| From: Brumar89 | 12/27/2022 6:58:31 AM | | | | | | John W. Jones: The Runaway Slave Who Buried Nearly 3000 Confederate Soldiers
By Lucas Reilly
Mar 23, 2018
Chemung County Historical Society, Elmira, NY / Chemung County Historical Society, Elmira, NY
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John W. Jones was as close to a sinless man as you could find—with the exception of the time he lied to his mother.
It was a late June evening in 1844 and the 26-year-old enslaved man, who lived on a plantation near Leesburg, Virginia, told his mother that he was leaving to attend a party. His real plans were much riskier. Jones slipped outside, grabbed a pistol, and rendezvoused with four other enslaved men. With starlight as their guide, they crept through the Virginia woods. Their destination: North.
The men hiked approximately 20 miles every day, dodging slave catchers in Maryland and crossing the Mason-Dixon Line into the free state of Pennsylvania. Following a major route along the Underground Railroad, they needled through Harrisburg and Williamsport and traced a path along what is now State Route 14. When the exhausted men snuck into a barn near the New York border to sleep, Jones kept guard as the others rested: He sat down, laid a shotgun on his lap, and kept his eyes peeled.
“He was serious about getting his freedom,” says Talima Aaron, President of the John W. Jones Museum Board of Trustees. “He understood the danger, and he constantly took responsibility for others. You’ll notice that was a thread for him—responsibility for others.”
Jones never had to use the gun. When the barn’s owner, Nathaniel Smith, discovered the five men on his property, he invited them into his home. His wife Sarah served the group hot biscuits and butter and cared for them until their strength returned. It was the first time many of them had ever been inside a white person’s home. According to an 1885 profile in The Elmira Telegram, the gesture brought the men to tears.
On July 5, 1844, Jones crossed a toll bridge into Elmira, New York, with less than $2 in his pocket. Unlike most runaways bound for Canada, Jones decided to stay in Elmira. It’s here that Jones would become one of the country's most successful Underground Railroad conductors, one of the richest black men in the state of New York, and the last earthly link for nearly 3000 dead Confederate soldiers.
Living in the north did not mean Jones had it easy. He could not vote. He still shared sidewalks with former slave-owners. When he asked to receive an education at the local schools, he was denied.
But Jones had a knack for cracking ceilings. After earning the admiration of a local judge, he was allowed to study at an all-women’s seminary, exchanging janitorial work for reading and writing lessons. He joined a church with abolitionist leanings and become its sexton, maintaining its cemetery. Then he became the sexton of a second cemetery, and then a third. The community quickly grew to respect his work ethic and, eventually, Jones had earned enough money to buy a small house—a house that he transformed into a vital hub for the Underground Railroad.
At the time, the Underground Railroad—an informal network of trails, hiding places, and guides that helped slaves escape northward—was under intense scrutiny. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act had created financial incentives to report runaways living in free states. “Slave catchers from the south could come up to a place like Elmira and claim that a person of color was a runaway slave, and they could haul them back into slavery—even if that person had been born free,” says Bruce Whitmarsh, Director of the Chemung County Historical Society. There were steep penalties for aiding a person’s escape.
Jones didn’t care. Not only did he join the Underground Railroad, he was openly vocal about it, loudly pledging his opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act in a message that was published in abolitionist newspapers across the region: “Resolved, that we, the colored citizens of Elmira, do hereby form ourselves into a society for the purpose of protecting ourselves against those persons, (slave-catchers) prowling through different parts of this and other States.” Jones committed to resisting the law, even at the risk that “everyone of us be assassinated.”
The Underground Railroad in Elmira was unique: Since the town included the only train stop between Philadelphia and Ontario, it actually involved locomotives. Jones communicated regularly with William Still, the chief "conductor" of the Underground Railroad in Philadelphia, and built a cozy network of abolitionists who worked on trains passing through town. He provided runaways with housing, food, and even part-time jobs. “Runaways usually came in groups of four, six, or 10,” Aaron says. “But he had up to 30 at once in his little house.” Jones arranged hiding space for all of the escapees on the 4 a.m. “Freedom Baggage Car” to Canada, as it was unofficially known.
Over the course of nine years, Jones aided the escape of around 800 runaway slaves. Not one was captured.
During the last years of the Civil War, the same railroad tracks that had delivered hundreds of runaways to freedom began to carry thousands of captive Confederate soldiers to Elmira’s new prisoner of war camp. Once again, Jones would be there.
Of the 620,000 Civil War deaths, approximately 10 percent occurred at prison camps. The most notorious P.O.W. camp—in Andersonville, Georgia—saw 13,000 Union troops, or approximately 29 percent of the prison population, perish. After the war, Andersonville's commander was tried for war crimes. The camp is now a National Historic Site.
Meanwhile, the prison camp in Elmira has been largely forgotten. Today, the riverside site is little more than an unremarkable patch of dandelion-speckled grass; a small, easy-to-miss monument is the only marker. It belies the fact that while Elmira's camp was noticeably smaller than Andersonville's—only one-quarter its size—it was just as deadly: If you were a prisoner at “Hellmira,” there was a one-in-four chance you would die.
Chemung County Historical Society, Elmira, NY
Elmira was never supposed to have a prison camp; it was a training depot for Union soldiers. But when the Confederacy began refusing to exchange African-American soldiers—who it considered captive slaves, not prisoners of war—the Union stopped participating in prisoner exchanges. “Both sides started scrambling for places to expand, and that’s how Elmira got caught up in the web,” says Terri Olszowy, a Board Member for the Friends of the Elmira Civil War Prison Camp.
The rollout was ill-planned, Olszowy explains. When it opened in July 1864, the camp had no hospital or medical staff. The first prisoners were already in rough shape and deteriorated quickly. Latrines were placed uphill from a small body of water called Foster’s Pond, which quickly became a cesspool. A shelter shortage meant that hundreds of soldiers were still living in tents by Christmas. During spring, the Chemung River flooded the grounds. Rats crawled everywhere. When authorities released a dog to catch them, the prisoners ate the dog.
The camp grew overcrowded. Designed to hold only 5000 prisoners, it saw approximately 7000 to 10,000 men confined there at its peak. Across the street, an observation tower allowed locals the opportunity to gawk at these prisoners through a pair of binoculars. It cost 10 cents.
It must have been a depressing sight, a scene of men stricken with dysentery, scurvy, typhoid, pneumonia, and smallpox. Many prisoners attempted to escape. One group successfully dug a 66-foot tunnel with spoons and knives. One man fled by hiding in a barrel of swill. Another hid inside a coffin, leaping out as he was being hauled to Woodlawn Cemetery.
It’s said that 2973 Confederate prisoners left the Elmira prison camp in coffins for real. The job to bury them belonged to the town’s sexton: John W. Jones.
The P.O.W. cemetery in Elmira is unique. The dead at many prison camps were buried in mass graves; Chicago’s Oak Woods Cemetery, for example, contains a plot filled with the remains of prisoners detained at Camp Douglas that is believed to be largest mass grave in the western hemisphere. All 2973 of the dead at Elmira, however, received an individual, marked grave in a special section of Woodlawn Cemetery. Only seven are unknown. Jones's effort to give each soldier an individual grave, as well as his meticulous record-keeping, were a big part of why the federal government designated the P.O.W. portion of Woodlawn a "National Cemetery" in 1877—a status awarded to veterans' cemeteries deemed to be of national importance, and which has only been awarded to 135 cemeteries nationwide.
Jones treated each dead soldier with superhuman levels of grace. Overseeing a crew of 12, he managed the burial of about six soldiers every day, treating each body as if that person had been a member of his own church. He kept detailed records of each soldier’s identity by creating improvised dog tags: Around each person's neck or under their arm, Jones tucked a jar containing a paper detailing their name, rank, and regiment. That same information was neatly scrawled on each coffin. When the dirt settled, Jones marked each plot with a wooden headstone.
“No one told him how to do that job, he did it in the way that he thought was right—even though the people he buried were fighting a war to keep people like him enslaved,” Aaron says. “He even knew one of the young men who had died, and he reached back to the South and told the parents so they knew where their child was buried. That speaks to his compassion.”
According to Clayton W. Holmes’s 1912 book Elmira Prison Camp, “History does not record anything to challenge the assertion that at no prison, North or South, were the dead so reverently cared for, or a more perfect record kept.” In fact, when representatives of the Daughters of the Confederacy came to Elmira at the turn of the century to consider repatriating the remains, Jones’s handiwork convinced them to touch not a blade of grass. Instead, a monument in the cemetery commemorates the “honorable way in which they were laid to rest by a caring man.”
Aaron sees a second moral in the story. “People always talk about the tension between him being an escaped slave and burying with respect and dignity these Confederate soldiers fighting to keep people like him as slaves,” she says. “But to me there’s a subtext: Here is a grown man who escaped slavery, and the first thing he wanted to do when he reached freedom was get an education. Because of that, he was able to keep these meticulous records that later led to this national designation: It became a historical moment because this man, who was denied an education, got one.”
Chemung County Historical Society, Elmira, NY
It also made a mark on Jones’s bank account. Jones earned $2.50 for each soldier he buried. It wasn’t much, but by the time he had finished burying nearly 3000 Confederate dead, he had become one of the 10 richest African-Americans in the state of New York. With that money, he bought a handsome farm of at least 12 acres.
It was a bittersweet purchase. Not only is it believed that parts of his home were built from wooden scraps of the disassembled Elmira prison camp, Jones had purchased the home when New York state law stipulated that black men must own $250 worth of property in order to vote. His home—today listed on the National Register of Historic Places [ PDF]—earned Jones that right to vote.
For the remainder of his life, Jones continued working as a sexton and church usher. In 1900, he died and was buried in one of the cemeteries that had become his life’s work.
Incidentally, his death also marked the end of a local mystery: For nearly two decades, fresh flowers kept appearing on the freshly manicured grave of a woman named Sarah Smith. Nobody knew why the flowers appeared there or where they originated—until the decorations stopped appearing immediately after Jones’s death. Residents later realized that the grave belonged to the same Sarah Smith who, 56 years earlier, had invited John W. Jones and his friends into her home for butter, biscuits, and a good night’s rest.
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| From: Brumar89 | 12/28/2022 6:05:01 PM | | | | | | Remembering Southern Unionists
Unionists in East Tennessee Swear Loyalty to the Union Flag in 1862. (Source: Harper’s Weekly)
Arguments against removing Confederate monuments over the past few years have often claimed that in doing so communities run the risk of erasing history. What has been universally overlooked, however, is that the push to establish monuments to the Confederacy during the postwar years helped to erase the history of those white and black southerners who remained loyal and were willing to give their lives to save the United States.
Southern Unionism took many forms during the Civil War. Some disagreed with the right of a state to secede from the Union at the war’s outset while others grew weary of the Confederacy in response to a number of factors, including a Conscription Act in 1862 that exempted large slaveowners, the impressment of horses or mules for the army, and a “tax-in-kind” law that allowed the government to confiscate a certain percentage of farm produce for military purposes. Others in places like Appalachia and other highland regions that included few slaves saw little value in supporting a government whose purpose was the creation of an independent slaveholding republic.
Resistance to the Confederacy also took many forms throughout the war. The release of the movie, The Free State of Jones, starring Matthew McConaughey in 2016, introduced audiences to Newton Knight, who led an armed rebellion against the Confederacy in Jones County, Mississippi. Some joined clandestine political organizations such as the Heroes of America, which may have contained upwards of 10,000 members. Networks of communication kept resistors in touch with one another and their activities throughout the region. Unionists risked arrest by Confederate officials, ostracism from within the family, and violent reprisals from the community.
It is impossible to know just how many white southerners remained loyal to the Union during the war given disagreements over its very definition, but we do know that somewhere around 100,000 southern white men from Confederate states, except for South Carolina, served in the U.S. military. East Tennessee supplied somewhere around 42,000 men, but other Confederate states yielded significant numbers, including 22,000 from Virginia (and West Virginia) and 25,000 from North Carolina. The First Alabama Cavalry, which was considered one of the toughest units in General William Tecumseh Sherman’s army, took part in his “march” through Georgia and the Carolinas in 1864-65.
The decision to express one’s loyalty to the Union by joining the army was often a painful one to make from the lowliest private to some of the highest-ranking officers. While the story of Robert E. Lee’s decision to resign his commission in the U.S. army, rather than betray his home of Virginia, is often told and re-told in tragic prose, others grappled with the same decisions and yet chose to remain loyal. The man who offered Lee command of the U.S. army in 1861 was another Virginian by the name of Winfield Scott. Scott, whose military career stretched back to the War of 1812—including a failed presidential bid in 1852—was the highest-ranking general at the beginning of the war. Scott’s decision was no less difficult than Lee’s and yet he remained loyal and although too old to take command in the field, he helped formulate military policy that ultimately proved successful in subduing the rebellion.
General George Henry Thomas, also from Virginia, became one of the most successful generals in the war and saved the Union army from being completely routed on September 19, 1863, earning him the nickname the “Rock of Chickamauga.” His loyalty to the nation cost him his family, who refused to speak with him ever again and even turned his picture against the wall. Very few monuments to the service of these men and others like them, who defied family, friends, and community for the sake of the nation, can be found in the former Confederate states. And yet the removal of some Confederate monuments has caused some to worry about erasing history.
The other significant Southern bloc that voiced their loyalty to the Union and commitment to crushing the rebellion was the region’s slave population. From the beginning of the war, and in the shadow of a Supreme Court that as recently as 1857 ruled that free and enslaved blacks could not be citizens of the United States, African Americans offered their services to the military. Beginning in 1862 along the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia, former slaves rushed into the first all black regiments. By the end of the war roughly 150,000 former slaves fought and died to save this nation. They did so under the most harrowing conditions. Black soldiers were massacred on battlefields and even sent back into slavery at places like Fort Pillow in Tennessee and at the Crater in Petersburg, Virginia by Confederates, who refused to treat them as legitimate soldiers. As if that wasn’t enough, their own government refused to pay them what white soldiers earned. Only sustained protests that lasted more than a year and continued demonstrations of bravery on the battlefield led Congress to correct this injustice in the summer of 1864.
Southern Unionists, both black and white, may have celebrated Confederate defeat, but they continued to be persecuted owing to their wartime beliefs and actions by terrorist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. Life was especially difficult for former slaves, who fought for the Union and now hoped to exercise the right to vote, own land, or run for public office. Their sacrifice for the Union ended in the rise of Jim Crow state governments by the turn of the 20th century.
After the war, as white Southerners erected monuments to their Confederate dead they also erected monuments to their former slaves, only they recalled not brave men who fought to preserve the Union, but their loving former “servants” who remained loyal to master and their Lost Cause. The very act of monument erection helped to erase this history for much of the 20th century.
The removal of Confederate monuments need not result in the erasure of history. In fact, it may for the first time create the intellectual and physical space to commemorate and remember a new narrative of the past, one that corresponds more closely to the long and rich history of service and sacrifice by Black and white Southerners during the Civil War.
Further Reading
Clayton J. Butler, True Blue: White Unionists in the Deep South During the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Victoria Bynum, The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War.
Brian Steel Wills: George Henry Thomas: As True as Steel.
Website: UVA Unionists
https://kevinmlevin.substack.com/p/remembering-southern-unionists?r=39xl5&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email |
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| From: Glenn Petersen | 1/8/2023 7:47:26 AM | | | | | | Riddle solved: Why was Roman concrete so durable?
An unexpected ancient manufacturing strategy may hold the key to designing concrete that lasts for millennia.
David L. Chandler | MIT News
MIT Technology Review
ublication Date:
January 6, 2023
A large-area elemental map (Calcium: red, Silicon: blue, Aluminum: green) of a 2 cm fragment of ancient Roman concrete (right) collected from the archaeological site of Privernum, Italy (left). A calcium-rich lime clast (in red), which is responsible for the unique self-healing properties in this ancient material, is clearly visible in the lower region of the image. / Credits: Courtesy of the researchers
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The ancient Romans were masters of engineering, constructing vast networks of roads, aqueducts, ports, and massive buildings, whose remains have survived for two millennia. Many of these structures were built with concrete: Rome’s famed Pantheon, which has the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome and was dedicated in A.D. 128, is still intact, and some ancient Roman aqueducts still deliver water to Rome today. Meanwhile, many modern concrete structures have crumbled after a few decades.
Researchers have spent decades trying to figure out the secret of this ultradurable ancient construction material, particularly in structures that endured especially harsh conditions, such as docks, sewers, and seawalls, or those constructed in seismically active locations.
Now, a team of investigators from MIT, Harvard University, and laboratories in Italy and Switzerland, has made progress in this field, discovering ancient concrete-manufacturing strategies that incorporated several key self-healing functionalities. The findings are published today in the journal Science Advances, in a paper by MIT professor of civil and environmental engineering Admir Masic, former doctoral student Linda Seymour ’14, PhD ’21, and four others.
For many years, researchers have assumed that the key to the ancient concrete’s durability was based on one ingredient: pozzolanic material such as volcanic ash from the area of Pozzuoli, on the Bay of Naples. This specific kind of ash was even shipped all across the vast Roman empire to be used in construction, and was described as a key ingredient for concrete in accounts by architects and historians at the time.
Under closer examination, these ancient samples also contain small, distinctive, millimeter-scale bright white mineral features, which have been long recognized as a ubiquitous component of Roman concretes. These white chunks, often referred to as “lime clasts,” originate from lime, another key component of the ancient concrete mix. “Ever since I first began working with ancient Roman concrete, I’ve always been fascinated by these features,” says Masic. “These are not found in modern concrete formulations, so why are they present in these ancient materials?”
Previously disregarded as merely evidence of sloppy mixing practices, or poor-quality raw materials, the new study suggests that these tiny lime clasts gave the concrete a previously unrecognized self-healing capability. “The idea that the presence of these lime clasts was simply attributed to low quality control always bothered me,” says Masic. “If the Romans put so much effort into making an outstanding construction material, following all of the detailed recipes that had been optimized over the course of many centuries, why would they put so little effort into ensuring the production of a well-mixed final product? There has to be more to this story.”
Upon further characterization of these lime clasts, using high-resolution multiscale imaging and chemical mapping techniques pioneered in Masic’s research lab, the researchers gained new insights into the potential functionality of these lime clasts.
Historically, it had been assumed that when lime was incorporated into Roman concrete, it was first combined with water to form a highly reactive paste-like material, in a process known as slaking. But this process alone could not account for the presence of the lime clasts. Masic wondered: “Was it possible that the Romans might have actually directly used lime in its more reactive form, known as quicklime?”
Studying samples of this ancient concrete, he and his team determined that the white inclusions were, indeed, made out of various forms of calcium carbonate. And spectroscopic examination provided clues that these had been formed at extreme temperatures, as would be expected from the exothermic reaction produced by using quicklime instead of, or in addition to, the slaked lime in the mixture. Hot mixing, the team has now concluded, was actually the key to the super-durable nature.
“The benefits of hot mixing are twofold,” Masic says. “First, when the overall concrete is heated to high temperatures, it allows chemistries that are not possible if you only used slaked lime, producing high-temperature-associated compounds that would not otherwise form. Second, this increased temperature significantly reduces curing and setting times since all the reactions are accelerated, allowing for much faster construction.”
During the hot mixing process, the lime clasts develop a characteristically brittle nanoparticulate architecture, creating an easily fractured and reactive calcium source, which, as the team proposed, could provide a critical self-healing functionality. As soon as tiny cracks start to form within the concrete, they can preferentially travel through the high-surface-area lime clasts. This material can then react with water, creating a calcium-saturated solution, which can recrystallize as calcium carbonate and quickly fill the crack, or react with pozzolanic materials to further strengthen the composite material. These reactions take place spontaneously and therefore automatically heal the cracks before they spread. Previous support for this hypothesis was found through the examination of other Roman concrete samples that exhibited calcite-filled cracks.
To prove that this was indeed the mechanism responsible for the durability of the Roman concrete, the team produced samples of hot-mixed concrete that incorporated both ancient and modern formulations, deliberately cracked them, and then ran water through the cracks. Sure enough: Within two weeks the cracks had completely healed and the water could no longer flow. An identical chunk of concrete made without quicklime never healed, and the water just kept flowing through the sample. As a result of these successful tests, the team is working to commercialize this modified cement material.
“It’s exciting to think about how these more durable concrete formulations could expand not only the service life of these materials, but also how it could improve the durability of 3D-printed concrete formulations,” says Masic.
Through the extended functional lifespan and the development of lighter-weight concrete forms, he hopes that these efforts could help reduce the environmental impact of cement production, which currently accounts for about 8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Along with other new formulations, such as concrete that can actually absorb carbon dioxide from the air, another current research focus of the Masic lab, these improvements could help to reduce concrete’s global climate impact.
The research team included Janille Maragh at MIT, Paolo Sabatini at DMAT in Italy, Michel Di Tommaso at the Instituto Meccanica dei Materiali in Switzerland, and James Weaver at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University. The work was carried out with the assistance of the Archeological Museum of Priverno in Italy.
Riddle solved: Why was Roman concrete so durable? | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
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| From: TimF | 2/10/2023 12:02:04 AM | | | | | | Areas impacted by the Peshtigo Wildfire, the deadliest wildfire in recorded history. Often forgotten due to starting on the same day as the Great Chicago Fire.
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| From: Brumar89 | 2/15/2023 7:14:01 AM | | | | | | Heather Cox Richardson
February 14, 2023 (Tuesday)
On Valentine’s Day in 1884, Theodore Roosevelt lost both his wife and his mother.
Four years before, Roosevelt could not have imagined the tragedy that would stun him in 1884. February 14, 1880, marked one of the happiest days of his life. He and the woman he had courted for more than a year, Alice Hathaway Lee, had just announced their engagement. Roosevelt was over the moon: “I can scarcely realize that I can hold her in my arms and kiss her and caress her and love her as much as I choose,” he recorded in his diary. What followed were, according to Roosevelt, “three years of happiness greater and more unalloyed than I have ever known fall to the lot of others.”
After they married in fall 1880, the Roosevelts moved into the home of Theodore’s mother, Martha Bulloch Roosevelt, in New York City. There they lived the life of wealthy young socialites, going to fancy parties and the opera and traveling to Europe. When Roosevelt was elected to the New York State Assembly in 1881, they moved to the bustling town of Albany, where the state’s political wire-pullers worked their magic. Roosevelt’s machine politician colleagues derided the rich, Harvard-educated young man as a “dude,” and they tried to ignore his irritating interest in reforming society.
In the summer of 1883, Alice discovered that she was pregnant, and that fall she moved back to New York City to live with her mother-in-law. There she awaited the birth of the child who Theodore was certain would arrive on February 14.
As headstrong as her father, Roosevelt’s daughter beat her father’s prediction by two days. On February 12, Alice gave birth to the couple’s first child, who would be named after her. Roosevelt was at work in Albany and learned the happy news by telegram. But Alice was only “fairly well,” Roosevelt noted. She soon began sliding downhill. She did not recover from the birth; she was suffering from something at the time called “Bright’s Disease,” an unspecified kidney illness.
Roosevelt rushed back to New York City, but by the time he got there at midnight on February 13, Alice was slipping into a coma. Distraught, he held her until he received word that his mother was dangerously ill downstairs. For more than a week, “Mittie” Roosevelt had been sick with typhoid. Roosevelt ran down to her room, where she died shortly after her son got to her bedside. With his mother gone, Roosevelt hurried back to Alice. Only hours later she, too, died.
On February 14, 1884, Roosevelt slashed a heavy black X in his diary and wrote “The light has gone out of my life.” He refused ever to mention Alice again.
Roosevelt’s profound personal tragedy turned out to have national significance. The diseases that killed his wife and mother were diseases of filth and crowding—the hallmarks of the growing Gilded Age American cities. Mittie contracted typhoid from either food or water that had been contaminated by sewage, since New York City did not yet treat or manage either sewage or drinking water. Alice’s disease was probably caused by a strep infection, which incubated in the teeming city’s tenements, where immigrants, whose wages barely kept food on the table, crowded together.
Roosevelt had been interested in urban reform because he worried that incessant work and unhealthy living conditions threatened the ability of young workers to become good citizens. Now, though, it was clear that he, and other rich New Yorkers, had a personal stake in cleaning up the cities and making sure employers paid workers a living wage.
The tragedy gave him a new political identity that enabled him to do just that. Ridiculed as a “dude” in his early career, Roosevelt changed his image in the wake of the events of February 1884. Desperate to bury his feelings for Alice along with her, Roosevelt left his baby daughter with his sister and escaped to Dakota Territory, to a ranch in which he had invested the previous year. There he rode horses, roped cattle, and toyed with the idea of spending the rest of his life as a western rancher. The brutal winter of 1886–1887 changed his mind. Months of blizzards and temperatures as low as –41 degrees killed off 80% of the Dakota cattle herds. More than half of Roosevelt’s cattle died.
Roosevelt decided to go back to eastern politics, but this time, no one would be able to make fun of him as a “dude.” In an era when the independent American cowboy dominated the popular imagination, Roosevelt now had credentials as a westerner. He ran for political office as a western cowboy taking on corruption in the East. And, with that cowboy image, he overtook his eastern rivals.
Eventually, Roosevelt’s successes made establishment politicians so nervous they tried to bury him in what was then seen as the graveyard of the vice presidency. Then, in 1901, an unemployed steelworker assassinated President William McKinley and put Roosevelt—“that damned cowboy,” as one of McKinley’s advisers called him—into the White House.
Once there, he worked to clean up the cities and stop the exploitation of workers, backing the urban reforms that were the hallmark of the Progressive Era.
[Photo of Theodore Roosevelt's diary, Library of Congress.]
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| From: Glenn Petersen | 3/18/2023 9:11:19 PM | | | | | | A Four-Decade Secret: One Man’s Untold Story of Sabotaging Carter’s Re-election
New York Times
March 18, 2023
WASHINGTON — It has been more than four decades, but Ben Barnes said he remembers it vividly. His longtime political mentor invited him on a mission to the Middle East. What Mr. Barnes said he did not realize until later was the real purpose of the mission: to sabotage the re-election campaign of the president of the United States.
It was 1980 and Jimmy Carter was in the White House, bedeviled by a hostage crisis in Iran that had paralyzed his presidency and hampered his effort to win a second term. Mr. Carter’s best chance for victory was to free the 52 Americans held captive before Election Day. That was something that Mr. Barnes said his mentor was determined to prevent.
His mentor was John B. Connally Jr., a titan of American politics and former Texas governor who had served three presidents and just lost his own bid for the White House. A former Democrat, Mr. Connally had sought the Republican nomination in 1980 only to be swamped by former Gov. Ronald Reagan of California. Now Mr. Connally resolved to help Mr. Reagan beat Mr. Carter and in the process, Mr. Barnes said, make his own case for becoming secretary of state or defense in a new administration.
What happened next Mr. Barnes has largely kept secret for nearly 43 years. Mr. Connally, he said, took him to one Middle Eastern capital after another that summer, meeting with a host of regional leaders to deliver a blunt message to be passed to Iran: Don’t release the hostages before the election. Mr. Reagan will win and give you a better deal.
Then shortly after returning home, Mr. Barnes said, Mr. Connally reported to William J. Casey, the chairman of Mr. Reagan’s campaign and later director of the Central Intelligence Agency, briefing him about the trip in an airport lounge.
Mr. Carter’s camp has long suspected that Mr. Casey or someone else in Mr. Reagan’s orbit sought to secretly torpedo efforts to liberate the hostages before the election, and books have been written on what came to be called the October surprise. But congressional investigations debunked previous theories of what happened.
Mr. Connally did not figure in those investigations. His involvement, as described by Mr. Barnes, adds a new understanding to what may have happened in that hard-fought, pivotal election year. With Mr. Carter now 98 and in hospice care, Mr. Barnes said he felt compelled to come forward to correct the record.
“History needs to know that this happened,” Mr. Barnes, who turns 85 next month, said in one of several interviews, his first with a news organization about the episode. “I think it’s so significant and I guess knowing that the end is near for President Carter put it on my mind more and more and more. I just feel like we’ve got to get it down some way.”
Mr. Barnes is no shady foreign arms dealer with questionable credibility, like some of the characters who fueled previous iterations of the October surprise theory. He was once one of the most prominent figures in Texas, the youngest speaker of the Texas House of Representatives and later lieutenant governor. He was such an influential figure that he helped a young George W. Bush get into the Texas Air National Guard rather than be exposed to the draft and sent to Vietnam. Lyndon B. Johnson predicted that Mr. Barnes would become president someday.
Confirming Mr. Barnes’s account is problematic after so much time. Mr. Connally, Mr. Casey and other central figures have long since died and Mr. Barnes has no diaries or memos to corroborate his account. But he has no obvious reason to make up the story and indeed expressed trepidation at going public because of the reaction of fellow Democrats.
Mr. Barnes identified four living people he said he had confided in over the years: Mark K. Updegrove, president of the L.B.J. Foundation; Tom Johnson, a former aide to Lyndon Johnson (no relation) who later became publisher of the Los Angeles Times and president of CNN; Larry Temple, a former aide to Mr. Connally and Lyndon Johnson; and H.W. Brands, a University of Texas historian.
All four of them confirmed in recent days that Mr. Barnes shared the story with them years ago. “As far as I know, Ben never has lied to me,” Tom Johnson said, a sentiment the others echoed. Mr. Brands included three paragraphs about Mr. Barnes’s recollections in a 2015 biography of Mr. Reagan, but the account generated little public notice at the time.
Records at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum confirm part of Mr. Barnes’s story. An itinerary found this past week in Mr. Connally’s files indicated that he did, in fact, leave Houston on July 18, 1980, for a trip that would take him to Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel before returning to Houston on Aug. 11. Mr. Barnes was listed as accompanying him.
Brief news accounts at the time reported on some of Mr. Connally’s stops with scant detail, describing the trip as “strictly private.” An intriguing note in Mr. Connally’s file confirms Mr. Barnes’s memory that there was contact with the Reagan camp early in the trip. Under the heading “Governor Reagan,” a note from an assistant reported to Mr. Connally on July 21: “Nancy Reagan called — they are at Ranch he wants to talk to you about being in on strategy meetings.” There was no record of his response.
Mr. Barnes recalled joining Mr. Connally in early September to sit down with Mr. Casey to report on their trip during a three-hour meeting in the American Airlines lounge at what was then called the Dallas/Fort Worth Regional Airport. An entry in Mr. Connally’s calendar found this past week showed that he traveled to Dallas on Sept. 10. A search of Mr. Casey’s archives at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University turned up no documents indicating whether he was in Dallas then or not.
Mr. Barnes said he was certain the point of Mr. Connally’s trip was to get a message to the Iranians to hold the hostages until after the election. “I’ll go to my grave believing that it was the purpose of the trip,” he said. “It wasn’t freelancing because Casey was so interested in hearing as soon as we got back to the United States.” Mr. Casey, he added, wanted to know whether “they were going to hold the hostages.”
None of that establishes whether Mr. Reagan knew about the trip, nor could Mr. Barnes say that Mr. Casey directed Mr. Connally to take the journey. Likewise, he does not know if the message transmitted to multiple Middle Eastern leaders got to the Iranians, much less whether it influenced their decision making. But Iran did hold the hostages until after the election, which Mr. Reagan won, and did not release them until minutes after noon on Jan. 20, 1981, when Mr. Carter left office.
John B. Connally III, the former governor’s eldest son, said in an interview on Friday that he remembered his father taking the Middle East trip but never heard about any message to Iran. While he did not join the trip, the younger Mr. Connally said he accompanied his father to a meeting with Mr. Reagan to discuss it without Mr. Barnes and the conversation centered on the Arab-Israeli conflict and other issues the next president would confront.
“No mention was made in any meeting I was in about any message being sent to the Iranians,” said Mr. Connally. “It doesn’t sound like my dad.” He added: “I can’t challenge Ben’s memory about it, but it’s not consistent with my memory of the trip.”
Suspicions about the Reagan camp’s interactions with Iran circulated quietly for years until Gary Sick, a former national security aide to Mr. Carter, published a guest essay in The New York Times in April 1991 advancing the theory, followed by a book, “October Surprise,” published that November.
The term “October surprise” was originally used by the Reagan camp to describe its fears that Mr. Carter would manipulate the hostage crisis to effect a release just before the election.
To forestall such a scenario, Mr. Casey was alleged to have met with representatives of Iran in July and August 1980 in Madrid leading to a deal supposedly finalized in Paris in October in which a future Reagan administration would ship arms to Tehran through Israel in exchange for the hostages being held until after the election.
The House and Senate separately authorized investigations and both ultimately rejected the claims. The bipartisan House task force, led by a Democrat, Representative Lee H. Hamilton of Indiana, and controlled by Democrats 8 to 5, concluded in a consensus 968-page report that Mr. Casey was not in Madrid at the time and that stories of covert dealings were not backed by credible testimony, documents or intelligence reports.
Reached by telephone this past week, Mr. Sick said he never heard of any involvement by Mr. Connally but saw Mr. Barnes’s account as verifying the broad concerns he had raised. “This is really very interesting and it really does add significantly to the base level of information on this,” Mr. Sick said. “Just the fact that he was doing it and debriefed Casey when he got back means a lot.” The story goes “further than anything that I’ve seen thus far,” he added. “So this is really new.”
Michael F. Zeldin, a Democratic lawyer for the task force, and David H. Laufman, a Republican lawyer for the task force, both said in recent interviews that Mr. Connally never crossed their radar screen during the inquiry and so they had no basis to judge Mr. Barnes’s account.
While Mr. Casey was never proved to have been engaged in any October surprise deal-making, he was later accused of surreptitiously obtaining a Carter campaign briefing book before the lone debate between the two candidates, although he denied involvement.
News of Mr. Barnes’s account came as validation to some of Mr. Carter’s remaining advisers. Gerald Rafshoon, who was his White House communications director, said any interference may have changed history. “If we had gotten the hostages home, we’d have won, I really believe that,” he said. “It’s pretty damn outrageous.”
Mr. Connally was a political giant of his era. Raised on a South Texas cotton farm, he served in the Navy in World War II and became a confidant of Lyndon B. Johnson, helping run five of his campaigns, including his disputed 1948 election to the Senate that was marred by credible allegations of fraud. Mr. Connally managed Mr. Johnson’s unsuccessful bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960, then worked for the ticket of John F. Kennedy and Mr. Johnson. Mr. Connally was rewarded with an appointment as secretary of the Navy. He then won a race for governor of Texas in 1962.
He was in the presidential limousine sitting just in front of Mr. Kennedy in Dallas in November 1963 when Lee Harvey Oswald opened fire. Mr. Connally suffered injuries to his back, chest, wrist and thigh, but unlike Mr. Kennedy survived the ordeal. He won two more terms as governor, then became President Richard M. Nixon’s secretary of the Treasury and ultimately switched parties. He was a favorite of Mr. Nixon, who wanted to make him his vice president or successor as president.
Mr. Connally was indicted on charges of perjury and conspiracy to obstruct justice in 1974, accused by prosecutors of taking $10,000 to support a milk price increase, but acquitted by a jury.
Along the way, Mr. Connally found a political protégé in Mr. Barnes, who became “more a godson than a friend,” as James Reston Jr. put it in “The Lone Star,” his biography of Mr. Connally. The son of a peanut farmer who paid for college selling vacuum cleaners door to door, Mr. Barnes was elected to the Texas Legislature at age 21 and stood at Mr. Connally’s side for his first speech as a candidate for governor in 1962.
With Mr. Connally’s help, Mr. Barnes became House speaker at 26 and was later elected lieutenant governor, a powerful position in Texas, only to fall short in his own bid for governor in 1972. He urged Mr. Connally to run for president in 1980 even though by then they were in different parties.
After Mr. Connally’s campaign collapsed, he and Mr. Barnes went into business together, forming Barnes/Connally Investments. The two built apartment complexes, shopping centers and office buildings, and bought a commuter airline and an oil company, and later a barbecue house, a Western art magazine, a title company and an advertising company. But they overextended themselves, took on too much debt and, after falling oil prices shattered the Texas real estate market, filed for bankruptcy in 1987.
The two stayed on good terms. “In spite of the disillusionment of our business arrangements, Ben Barnes and I remain friends, although I doubt that either of us would go back into business with the other,” Mr. Connally wrote in his memoir, “ In History’s Shadow,” shortly before dying in 1993 at age 76. Mr. Barnes, for his part, said this past week that “I remain a great fan of him.”
Mr. Barnes said he had no idea of the purpose of the Middle East trip when Mr. Connally invited him. They traveled to the region on a Gulfstream jet owned by Superior Oil. Only when they sat down with the first Arab leader did Mr. Barnes learn what Mr. Connally was up to, he said.
Mr. Connally said, “‘Look, Ronald Reagan’s going to be elected president and you need to get the word to Iran that they’re going to make a better deal with Reagan than they are Carter,’” Mr. Barnes recalled. “He said, ‘It would be very smart for you to pass the word to the Iranians to wait until after this general election is over.’ And boy, I tell you, I’m sitting there and I heard it and so now it dawns on me, I realize why we’re there.”
Mr. Barnes said that, except for Israel, Mr. Connally repeated the same message at every stop in the region to leaders such as President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt. He thought his friend’s motive was clear. “It became very clear to me that Connally was running for secretary of state or secretary of defense,” Mr. Barnes said. (Mr. Connally was later offered energy secretary but declined.)
Mr. Barnes said he did not reveal the real story at the time to avoid blowback from his own party. “I don’t want to look like Benedict Arnold to the Democratic Party by participating in this,” he recalled explaining to a friend. The headlines at the time, he imagined, would have been scandalous. “I did not want that to be on my obituary at all.”
But as the years have passed, he said, he has often thought an injustice had been done to Mr. Carter. Discussing the trip now, he indicated, was his way of making amends. “I just want history to reflect that Carter got a little bit of a bad deal about the hostages,” he said. “He didn’t have a fighting chance with those hostages still in the embassy in Iran.”
The post A Four-Decade Secret: One Man’s Untold Story of Sabotaging Carter’s Re-election appeared first on New York Times.
A Four-Decade Secret: One Man’s Untold Story of Sabotaging Carter’s Re-election (dnyuz.com) |
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| From: Brumar89 | 4/14/2023 7:09:01 AM | | | | | | Emmett Till’s Murder: The Importance of Seeing and Remembering
A museum exhibition dedicated to Till and his mother collides with the Mississippi governor’s proclamation of Confederate Heritage Month.
by MARGARET MCMULLAN
APRIL 14, 2023 5:30 AM
A plaque marks the gravesite of Emmett Till at Burr Oak Cemetery May 4, 2005 in Aslip, Illinois. The FBI is considering exhuming the body of Till, whose unsolved 1955 murder in Money, Mississippi, after whistling at a white woman helped spark the U.S. civil rights movement. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
He stuttered because he had polio as a child. To help his speech, he imitated his favorite TV comedians and memorized the Gettysburg Address. He whistled, too.
To prepare Emmett for the racism he would inevitably experience in midcentury Mississippi, his mother gave him instructions: Don’t look white people in the eye. Move off the sidewalk when you see one coming.
“Oh, Mama. It can’t be that bad,” 14-year-old Emmett said.
“Emmett, it’s worse than that.”
Coming from a concerned mother, these words resonate perhaps even more now, in this era of widely documented and sometimes instantly broadcast police brutality and racial violence. But African-American parents have always felt the need to give their children the talk.
“How do you give a crash course in hatred to a boy who has only known love?” Mamie Till-Mobley later wrote.
In Chicago, before he boarded the train headed south to visit his cousins for the summer, Emmett asked his mother to have his bike fixed while he was away. He promised to pay her back. He gave her his watch to wear while he was gone.
He never did return home alive.
“ Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley: Let the World See,” now at the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson, Mississippi, is a powerful traveling exhibit that tells Emmett’s personal story. It also shows a mother’s perspective: Mamie Till-Mobley’s bravery is much in evidence, as is her ability to bring together a community to fight for justice. Her work helped fuel the civil rights movement in America more than six decades ago.
This is a family-friendly exhibit designed for adults and children of roughly middle-school age on up. Creative uses of technology make the displays intensely interactive; they provide novel, tangible ways for people to connect to this important history.
The brutal facts are not sugarcoated.
Visitors learn about Emmett’s kidnapping and murder, the funeral and trial, and the movement that followed. Throughout the exhibit hall, easels with the phrase “Share with Us” invite people to write feelings they experience on yellow Post-it notes. There’s a “mother’s night” for moms to gather, reflect, and discuss. Emmett Till’s cousin, Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr.—who witnessed Emmett’s abduction by the men who killed him—will speak at Mississippi schools throughout April and May.
But the same month the exhibit opened in Jackson, Tate Reeves, Mississippi’s Republican governor, made a proclamation designating April Confederate Heritage Month. He offered this symbolic gesture on behalf of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a neo-Confederate organization known for promoting Lost Cause myths such as the shopworn lie that the Civil War wasn’t about slavery.
Reeves’s Confederate Heritage Month proclamation says “it is important for all Americans to reflect upon our nation’s past [and] to gain insight from our mistakes.” Last year, while signing a bill prohibiting the teaching of “critical race theory” in the state’s public schools and community colleges, Reeves claimed that CRT is taught to “humiliate” white children. As a result of that vaguely worded law, students struggle to learn, teachers refrain from teaching, and all are hesitant to discuss uncomfortable truths about our past in Mississippi public schools.
African Americans make up 38 percent of Mississippi’s population—the highest proportion of any state—and yet the Republican-controlled legislature has banned books and squelched the teaching of black history. It also limits public school funding, demonizes school librarians, remains mute and immobile amid ongoing water and health-care crises, and has moved to silence political dissent in its own legislative body.
The Till exhibition will stay in Mississippi until May, then travel to Illinois, Georgia, and Tennessee; it has already stopped in Indiana, Alabama, and Washington, D.C.
Its artifacts serve as entryways to the past. They take us to 1955 Mississippi, a difficult, uncomfortable, violent place to be, but an essential one to understand if we want to comprehend our own times.
We need to go there. I would suggest that our political leaders need to go there, too.
One of the first things visitors see upon entering the exhibition is a display of Emmett’s baby and toddler pictures alongside Jim Crow–era signs such as “We cater to white trade only.” These can be viewed within an open green suitcase, the kind Emmett carried.
On the afternoon of my visit, I sit in a viewing area next to Ashanti Esco, her husband, and their 6-year-old son as we all watch a short video. The family hold hands as Rev. Parker, in the video, describes traveling with Emmett on the train from Chicago and arriving at the station in Mississippi.
On August 24, Emmett joined his cousins and some friends at Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market in Money, Mississippi, where they played checkers on the store’s front porch. They took turns going inside to buy candy. After they left the store, Carolyn Bryant—the grocery’s shopkeeper—walked to her car.
Emmett whistled. As Rev. Parker describes it, he did so as a joke. It was a long wolf-whistle, like something out of a cartoon, and it shattered the tense Jim Crow decorum. Simeon Wright, another cousin traveling with Emmett, later said of his facetious provocation, “He had no idea how dangerous that was; because when he saw our reaction, he got scared too.”
Knowing he’d made a risky mistake, Emmett’s cousins got him away from the store as fast as they could.
Days passed.
At 2 a.m. on August 28, Carolyn Bryant’s husband, Roy, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, arrived with weapons at the home where the young men were staying, and they kidnapped Emmett.
No one knew what happened to him.
Three days later, a teenager fishing in the Tallahatchie River discovered Emmett’s body.
While the video plays, moving images of the muddy Tallahatchie River surround us.
To our left, the historical marker about Emmett Till lights up. Riddled with bullet holes, the sign has become a character in the saga, a visible reminder of an elusive but necessary reckoning. A bulletproof version was put up in 2019 to replace earlier Tallahatchie County signs that had been shot up or stolen.
Displayed in the words and pictures that surround us is the unerasable fact: Emmett Till was murdered for whistling. Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till came to Mississippi, where he was murdered by men who were never held to account. That’s a fact that this traveling exhibit insists will not be erased or whitewashed.
Ashanti’s son looks at his mother. She squeezes his hand.
Mamie Till-Mobley did not disappear into her grief. She spoke out. “My boy was not going to be buried in Mississippi,” she said. “Let the world see what they did to my son.” She had his body sent to Chicago and displayed in an open, glass-topped casket, which was photographed for Jet magazine. A copy of the magazine’s September 22, 1955 issue—which contained the unforgettable images, including a picture of Emmett’s destroyed face—is on display in the exhibition. The cover caption: Will Mississippi ‘Whitewash’ the Emmett Till Slaying?
It’s a headline that could appear in today’s papers.
I ask Ashanti if the exhibit is too much for her or for her 6-year-old son.
Ashanti’s son shakes his head no.
“It’s a beautiful exhibit because Emmett was here,” she says. “He was here.”
Ashanti’s son picks up an old rotary phone to listen again to the eyewitness tell exactly what he saw the night Emmett disappeared.
“She did what was right for her child,” Ashanti says. “Support your children, even if they’re not here with you. Mamie Till-Mobley had young people come together and stand up and fight against something that was bigger than them.”
The Till exhibition tells Emmett’s story in a very contemporary-feeling, action-oriented way: It invites visitors into its work of witness and challenges them to explore ways to make change by sharing their stories, raising their voices, and providing support to those continuing the work that Emmett’s mother started.
Nearby, one of the “sharing boards” is covered with Post-its.
Share with us something that strengthened your resolve.
Mamie Till’s strength in spite of her grief, one note says.
Share with us something that deserves applause.
This exhibit.
“Emmett Till was my George Floyd,” Congressman John Lewis wrote in an essay published the day he died. “He was my Rayshard Brooks, Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor.” Lewis was only a year older than Till. “I will never ever forget the moment when it became so clear that he could easily have been me,” Lewis wrote.
On the same day I spoke with Ashanti Esco and her husband and son during our tour of the exhibition, the mayor of Jackson, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, his wife Ebony, and their two children also visited. They came in the company of California Governor Gavin Newsom, his wife, and their three children.
Newsom tweeted about the “enriching and grounding experience . . . [taking] in our nation’s complicated history.”
Would that all our political leaders toured museums like this one and reflected on the complicated, sad, and sometimes harrowing stories about our country they contain.
When the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum opened in 2017, Myrlie Evers-Williams—widow of the civil rights leader Medgar Evers, who was assassinated in the driveway of their Jackson home in 1963— addressed a crowd of over two thousand people. (The fact that she was his wife, and not a descendant, is a stark reminder of how close that era of struggle remains to us historically; as Faulkner wrote, the past is “not even past.”) Evers-Williams said that at one time, she hated Mississippi because of what it had taken from her.
“But Mississippi is not all that people think that it is,” she continued. She said she hoped we would slow down inside the exhibit halls. Look carefully at the rifle that killed her husband. Touch the bullet holes in Vernon Dahmer’s firebombed truck. Cry. Feel.
Artifacts connect us to the past in ways that books cannot. By providing access to them, museums can put the past directly into the hands of citizens. If you touch something, you are also touched by it. Voters and policymakers can here receive a different kind of education than they would through reprinted pictures and texts alone.
I hope that for some, seeing, feeling, and hearing these artifacts might make a difference in how they understand the history of their state, of the South, of our country. For others, though, it might just not work that way.
Former Mississippi Republican Governor Haley Barbour, who was instrumental in getting the museum in Jackson funded, discussed his memory of the civil rights era with a writer from the Weekly Standard in 2010. “I just don’t remember it as being that bad,” he said. The gaffe ended Barber’s presidential aspirations.
Then again, perhaps his poor memory of the era is what got the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum built in the first place.
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