rudder, I sometimes repeat myself, or I have ideas appearing in an order that is not terribly logical or dramatically-satisfying.  It's so big and unwieldy that I can't remember everything that's in it.  So vital to this re-write is the scene-by-scene list of everything that happens.  When I finally finish writing draft 2 I'll finally have, in effect, a storyboard for the entire novel.  Only at that point will I be able to really think about how to order everything properly, and what can best be rearranged or excised for reasons of clarity.

Here's a short excerpt from what used to be Chapter 10 although it's presently designated Chapter 24, and I'm certain that designation will change later, too.  This minor vignette takes place on a ferry boat on the Mississippi River in New Orleans.

Nora had moved a little distance away.  She was shielding her eyes against the sunlight, looking in towards the concrete pilings at the river's edge.  He moved to join her.

"What are you looking at?"

She pointed.  "That bird."

It stood perched on an air horn that was mounted on a shallow pier-like structure.  About a dozen more of the same kind of bird milled about down on the rusty deck below.  They had soft gray wings, full white breasts, and short black legs.  Their white necks and shoulders made a distinct and prominent band between the black head and the gray plumage of the back.  They were preening themselves, or dozing, their heads turned and beaks tucked down along their spines.

"Looks like some kind of a gull," he said.

"Maybe.  But I think gulls are larger, and aren't their tails usually white?  These are black.  And I don't think I've seen that black head on a gull before."

He looked at it more closely.  "Maybe it's a shearwater," he said.  "Or perhaps a petrel."

"Do you think so?"

"I don't know.  I'm not really a bird-person."

"Oh.  I wish I knew.  Did you notice its eyes?"

"Its eyes?"

"A white spot with a horizontal band where the eye cuts across.  You can see where the tiny black eye itself is glittering.  I wonder what he's thinking about."

"Wow.  Your eyes are much better than mine."

"How long do you think a bird like that lives?"

"I don't know.  One year?  Two?"

"All of its life compressed into so little time," she said.  She sighed.  "Isn't it a beautiful creature, though?  I mean, if you take the time to really see it?"

"Yes."

"So beautiful, and so brief a life.  But all we see is just another bird.  It lives out its life, and it dies unnoticed and alone.  No chance of ever entering any history book.  No lingering memory of it once we turn away."

She turned to look at him.

"It's like a shooting star, sublime for a fraction of a second if someone happens to notice it, then it's gone forever, like it had never existed.  Isn't that sad?"

"Not many books get written about the lives of individual birds," he agreed.

She reached over and took his hands in hers.  "Look at me," she said.

He did.  He saw how intently her eyes were focused.

"Don't ever forget me."

Chapters 9 & 10



I'm preparing to launch into the rewrite of what used to be Chapter 10, but I've been so long disengaged from this project I must re-read Chapter 9 before I resume.  I recently finished writing an unrelated short story, and now have a fairly good idea for the next novel, so I have great motivation to finish Memphis Blues Again.  But there's still a long way to go, so. . . .

Tennessee Governor speaks out, 7 January 1861

Copyright © 2011 Bob R Bogle



Many continue to maintain that the Civil War was not fought over slavery but over States Rights, as though the latter term were not a subverting synonym for the former.

The time has arrived when the people of the South must prepare either to abandon or to fortify and maintain [slavery].  Abandon it we cannot, interwoven as it is with our wealth, prosperity, and domestic happiness.

Call for a Referendum on a Tennessee Secession Convention, Tennessee Governor Isham G. Harris, 7 January 1861

Spoken with no sense of irony or shame.  http://americancivilwar.com/documents/isham_harris.html

Essay: The Connection Between Language and History.

Copyright © 2011 Bob R Bogle



Over time, writers may develop a profound sensitivity to the limits of words.

It doesn't happen to everyone.  In fact, I suspect that relatively few novelists ever pause to consider the tender underbellies of words.  A sharp awareness of their physical strengths and weaknesses is more pronounced among poets, who are compelled to do so much with the fragile things in so little space.

George Orwell said a good deal about the subject.  He's explicit on the matter in the appendix to 1984, and of course the deliberate curtailing of language is important to the novel-proper.  "The purpose of Newspeak," George tells us, "was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. . . .It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought -- that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc -- should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words."

Orwell's fictional weaponization of language is fanciful, but it's not farcical.

Some people, inordinately attached to the physical world, proclaim the mantra "you are what you eat," but the more philosophical among us know that you are what you think.  It behooves us therefore to have a care for the thoughts we harbor inside our skulls.  Will you be a cog responding mechanically to external stimuli, in cold Newspeak bound, or will you consciously choose to interact with the wider world confronting you?  Will you assess?  Will you analyze?  Will you make value judgments?  Will you live a principled and moral life, or will you simply do as you're told?

Our thoughts are constrained by the words in which they are expressed, whether in voice, on paper, in electrons, or between our own ears.  Identity being inseparable from our thoughts, it follows that a nuanced vocabulary is desirable if one aspires to a life superior to that of a record-and-parrot automaton in a wind-up player piano world.  Orwell's warning remains urgent, if muffled by a million droning high-def TVs.  A government, or a mega-corporation, or any other power, that successfully controls what words mean or what words are available, tightens the limits on whom any individual or citizen or employee can ever possibly become.  Control the words and you control the world.

People assume words are like snap-beads.  String enough of them together in new ways and voilà! out pops a brand new concept unprecedented in human history.  Certainly playing with words this way can lead to strange new thoughts, but vanishingly few of them ever break the absurdity barrier.  Creativity is hard to sustain because it requires active, continuing effort to think differently than you yourself have thought before, putting different words in different orders, recombining concepts, searching for new, unanticipated, emergent synergies.  How many people do you know who significantly alter their vocabularies or word sequences or even fundamental thoughts when you speak with them over the course of months to years?  Not many.  This verbal inertia contributes substantially to the anticlimactic conclusions of old friendships and causes us to seek out the freshness of a new crowd.  Or a new spouse.

And words are not rocks.  The concept of the dictionary, the idée fixe, imposes the false impression that words signify concrete, frozen things, that words are stable, that their definitions are inalterable.  No, words are transitory symbols that error-ridden and short-sighted human beings attach to real-life things and actions and attributes or to abstract conceptualizations.  No word exists within a vacuum:  every word relies upon our ever-evolving understandings of the world around us.  The connotations, the secondary meanings of words, the feelings that some words give us while their synonyms don't, are in a continuing state of flux, but what is less appreciated is that the same is true of the denotations, the dictionary definitions.  I'll give some examples.

Take the word "hammer."  When you read the word here, your mind instantaneously invokes an iconic object.  You know what a hammer is.  It doesn't matter whether or not you know every physical detail of the hammer I pictured when I wrote the word down.  We all know what a hammer is, and what a hammer does.

But let's imagine that someone picks up the hammer and throws it very hard through the air, and to our surprise it whirls about, handle over head, sweeping out a great curving arc, until it boomerangs right back into the hand of the person who threw it.  Astonishing!  Unexpected!  Who knew hammers could do such things?

But that was a fluke, surely.  That's not a property of hammers.  So the hammer-thrower performs an experiment.  He flings the hammer through the air over and over, to see whether he can replicate the effect.  And every time the hammer returns to his hand.  And then he decides to see how general the phenomenon is, so he obtains twenty other hammers of different designs, repeats the experiment with all of them, and the hammers all return to his hand.

Are they all still hammers?  Clearly.  The object is unchanged, and the word is unchanged.  But our understanding of hammer-ness has forever changed.  When we read the word hammer now, the iconic image our minds dredge up is changed:  our expectations for what a hammer is and what a hammer does have changed.  The denoted meaning of the symbol has slipped.

That's an imaginary example, but consider this.  We used to listen to records, which we sometimes called albums.  And then CDs came along.  Now mp3 downloads are the preferred format for recorded music, and only sentimentalists talk about or purchase analog musical recordings etched in vinyl.  But what should we call those collections of twelve or fifteen songs which are released simultaneously by an artist as a collective whole when we purchase them as mp3s?  So far we still use the word "album" to indicate such a collection of songs, although the suitability of that vinyl-drenched word is clearly unconvincing.  The concept of "album" remains, the word "album" remains, but again, the symbol has slipped.

Words and ideas are slippery.  To an indefinable degree even one's native language is foreign because we're never fully certain of how meanings slip from one geographic region to another, and from day to day, and because no two people use the same words in exactly the same ways.  Every interpretation of meaning is surrounded by a fuzzy region of error.  Beginning to understand this uncertainty is important when trying to come to terms with a sequence of historical events, and also when trying to understand how history unfolds.  How history happens.

The American Civil War.  The words immediately provoke thoughts of slavery and Lincoln.  Iconic images and conceptualizations rush to fill our minds:  if we think of the American Civil War we think of slavery.   White supremacists and racists.  Initially we flash on white-robed members of the Ku Klux Klan, and then we might think of more modern racists who are everyday bigots who dress just like everyone else.  We've all met people who aren't even aware of their own bigotry.  Racism can be blatant and abhorrent, or it can be more subtle and morally elusive.  A white supremacist can be a skinhead inclined to violence or a random Caucasian whose working assumption, generally unexamined, is that those of another race are of inferior stock, although he has no desire to ever attend any hate-mongering rally or to act upon his bigoted beliefs in any way.  These emotionally-charged words can be a challenge to pin down.  Also, their connotations and denotations have evolved over the years.

What is the distinction between being racist and being a racist?  What does it mean to be racist today, and what did it mean to be racist a century ago?  When we say someone was racist in 1861, do we mean that in terms of 2011 racism or 1861 racism?

Prior to the Civil War, the overwhelming majority of white Americans, North and South, knew blacks to be an inferior race.  Even most abolitionists and their adherents wanted to emancipate black slaves and then expel them from the country.  This was Abraham Lincoln's early goal.  White superiority (another way of saying black inferiority, but how differently our minds respond to the word choice) was manifestly obvious and noncontroversial, an obvious fact that went unchallenged until Frederick Douglass began to gain some traction and raise consciousness.  I think "white supremacy" was almost universal, but "racism," by which I mean "race-hatred," was rare before Reconstruction.  Lincoln was a white supremacist but not a racist:  a strange notion to ponder in the present, particularly given the images that form in our minds when we read the word "Lincoln".  (And notice how the sentence "Lincoln is a white supremacist but not a racist" would have been unintelligible if uttered in 1861.)  By and large antebellum whites felt affection for their slaves, much as they did for their other pets.

Of course this is no defense of white slave owners or of the slavery system; I'm only trying to illustrate how the words and concepts that instantly flash into our minds nowadays don't apply to other times.  Like Orwell suggested, as words and meanings change, the way we think -- the way we are capable of thinking -- changes without our recognition that the changes are taking place.  Changing vocabularies brainwash societies.  It's happening to you and me every day.

Now I'm interested in this question.  How is it that one group of human beings could buy and sell individuals who were members of another group of human beings, and view them as property?  How is it that we can dehumanize humans when we can't depencilize pencils or dedogize dogs?  What's the psychology there?  I think in part the answer has to do with memes.

Memes.  What is a meme?  What is the dictionary definition?  A meme is said to be an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture.  I'd like to consider two memes here that were prominent during the Civil War.  These were popular among the privates on either side.  From a Northerner you were apt to hear the explanation:  "I'm fighting to save the Union," and from the Southerner:  "I'm fighting to defend my country from Yankee invaders."  Before examining these widespread memes closer we should briefly revisit some of the prevailing conditions and events that unfolded just prior to the war's inception.

It's easy to compile a laundry list of developments leading up to the Civil War.  Important contributing events and prevailing cultural beliefs, in no particular order, included sectional variation in cultural mores; a greater desire among wealthy industrialists in the North for a free hand in the exploitation of Western resources for economic gain, and among the most wealthy and powerful in the South for perpetuating a kind of quasi-feudal aristocracy; the pressures for expansionism bound up in Manifest Destiny and the threat it posed to Congressional parity on the national level which, if upset, could lead to the North's eventual sociopolitical domination and subjugation of the South; the pro-/anti-federalism challenge; the economic implications of slavery vs the moral indignation of abolitionists and their expanding legions of converts; the widening crisis of conscience regarding the morality of slavery; the global cotton boom brought about by Eli Whitney's gin; tariffs imposed to pay down the national debt that inordinately impacted the South and the resulting nullification crisis; the ever-changing ratio of whites to blacks in the South and fear of slave revolts, actual slave revolts, and the substantive apotheosis of John Brown at Harpers Ferry; the Dred Scott case; fugitive slave laws, unsustainable and distasteful to Northerners, and hunts and roundups of runaways by Southerners and their hirelings in the North; incendiary rhetoric of the fire-eaters in the South and public consideration of secession; the Compromise of 1850, clarification of the issues brought about by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Bleeding Kansas, the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and the Lincoln-Douglas debates that condensed and sharpened all relevant issues to a near white-hot focus in the political and public consciousness; the sectional fractioning of the Democratic party and the election of Abraham Lincoln; and so on.

And yet:  "I'm fighting to save the Union," Billy Yank said.  Notice that he wasn't fighting against slavery.  Slavery wasn't significant to him after secession, and indeed most Northerners declared they would never have fought to end slavery; Lincoln was always extremely sensitive to this truth.  And note too that Johnny Reb wasn't fighting to preserve slavery:  "I'm fighting to defend my country from Yankee invaders."  Something funny's going on here; something related to how we use words and the concepts they represent.  Remember what I said previously?  If we think of the American Civil War we think of slavery.  Funny how slavery wasn't foremost on the minds of the war's combatants.

These two memes were rampant in either army.  They were useful taglines to sum up in a very few short words one's personal beliefs and to immediately identify one's self  with a larger group:  one's comrades in arms.  We all do this all the time, use a few short words as proxies to substitute for deeper and more voluminous accumulations of beliefs and assumptions, and this is why I assert that every syllable stands in for a dozen words; every word stands in for a dozen sentences; every sentence stands in for a dozen paragraphs; every paragraph stands in for a dozen chapters; every chapter stands in for a dozen books; every book stands in for a dozen Alexandrian libraries.  When you say "I'm fighting to defend my country from Yankee invaders," you're saying a great deal more than you can possibly know.

A meme is a digest of deeper, unexamined thoughts, feelings and beliefs.  The soldiers who said these things were sincere, but in perpetuating and spreading these memes they were behaving exactly the way that we all usually behave when we string words together:  they were not deliberately weighing their own thoughts, experiences, and principles against the events unfolding around them.  They were aligning themselves with prevailing sentiments, parroting the memes that reinforced cohesion within their fighting units, behaving like cogs, turning mechanically in response to external stimuli.

I listed some of the precedents of the Civil War, but there are no "causes" of a phenomenon of such enormity as this war was. Probably none of the individual events enumerated above was either necessary or sufficient for the conflict. My core historiographical assumption is this: the tides of history reflect the sum-totality of the beliefs and actions of all individuals ‑‑ all individuals, not just those whose names are recorded in the archives. "The reason" for the Civil War is to be found in diverging sectional beliefs, justified or not, rational or not, and the personal experiences of all Americans during preceding generations. How all these factors are encoded as behavior-affecting memes, and how the memes are then passed on, how they spread and proliferate, which ones peter out, which ones come to dominate, which ones capture the imagination: this, I believe, provides the driving force of history.

I think it's inescapable that one factor overwhelmingly influenced which memes predominated and "led to" the Civil War.  That factor was the fact of slavery, mostly as it affected economic concerns, even if these vexations were relatively infrequently expressed in the public debate or ever crystallized in consciousness.  The fact of slavery shaped and constrained the words and the language and the ways people could talk and think until the war broke out.

Southern soldiers were never consciously fighting to protect the slave economy.  I doubt Robert E Lee ever once conceived of the defense of Virginia that way -- although no doubt some of the wealthier plantation owners did.  But I do believe that more popular expressions of the rising concerns of the day, mostly voiced in social and cultural and sentimental terms, stood in as proxies for these deeper, subconscious currents that carried the nation into war.  Furthermore, I should point out that wealthy plantation owners who were cognizant of the economic implications of rising sectional divisions over slavery in the late 1850s comprised a small minority.  The force of the thesis I'm advancing here doesn't really require anyone to be consciously aware of deeper currents of history, whether in the majority or a small minority.  But in this case one consideration should be borne in mind:  in which minority do we find these plutocrats?  They were synonymous with the most politically-connected Southerners:  those with the most pronounced vested interest in leaving the Union before it put an end to slavery.  Those best positioned to influence the course of history, if you will.  The hyperwealthy in our own time comprise an analogous minority with political influence disproportionate by far to their actual numbers.  This can be seen as being factually true without going down the road of conspiracy theories, which I reject.

The Emancipation Proclamation came as a shock and frequently as a disappointment to Northern soldiers, and it also flew in the face of the stance Lincoln had taken during his presidential campaign.  The Northern soldiers had told each other they were fighting only to preserve the Union, not to free the slaves.  But who can deny that most events within the sphere of human activity are driven by subconscious impulses at least as much as by our conscious choices and decisions?  I don't mean to suggest that white supremacist Northerners had a secret, almost Freudian desire to emancipate the slaves and that's what really compelled them to fight.  I mean that everyone was fighting because of the fact of slavery, even if no one could guess what the war's outcome would mean for blacks and whites in America.  "I'm fighting to save the Union" is a proxy meme, a kind of oversimplified and generally unexamined verbal shortcut that, while superficially true, stands in for: "I'm fighting against the slave economy that broke the Union." It's true that the Northerners didn't think that way, and would have objected vociferously to my psycho-linguistic argument; their objections are noted, but I deem those objections irrelevant to the model I'm always laboring to refine concerning how history "works." It's equally irrelevant to me that a Southerner saying:  "I'm fighting to defend my country from Yankee invaders" was unaware that this was an unconscious proxy position unwittingly substituting for:  "I'm fighting because my country's existence requires preservation of the slave economy, even if so few of us own slaves."

The implication of this crude historiographical model with which I continue to tinker must be that all of us behave in this manner all the time:  our most sincere individual, personal beliefs are better perceived to be limited and truncated insights representative or symbolic of deeper, truer psychological currents that are at work at the scale of the broader population.  Just because human beings can't plumb all those deep currents says nothing about whether those occult currents truly exist. . . .as I suspect they do.