Chasing Smallwood — .22. We Didn’t Expect the War

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Chasing Smallwood

[A book with four interlocking themes:

  • how to communicate with the dead;
  • the life of a 19th-century American;
  • the massive task facing us today, and
  • the physical world’s place in the scheme of things.]

.22. We Didn’t Expect the War

[Saturday, January 28, 2006]

(8:10 p.m.) All right. Set pieces? I can hear a few of them. Gettysburg, Fredericksburg. Shiloh and the west, to Chattanooga? Slow-trot Thomas and Hood? The march to the sea? North Carolina? Or do you have other things in mind?

Other things, mostly. How could I give you a description of battles? You’d die of nerve strain, wondering if the detail would check out. But I can give you other things of value, and I will.

I told you, we didn’t expect the war. We looked at it as a conspiracy – a long-running conspiracy but still, nothing much more than a plot – among the few families that ran southern society. You’ve learned what a jumble Virginian genealogy is, with cross-connection on cross-connection. That’s what the other southern states would have been, only they didn’t stay together long enough. Virginia was 250 years old when the war came, just as Mr. Lincoln said, “the bondsman’s 250 years of unrequited toil.” But Mississippi and Alabama, say, weren’t but 50 years old at the most! Their old and venerable traditions weren’t much older than the generation that saw it crumble – or, say, their parents, anyway. They talk about the Old South and they like to make out that it is the oldest part of the country and the northwest the latecomers. But that’s about as accurate as anything else they said, trying to find any straw anywhere to prop themselves up, and slavery with them.

Just look at the history of it! When we got freedom from England, what of the future confederacy was there? Virginia. The Carolinas. Georgia. Mary land if you want to count it too.

There wasn’t any other Old South! Kentucky was a county of Virginia with a few thousand people. Tennessee, the same in connection with North Carolina. Where were the other states? Florida was Spanish. Mississippi, Alabama, was Indian. Louisiana was French and then Spanish. Arkansas [ARE-Kansas] and Texas were empty and didn’t belong to us anyway. Missouri was Spanish. So where was your old south? I’ll tell you where – it was Virginia, mostly, and Charleston, South Carolina. You find me any more old south, anywhere. North Carolina didn’t have any harbors to amount to anything, so its piedmont country got filled in, by way of Pennsylvania and the Shenandoah Valley, long before the rest of it. Georgia was a howling wilderness, and Maryland was up next to Pennsylvania, which meant it had cross-currents in its society and its economy, that Charleston never did.

That’s why it was so important for these upstarts that they get Virginia! That, and Tredegar Iron Works. But mostly if Virginia had stayed in the union – if it had been a model of a slave-holding state staying loyal, with the prestige that only Virginia had – well, the confederacy’d have fallen in a heap, quicker than Jack Frost. That’s one thing Mr. Lincoln was playing for, I think – trying to find a way to keep Virginia in. If he’d succeeded at that – well, hell, if he’d kept Virginia in, he’d have had Bobby Lee at the head of the army, for one thing! – I don’t think the rebellion would have lasted the year. But if it had stayed in, there’s no way the country could have abolished slavery. It just couldn’t have happened, so maybe it all came out for the best after all. Sure spilled a lot of blood this way, though.

But I was saying, we didn’t expect an actual war. We thought we were going to assemble a very big posse and round up some influential trouble-makers and that would be the end of the military aspect and then it would be a matter of dealing with the political aftermath. In the spring of 1861, I think you could say a lot of us were thinking this was going to be another Shay’s Rebellion. We never dreamed it was going to be – as one of your historians said – our 1848.

That’s why all that “on to Richmond” stuff before Bull Run, and all the suspicion of the army, and the political interferences with it afterwards. We were still thinking, “what’s the hold-up?” as you say. We didn’t see it as a conflict between two armies, but between our army, that we had always known, and this jacked-up comic opera army representing the slave power that had a stranglehold on the south’s politics and its economy. We couldn’t quite picture people that weren’t slave owners fighting for the right of these very same slave owners to continue to run everything the way they pleased, for their own benefit and nobody else’s. We didn’t understand yet what forces we were playing with. We didn’t realize, for one thing, what 50 years of lies had done to people’s ideas about the rest of the country and about what the world thought of slavery, and what the outside world was becoming in the age of steam.

Well, so we had Bull Run and we got whipped, and it was a terrific shock. We – the army! – got whipped by a bunch of rebels! How could that be? Treason within our army? Maybe – God knows we’d seen enough to it, years and years of it bearing fruit all in one bitter winter and spring. But Bull Run wasn’t so bad in the long run. One of the rebs said later that they’d been worse demoralized by the victory than the north was by the defeat, and there’s probably something to that: There ain’t anything concentrates your mind like a good whipping, and nothing makes you more lazy and stupid than a big win that you think is just the natural result of your own superiority. Anyway, we got whipped at Bull Run, but anybody could see, once they got the whole story, that as much as anything it was that our boys were green. So were the rebs, but there wasn’t any Bobby Lee legend to make them especially fearsome, and they hadn’t yet built up their reputation as A1 fighting men. What I’m saying is, we could see we were going to have to build up and do it again, and maybe take it all a little more serious, but what wasn’t clear and didn’t get made clear by Bull Run is that this was going to be a stiff fight and a long one.

Shiloh showed us that.

Up until Shiloh, things was going pretty good in the West. In fact, they weren’t going so bad anywhere if you look just at the facts and not at our own expectations. Kentucky was ours, Mary land was ours, Missouri was mostly ours. They’d all been saved from the wreckage. Grant had been clearing the Tennessee River, and it looked like he’d be down in Mississippi and Alabama before too long. It looked pretty much like the army in Virginia was the main thing we had to worry about. And if we could clear the boards around it, Virginia couldn’t stand alone very long. In a way that’s what finally happened, as you know. We cleared out the Mississippi valley, went down through Georgia and started up at her from the south. But that was a whole mountain of corpses later. In 1861 nobody – nobody, even old far-seeing Sherman – was imagining anything like the number of men were going to get killed over this. Sherman said we’d need 300,000 men to end the rebellion and everybody thought he was crazy. Even he didn’t guess that twice that many men were going to get killed before it was over. And that by the way is what he figured he was doing in Georgia three years later, something you don’t generally understand. He said he was going to give ‘em memories that would stop them from thinking rebellion a good long way into the future.

Grant was proceeding down through Tennessee, moving up the Tennessee River that more or less paralleled the Mississippi but as you know had the advantage of flowing north, so that any gunboats that might get put out of action by gunfire or mechanical accident would drift back behind our own lines, not over to the enemy’s territory. Plus, once he’d got past Forts Henry and Donelson, he had the river pretty well cleared: It wasn’t like the Mississippi where they were going to have to clear out post after post, although as it turned out that was just a matter of time, being as we had a navy and we had the navy men, and the rebels didn’t.

You know the story of Shiloh. Grant was maybe a little overconfident, and maybe the troops weren’t as careful as they should have been. I can’t say; I wasn’t there. But there was a terrific hell of a battle, and if it wasn’t for those cool old boys, Sherman and Grant, we could have lost big. But you know the story of Uncle Billy coming up on Grant that night and saying, “Grant, we’ve had a hell of a time today,” and Grant saying, “Yep. Whip ‘em tomorrow, though.” And sure enough they did – with the help of Don Carlos Buell’s last-minute-Charlie appearance in the middle of the night, coming upriver just in time. My point here though is that Grant himself later said, Shiloh is when he knew we were in for a long fight. Them southern boys just came in like thunder, and they kept coming on all day, and if anybody after that day thought that southerners that didn’t own slaves weren’t liable to fight like the devil anyway, they just weren’t wanting to know. Anybody wanted to know, knew.

Here’s what I’m going to do, Joseph. I’ll find some short history, and study up on the way it went and you can continue without my worrying about is the order of things right, and all.

Wrong way to go about it. It’s bad enough what you already know – though, come to think about it, I suppose it is like my showing you on the map so you could get the lay of the land and have one thing less to worry over. But don’t do more than get the sequence. If you do that, set it down for your possible readers too so we’re all at the same place when I start in again.

Chasing Smallwood — .21. How to work your way backwards

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Chasing Smallwood

[A book with four interlocking themes:

  • how to communicate with the dead;
  • the life of a 19th-century American;
  • the massive task facing us today, and
  • the physical world’s place in the scheme of things.]

.21. How to work your way backwards

After a long few weeks exploring various aspects of guidance, I felt ready to return to Joseph, resolved not to let the problems around verification prevent me from receiving the material.

[Saturday, January 28, 2006] 4:10 p.m.

– Joseph, I sure would like to hear your Civil War experiences, and if you will tell me I will listen and won’t try to correct you.

Well, that’s better. You take a lot on when you set out to follow someone else’s story, and don’t think I don’t know it. And for you who hates to be wrong and hates to mislead people, it’s a lot, and I know it.

You liked what I said about old Mr. A Lincoln, but if you stop a bit and think about it, there were plenty of facts within my opinions that might have been as wrong as anything. What we though of him might have anachronisms, you know. So it isn’t like you haven‘t been sailing into the wind all along, just that you didn’t quite see it.

I think it will be easier to tell it out of order and you maybe won’t get so fussed. I can hear you wondering where the story should go, what to make up if I don’t, so to speak! Just relax and let me make up a story.

You remember you had half a memory of living in those half-earth half-timber buildings you were told were called “red-outs” – redoubts? And you recall you got a full sense of the grim year 1864? And you were moved by the Battle of Chickamauga – that you always called Chick-a-MAWG-wa? You know that you were greatly drawn to Sherman and Grant (and Mr. Lincoln, of course) and a few others like old Slow-Trot Thomas? You had lively sympathy with Burnside and Hooker – kind of wished for his sake that Fighting Joe had been killed instead of stunned at Chancellorsville – and nothing but contempt for McClellan? And your mixed feelings for Ben Butler, who wasn’t much as a general but was pretty good as a politician? Don’t you suppose all that meant something? Gettysburg was dammed important, but so was Vicksburg – but you don’t have any more feeling for Vicksburg than 50 other occasions, and for Gettysburg, well, you know.

Do you have any feeling at all for the Indian fighting? For the border ruffian kind of skirmishing? For, say, the little skirmishes in New Mexico or the Indian Territory – Oklahoma? Nothing for the naval battles except a sort of abstract appreciation.

Now reel all this in and what interests you most?

Grant, early on, and Sherman, in the west in the war’s very early days. Not McClellan in West Virginia as it became, and not McClellan organizing the army except, again, as an abstract achievement. Not McDowell or the other innocents of the first part of the war, and not the Peninsular campaign except as occasion to seethe over a lost opportunity! – except you see how it was the will of providence that we not win the war without finally ending slavery.

So – Grant and Sharman in ’61 and early ’62. Then what?

Chancellorsville and Gettysburg in ’63. That is, the east, not the Mississippi Valley. Fredericksburg, but not Sharpsburg (Antietam Creek).

And then the long brutal spring and mostly summer of 1864.

Not all that much interest in the siege and the extension of encampments and fortifications – ever wondered why? Not much interest in the complicated actions in the Mississippi valley – I should say the intricate and frustrating and unglamorous and not very attractive actions – except Grant’s campaign (conceptually) to the east of Vicksburg, his relief of Chattanooga, then Sherman’s chess-match with Johnston and his hammering of Hood, and not the capture of Atlanta but Atlanta to the sea, and then back north. “Uncle Billy seems to have hit this river longways.”

So let’s you and me play a little game here. If I was only at the places interested you – and noplace else – would that draw us a route map, do you think?

Here’s how I make it. Grand and Sherman to Shiloh – though not either of them right off, but more like coming in in the middle of the story, like coming in on the night of the first day at Shiloh.

In the east at least for Fredericksburg which was December ’62, Chancellorsville, May of ’63, Gettysburg July ’63 and some undefined time, then the winter – the hard winter of ’64 and what might have been, maybe should have been, the last year of the war. Maybe almost was. But then no more connection with the east after a time, why is that? Then Franklin and after the capture of Atlanta a joyride through Georgia and the expectation of some hard fighting in South Carolina – which they couldn’t give us, damn them! – and up into North Carolina and the end.

Doesn’t that seem to hang together to you? If you’d do the research to see what units were where, when, you’d be a long way easier in your mind. But if you don’t mind treating all this as fiction we can get the story told anyway. I won’t be able to bring in the level of detail that would convince you – because your level of anxiety makes it sure that I won’t! So we’ll do it round the barn.

Well, that is great and I look forward to it. I can’t do it now – got to get ready to go out to supper – but this does offer promise. And what an interesting approach to it! Start with what is vivid to me and see if it structures itself!

Remember though, life ain’t as tidy as theory. One man, any small unit, could have all sorts of experiences they shouldn’t have got, in theory. Just like Chamberlain said in the book you just read, The Passing of the Armies, you saw how this and that unit wound up fighting with this and that other command in the head of battle. So it happens on a larger scale, too: People wound up here and then there for reasons they sure didn’t know much about!

By the way, you notice how you were very interested in Chamberlain’s description of the days after Appomattox? And you notice in the description of the Grand Review it was the second day – Sherman’s men – that interested you? And you notice your disappointment in Grant over Gouvernor Warren, and your predisposition to be of two minds about Sheridan – kind of a horse’s ass but a great fighter? All that is more clues for you. Fix your attitude and work backwards, figure out for yourself who was likely to have those feelings and why. There’s your key. Hit the gong and see if it rings true. Terrible metaphor, let’s try it again. If you hit it and you hear “clunk” it ain’t bell-metal. Enough for now, go get ready and I’ll see you when you can spare the time next.

More photos of Bruce

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

These, courtesy of Jim Szpajcher, are from a workshop Jim hosted for Bruce. In the group picture, Jim is in front, wearing a blue shirt and a big smile. Bruce, suffering the fate always accorded to tall people, in in the very last row (on the right).

The photo below, of Bruce illustrating a point with a gesture, will likely remind those who knew him of Bruce’s lucid, relaxed style of instruction.

Chasing Smallwood — .20. The Question of Trust

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Chasing Smallwood

[A book with four interlocking themes:

  • how to communicate with the dead;
  • the life of a 19th-century American;
  • the massive task facing us today, and
  • the physical world’s place in the scheme of things.]

.20. The Question of Trust

The question of verification bothered me more than ever after my session with psychic (and psychotherapist) Karen Storsteen on December 29, has described here in Chasing Smallwood — 15. I know that people think that psychic investigators are willing to believe anything and everything, and are so eager to connect that they fooled themselves routinely, never doubting that whatever they fantasize is true. No doubt some people are like that, but I am not. If anything, my need for verification has often stood in the way of obtaining the experience that would eventually provide the verification. Clutching in the face of uncertainty often has the effect of stepping on the air hose, cutting off the flow. One doesn’t want to be a fool; one doesn’t want to cut off the flow. It makes for a delicate, often uncomfortable balance.

Friday, December 30, 2005

I feel particularly down and out this morning. Last night’s session with Karen seems to say that much of what I thought I know knew about Joseph isn’t so — and much that he said isn’t so. Damn it, I’m tired of cat and mouse!

Very depressed; no way to end an old year.

Alright gentlemen, I guess I’ve been putting this off. As Bruce Moen says, trust is always the issue. You know what is bothering me. Why in 18 years have I been unable to find one shred of physical evidence to support any of the stories I’ve been given or have fabricated?

The validations have all been internal, and they have changed you. But you wish something external and have not gotten it. How much effort have you made to obtain it?

Every lead that I have been given has come up negative. Don’t tell me that it is my fault that I — faithfully recording Smallwood’s stories — have been unable to find him where he now says he is not.

You know as well as I that I do not need a tenth — a percent — of one scholar would need as evidence. I, knowing that I am not perpetuating a hoax, need not prove that I am not doing so. Therefore all I need is some concrete thing — a historical record, a book, something — to say “here you are, as promised.” Instead I get nothing.

And do not tell me that this is so I can tell others of the difficulties in the path. Fine! I’ve had 18 years of it, some of it in public. There is enough already on the record to demonstrate the point. Now I want something concrete.

You have the Army records to be found.

Maybe. And maybe no David Joseph Smallwood is to be found there. To this point I don’t have one slightest point to lean on, and I’m getting mighty tired of it.

And another thing — those stories from Smallwood. They seemed real enough. They were just stories, apparently. I notice they stopped dead when it came time to look at facts that could be checked.

I don’t know why I bother with this, and I don’t know what to do. I have so much of my being tied up in the into this. My god what will I do?

Trust. You live in trust. Keep living in trust, and all will be seen as well. It is well; it will be seen to be well.

Yes, well — what is your answer to my question? Why have I been unable to find evidence?

We answered the question. You haven’t really looked. Your efforts have been halfhearted and cursory. You have not even made up sheets of information to check! Never have thought of doing it, or of asking us how.

Say that’s true. Why can’t you just give me where to find a thing? “Yeats” gave me the publisher of David’s book, but no trace, no idea how or where to find it, or even if it exists.