Elizabeth Cady Stanton & Lucretia Mott wrote the Declaration of Sentiments for the 1848 Woman's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York, deliberately modeling it on the Declaration of Independence....
After his failed Beer Hall Putsch (1923), Adolf Hitler was arrested on November 11 and soon after found guilty of high treason and sentenced to five years imprisonment. The term would be reduced, but nonetheless the young chap hand some time on his hands. So what did he do? He wrote a manifesto outlining exactly what he hoped to achieve… too bad no one read it and no one believed the little crazy guy from Austria. Germany was practically a third world country after the ravages of war (WWI), and Hitler and his Nazis just a radical expression of desperation. The world ignored him. But within 10 years the National Socialist Party controlled Germany, and Europe’s fate was sealed. The result of his imprisonment was his book, Mein Kampf (”My Struggle”) and was published on July 18, 1925 (that’s today, 83 years ago). I have held an original 1925 copy in my hands and frankly, though it is in German and I could not read it, it brought a cold chill down my spine.
We need to use the Way Back Machine and put poor Adolf out of his misery in 1925…
I’ve been spending a lot of time reading Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848. This book is another outstanding contribution to the Oxford History of the United States series. Howe’s work might be the best of the bunch so far, I don’t know.
Anyway, his handling of Andrew Jackson and his legacy has really been interesting and thought provoking. Howe avoided using terms such as “Jacksonian America” and he did so as Jackson was a very controversial figure who tended to divide American, which, for example, was in staunch contrast to Monroe who was pretty much the opposite. To call this era as being “Jacksonian” is probably not historically accurate.
So how do you teach Jackson? I have to admit, part of me really finds a no-nonsense president who had actually fought in a battle (and killed) kinda appealing considering the ilk we get today.
Jackson’s era was complicated, crazy, and incredibly American. It was a time of lots of things, both good and bad: massive expansion, technological and transportation revolutions, and of course, slavery.
Interestingly, I see a lot of similarities with Jackson and President George W. Bush. Though even if future historians are tempted, I hope they don’t label us “Bushonian,” Gawd (wink) that would be horrificationally (wink) bad.
However, looking at the two, the similarities are interesting. Both won by running as “outsiders.” Though Jackson won the popular vote decidedly, Bush did not.
But continuing, both had presidency’s that were decidedly divisive, polarizing, and highly scrutinized. Jackson seemed to have created the Democratic party by dismantling its predecessor, and the Bush presidency has probably seriously altered the Republican party.
From the polarizing effects of Jackson and his opposition emerged two parties: the Democratic Republicans, or Democrats, adhering to Jackson; and the National Republicans, or Whigs, opposing him. Both evolving from the old Republican Party. Today, the Republican party might very well be undone after Bush is gone as well. There are already ramifications.
Both were criticized and saw members of their party abandon them because of their policies, and both are seen as cowboys or westerners.
Jackson, an unapologetic racist and white supremest (much like most whites of his time). Bush, rightly or wrongly, was not beloved by such groups as the NAACP and La Raza.
Bush will probably be remember as a gunslinger or warmonger, or something of sort. Jackson had killed and was always up for a duel.
And as the election comes around, something else to note, when Van Buren succeeded Jackson as a candidate, it was described as “Jackson’s Third Term,” and today political opponents are calling McCain, “Bush’s Third Term,” as well.
This is not a “political” post but an observation. I take no sides, express no ideological belief, but only seek to find some kind of “historical sense” within the here and now, as well as the past. So please, do not enter comments blasting Bush or anyone else, they will be deleted. If you wish to make an intelligent observation, please do!!
Gordon S. Wood is the Alva O. Way University Professor and professor of history at Brown University. He is the author of many award-winning works, including The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, which won the Bancroft and John H. Dunning prizes and was nominated for the National Book Award; The Radicalism of the American Revolution, awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the Emerson Prize.
Now comes his newest book, The Purpose of the Past, which is a collection of long-form book reviews Wood’s wrote during the past 25 years for the New York Review of Books and the New Republic. The book holds together nicely thematically, which can be an issue with a book of “reviews.” However, as you’ll see there is a consistent element to the tone of the book which starts with Wood’s review of Garry Wills’ Explaining America (1981) and ends with his thoughts on Robin L. Einhorn’s American Taxation, American Slavery (2006). What also makes The Purpose of the Past worthy of purchase is that Wood offers an “Afterward” with new insights or thoughts since the publication of the review he wrote.
A fellow reviewer offered this description of the book: “The Purpose of the Past is not another crotchety elegy for what history once was but sadly now isn’t; it is also a celebration of what, at its best, it is, and a powerful argument for its ongoing necessity,” and I could not agree more.
In her book, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, historian Drew Faust hoped to offer “a sense of how people are shaped and constrained by the world into which they are born, of how their choices are limited by the ‘taken for grantedness’ of their social universe.” Faust wanted to show “how people managed not just to accept, but to justify social arrangements we today find abhorrent.”
For both good and bad, notes Wood, the last 40 years have seen significant changes in the field of history. Though after reading The Purpose of the Past, one gets the sense this “historiographical revolution” has been more bad than good. Obviously, a matter of opinion.
The 1960s and 70s awakened budding historians to cast away the “top down” approach for the “bottom up” and this produced incredible work that for the first time brought understanding and appreciation for women, blacks, and other minorities that had been ignored. Today social, or “cultural” history is thriving. But we still need balance and that seems to be lost on most universities.
As Wood points out, the evolution and dominance in academia of “cultural” history has produced universities where they have “stopped” hiring anyone but cultural historians. Wood seems to have a problem with this as it does not provide for balance.
Cultural historiography is, in Wood’s viewpoint, dominated by historians who see themselves “essentially as cultural critics” who do not seek to truly understand the past “on its own terms,” but to “use history to empower people in the present.” Strong words, indeed, and for some cultural historians, they be fight’n words.
Historian Bernard Bailyn noted that it was human nature to want to “extract from the past some kind of bearing on contemporary problems,” or to want to see something that is not always there. To impose a contemporary view on the past can be trouble if the historian does not employ “critical control,” as without it generates “presentism” and then all meaning is lost.
Memory and history become at odds and ultimately history becomes the destructor of memory, Wood notes. History is indeed “used” by some cultural historians who have agendas. Taking the past not on its own terms, but by imposing the present upon it for personal or political purposes, according to Wood, has become the downfall of some “cultural” historians during the past 25 years.
In his Introduction to the book (p.11) Wood writes:
“To be able to see the participants of the past in this comprehensive way, to see them in the context of their own time, to describe their blindness and folly with sympathy, to recognize the extent to which they were caught up in changing circumstances over which they had little control, and to realize the degree to which they created results they never intended — to know all this about the past and to be able to relate it without anachronistic distortion to our present is what is meant by having a historical sense.”
There are no grand lessons to be learned from the past, Wood surmises, only more questions, and at best we can seek to humanize and develop what Wood calls a “historical sense” of things, and do so without “anachronistic distortion.”
Powerful words, indeed.
Through 21 exceptional and thoughtful past reviews, Wood tackles such subjects as: Narrative History, The Lessons of History, History as High Politics, History without Ideas, Postmodern History, Multicultural History, History as Cultural Criticism, Presentism in History, among others.
This is a book you have to at least read, if not own.
Listen to an interview with Gordon S. Wood, or you can also read his reviews.
One of my favorite HISTORY blogs is back, Brian @ A Lincoln Blog is back and posting regularily now that his “schedule has loosened” up a bit. I have truly missed his musings. A Top Blog in my book!
I will have one last 2008 Presidential post in October or so, for now, Jib Jab will have to do. Hat tip to Ralph E. Luker at HNN:
There’s been lots of finger pointing going on in Congress of late. They blame big oil, then speculators, and now the President. The President in turn blames Congress. All of this could have been avoided, but our elected officials made sure it would not be, and here we are.
Let me take you way back, I mean way-way back to 1975. There was somebody who recognized our growing dependence on foreign oil and who spoke out about it. Do you know who it was? The picture to the right is him… OK, I’ll tell you, President Gerald Ford. Here’s a President that some ridiculed at the time and declared him to be somewhat, stupid.
In Ford’s State of the Union Address, he announced: “We, the United States, are not blameless. Our growing dependence upon foreign sources has been adding to our vulnerability for years and years, and we did nothing to prepare ourselves for such an event as the embargo of 1973.”
He didn’t look to others for solutions or blame, he offered a solution. A program that would have included: “200 major nuclear power plants, 250 major new coal mines, 150 major coal-fired power plants, 30 major new refineries, 20 major new synthetic fuel plants, the drilling of many thousands of new wells, the insulation of 18 million homes and the manufacturing and sale of millions of new automobiles, trucks and buses that use much less fuel.”
You might be asking yourself, What the Heck Happened?
If you want to learn more, click here to read the Op-ed from the N.Y. Times (yes hard to believe).
Anyway, while we face $5 per gallon at the pump, and who knows by 2009, Congress continues not to offer solutions, but rhetoric and hyperbole, no wonder their approval rating is in a dive:
I was very wary of novels by H.G.Wells, having forced myself to wade through the sheer opinionated tedium of his Joan and Peter (1918), but I found a cheap copy of his The Soul of a Bishop in Hay-on-Wye, and decided I might as well try it.
The novel is a sort-of-satirical fantasy about a Bishop who finds God. He starts off in the rather dismal diocese of Princhester, depressed by local politics and scandals, and feeling himself (and the church) to be totally ineffective. It is wartime, and he has followed the King’s example in giving up alcohol and tobacco, which makes him extremely irritable, so he goes to Harley Street in the hope that his doctor will tell him to start smoking again for the sake of his health. Unfortunately, his usual affable doctor has gone to serve at the front, and the locum prescribes instead a powerful stimulant, which has psychotropic effects. The Bishop sees visions, comes to a personal knowledge of God, and appals the Anglican community by preaching a heartfelt sermon at a confirmation service.
The satire on Anglicanism is enjoyable, though one suspects that Wells need to stretch himself much to write it. Bishops are such an easy target; a hundred years ago they had just the same talent for making themselves ridiculous that they do today (For a non-believer, the current crises in the C of E are like one of those exquisitely painful comedies, like The Office, where the viewer squirms even while laughing helplessly. Have they no idea how silly they look? Last week a Bishop burst into tears when he couldn’t get his own way about hindering the progress of women Bishops. Their concerns seem so tiny in the greats scheme of things. Do they really believe in a Being who might get upset because a couple of men are doing rude things with one another in the privacy of their own bedroom? But I digress…)
Wells’s Bishop has a vision of God that makes him realise Truth (which is very close to the opinions that happen to be held by H.G.Wells.) He undergoes a spiritual Odyssey that takes him from mitred misery to contented poverty. Some amusing points are made about the temptations of power and the temptations of powerlessness.
I don’t know if the religious ideas were seen as striking in 1917; today they seem rather tame. The bishop finds that he needs to get past the details of faith, such as the Trinity, to the great fact of God. He preaches that all faiths are good, and that all offer a way to the same God. It’s the sort of idea that prince Charles seemed to be hankering after,when he said he wanted to be Defender of Faith, rather than of The Faith. This seems very dubious to me. All faiths like to stress their good intentions, but if you start giving them all a blanket approval, doesn’t this mean that you’re likely to be unintentionally giving approval to their more unlovely aspects too - such as female circumcision, homophobia, and the killing of apostates, for example. Not many religions are without their nasty side.
the book interested me as a wartime novel, because the War is very much in the background. There are passages like the one I quoted yesterday that suggest something about the wartime atmosphere, and once or twice the War is used to intensify the atmosphere slightly (so that when the Bishop’s daughter falls in love, the fact that the man is a lieutenant heading for the front makes the scene more poignant.) On the whole, though, the Bishop’s progress could have happened just as well in peacetime, which reminds me of a truth that I occasionally let myself forget. While the War was there in everyone’s mind for four years as a real and terrible fact, other aspects of life (such as searches for God and falling in love) continued, that some people might have thought even more significant than the events of the Western Front.
“Scientists have released some of the most detailed photographs of Mars ever taken.The pictures, which were snapped from a European Space Agency (ESA) probe, show a region of the Red Planet called the Echus Chasma.The deeply-incised area is a network of valleys that planetary geologists believe were created by channelling groundwater that once flowed on Mars’ surface.”
This passage is one of the best I’ve read describing the spiritual effect that the war had on many - or at least the effect that they liked to believe it had had on them…
The first effect of the war upon the mind of the bishop, as upon
most imaginative minds, was to steady and exalt it. Trivialities and
exasperations seemed swept out of existence. Men lifted up their eyes
from disputes that had seemed incurable and wrangling that promised to
be interminable, and discovered a plain and tragic issue that involved
every one in a common call for devotion. For a great number of men and
women who had been born and bred in security, the August and September
of 1914 were the supremely heroic period of their lives. Myriads
of souls were born again to ideas of service and sacrifice in those
tremendous days.Black and evil thing as the war was, it was at any rate a great thing;
it did this much for countless minds that for the first time they
realized the epic quality of history and their own relationship to the
destinies of the race. The flimsy roof under which we had been living
our lives of comedy fell and shattered the floor under our feet; we saw
the stars above and the abyss below. We perceived that life was insecure
and adventurous, part of one vast adventure in space and time….Presently the smoke and dust of battle hid the great distances again,
but they could not altogether destroy the memories of this revelation.
I’m reading The Soul of a Bishop, a moderately amusing wartime fantasy by H.G.Wells about the spiritual troubles of the Bishop of Princhester.
His doctor prescribes experimental psychotropic drugs, which give him an alarming vision of God. He wants to discuss it, and so goes to the room of an advanced thinker. Wells’s description of her room reminded me of the Bloomsbury/Vorticism day at the NPG last Saturday:
But when he got to her great airy flat overlooking Hyde park, with its Omega Workshop furniture and its arresting decoration, he was not so sure whether this encounter was so exactly the thing he had desired as he had supposed…
He had a feeling he was taking an afternoon off from God. The adventurous modernity of the room in which he waited intensified that. One whole white wall was devoted to a small picture by Wyndham Lewis. It was like a picture of an earthquake in a city of aniline pink and grey and keen green cardboard, and he wished it had never existed.
He turned his back on it and stared out of the window over the trees and greenery…
Bush lifts the ban on U.S. Offshore Oil Drilling, thank God, but unfortunately there is still a ways to go.
Congressional opposition will argue this is just a short term and minimal answer. So be it. We need all the short term and minimal answers we can get until we develop more long term (and non-fossil fuel) answers. It will take time to develop wind and nuclear, and yes, natural gas and coal liquidification solutions.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, in a statement, called the Bush plan “a hoax” that will “neither reduce gas prices nor increase energy independence.” Which has some asking, “What The Hell Is Nancy Pelosi Talking About?”
Meanwhile, Pelosi and the rest of Congress have done little to help the average American with the rising energy costs. Remember, this is the same Pelosi who stated that Bush’s ”policies have produced $4 a gallon gasoline.”
Surprisingly, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid last week told reporters that expanded offshore drilling is not off the table, and that Democrats will take a look at whether states should be able to choose to drill off their coasts. “I’m not knee-jerk-opposed to anything,” Reid said.
Lets hope Republicans and Democrats can stop arguing, and get together and come up with both short and long term plans.
One of the most interesting history-related sites I have come across lately is “Strange Maps“. It is fun to look back on earlier posts and see all kinds of news on maps, demographics, charts, etc. Good analysis too, I might add.
“If one drop of blood be shed in South Carolina in defiance of the laws of the U.S., I will hang the first of the nullifiers I can get my hands on.” He went on to say he would do so on the first tree he could find. And what is also important to note, only the stupid doubted he would do so.
Yes, hard to imagine why a U.S. president who spoke so eloquently (wink) could be the first one ever targeted for assassination.
On January 30, 1835 not one but two unsuccessful assassination attempts against President Andrew Jackson occurred. Jackson was attending a funeral when lone assassin Richard Lawrence came up to him and fired a pistol at point-blank range. Bang! The weapon misfired. Attempt #1, no good. Now this assassin did not have a repeating carbine pistol (Colt was just getting around to producing its “revolver”) and had to toss his one-shooter aside and pull out another, and do so before anyone could react. Miraculously, Lawrence was able to pull another pistol and fire, but it too misfired! According to witnesses, President Jackson proceeded to beat the man over the head with his cane.
So, what are the odds of such an event? Not one, but two shots are fired, and both are lame. No one intercedes, no bodyguards or soldiers? And interestingly enough, Jackson, who was known to have killed, only beats Lawrence some before he is taken away. Also, Lawrence was later deemed insane, institutionalized, and never punished for his assassination attempt.
Thus was the first assassination attempt ever against an American President.
Tell this to a class of 16 and 17 year olds, and watch the conspiracy theories fly!
[Note: There was an incident that occurred before the above after Jackson ordered the dismissal of Robert B. Randolph from the Navy for embezzlement, who then sought revenge by attempting to punch the President.]
I just finished reading The Yowie: In Search of Australia's Bigfoot. It was written by Tony Healy and Paul Cropper. The book is interesting and is a good use of oral history.
The National Portrait Gallery is currently staging a superb exhibition of portraits by Wyndham Lewis. The best of this complicated man went into his portraits, and seeing the T.S.Eliot picture in the actual paint is a joy indeed. Its face a mask that both conceals and reveals, and the indeterminate shapes behind the chair speak darkly of the unconscious from which Eliot drew his poetry. Once again one marvels at how the Royal Academy could possibly have refused it in 1938. Could there possibly have been a better painting in their summer exhibition?
In conjunction with the exhibition, the NPG organised a study day – Vorticism vs Bloomsbury, a combative title that Lewis would have appreciated. Nobody was fonder of a fight.
We gathered in the rather fine Ondaatje Theatre at the NPG. There was a good turnout; as we queued I looked at my fellow-participants and tried to label them according to dress code – Vorticist or Bloomsbury. Bloomsbury won easily.
Bloomsbury won out in lecture time, too.
Richard Cork began the proceedings. He’s a terrific speaker, and exuded enthusiasm for both camps. He made an excellent case for Vanessa Bell’s stripped-down paintings, and for Duncan Grant’s pre-war abstraction, as well as for the wild Vorticist masterpieces, so many of which are lost. He’s the best kind of art lecturer – he makes you want to see more paintings. Even more than that he made one long to venture down the Lewis-decorated stairs to Madame Strindberg’s Cave of the Golden Calf. Of which nothing now remains.
The next speaker, Frances Spalding, was from the Bloomsbury camp. She considered the Fry/Lewis relationship, in a way that was generous to both sides (She refrained from deciding the rights and wrongs of their epic row, when Lewis accused the Omega workshop of cheating him over the Ideal Home exhibition.) Frances Spalding had good things to say about the conflict between portrait painting (essentially representational) and high modernism (essentially formal, non-representational) and gave a lucid account of Lewis’s Edith Sitwell portrait.
Next, though, came Simon Watney, in his youth a friend of Duncan Grant, and very pro-Bloomsbury. He started with the excellent point that seeing art history as movements and –isms often misses what is most important, and made a plea for both Vorticist and Bloomsbury paintings to be seen without preconception or prejudice. He couldn’t quite hide his distaste for much of Lewis’s work, however, and the talk ended with a slide show of charming Bloomsbury artefacts. A good lecture, even though I disagreed with it.
(Charm – that’s the problem for me. The Bloomsburies had masses and appreciated each other’s. Lewis had none, and I think his charmlessness is what I like best about him. He lived not among prettily decorated niceness, but mostly in rented shilling-in-the-slot-for-the gas grimness, churning out books that few wanted to read and paintings that many found abominable. Good for him.)
The lunch break was an opportunity to see the exhibition. The lady collecting tickets was delighted by the number of visitors to what she called “the intelligent part” of the gallery, and the three rooms were pleasantly full. The exhibition was excellently laid out, with many portraits surrounded by Lewis’s drawings of the same subject, so that one got an inkling of his process of thinking through the process of portrait-making.
The first image that greets the visitor is the self-portrait as a Tyro, a wonderfully uncompromising and unsettling picture. I should have liked to see more tyros.
There were books and magazines, too. Blast in all its shocking pinkness, the big deluxe first edition of The Apes of God, and that dreadful Hitler book (When the book was displayed in Zwemmer’s window, an assistant had to pop out regularly to wipe off the slobber where dissenting citizens had spat at it.)
After lunch, Paul Edwards, curator of the exhibition, came on to make the case for Lewis. I was a bit disappointed, maybe because this was very much Lewis for beginners. He made a good case for Lewis’s multiplicity and ability to surprise, but it was all a bit general, and toned down. More quotation from the man himself would have communicated more of his spirit – and why he made so many enemies.
The last speaker was Bloomsbury at its most utter. Christopher Reed celebrated American collectors of Bloomsbury art (What had this to do with the exhibition we were discussing, or other themes of the day?) He was quite engaging, and described the sort of people who collected Omega fabrics or pictures by Vanessa Bell or Duncan Grant. At first a particular sort of Anglophile, with a penchant for rural tweeness, it would seem. Then feminists and gays who saw their own lifestyle choices reflected in the unorthodox passions of Bloomsbury. (So they wanted art that held up a flattering mirror to themselves, and charming, urbane Bloomsbury provided it. No, you could see why they wouldn’t have wanted a Tyro on their wall…)
So – two talks even-handed, one pro-Lewis and two pro-Bloomsbury. Even fifty years after his death Lewis is still being sidelined by those who prefer their art to be a little less serious, a little more lovely…
Question time redressed the balance a bit. Some tough questions from Lewisites put the Bloomsburyites on the defensive. Paul Edwards allowed himself a small complaint, that Lewis was quite important and interesting enough to have a study day to himself, without the Bloomsburyites coming in and getting more attention to themselves.
I enjoyed the day, and learnt quite a lot, one way and another, but I too would much have preferred a day entirely devoted to the complexities and contradictions of Lewis – often a horrible man, and sometimes a bad one, but quite extraordinary. A few years ago, I was among those who dismissed him as just another reactionary modernist. Looking at what he wrote during the war years has given me a new respect for him, and the NPG exhibition has convinced me that whatever else he was, he was an astonishing portraitist.
My dear Husband,
I have just laid our baby down to sleep, and now sit down to have a little chat with you. I rather think though that I will do all the chatting, if it can be called so, and it ought not, for how much pleasanter it would be to have you here so that we could talk in earnest, this way of sending questions and answers by letters is a slow business, but being able to write and read letters is a great blessing, yes letter writing was a great invention.
I don't know how I would do if I could not hear from you. You don't know how much I want to see you, the weeks are very long. I suppose when you come home you will be Captain, as I hear that you will most probably be elected to that office. The night that the men passed here with Captain Hopkins' body, four men stopped in the yard and got Jane to cook them some supper.
My own dear wife,
I am now writing with a Yankee pen, Yankee ink, and on Yankee Paper captured on the battlefield. We had one of the hottest contested battles of the war on yesterday, commencing about 2 o'clock PM and ending 1/2 past 5 PM, and during the whole time there was not a moments cessation in the fire.
Men never fought better than our men did, and God seemed to shield them in great measure from destruction as the loss on our side is comparatively light. We can't tell yet how much it is, but I think from all I can learn that 300 will cover dead and wounded and the enemy think that they have lost 1500 men killed and wounded.
I am so tired and dirty, I can hardly keep my eyes open to write. I went over the battleground this morning on my way to camp, and never in all my life have I seen such a distressing sight – some men with their legs carried off, others with their brains out, and mangled in every conceivable way, and then our men commenced stripping them of their clothing and left their bodies naked. (They needed the clothing.)
I never want to see another battle or go on the field after it is over. I have only received one letter from you in nearly three weeks. I do wish you would write. I can get a letter any day here as the cars come through. When you feel like writing do so and don't wait for me.
I must close. Give my love to Mother and the boys, kiss Dear Rosa and tell her Pa thought of her Ma often while under fire, and I feel thankful to God that he has been so merciful to me and mine. Goodbye, my darling, and may the Giver of Good continue to watch over us in mercy. I am as ever your devoted husband.
Winston
My darling wife,
I know how anxious you are to hear from us, and I write every spare time. You will see by this that we are gradually closing upon the Yanks. We moved down from Baldwin yesterday. Our main force rests on the west side of the branch from your Uncle George's old place.
I don't know General Finegan's program, but I think if any Yankees sleep on the west side of Cedar Creek, it will be in their last sleep. Oh how I wish I could never see such a sight as I witnessed after the battle near Olustee Station, and then to think of the loved ones at home who have been left lonely in this life by the loss of a husband, son, or father, or some young lady whose love had been centered upon some dear one whose life is so suddenly cut off.
Those reflections are not sweet, and I'll not write of them. I think the General intends driving the enemy to their gun boats, and if he gets the force I learn is coming he will be able to do so. The sound drubbing we gave them before will prepare them to expect a second one when we meet. I don't suppose there has been a more decisive battle fought since the war commenced. We had about 4500 men in the fight and had 183 killed and 729 wounded. Some of our wounded have since died, some 20 I think.
The Yanks had, from the best information, 11,700 men. We have over 600 in our hands, and we buried over 500 of their dead and they carried off nearly or quite 2000 wounded, so their loss was not less than 3,000 men or 1/4 of their command. They did not stop running until they reached Camp Finegan.
If we had only pressed them after the fight, we could have captured the whole army. I hear that General Colquitt wanted to follow them, but General Finegan opposed. Colonel Hopkins told me that General Finegan ordered General Colquitt to fall back during the fight but Colquitt sent him word it was no time to fall back and told him to send him more men, which he did and we have one of the best victories recorded. I want Gen. Colquitt to have all the credit due him.
I am well but as near worn out as any man you ever saw, and so black that I am ashamed. I left Camp Cooper on the 6th and had on a dirty shirt and I have changed but once since that time. I have clean clothes in Lake City, but they had as well not be for the good they do, as I am kept so constantly going I can't get them, and we are not still long enough to wash one.
I hope God in his goodness will soon deliver us from this awful condition. Give love to Mother and boys and kind remembrance to all friends, give a kiss and love to dear Rosa and accept for yourself the love and devotion of a sincere and loving husband. Direct to Camp Finegan care of Colonel McCormick.
Winston Stephens
With a sad heart I begin another journal. On Sunday, February 28, dear Mother was taken with a congestive chill. On Friday, March 4, Davis came with the news of the death of my dear, dear husband. He was killed in battle near Jacksonville on the first of March.
Mother grew worse and on Sunday, March 6, she was taken from us between 12 and 1 O'clock. She passed quietly away, (Typhoid pneumonia). At 7 p.m. I gave birth to a dear little boy, which although three or four weeks before the time, the Lord still spared to me.
Mother was buried on the 7th and Rosa was taken with fever, but recovered after two days... I have named my baby Winston, the sweet name of that dear lost one, my husband, almost my life. God grant that his son, whom he longed for, but was not spared to see, may be like him.
I now begin as it were a new life and I pray that the Lord will give me strength to bear up under this great affliction, and with His help and the example of those two dear ones now with Him, I may be enabled to do my duty in this life and be prepared when the Lord calls me to meet them in that better world, where there will be no parting and no more sorrow.
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