I don’t have cable TV, so I thankfully have no exposure to the constant assault of the cable news networks. Instead, every morning I walk outside and pick up my morning Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star and sit down to a morning mug of tea. This morning I read about an event held by the Civil War Trust (CWT) to commemorate the 155th anniversary of the first battle of Fredericksburg. Historians from the CWT and the National Park Service filmed a terrain walk of the Fredericksburg battlefield.
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“The small troupe trudged through the expansive field on Slaughter Pen Farm Wednesday morning, stopping intermittently under a clear winter sky and under the assault of freezing and whipping winds to recount a battle that raged on the outskirts of the city during the Civil War’s Battle of Fredericksburg.
Four historians rotated turns in front of a cameraman, armed with a smartphone, providing play-by-play accounts of the fighting—strategies, missteps, near misses and bloody clashes.
The group’s production at Slaughter Pen Farm was one of several stops as they hopscotched to numerous battle sites around Fredericksburg as part of a live Facebook video presentation marking 155 years since the famous and bloody Civil War battle in and around Fredericksburg.
Garry Adelman, director of history and education with the Civil War Trust, was the ringleader of the college football gameday-like live production, guiding the historians through the story of what happened on the fields outside the city in December of 1862 and interacting with viewers at the same time.” (FLS)
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I maintain a Facebook account for the sole purpose of viewing other FaceBook pages of interest. How fortunate. I viewed the CWT videos on their Facebook page today and was glad I did. The cold and the wind of the last few days added to my appreciation of the videos, even if it did play havoc with the production. The series of videos started at Chatham Manor on the Stafford side of the Rappahanock River. It moved across the river to highlight the street fighting in the city. At Pelham’s Corner, we learn of the gallant Pelham and his twelve pounder Napoleon. The crew moves to the swale at the base of Marye’s Heights and then on to Slaughter Pen Farm and Prospect Hill before ending at the Sunken Road. A final video is taken at the Fredericksburg Confederate Cemetery to wrap up the event.
Eventually, CWT will put these videos on YouTube where they’ll probably be easier to view. I’ve walked much of the Fredricksburg battlefield, but the guided video tour was enlightening. My advice is to skip the Fox and Friends, MSNBC and CNN madness for a day and watch these videos.
TTG
Fredricksburg, like the entire war of Northern Aggression, was completely unnecessary. That entire area now has been stripped of its true culture and now is completely owned by the MIC and its Yankee minions.
Fredricksburg is probably the last battle the US fought on equal terms, and it shows. Once again the Yankees got the holy shit kicked out of them by a much smaller but far more motivated force. Ever since then Yankees never fight honorably one on one. This was when the Yankees learned the one thing they seem to remember: It doesn’t matter how dirty you fight, how many innocents you murder, just don’t lose.
This is why the Yankees aren’t giving up in Syria and letting the people have peace. They have announced they are not leaving and even started protecting their “no fly zone” with F-22’s.
Just like after Fredricksburg, the Yankees are merely looking for someone willing to commit genocide scale slaughter to win. A Grant, Sherman or a Sheridan. Or in England, a Churchill. Now, just like then, they know they have the biggest hammer, a nuclear powered one. All they need is someone willing to wield it. Hillary was their man. Hillary, the ultimate Yankee.
I will watch the videos , but I would extend your advice a bit on the cable networks to say one should give them up entirely.
Very interesting. Can I also recommend the BBC series “War Walks”, by the late Colonel Richard Holmes? Some of these are on Youtube (together with some pale imitations from wannabe imitators).
Thank you for this Col.Lang. I fear my retired father has fallen into the Fox news vortex and I’m always looking for items to pull him out even if for a short time. This link ties into exactly what he loves. Hopefully we can make the short drive to Fredericksburg and make the walk ourselves!
TTG
5th NY Volunteer Infantry in the painting (Duryea’s Zouaves)This was a hard fighting outfit. Notice that the officers do not wear the regimental uniform except that they wear red trousers and kepis. It used to be thought that these colorful uniforms were replaced with Union Blue later in the war but in fact the War Department maintained a factory to make the various Zouave uniforms throughout the war. There were half a dozen such regiments, all with different uniforms. The Johnnies had a couple such units as well, predictably from Louisiana. One of them, Coppens’ Zouave Battalion was so badly shot up in the Peninsula in 1862 that it became Lee’s headquarter guard because of reduced numbers. My favorite event at Fredericksburg was Stonewall’s recommendation at the end of the first day that the Confederates strip down to their underwear to make a night assault. the idea being that so attired they could distinguish the federals from themselves. pl
Thanks TTG. Walking the actual battlefield, even if by video, gives an insight into that battle you cannot get from even the best researched books. I am not a Facebook fan, but had my daughter enroll me so that I could view sites like the one you mention.
I do follow this page and appreciate the work they do on preserving battlefields. Ditto on educating us on the history of the conflict.
All
Apropos of nothing but my memories, I remember a very old lady telling me when I was young that I should not worry about her because she was going home soon to be with General Lee and Jesus. pl
TTG re: “The cold and the wind of the last few days added to my appreciation of the videos, even if it did play havoc with the production.”
Here in Cologne we’re slowly getting some winter. The rhine has rather high water atm (ie. there is flood), and it’s usually around 1° Celsius (i.e. just around frost) and in addition to that it is rainy and rather windy.
Except for the cold I like the weather 😉 That said, it’s rather unpleasant when you have to, say, stand and wait for an S-Bahn.
I am glad that I have succumbed to the temptation of warmness, and so I wear a splendid … Ushanka (even though a variation without the red star).
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Soviet_soldier_DN-SC-92-04942.jpg
No longer a cold neck and cold ears … 😀 IMO recommendable for cold weather.
Gettysburg was the first battlefield I walked, almost 50 years ago. Before walking the field much of the battle didn’t make that much sense. Once you walk it you begin to understand why some of the things that happened were possible. I feel that way about many of the battlefields we have now visited over the years. Cowpens was the most recent one. (Good barbecue in the area to boot.)
Steve
Yankees never fight honorably one on one… It doesn’t matter how dirty you fight, how many innocents you murder…the Yankees are merely looking for someone willing to commit genocide scale slaughter to win . .
Red Sox fan?
“going home soon to be with General Lee and Jesus”
My Grandmother (b 1899) was from Little Egypt in Illinois, and she also had a few quaint Lee expressions. Her people were horribly persecuted by Yankees during the war.
http://littleegyptcivilwar.leadr.msu.edu/
I think that for some reason they allowed Lee and many of his generals to remain unsmeared after the war, perhaps as a cover up for what the carpet baggers were doing. The quid-pro-quo seemed to be “You let us keep Lee and our pride, and we won’t try to stop your reconstruction rape”. Another reason was likely because of experiences getting whooped by the south like Fredricksburg. The Yankees figured out that their inscripted blue bellies just couldn’t fight like the Confederates, and that they would be needed in all the panned wars looming on the horizon. Now even this deal has been abrogated as Lee statues across the south have become targets for Yankee historical revisionism. The empire no longer needs those southerners with fighting spirit.
At Nuremburg the throwing of a bone of honor to the losers so that they had something sacred to cling to was replaced by the doctrine of obliteration of the heroes of the vanquished and the Morgentau plan. No German, Nazi or non Nazi, was allowed to have remained good and honorable. They called it “de-nazification” but it was really cultural obliteration. To this day, the efforts to link the Wehrmacht to the holocaust are unceasing. Rommel wasn’t even allowed to be without taint, although he took cyanide after participating in the attempted assassination of Hitler.
Today, this total vilification of enemies of the empire is one method of covering up the empires’ war crimes. Just as with Saddam, Ghadafi, Assad and Kim, it is always the brazenness of the accusations that trumps the supporting lies of projection backing it up.
Steve –
I envy your visit to Gettysburg. Family lore claims an ancestor fought there. Years ago when younger I walked the battlefield of Saratoga. But at the time I was too young and too dumb to either understand or appreciate the tactics. Later, while stationed on Okinawa, I walked the battlefields there including the hill where General Buckner was KIA.
confusedponderer,
I still have an old Army winter parka with a wool lined hood and a wolf fur ruff that I bought in an Army surplus store back in my college days. It served me well on a cold troy, NY campus and on many winter trips into the Adirondacks back country. That and a nice wool tuque kept me toasty warm… almost.
I think cousin Eddie wore the ushanka well in “Christmas Vacation,” a holiday tradition in my house.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMOiwA0yytc
Walker,
Best comment ever.
GeneO,
Over the years I’ve covered every inch of the Saratoga battlefield on foot, showshoe and ski. That was one hell of a campaign.
I have stopped to see Fredericksburg on the way to Florida. I have visited Antietam. Haven’t gotten to Gettysburg yet. There is a missing element of history in today’s marketplace: Honest accounts of important battles examined through the lens of “staff rides” by people with historical, military, technological, political hindsight, foresight, wisdom and creative talent. This could include text written by participants during or after the fact, Added commentary by Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, B. H. Liddell-Hart, and Boydian acolytes would be a juicy plus. I have walked most of the Revolutionary sites north of Philadelphia. I wish I had rthe time and money to do the Civil War, and the Battle of the Bulge. Reading great texts is wonderful. Television could and often does break down distance/cost.
TTG –
Did you ever get up to Walloomsac to the Bennington Battlefield?
GeneO,
I visited that battlefield several times, but certainly not to the extent that I damned near inhabited the Saratoga site. I often wonder how many of Stark’s militiamen learned their military skills as rangers and snowshoemen on the northern New England frontier rather than drilling on the village green.
TTG –
Hunters, every one of them. Those New England fields were too rocky and barren, so they all needed a little side-meat in the pot. My great uncle lived back there on a hardscrabble farm, and he always had a deer or two nailed to the barn door in the winter, skinned and gutted. He would only carve off a cut when it turned green, said it improved the meat. He still went into the woods when in his 80s. Of course that was long before the invasion of the big city boys playing great white hunter.
TTG,
you’re right. What Eddie wore looks like an Ushanka. My one has dark brown fur.
When I was in the army we had a teddy-ed canvas winter cap, with the then freshly new camo pattern, and it was quite ok for the weather we faced on the cold, windy hills in the Westerwald.
I liked the warmness, but not the thing itself because it looked, well, silly. Still, the design made sense. The Ushanka looks better, (and if red-star-less) looks civilised also, and IMO it is warmer. Well, so I think, and my lady disagrees.
That written, tastes change but sensible designs can become classics. Being able to fold down warm, furred flaps is one such sensible classic capable things.
My ushanka is ‘international’ – from a bavarian or austrian company, but sewed in slovakia, transported cheaply over EU funded highways and getting EU tax benefits.
It can be wilder than that. I have American t-shirts with nice and smart labels, which I ordered from a company in chicago. Well, according to the tax stamps … they were shipped to me from India. I have Nike sneakers which are wonderful, and they were made in … vietnam. Some of my super american Lewis jeans were made in … belgium. That’s one of the odd things in globalisation. The corporation on the label doesn’t tell you where it was made.
GeneO,
Ah, the rocky fields of New England. I spent the summer of my 15th year busting up rocks in our yard with a 10 lb sledge, a 3 lb hammer and a star drill. The goal was to lower the rocks to the point I could run the lawn mower over them. The next year when I was wasn’t filling a 1934 IH dump truck with chicken manure, I was filling it with rocks from a plowed field. Now down in the Virginia Piedmont, people buy rocks. No matter how bad i want to build a stone wall, I cannot bring myself to paying money for rocks.
You might enjoy this site about a ranger and snowshoeman recreation outfit in northern New England. I don’t know if this outfit is still in business, but the site is interesting.
http://www.snowshoemen.com
TTG –
Thanks! Great site. I was never aware of Eames, Harmon and Church. Rogers got all the fame mainly due to the novel and the Spencer Tracy film. Knowlton’s and Whitcomb’s Rangers also never got the renown that Rogers did.
General Stark was quite a guy. A Lieutenant with Rogers Rangers, he did not go on the St Francis mission. Wiki claims he had apparently spent a year as a “guest” of the Abenaki until ransomed. So out of deference to his Indian foster family he opted out.
I lucked out, never had to bust rocks like you at 15. But my I did spend some time repairing frost heave damage on rock walls at Uncle Doug’s farm.
Nice post