This Book is Progressing Too Slowly. Suggestions Please.

Yesterday, I realized that I hadn't made any real progress on this book for several months now.  About the same time, I received an email from a so-called self publishing service, with advice on how to finish a book really fast.  The essential idea was to isolate oneself from as many distractions as possible by holing up in a cheap hotel, subsisting on deliveries of pizza and Chinese food, and to do nothing but write.  There were other good suggestions such as how to make an outline with 300 3x5 cards sorted out on the floor, and how to boost self discipline by forcing oneself to write 2000 words before breakfast.

But the essential lesson for me was that I was trying to spread myself too thin.  I used to be able to multi-task a little, but I'm getting too old for that.  So, I am going to try to isolate myself a little more during this month of July.  That means that I'm going to suspend my two other blogs and make posts here shorter.  I may also shirk my share of household chores by ordering Chinese and pizza instead of cooking and shopping.

I guess Henry, my ancestor, had similar problems.  When he was young he wrote lots of beautiful long letters, but they got fewer and farther between as he grew older and became immersed in a responsible job.

If you have any suggestions, please comment.

My Apologies to All Southerners

In my last post, I seemed to single out Southerners as being particularly reluctant to help replenish the suffering U.S. Federal Treasury.  I'm sorry about that, and I apologize.  I know very well that nobody likes to pay taxes. Not even me. It hurts when it comes to writing that check.

It's just that the the Representatives and Senators who seem to be the leading anti taxers are from the South. You may object that John Boehner is from Ohio, which isn't exactly South, but he was born in Reading, Ohio, which is just across the River from Kentucky. 

I admit, however, that there are plenty of other leading anti taxers from the North, East, and West.

I am trying to keep my politics out of this blog, which is why I have a separate blog for my political rants.  But practically every day, there is some event that makes me either sad or mad about the political and economic state of the country.  Now I know how my great grandfather felt when as Chief Engineer of Louisiana he struggled, often in vain, to get the appropriations needed to build and repair Louisiana levees.

In Those Days it was Even Harder to Get Southerners to Pay Taxes

Current events lead me to jump many years forward in my posts.  Newspaper articles are now warning us that Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana are threatened with disastrous flooding due to the unprecedented height of the Mississippi flood crests now rushing down on them. Today's NY Times article begins:

All eyes in the delta are on the Mississippi River and the bulge of water it is carrying southward, pushing back its tributaries into the towns along its banks, sending residents scattering toward higher ground and setting records all along the way.
"This is historic," said Col. Jeffrey R. Eckstein, commander of the Vicksburg District of the Army Corps of Engineers, who became the day's keynote speaker at the last minute. "Things that have never happened, people here have never seen before, we are going to see."

Continue reading here: http://nyti.ms/m9QxX0
Henry Brown Richardson faced similar situations often after he was named Head Engineer of the State of Louisiana in 1880.  At that time the Federal government had not yet taken any responsibility for flood control, so Louisiana, that is, Henry and his three assistants, had to face up to this problem alone. Henry's most difficult task was to convince the planter aristocracy to accept taxes high enough to pay for levee improvements.  As long as the levees held, they rejected higher taxes for this purpose. But in 1882, many levees broke, and planters suffered disastrous flooding and severe financial losses.  After that, it was much easier to convince them to pay taxes for levee construction.
But for little else.
The State Constitution of 1879, provided strict limitations on taxation, which made it extremely difficult to raise funds even for minimum public services. The State Engineer's office received no funds for the State highway system until after 1900, when Henry was about to retire.  Public schools for whites as well as blacks were starved of funds. Henry's wife's diary suggests that they had to send all of their nine children to private schools, which even then was a considerable burden on a public servant's salary.
As we see from current State and Federal budget fights, political elites in Louisiana and neighboring states still don't like paying taxes all that much. Well, nobody does, but when the water starts to rise, we're sure glad the Corps of Engineers is there to build and repair those levees.

I'm a Little Late in Learning About Early

Daniel Crofts's post about Jubal Early on the Times's Disunion blog (http://nyti.ms/efHRna) was the first I'd read about the "Bad Old Man" having been opposed to secession. Obviously, I should not have skipped the preface of Early's book about the war. Crofts tells us:

Viewed in retrospect, Early was the most improbable member of the anti-secession coalition that dominated the convention and that believed disaster would befall the Old Dominion if it left the Union. He worked tirelessly to promote a Union-saving compromise that would halt secession in the Upper South and oblige the Lower South to reconsider its reckless course.

From what I've read by Early and about him, however, he seemed a thoroughly disagreeable and stubborn old man, who who was just as skilled at advancing his own interests as he was at commanding men on the field of battle. Early was said to be hyper critical of his subordinates, and Henry Brown Richardson must have suffered when he served as Early's Engineering Officer during the long, cold winter of 1863, when the division was encamped east of Fredericksburg. Henry never complained, however, despite the heavy work load the old man laid on him. In Early's book he writes about the engineering work undertaken during that winter:

After a careful examination of the country, I proceeded to fortify the banks of the river at points likely to afford facilities for crossing, and I established a line of defence also along the main road running parallel with the river, where high embankments with cedar hedges on them afforded good cover for troops and excellent breastworks.... New roads were constructed in rear of the line of defence out of reach of artillery from the opposite bank, for the purpose of facilitating communication between the different positions, and two Whitworth guns... were placed on a high hill in rear of Port Royal…. We were compelled to haul our supplies in wagons from Guiney's Depot on the railroad, and as the winter was a severe one with much snow and rain, the country roads, which we had to use, became almost impassible from the mud, and we were compelled to employ the men for a considerable time in corduroying them at the worst places.

Of course, It was Henry who organized and supervised this work, but Early probably didn't even remember his name.

Crofts continues:

But once the war started, he committed to the Confederate States of America and never let go, becoming one of Robert E. Lee’s corps commanders by the last year of the war. Then, during the postwar era, he became the quintessential promoter of “Lost Cause” mythology, which airbrushed slavery as a cause of the conflict and instead celebrated the heroic fight by outnumbered white Southerners, who sought only to vindicate their honor and maintain their rights.

As promoter of the "lost cause" meme, he was probably no worse than many others. What confirmed my negative opinion of Early, though, was his association with the Louisiana State Lottery during the post war years of Reconstruction and Redemption. Early and General P. G. T. Beauregard provided a front of respectability for this organization by officiating at the drawings, while the Lottery's corrupt backers made millions on the backs of Louisiana taxpayers for a quarter century.

In 1890, Henry's brother-in-law, Edgar Howard Farrar of New Orleans, took a leading role at the Anti-Lottery Democratic Convention, which helped bring down the Lottery machine. But that's another story to be expanded in a later post.

The Rebel's Archives are Here, on this Beautiful Campus

Most of Henry Brown Richardson's family papers are archived at the Hill Memorial Library at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge shown in the gallery below. The LSU campus is one of the most beautiful I've seen.  Its giant oaks with their drooping limbs and moss is like a Louisiana dream. If you have a long research project, you can stay overnight at the Faculty Club.  The lunches there are excellent and not expensive.

One of the photos shows some of Henry's descendants in a conference room at the Hill Library as they prepare to donate some more papers

See the full gallery on Posterous

.

There are also a few of Henry's papers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

A Valuable Resource for Amateur and Professional Historians: The Civil War Book Review

While looking for something else on the internet I happened across The Civil War Book Review, which is hosted on the site of Louisiana State University's Hill Library. The Civil  war sesquicentennial now underway is bringing forth a stream of new books on the subject - so many that we will never have time to read them all, let alone the budgets to buy them or the shelves to hold them. In such circumstances, we desperately need the services of the distinguished reviewers - 58 of them in the Winter edition - which the CWBR has hired for us. We eagerly await the Spring issue.

A Yankee's Conversion from Douglas Democrat to Solid Successionist

Russell McClintock's recent post in the NY Times Opinionator blog (here http://nyti.ms/gtfF4a ) about Senator Stephen Douglas reminded me that Henry Brown Richardson had been a Douglas Democrat before he went to Louisiana. McClintock writes about Douglas's energetic efforts to avoid secession, and within that context, his support for Lincoln:

For both patriotic and political reasons, the Democratic senator had decided that his best course lay in a conspicuous display of public support for the incoming Republican administration — and in making himself a critical player in the last-ditch efforts to avoid civil war.

Douglas’s change was jarring for many observers; for years, and especially over the last several months, the belligerent, free-swinging senator had been blunt in asserting that the Republicans, with their irrational, reckless belief in racial equality and their self-righteous, moralistic attacks on Southern society, were no less to blame for the growing sectional crisis than the fire-eating Southern radicals. The previous August, referring to Andrew Jackson’s ferocious response to South Carolina’s defiance of federal law three decades earlier, Douglas had linked extremists on both sides of the slavery question with disunion when he thundered, “I wish to God we had an Old Hickory now alive, in order that he might hang Northern and Southern traitors on the same gallows.”

Yet Douglas was no fire-eater himself: his overriding goal was to save the Union, and to him, the only effective way to do this was through compromise. “I will not meditate war, nor tolerate the idea,” he pronounced in a fiery speech in early January 1861, “until every effort at peaceful adjustment shall have been exhausted, and the last ray of hope shall have deserted the patriot’s heart.” His reasoning captured the fears of millions, North and South: “War is disunion, certain, inevitable, irrevocable disunion. I am for peace to save the Union.”

Henry claimed to have little or no interest in politics, but his letters showed consistent sympathy for "The Little Giant" until the final months of 1860. He was probably circumspect about expressing these views in Louisiana, because many in the South considered Douglas to be a traitor. "The Little Giant" had incurred Southern enmity by his consistent support of the principle that local sovereignty must determine whether a territory or a state should be slave or free. Thus, according to his Freeport Doctrine, the Dred Scott decision could not be enforced in a territory opposed to slavery, because its citizens would never permit the exercise of police power necessary to support the peculiar institution. His ultimate act of "treason", however, came in 1858, when he led Congress to refuse admission of Kansas to the Union as a slave state, following a constitutional convention and referendum in that territory, which were tainted by fraud and misrepresentation.

Henry was a solid supporter of States Rights including the right to secede from the Union, but as one would expect from a Douglas Democrat, he doubted at first that secession was a wise policy. As secession fever swept the South, however, Henry, too, was caught up in the same current, and by mid April of 1861 found himself to be a committed citizen soldier of the Confederacy.

Henry was probably an ideal candidate for conversion to the Confederate cause, and the story of this conversion is treated in detail in my forthcoming book.