The Battle of Lexington and so on

  • I’m not really look­ing for­ward to the next cou­ple months. Lis­ten­ing to the news last night, it seems obvi­ous that the next Supreme nom­i­nee is going to become a light­ning rod for the entire cul­ture war. If Bush nom­i­nates the kind of per­son I wish he would nom­i­nate — some­one who is actu­ally on the record as being pro-life, pro-family and pro-values — you’ll be able to hear the shriek from Ban­gor to Berke­ley. The media will go bold­face. Talk­ing heads will pre­dict the end of all things decent. And the Democ­rats in Con­gress — since the coun­try hasn’t seen fit to give them a major­ity — will prob­a­bly recant on their promise not to fil­i­buster. And so the siege will be on.

    The siege. Kind of reminds me of the Civil War bat­tle­field I vis­ited on Wednes­day. (And so begins another of my ram­bles.)

    Lexington sunsetI like vis­it­ing Civil War bat­tle­fields. I’m not a big Civil War buff or a mil­i­tary his­tory buff, but I find that a lot of the ones that are left are quiet places. Around them, life has gone on and looks the way it does every­where. But if a bat­tle­field hasn’t been plowed under or paved over, and if it’s not one of the big ones like Get­tys­burg that attracts many tourists, chances are it’ll be like turn­ing a page back in his­tory. And chances are you’ll have it more or less to your­self. That’s espe­cially true for me in my bat­tle­field excur­sions because my sense of tim­ing is just as errant get­ting to these des­ti­na­tions as it always is, and I tend to show up towards the end of their oper­at­ing hours. So the after­noon light had started to change when I used the oppor­tu­nity of a long drive home after a meet­ing to fol­low the brown Park Depart­ment signs to the Lex­ing­ton Bat­tle Site.

    The town of Lex­ing­ton is really just cute, but I could say the same for a num­ber of population-challenged Mis­souri towns. The side­walks aren’t all that straight, and it’s all par­al­lel park­ing on Main Street. Some­where there’s bound to be a dog wait­ing patiently out­side a small gro­cery store. And some­where there’s a sign that looks like a joke announc­ing that the next cou­ple hun­dred feet of old brick build­ings that look like they could say “Horses shod while you wait” com­prise “the busi­ness dis­trict.” But when I pulled onto the road lead­ing to the bat­tle­ground, even the town looked urban. There’s just some­thing about the way streets used to twist and pitch around that lets you know they came from a dif­fer­ent era. They’re nar­row and hilly, and this one led to a cir­cu­lar drive that looked out on a totally placid field ringed by trees.

    Lexington earthworksI had watched the aged video in the park office, and so I knew what I was look­ing at: the for­mer site of a Masonic col­lege that became for a short time the nexus for all ambi­tions for sev­eral thou­sand Union sol­diers and the site of a great early vic­tory for a larger Con­fed­er­ate force. I’ll leave it to this link to hand out the detailed account, but here’s the short story: An inex­pe­ri­enced Con­fed­er­ate com­man­der Major Gen­eral Price left the area to the Union with 7,000 or so men and, after win­ning a deci­sive vic­tory at Wilson’s Creek, coa­lesc­ing his forces with numer­ous rebel bands and gen­er­ally get­ting his groove back, he returned in spring of 1861 with 15–18,000 men to reclaim the impor­tant out­post to the Mis­souri River from 3,000 or so entrenched Fed­eral troops. In the interim, the Fed­er­als had taken out a “forced loan” of all the assets of a local bank and cut down a large for­est to pre­vent sniper attack — nei­ther of which activ­ity endeared them to the local pop­u­lace. They had also had time to make the col­lege their base of oper­a­tions and dig exten­sive trench earth­works to defend it. (The earth­works are one of the only vis­i­ble remains of the bat­tle­ground. The col­lege burned down in the ’30s.)

    When Price arrived, he could see there wasn’t much point in wast­ing ammu­ni­tion and cost­ing lives. He set up troops on all sides of the area and laid siege, exchang­ing can­non and rifle fire on the first and sec­ond day and accept­ing sur­ren­der on the third. Given the dis­parate num­bers, no other out­come is con­ceiv­able. But I imag­ine it was a sweet vin­di­ca­tion of both Rebel tac­tics and South­ern gen­til­ity all the same. The Con­fed­er­ates had shown great inge­nu­ity in using the enor­mous bales of hemp from farm­ers’ ware­houses as “mov­ing earth­works” behind which they could fire and approach.

    And Price employed a won­der­ful, if weird, gra­cious­ness after the bat­tle. (And this part isn’t in the link I gave, so you’ll just have to trust me that it was on the crack­ling video.) He didn’t mis­use the defeated sol­diers or even take them pris­oner. He let them go as long as … well, as long as they promised not to do it again. He made them sign an oath that they would never take up arms against the Con­fed­er­ate army again. I mean, it’s just a lovely ges­ture, but what are the odds? The Fed­eral com­man­der refused to sign, but then he prob­a­bly under­stood he’d be taken as a pris­oner for barter in any case.

    That’s the odd­ity in this bat­tle, the thing that keeps it on my mind. It was such a won­der­ful thing to do, but so naive and so con­trary to the usual rules of engage­ment. Per­haps it seemed like the best way to edu­cate the North­ern aggres­sors in the grand ways of South­ern gen­til­ity. The video had much to say about the great­ness of that way of life and the irre­place­able loss to Amer­i­can soci­ety. It’s dif­fi­cult for me to imag­ine how much longer that style of court­li­ness and man­nerly aris­toc­racy might have lasted, and per­haps its loss is a ter­ri­ble one to us all. Despite the vic­tory of Lex­ing­ton, the state of Mis­souri was already lost to the Con­fed­er­acy, and as the war turned more des­per­ate, such gen­til­ity appar­ently gave way to more bru­tal tac­tics. Not far from Lex­ing­ton is the town of Cen­tralia, where in late 1864, a rag­tag Con­fed­er­ate coali­tion of bush­whack­ers (in whose ranks Frank and Jesse James devel­oped some worth­while skills) pil­laged a town, stopped a train and killed 23 unarmed Union soldiers.

    Lexington gravesI think of those of one sym­pa­thy tak­ing on those of another. I think about the use­less ges­ture we make in soci­eties to edu­cate each other on the advis­abil­ity of our point of view. And when edu­ca­tion doesn’t work, we lay siege. We use what power we’ve got and try to bleed power out of the other side. We hope they’ll come around and see that we have the high ground. If they don’t, each side has got big guns and snipers, spies and pro­pa­ganda, sor­ties and all-out assaults.

    I’m not sure there’s any back­ing down from the place we’ve got­ten our­selves to, where the left-of-Stalin crowd won’t seem to ever stop scream­ing and so we go from one nasty skir­mish to the next — each one get­ting uglier, each one eras­ing lines, each one intro­duc­ing some new low and requir­ing either capit­u­la­tion on the grounds of self-respect or engage­ment at the risk of any of the human decency we’re seek­ing to defend.

    I’m not look­ing for­ward to the next few months.


    Related posts:

    1. The Bat­tle for New Orleans
    2. Stem cells and Frist’s inconsistency
    3. Lon­don and the EU Breakdown

    October 28th, 2005 | Grace | No Comments |

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