Category Archives: Civil War

Ephesians 6:11 

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This is the Bible verse that Donald Trump’s evangelical supporters cite to show that God kept him from being assassinated this summer in Pennsylvania.  Since the shooting occurred at 6:11 p.m., some of those who thump Bibles that he uses for fun and profit more than he uses them for any guidance claim God wants him to win next week’s election.

It is an absurd example of using the Bible by taking one verse out of context or of avoiding all of the other 6:11 verses in the Bible.

Ephesians 6:11 is a manmade division of the scriptures and 6:11 might easily have been some other chapter and verse had not Robert Etienne, a printer in Paris, divided the Greek New Testament as he did, into the chapters and verses in 1551.  He used his system when he published the Hebrew Bible two years later.

The sixth chapter of Paul’s letter to the Christians at Ephesus contains 24 verses.

Reading the entire letter in which Paul defines what it takes to be a Christian does not work very well for those who grant the ex-President holy status.  Chapters five and six seem more applicable to Mr. Trump than the out-of-context verse 11.

In these two chapters, Paul tells the Ephesians to be “imitators of God” and to “walk in love.”

“Among you…there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or any kind of impurity or of greed,” he tells them.  That seems more applicable to the candidate than the one that, it is claimed, clipped his ear.

“Nor should there be obscenity, foolish talk, or crude joking…No immoral, impure, or greedy person…has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God,” he advises the Ephesians.  Hmmmm. That seems to fit somebody we know more than one verse that some think means God is on his side.

Paul advises them (and us, if we think the scriptures have any contemporary relevance), “Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of such things the wrath of God is coming on the sons of disobedience.”  Sons of disobedience might fit the speeches and subsequent events of January 6, 2021 more than explaining how someone’s life was “spared” in a shooting.

Elsewhere in that chapter he advises people to “have no fellowship with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them, for it is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret.”  Mr. Trump brands those who expose “fruitless deeds” as “Fake News.”

There’s some great advice about how husbands and wives should treat each other that might do him some good or might have done him some good.

The sixth chapter, the one in which the evangelistic supporters pluck out of context to prove it was God who caused the shooter to carefully miss the speaker that day in Ohio, addresses children and parents.

It also tells slaves how to behave. And he offers advice to their masters.  As we recall, slavery was ended, although at terrible cost, by a war that Mr. Trump says could have been avoided if Abraham Lincoln had negotiated.

If Mr. Trump had any sense of history he would know that negotiations had gone on for decades, even before the anti-slavery language was removed from the Declaration of Independence almost 250 years ago.  Missouri came into the union in 1821 because of heavy discussions about slavery that led to a mutual appeasement policy that let the debate rage on.  Lincoln took office telling the South he did not want to end slavery; he just didn’t want it to expand to newer states.

We have an idea of what Mr. Trump’s solution would have been had he been in Lincoln’s place in 1861: let the states decide.

And that brings us to the celebrated eleventh verse and the later verses that it is easy to ignore for those who want religion to focus on power.

Paul was writing from a Roman prison to the Christians in Ephesus who had seen many pilgrims make trips to worship a pagan god.

The twelfth verse reads, “For our struggle is not against the flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this world’s darkness, and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”

Do you suppose that could be read to mean we should be more concerned about Vladimir Putin, President Xi and Supreme Leader Kim than we should be about a non-existent flood of fentanyl-lugging criminals and mental patients released from Central American prisons and mental hospitals so they can come here and take over Colorado apartment buildings and eat our pets?

“Take up the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you will be able to stand your ground…Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, and the breastplate of righteousness arrayed,” says verses thirteen and fourteen.  Unfortunately for the “belt of truth,” Mr. Trump seems to be a suspenders sort of guy.

And righteousness?  Calling people names after they have spoken out about your love of Hitler, your respect for dictators, and your various slanders and assaults, verbal and otherwise, on individuals and institutions—-is that an example of righteousness all of us should follow?

Near the end of Chapter Six, Paul asks the Ephesians to “pray in the spirit at all times, with every kind of prayer and petition.”

I’m waiting for Mr. Trump to open one of his rallies with an off-the-cuff prayer. I worry, however, how I could tolerate a two-hour prayer

He certainly had his chances twice in one day last week—at a “Believers and Ballots Faith Town Hallk in Zebulon, Georgia and a Turning Point event right after that in Duluth, Georgia.

Sarah Posner, in an opinion piece for MSNBC (or as Trump likes to call it “MSDNC,” for Democratic National Committee, wrote that one the participants in the town hall meeting, held at a church, asked Trump about a new survey showing 32 million regular church goers might not vote this fall.  When the questioner asked him for a message to those voters encouraging them to vote, the best he could do was respond, “Christians are not tremendous voters,”  which might be a surprise to a lot of us. Then, she reports, he “rambled for nearly three minutes on themes of religious persecution by ‘not nice’ and ‘stupid’ people, guns and COVID restrictions, without completing coherent sentences or thoughts.”

Turning Point is run by conservative evangelical Charlie Kirk, who also is an election denier. The AP reported that Kirk called this election “a spiritual battle,” and charged Democrats “stand for everything God hates.”  Posner says Kirk and another conservative, Jack Posobiec, have been the big promoters of the Ephesians 6:11 protection plan.

She concludes, “Amid GOP panic over losing women and swing voters who support abortion rights, Trump appears adrift in his evangelical mobilization, meandering through disconnected verbal thickets of insults and boasts, unable to focus on issues or hammer home talking points.”

We don’t want to exhaust our participants in these discussions much more than we already have. But we decided to look up some other 6:11 Bible verses, chosen at random.

Genesis 6:11 says “Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight and was full of violence.” So God authorized the great flood.

The sixth chapter of Ruth has some good advice for somebody on our ballot next week, beginning a verse earlier:

“10 For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows. 11But thou, O man of God, flee these things; and follow after righteousness, godliness, faith, love, patience, meekness.”

The sixth chapter of Matthew offers some caution to those who make good social and political hay from religious organizations. It begins with “Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.”  This is the chapter that includes the Lord’s prayer and Verse eleven prays, “Give us, this day, our daily bread.”

First Timothy, 6:11 reads, “…Pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, steadfastness, gentleness.”  Nice, but it doesn’t seem to describe the person who survived an assassination attempt.

We could go on but we will not, to your great relief we are sure. We close with the Sixth Psalm that does not have an eleventh verse.  But its ten verses seem to fit our situation.

1 Lord, do not rebuke me in your anger
or discipline me in your wrath.
2 Have mercy on me, Lord, for I am faint;
heal me, Lord, for my bones are in agony.
3 My soul is in deep anguish.
How long, Lord, how long?

4 Turn, Lord, and deliver me;
save me because of your unfailing love.
5 Among the dead no one proclaims your name.
Who praises you from the grave?

6 I am worn out from my groaning.

All night long I flood my bed with weeping
and drench my couch with tears.
7 My eyes grow weak with sorrow;
they fail because of all my foes.

8 Away from me, all you who do evil,
for the Lord has heard my weeping.
9 The Lord has heard my cry for mercy;
the Lord accepts my prayer.
10 All my enemies will be overwhelmed with shame and anguish;
they will turn back and suddenly be put to shame.

The Gun, The School, The Town , The Times

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I took a gun to school once.

In a more innocent time.

A long, long time ago.

It was a revolver that held seven .22-short bullets.

It wasn’t loaded.

Here is the gun:

Well, not really THE gun. Our house burned down three weeks before Christmas when I was a high school freshman.  I lost my coin collection that included a mis-strike nickel that had two heads, several plastic model airplanes, a baseball card collection that probably included a Mantle rookie card, a few Red Man Chewing Tobacco cards, and assorted other baseball cards that would have put both of our children through college had the collection survived, a collection of Lone Ranger novels (since re-accumulated through the years), my old maid aunt Gertrude’s National Geographic collection that began in 1907 (I had looked through only a few as I sought out the ones that had stories about African natives whose lack of above-the-waist attire was very interesting to a boy my age), and the gun.

Today I would be rushed to the principal’s office; my parents would be called; I would be home-schooled for a while, to say the least.

My great-grandfather played the fife for the 126th Illinois Infantry that served under General Sherman at Vicksburg and then was instrumental in gaining control of northern Arkansas, including the capture of Little Rock.  He enlisted in another town in Moultrie County and after the war lived in what we called a big city in those days—Decatur—for sixty more years where he once owned an ice cream store.

His pistol was the first Smith & Wesson pistol.   Not THE first, but—well, you get the idea.

I think I took it to school because we were studying the Civil War in an elementary school class and it was no big deal.

I don’t remember the duck-and-cover drills some children of that vintage practiced, thinking that hiding under a school desk would save them from an Atom Bomb.   We had fire drills, though.  A couple of times a year.  Outside we’d go. Never in rain or snow but I do remember some cold days standing on the sidewalk while the teachers checked every room to make sure one of my classmates hadn’t decided to hide out.

I grew up in two towns in which Abraham Lincoln, then a circuit-riding lawyer, occasionally visited to take part in trials.  I have been told that the one in which I spent the most time had a Sundown Ordinance—no Negroes allowed in town after dark.  (I use the word because that’s the word that was used then.) Many years later I considered the irony of a town where Lincoln was a sometime-lawyer that told black people they were not welcome after sundown.  But then, as I have learned, Lincoln’s own attitudes toward black people were pretty undeveloped then.

My class was the first to graduate from the new high school that I could watch being constructed when I was in my Junior English class in the old high school—which was torn down a few months ago. Some black men from Decatur were part of the construction crew and one day one of my classmates told me he had heard that they planned to move their families to our town after the new school was built and “if they do, there’s going to be trouble.”

I couldn’t understand why he felt that way. I was young, innocent of worldly things.  I did not meet my first black people until the second semester of my freshman college year when the Residential Assistant for my dormitory floor brought a couple of black guys around to every room and introduced them.  To me they were just guys.  Years later, I figured out that the university was integrating the dormitories (I watched the first black football and basketball players perform for the school).  By the time I left, America had undergone a painful change. I had changed, too, picketing a segregated bowling alley one evening with my church group, and came to work in a segregated city with an HBCU that would taste violence during the Civil Rights struggle.

My little town surrounded by the rich land of the Illinois prairie still has high school sports teams unapologetically called Redskins. It’s about fifty miles from the University teams are called the Fighting Illini. My class ring, safely in a bank deposit box, features the abstract image of a Native American Chief.  Or at least the profile of a Native American in an ornate headdress.

Not commenting. Just saying.

One of our World War II heroes was a B-25 pilot who wasn’t satisfied to just fly over his hometown. He buzzed it.  Stood that plane on its wing and flew around the courthouse dome.  That was before we moved there.  By the time we moved there he was our school principal.  Col. Loren Jenne’s Army Air Corps uniform is in the county historical museum.  It’s a really, really good recently-built museum constructed with the help of an advisor for the Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield.  Visiting it for a reunion a couple of years ago made me realize how lacking we are in Jefferson City for a good local historical museum.

The town library’s board room holds part of local resident’s collection of 700 hood ornaments and the former Illinois Masonic Home has one of the largest collections of sea shells in the country.

I had a laid-back high school history teacher who once told me he became a teacher because “it was better than working for a living.”  Everybody had to do a report on some historical event for his class. Mine was on the Battle of Gettysburg. It took as long as the battle took—three days. Even then I could write long.

I missed one of the biggest events in town history because I was in college.  Richard Nixon dropped in on this little town of about 3600 during his 1960 campaign. Town leaders had invited him and challenger John Kennedy to hold an old-fashioned debate at the annual buffalo barbecue.  Kennedy didn’t show but Nixon ate half a sandwich and then spoke to about 17,000 people who gathered in a park where I had learned to love playing baseball.  A Boy Scout who helped provide security at Nixon’s table picked up the remainder of his buffalo sandwich and took it home.  His mother put the remnant in a pickle jar and froze it.  Sixty years later, he published a book, The Sandwich That Changed My Life, recounting how the sandwich is still in that jar but occasionally had been on public display including the day he took it to Los Angeles for an appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.  Carson gave him one of his half-eaten sandwiches, which led people such as Tiny Tim and Steve Martin to make additional contributions.

Nixon wasn’t the first presidential aspirant to visit my little town.  When Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas were holding their famous debates throughout the state—Lincoln was challenging Douglas for a seat in the U. S. Senate—Lincoln paused to give a speech in a little grove of trees that is now the site of the civic center. Douglas wasn’t there. However, a riot between Lincoln and Douglas supporters broke out on the town square during the 1858 campaign.

We had a Brown Shoe factory, as did many small towns, for decades. It was near the now-gone elementary school I entered late in my fourth grade year.  I hit a softball through one of its windows one day during a noon hour game on the vacant lot between the school and the factory. Foreign competition shut it down. The building is still there, re-purposed several times. .

I went away from that little town to study journalism at the University of Missouri.  In those first few days, new college students ask and are asked many times, “Where are you from?”  There were nods of the head when the answers were St. Louis, or Kirksville, or Joplin, or Polo, or Hannibal (my roommate), or other Missouri towns.  But when I said, “Sullivan, Illinois,” there was the second question:

“Where’s that?”

And I would reach into my back pocket and pull out an official Illinois State Highway Map, William G. Stratton, Governor, and I would unfold it and show them.  Today I would say, “It’s about 40 minutes north of Effingham” and everybody would know because Effingham, then a bowling alley and a gas station-small town on Highway 40, is a major stop on straight and boring I-70 between St. Louis and Terre Haute.  I’m sure some of my new classmates walked away thinking, “He’s too weird.”

In a few days, I’m headed back to Sullivan for my (mumble-mumble) class reunion. I cherish these get-togethers, especially as our numbers dwindle.  I have a nice red polo shirt, although I wish I could find an appropriate red and black sweatshirt or jacket to wear while I ride in one of the 1959 convertibles a classmate has arranged for classmates to ride in during the homecoming parade. It shouldn’t be as hard as it was the other day to find the right thing in Jay and Chiefs country.

But the other day I bought a new car that’s red with black trim and I hope that is appropriate.

A few years ago I came to the conclusion that the last time we met as a class was the night we graduated.  Now, we are the Community of ’59.  Then, were a homogenous group raised in the same county, for the most part, part of the same culture for the first 18 years of our life, no more acutely aware of the greater world beyond us than teenagers today probably are plugged into life outside their schools.  But since then, life has changed us, has filled us with our own unique experiences and we come together as diverse individuals shaped by the decades that have passed.

Yet, when I think of them, it is easy to see them in my mind as perpetually young. And when we meet, we don’t spend a lot of time reminiscing. Instead we talk as contemporary people who have been friends for a long, long time who have nothing to prove to each other or no reason to try to impress one another.  We are special friends bound together by long-ago experiences who can talk about present issues, even those on which we not unexpectedly differ, and then go back to our homes and our separate futures cherishing this one more chance to be with each other.

I’ve lived in Missouri (except for three summers while I was in college) for almost eighty percent of my life. Each year I travel from Jefferson City to Indianapolis for a couple of races.  I usually stop for lunch in Effingham.  And each time, I feel a little tug to turn north.

All of our towns and each of us have stories such as these. Someday, descendants I will never know, might read these stories.

Think about writing yours.

For them.

I went to school with a gun one day in a time my grandchildren probably would not understand, when the only drill we had to worry about was the fire drill.

That was a long, long time ago. But if nobody every tells about those times, how can anybody else ever hope that there ever can be that kind of safe era again?

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Medal

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I am really, really angry about our former President’s comments that the Presidential Medal of Freedom is better than the Medal of Honor.

Most of you have watched or listened to what he said a few days ago, speaking of the Medal of Freedom:

That’s the highest award you can get as a civilian. It’s the equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor, but civilian version. It’s actually much better because everyone gets the Congressional Medal of Honor, they’re soldiers. They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they are dead. She gets it and she’s a healthy, beautiful woman. And they’re rated equal, but she got the Presidential Medal of Freedom.”  

She is the equal of soldiers who are “hit so many times by bullets or they are dead?”

What is it with this guy who shows no respect for honor, courage, or sacrifice, whose vacuousness regularly produces such instantly cringeworthy observations as his discussion of the Battle of Gettysburg?—

“What an unbelievable battle that was. The Battle of Gettysburg. What an unbelievable—I mean, it was so much and so interesting, and so vicious and horrible and so beautiful in so many different ways.  Gettysburg, Wow. I go to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to look and to watch. And the statement of Robert E. Lee—who’s no longer in favor, did you ever notice that? No longer in favor—‘Never fight uphill me boys, never fight uphill.’  They were fighting uphill. He said, “Wow, that was a big mistake.” He lost his great general, and they were fighting. ‘Never fight uphill, me boys,’  But it was too late”

Civil War historians have never found any verification that a native Virginian ever sounded like a native of Ireland in encouraging his soldiers to fight.  Uphill, downhill, or on flat land. Or that he said anything such as that or—

According to Trump, Lee said, “Wow, that was a big mistake.”

Wow?  Here is part of Lee’s report of the battle:

“The highest praise is due to both officers and men for their conduct during the campaign. The privations and hardships of the march and camp were cheerfully encountered, and borne with a fortitude unsurpassed by our ancestors in their struggle for independence, while their courage in battle entitles them to rank with the soldiers of any army and of any time.”

Lee lost. He did not say wow.  But he did honor his troops, living and dead, in the full report.

Sixty-four Union soldiers received the Medal of Honor for actions at Gettysburg.

Or his extensive knowledge of the American Revolution, shared in a July 4th speech in 2019 when he educated his audience this way:

“The Continental Army suffered a bitter winter of Valley Forge, found glory across the waters of the Delaware, and seized victory from Cornwallis of Yorktown. Our army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over the airports, it did everything it had to do. And at Fort McHenry, under the rockets’ red glare, it had nothing but victory. And when dawn came, their Star Spangled Banner waved defiant.”

Fort McHenry and the Francis Scott Key’s poem about the flag are from the War of 1812, not the revolution.  And—what is his definition of “rampart.”  And seizing the airports????!!!

(There was no Medal of Honor in the American Revolution. George Washington established a Badge of Military Merit, the first medal applying to private soldiers, in 1782. The medal today is awarded for reasons Washington did not mention and is known since its formal establishment 150 years later as the Purple Heart.)

I’m getting too worked up as I go back over the uncounted instances of disrespect for those who have worn our country’s uniforms and the historical and scientific gibberish that he thinks is clever and smart and that far too many people who must be a whole lot smarter than him accept anyway. Let me get back to what I started to write.

I am not a veteran.  But I cannot describe the depth of gratitude that I have for veterans, whether they came under enemy fire or whether they were a clerk at a stateside base. I was honored to be asked to work with a dedicated group made up of veterans and Gold Star Family members (Gold Star families are those who have lost loved ones in wartime) to build a Gold Star Family Memorial Monument near the Capitol a few years ago. I provided the words carved into the memorial’s stones.

The Chairman of that group was my State Representative, Dave Griffith, a Special Forces veteran who has spent most of his life in positions of service to the public. We differ on some political issues—some—but that has not affected our friendship and our working on some legislation for next year that will restore millions of dollars in funding for our state veterans homes and for other causes.  It is an honor to associate with people such as him.  And it is that kind of respect that leaves me so angry when someone such as our 45th President diminishes the Medal of Honor and disrespects those who have received it as well as those who have served honorably whether on the front lines or in the back offices.

There seems to be nothing this candidate cannot cheapen with his words and his actions. He awarded 24 Presidential Medals of Freedom, fourteen of them to sports figures. He interrupted one of his State of the Union speeches to give one to Rush Limbaugh. The quotation at the start of this entry refers to the award to Miriam Adelson, a doctor known for her humanitarian work and donations to Jewish organizations.  But probably more important to him is that she and her late husband donated $20 million to his 2016 campaign and another five-million dollars to his inauguration fund, then a half-million more to a legal fund for Trump aides, another $100 million that went to conservative groups and Republican candidates in 2018. Open Secrets, which watches political donations, says the Adelson’s total giving to these causes and to a pro-Trump political action committee is close to $220 million dollars in 2019 and 2020. She’s also “a healthy and beautiful woman,” which most of us would not consider a qualification for a presidential medal.

Here’s an important difference between those who get the Medal of Freedom and those who receive the Medal of Honor:

Military members are encouraged to salute a Medal of Honor recipient who is wearing the medal, even if that person is wearing civilian clothes. The military custom is for junior offices to salute senior officers.  But the Medal of Honor recipient is entitled to receive a salute from anyone, regardless of rank.

No Medal of Freedom winner is entitled to that show of respect. The former President is correct that many recipients of the Medal of Honor are dead or have dealt with serious wounds.  To say that they are entitled to less respect from the President of the United States than someone who hits a baseball, shoots a basketball, hits a golf ball, or carries a football is unforgiveable—or gives a lot of money to his campaign and also is a good-looking woman—is beyond forgivable.

It is best to stop here rather than go on with the altercation at Arlington that was as much about honoring soldiers killed in the Afghanistan withdrawal (that he planned while in office) as staging a photo op at a D.C. church was about sincerely-held faith.

NO, ON SECOND THOUGHT IT IS NOT BEST TO STOP.

The above material was written last Wednesday.  On Thursday, he blamed the Arlington controversy on “very bad people” and suggested that the Gold Star families he was with made the video of the event public, not members of his campaign staff who have been accused of pushing a cemetery staffer out of the way when she tried to enforce the no-politicking rule for the area out of the way.

“This all comes out of Washington, just like all these prosecutors come out of Washington. These are bad people we’re dealing with,” he told an interviewer in Michigan. “They ask me to have a picture, and they say I was campaigning. The one thing I get is plenty of publicity… I don’t need the publicity.”

If he didn’t need the publicity, why did he have a video crew with him?

The Army has confirmed that the shoving incident happened when the staffer tried to keep a Trump campaign aide out of the area that has strict rules about media presence. The area is for recently-buried service members and regulations published by the Army and Arlington National Cemetery prohibit political activity there. The Washington Post reported that “ahead of the visit, Arlington National Cemetery officials had warned Trump’s team that he could visit the grave sites, but not as part of a campaign event. The cemetery made clear that while media could accompany Trump to a wreath laying at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, they could not accompany him into Section 60.”

Officials have told The New York Times the woman refused to press chages because “she feared Mr. Trump’s supporters pursuing retaliation.”  Trump Campaign Press Secretary Steven Cheung says she is “suffering from a mental health issue,” and senior adviser Chris LaCivita has called her a “despicable individual.

Trump’s campaign social media site shortly afterwards posted several pictures and videos that were taken during the visit, including a recording of him blaming President Biden for the deaths of American soldiers in the final hours of our occupation of Afghanistan.

When asked by NBC if his campaign should have published the images, Trump gave his familiar excuse: he knew “nothing about” that.  And when the reporter bored in with another question, he suggested parents of the dead servicemen distributed the images.

On HIS social media??????.

“I don’t know what the rules and regulations are. I don’t know who did it, It could have been them – it could have been the parents.”  When pressed even more, he said, “I really don’t know anything about it.”

The family that invited Trump was contacted by Trump nemesis Maggie Haberman, a New York Times reporter. She posted on X:

“Contacted by NYT, Michele Marckesano issued a statement from the family saying they support the families searching for accountability around the Abbey Gate bombing. However, she said, their conversations with Arlington officials indicated Trump staff didn’t adhere to rules.”

The Gold Star families are the “very bad people????”

There is a terrible irony to this deplorable incident at Arlington:

A 1998 law allows Trump, if he wishes, to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery—-

—-the burial place of more than 400 recipients of the Medal of Honor.

Surely, he wouldn’t——

would he?

(This entry was changed on September 2, 2024 to include Maggie Haberman’s post on X)

JUST DESSERTS

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When I’m in Indianapolis, I stay with my friends, Rick and Karen, who have a condo downtown, a few blocks from Monument Circle.  They know all of the fine downtown restaurants—I think, in fact, that Rick has a couple of places that have tables for him whenever he goes in—and, worse, they know all of the dessert places.

The most recent visit involved three excellent dinners and three visits to dessert places none of us had any business going into.  The last night we went to something called The Sugar Factory.

I should have turned and run as fast as I could the other way.

Of all the items on the menu, I thought the Strawberry Cheesecake Milk Shake sounded the most tasty and probably the simplest of the desserts.  Boy, was I ever wrong.

There was the milk shake in a sugar-topped glass and a straw.  But the straw was there mainly to hold the other elements together. Whipped cream and candy strawberries topped the shake itself, topped by the cheesecake and more whipped cream, a real strawberry, and then a strawberry/chocolate cupcake topped by more whipped cream.

God help me!  I ate and drank it all.  The cupcake was nothing to write a blog about but the cheesecake was pretty good and the strawberry milkshake was just the right thickness and flavor.

The eight-block walk back to the condo was done at a fairly leisurely pace.

I had planned to spend a fourth night, after the race, but I decided to stick around only long enough to take the pictures I wanted and then head home early, listening to the rest of the race on the radio (it is, after all, about a 400-mile drive).  I told Rick I was leaving early because I didn’t think I could survive another dessert.

If my doctors were to look closely at my blood samples, I am sure they would find I don’t have white blood cells.  I have vanilla blood cells.

Once a week Nancy and I get together with a couple friends for game night—dominoes, Rummikub, Five Crown, Swoop, stuff like that.  Halfway through the evening, or when we change games, is dessert time.  No matter what the basic treat is—brownies, cobblers, cake, whatever—ice cream is the vital ingredient.  Always too much ice cream.

On our refrigerator, amidst the numerous pictures of grandchildren, cartoons, the next shopping list and assorted refrigerator magnets, is an advertisement I found in a 1916 Jefferson City newspaper. I look at it the way some people consider their bumper stickers, “He said it. I believe it. So it’s true.”

In 1916 the ad assured buyers that Weber’s ice cream was safe to eat, produced in sanitary surroundings, and was not the impure foods of the time found in grocery stores, themeat sometimes hanging openly in the windows.   Eat our ice cream and you’ll be alive tomorrow to eat more.  That kind of message.

But in today’s FDA-regulated food environment, I am comfortable reading it another way—that ice cream is an essential food group.

I think it is a genetic flaw.

While doing some family research a few years ago, looking for references to my great-grandfather, a Union (with Sherman) Civil War veteran, I uncovered a family secret

A longer article in the Decatur (Ill.) Evening Bulletin from July 6,1896 telling me that Robert Thomas Priddy and his partner, A. A. Cooper, both experienced dairymen, had bought “the milk depot and ice cream business “in the basement of Fay’s meat market on the west side of Lincoln Square.”

A year later:

I inherited my addiction to ice cream from an ancestor who was with Sherman at Vicksburg and later helped capture Little Rock.

He died in 1925.

In the old family photographs, he’s thin. It’s clear he didn’t dip into the inventory as often as he could have.

I wonder what he would have thought of that Strawberry Cheesecake Milkshake at The Sugar Factory.

 

 

 

A New County—part II, A New Book

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Before hostilities in pre-Civil War Missouri turned deadly with the Camp Jackson incident in St. Louis, Governor Claiborne Jackson and his associates were gathering supplies they would need to repel an “invasion” of Missouri by federal troops if one happened.  A large quantity of gun powder was procured in St. Louis and taken to Jefferson City by two companies of the Missouri Volunteer Militia, one of which was Kelly’s.  From Jefferson City, some 12,000 kegs of powder that had been stored at the fairgrounds about a mile from town were distributed throughout much of the state to be hidden away until needed by Jackson’s forces. Kelly and his unit took about half of the supply to Cooper, Saline and other nearby counties where they were carefully hidden.  The stored powder was a factor in the Confederate victory in the Battle of Lexington.  One of those involved was Michael K. McGrath.

The Irish unit fought at Boonville, Carthage and Wilson’s Creek, where Kelly was wounded in the right hand, (as seen in his picture) and in the Confederate capture of Lexington. The unit also was at the Battle of Pea Ridge, in Arkansas then in 1862, he became part of the regular Confederate army that fought in Mississippi and in the Atlanta campaign against Sherman and his Union troops.

St. Louis researcher Doug Harding indicates that McGrath would have been one of the 23 survivors out of the original 125 members of Kelly’s unit. Kelly surrendered in Louisiana in 1865 and took the oath of allegiance to the Union and was paroled in Shreveport.

It is not clear if McGrath also took the oath there or at some other time and place.  But signing it allowed him to take a bar examination and become a lawyer, paving the way for him to return to public office.

Kelly, his health broken by the war, died in 1870 and is buried in the McGrath family plot in St.  Louis’ Calvary Cemetery.

(Official Manual of the State of Missouri, 1913-14)

McGrath in 1866 became a deputy clerk for the United States district and circuit courts. In 1868 he was elected to the clerkship of the St. Louis City Council.  Two years later he was elected clerk of the criminal court and in 1874 he was elected to the first of his four terms as Secretary of State (his first term under the 1865 Constitution was for only two years; the 1875 constitution established the term at four years.

He decided the State of Missouri government had grown large enough to require some kind of a directory.  He produced the first one in 1878.

(Missouri State Archives)

McGrath wrote in the two-page introduction, “It is a truth that must be admitted, that many outside and some even in it, know but little of the vast resources or of its immense wealth and unexampled prosperity, and when told scarcely believe it, so great is the extent and magnitude thereof…No location in the republic represents a more encouraging field for the honest laborer or the aspiring citizen. The contentions of the war have long since disappeared. Liberalism and tolerance in politics and religion are noted characteristics of her people. They are generous, hospitable and enterprising. Among them poverty and humble birth present no barrier to the attainment of wealth, distinction and honor.

“True merit is the criterion of success, and is fostered by hearty encouragement and profitable recognition. Occupying, as she does already, a front rank among the States of the Union, it is easy to forecast her future as one of glory and renown!”

This first manual was 72 pages long.

His term was the longest in Missouri records until James C. Kirkpatrick served five four-year terms.

He was elected to the Missouri Senate to fill a vacancy and served in the Senate during the 1889 session.

McGrath was never far from the public trough, it appears.  The Columbia Daily Tribune observed upon McGrath’s death that “He has been inspector and attorney in the office of the building commissioner, assistant state examiner of building and loan associations…” He also had a brief and unsuccessful stint as a publisher of a Sedalia newspaper. He was nominated in 1909 to be St. Louis City Register of Deeds and was nominated for another city job in 1911 but lost both times.

In 1912, McGrath was elected to the Missouri House of Representatives. He introduced some bills, including the one to chance St. Louis County to Grant County, but failing health forced  him to go home where heart trouble and bronchitis became too much to overcome and he died on January 28, 1913 at his home in St. Louis.

A resolution of mourning passed by the House of Representatives said, “The House lost a useful, honest, and courageous member, the State a valued and Patriotic citizen, and society an influential and sympathetic member.”

The St. Louis Times wrote, “It is much to say that a man can spend all his mature thought in a lifetime covering seventy-nine years upon the chances and changes of politics and go to his grave ithout surrendering the belief that reform in politics is possible, and that it is worth while to keep on fighting.  Such was the experience of Michael McGrath, of whom men ar easing toda, ‘Yes, he was a politician—but he was square.”

A New County

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We’ve commented in the past about whether some of our county names should be changed to honor more contemporary heroes—and maybe reject some scalawags who we learn from history weren’t really worth honoring in the first place.

110 years ago a distinguished Missouri politician introduced a bill to change the name of one of our major counties.

We discovered his suggestion among our clippings.  It’s part of a column from the Taney County Republican, January 30, 1913

The column began, “Until a few years after the war, the city of St. Louis was the seat of St. Louis County. When, by authority of an act of the legislature, the voters of the city and the county adopted the “scheme and charter,” St. Louis became a separate jurisdiction, a county within itself, under the name “The City of St. Louis” and the county became known as “the County of St. Louis.”  The county seat was established at the city of Clayton and a courthouse was erecte don land donated by a citizen of that name. It has never since had any legal connection with the city of St. Louis, although comparatively few of the people of the Stat know yet that St. Louis is not in St. Louis County. Deeds and legal documents intended for county officials and courts and lawyers are often mailed to St. Louis and important legal documents affecting property and persons in the city of St. Louis are often mailed to Clayton. The confusion created by the use of name St. Louis for the county has been a source of annoyance for many years to both city and county.”

It continues:

It was doubted, of course. One reason Michael McGrath’s bill didn’t make it is because Michael McGrath didn’t make it either.  By the time the newspaper published this article, McGrath had been dead for two days.  But it was something of a remarkable gesture—-because Michael McGrath had been a Confederate soldier whose unit took part in important early battles in the Civil War.

His name means nothing to most of those who labor in the halls of the Capitol now.  But in his time, Michael McGrath was a political power.  And his influence is still felt in Missouri government today. In fact, he has a presence in thousands of homes, libraries, offices, and schools.

McGrath was born in 1844 in Ballymartle, County Cork, Ireland and was raised on a farm and educated in a parish school.  He went to the National School in Kinsale, a small village in the southeast corner of Ireland where he studied to be a teacher and became one at age 16 (Kinsale is the home to a lot of famous people we Americans have never heard of except for William Penn, the founder of the colony of Pennsylvania.  Nearby is Old Kinsale Head, a piece of land jutting into the Atlantic that has a lighthouse and the remains of an old castle.  About elven miles out to sea from Kinsale Head, the wreckage of the torpedoed liner Lusitania. sunk in 1915, lies 300 feet down.)

A blight that infected the potato crops throughout Europe, causing “The Great Potato Famine,” led to thousands of deaths and thousands of emigrants fleeing Ireland and other European countries to the United States. McGrath arrived here in 1851. He hung out at the library in New York where his reading of copies of The St. Louis Republic convinced him to come to Missouri in July, 1856.

His good handwriting landed him a job with the St. Louis County Recorder.  He became a deputy clerk in the criminal court in 1861, a position he lost when Radical Republicans in the legislature passed an Ouster Ordinance that declared all offices not held by citizens loyal to the Union to be vacant.

We don’t know how soon McGrath came under the influence of Father John O’Bannon who at that time was raising money for the construction of St. John the Apostle and Evangelist Church, but he soon became involved a local militia unit tied closely to O’Bannon’s Total Abstinence and Benevolence Society. The unit, known as the Washington Blues, was led by Captain Joseph Kelly, another Irish immigrant, who ran a grocery and became McGrath’s father-in-law. A drill by the Blues helped raise money for O’Bannon’s church that later served as the cathedral church of the St. Louis Archdiocese and remains an active congregation today. O’Bannon was a Confederate chaplain in the war.

Kelly’s Irish Brigade was sent to Missouri’s western border in late 1860 to repel Kansas invaders, part of the infamous Missouri-Kansas border war, and became one of the first units in the Missouri State Guard, a pro-confederate force organized by Governor Claiborne Jackson and former governor Sterling Price.  McGrath was a private in what became a regiment of the Sixth Division of the Missouri State Guard.

Irish Immigrants were more likely to join the Union army but some historians think many of the immigrants in Missouri were felt they were disrespected by the anti-Irish German Unionists in St. Louis, and further identified with the Confederacy because it reminded them of Ireland’s long-standing struggle to become independent of England.

Whatever his personal motivation, Michael K. McGrath was a rebel who apparently spent the entire war fighting against the forces of the man for whom he later wanted to name a county.

Come back next time to see how this Confederate survived the war and became a distinguished political figure in Missouri.

 

 

You never know—

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—-what stories you might discover when you knock on a stranger’s door.

One summer night in Columbia when I was a college student selling encyclopedias door-to-door—a job that convinced me I was not meant to be in sales—an old man named Brooks Bradley answered the door.

I sold no encyclopedias that night.  Instead, I spent my time in his living room listening to him tell me stories.

He told me he was the oldest printer in the state. He showed me his commission as a Kentucky Colonel.  (Many years later, I joined him in that, uh, distinguished group.)

I wound up talking to a man who used to run steamboats on the Osage River as far upstream as Warsaw; today there are two dams and two big reservoirs below Warsaw. Nobody can take any kind of a boat upstream on the Osage anymore, at least not past Bagnell Dam at the Lake of the Ozarks.

Bradley’s family was an old family in Columbia.  He told me of the day his grandfather almost murdered General Odon Guitar, one of the city’s most famous residents. Guitar had been a Union officer and the Bradley family was on the Confederate side.

He told me he dreamed of writing a book someday called, “Pre-eminent Sons of Bitches I Have Known.”   I read his obituary in the paper a few months later. I still have it. I don’t think he ever wrote the book and to this day I wish I had a recorder that night.

The other day I decided to see if he had left any writings of any kind behind.

I found a January, 1914 copy of the magazine Typographical Journal that listed “W. Brooks Bradley, age 29 years; at trade fourteen years; learned trade in Rockport, Mo; has also worked in Pleasant Hill, Harrisonville and Warrensburg, Mo.”  He was applying for membership in the Typographers Union.”

I don’t know if the house where I spent that memorable evening was at 810 Sandifer Street, but that’s where he and his wife, Mae, were living when the census taker came round in 1940 and found them living with their 20-year old daughter, Dorothea.

I have run across one other record that includes a Brooks Bradley story.  A monthly magazine, Confederate Veteran (published “in the interest of Confederate Veterans and Kindred Topics”), from October, 1923, has him asking for some help.

An inquiry comes from Brooks Bradley, of Fayette, Mo., for some information of a soldier buried in that community, Richard Benedict, of Virginia, who went into Missouri in 1864 to secure recruits and information, and while there was taken ill and died. Mr. Bradley is very interested in securing the record of this soldier, as he and a few friends wish to erect a monument at the grave, which is on the old Bradley farm.

The following is taken from a newspaper story of this long forgotten soldier:

“In a neglected grave on a farm some seven miles northwest of Columbia (Mo.) rest the remains of a Confederate soldier whose tragic death is still remembered by a few Boone County people. The name of this soldier was Benedict, a commissioned officer of the Confederate army, and his business in this part of the country was to secure recruits. The county at the time was overrun with Federal commands.

“While on this mission, Benedict was taken sick, and, to keep his whereabouts a secret, he was placed in a camp on what was then the William Wade farm. In the same camp was a wounded soldier, Andrew J. Caldwell, now a resident of Columbia, who had been shot in a sharp skirmish on what was known as the John Fenton Ridge.

“So completely was the county overrun by Federals that it was almost impossible to give Benedict’s body a decent burial. An attempt was made to secure a suit of gray for burial purposes, but this was impossible. During the night his body was removed to the residence of James Boyce and prepared for burial. James Bradley made the coffin, and the immediate neighbors gathered and conveyed the body to its final resting place. In passing through this old deserted graveyard to-day, a close observer will find a plain, flat rock upon which is inscribed the word ‘Benedict.'”

Mr. Bradley is a young man and the nephew of a Confederate soldier. He writes: “My grandfather raised the first Confederate regiment in Boone County, Mo. He was a sort of preacher and sent out a call to meet at the church. Going into the pulpit, instead of preaching a sermon, he read the ‘Ordinance of Secession.’ At the conclusion, they all sang the ‘Bonnie Blue Flag.’ The old church yet stands as a shrine of democracy, and he is buried there. The monument marking his grave reads: ‘Here lies buried a Hardshell Baptist and an Unreconstructed Rebel.'”

Oh, how I wish that old printer had been more of a writer.

Hymn to the Fallen

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Originally, this was Decoration Day, a day set aside in 1868 at the suggestion of Union General John A. Logan to remember the dead of the Civil War. By 1890 all of the northern states had adopted May 30 as “Decoration Day, a day to decorate the graves of those Civil War soldiers who had died “to make men free,” as the song says.

Two world wars turned the day into a day to remember our nation’s dead from all wars.  It became “Memorial Day” in 1971 when a three-day holiday was created with the last Monday in May, regardless of the date, as the observance.

The Jefferson City Community Band is holding its annual Memorial Day Concert today at the First Christian Church, the usual venue for this concert.

The program is always patriotic music or music with a military orientation.

One of the selections this year is John Williams’ Hymn to the Fallen from the 1998 Stephen Spielberg movie “Saving Private Ryan.”

The movie is the story of a World War II Army Ranger unit’s search for a Private James Ryan, an Iowa farm boy whose three brothers have been killed in action.  The Army wants him sent home, alive, but first he must be found.

The unit is led behind enemy lines by Captain John H. Miller to find Ryan before the War Department has to send a fourth letter of profound regret to his mother.  The unit finds Ryan but pays a tragic price by losing several men to save this one.  Miller is the last, telling Ryan, “Earn this” as he dies—to live a life worthy of the cost of saving him.

The musical motif is repeated at the end of the film as we see the face of Private Ryan (played by Matt Damon) morph into the face of James Ryan (played by Harrison Young) fifty years later, visiting the cemetery at Normandy with his wife, children, and grandchildren.  He finds the simple cross that marks Miller’s grave and kneels.

Old James Ryan: “My family is with me today.  They wanted to come with me.  To be honest with you, I wasn’t sure how I’d feel coming back here.  Every day I think about what you said to me that day on the bridge. I tried to live my life the best that I could. I hope that was enough.  I hope that, at least in your eyes, I’ve earned what all of you have done for me.”

His wife approaches. “James?..”

She looks at the headstone. “Captain John H. Miller.”

Ryan stands and looks at his wife.  “Tell me I have led a good life.”

“What?”

“Tell me I’m a good man.”

“You are,” and she walks back to the family members who have been watching, quietly, as Old James Ryan straightens, and salutes the cross with Miller’s name on it.

Writer John Biguenet, in a 2014 Atlantic Magazine article about the movie concludes that “the living are called not merely to bear witness to the achievement of the fallen heroes; the living are in fact the achievement itself.  Like Private Ryan we cannot help but ask what we’ve done to deserve such sacrifice by others and beg their forgiveness for what we have cost them.  And like James Ryan, all we can do to justify that sacrifice is to live our lives as well as we are able.”

On this Memorial Day, when self-centeredness, too often further corrupted by meanness, burdens our daily discussions, perhaps we can find a moment to justify the sacrifices of those intended to be honored today by living our lives better than we are living them.

A Western Paul Revere

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While looking for something else a few days ago I came across a story in a 1912 edition of the Keokuk Daily Gate City that explained how Union forces won the northernmost battle of the Civil War west of the Mississippi River. The story involves a mad ride through the countryside to warn of impending attack and a small town’s action against a stronger enemy. Unlike the story that turned Paul Revere’s truncated ride into an epic apocryphal poem, this story is a first-hand account of a wild adventure that changed history west of the Mississippi River.

Athens, Missouri (It’s pronounced AY-thens there) was a town of about fifty about the time of the Civil War, backed up against the Des Moines River that forms the notch in our border in the far northeast corner of the state.  It’s pretty much a ghost town now, with a state historic site nearby commemorating the Battle of Athens. Athens doesn’t even show up on the maps anymore (the one above is from Google). Go up to the northeast corner of the notch, just east of Highway 81 about seven miles (as the crow flies) southeast of Farmington, Iowa, where the DesMoines River forms the state boundary and imagine a dot there and you’ll pretty much know where Athens was.

About 2,000 Confederates under Colonel Martin Green tried to capture Athens from the Home Guard Troops under Col. David Moore who occupied the town. Normally he would have had 500 men but he was down to about 330 because some of his troops had been allowed to go to their homes in the area. Green surrounded the town on three sides and attacked on August 5, 1861.

But Moore’s men turned out to be better armed, with rifled muskets and bayonets while Green’s force was poorly equipped and was mostly untrained recruits. When the Confederate attack wavered in the face of better-than-expected defenses, Moore led a bayonet counter-attack that forced the Rebels to flee, never again to threaten an invasion Iowa.

A key part of the story is how the Union forces came to be better armed. And that is where the seldom-related (for many years, apparently) story of General Cyrus Bussey, then a cavalry Lieutenant-Colonel of the Iowa Home Guard begins.  He told it to Phillip Dolan of the New York World and it was reprinted in the Keokuk newspaper on January 1, 1912.

Listen my friends and you shall hear of the daring ride of Cyrus Bussey, and how it changed Civil War history in northeast Missouri and in Iowa.

“Because I was a Democratic member of the Iowa State Senate and supported the measure to appropriate $800,000 to raise troops in Iowa for the preservation of the Union, Governor Kirkwood named me his aide-de-camp on his staff, with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel of Cavalry. That was May, 1861. I was twenty-eight years old with no military education or training.

“I lived in Bloomfield, twelve miles from the Missouri border. My messenger reported to me that the Confederal Gen. Martin Green was organizing a brigade on the border to invade Iowa. I applied to Governor Kirkwood for arms but he had none.  The Battle of Bull Run had given the southerners big encouragement and there was great enlistment in northern Missouri for the Confederate army.

“I went to General Fremont in St. Louis and asked for arms. He had none.  I said, ‘Give me 100,000 rounds of ammunition.

“What will you do with ammunition without guns?”

“I replied ‘I don’t know but I’ll feel better if I have ammunition.’

“He gave me 50,000 rounds and right away it was loaded on a steamboat and sent up the Mississippi River to Keokuk, Iowa.

“The next night about midnight my messenger came to my house in Bloomfield and reported that Gen. Green was shoeing his horses and would start the invasion of Iowa within thirty-six hours with 1,500 cavalry.

“I went at once to a livery stable and asked for a horse and buggy. At 4 o’clock in the morning they brought to my house a rig —a two-wheeled sulky—and in the shafts was a mustang and three men were holding him, for he was really a wild horse just taken from the herd. It was the only horse they could give me.

“I got up in the seat, took the reins, the men let go and the mustang plunged off.  Away I went behind that wild horse toward Keokuk, forty miles to the eastward. For fourteen miles he tore over the road, over the hills, up and down and through streams with never a let up; a hundred escapes from imminent wreck we had.

“We approached the home of Mr. Bloom, a friend of mine. Here the road led down to a ravine and Mr. Bloom’s cattle filled the road, lying down. Straight down the road, galloped the horse, straight at the herd of cattle. One wheel struck a cow, the shock took the horse clean off his feet, threw him into the air and down he landed on his back in a ditch with the sulky on top of him. I was flung twenty feet.

“But good fortune was with me. The sulky was not broken, and better still, the horse was still full of life and his legs uninjured. Swiftly, Mr. Bloom and his hired man helped me to hitch up again, and away we went, the horse wilder than ever. At the Pittsburgh ford he plunged through the Des Moines River, half a mile wide, and a mile and a half further, came to the town of Keosauqua. Here I tried to stop him but he would not stop. I guided him around the square in the center of the town. Round and round he raced three times, and then a crowd of the town’s people stopped him and I got out. I left him there for good. I took the train for Keokuk and reached that place.

“I notified the authorities of Keokuk to barricade their streets against the coming of Martin Green. One of the railroad officials came to me with a bill of lading showing 1,000 guns in transit, shipped by the war department to Col. Grenville M. Dodge at Council Bluffs, for the regiment he was raising there and these guns had just arrived in Keokuk and were about to go out on the west bound train. I felt that Providence was with me. I seized the guns and the train.

“I found the ammunition which General Fremont had sent, and by more wonderful good fortune, the cartridges were exactly right for the caliber of the guns.

“Immediately I gave 100 of the guns to Gen. Belknap, afterwards secretary of war, and 100 to H. J. Sample. I got on the train with 800 guns. At Athens, Mo., Col. David Moore was in camp with 300 loyal Missourians armed with a few shotguns. I gave him 200 rifles. A few miles further up, I left 100 guns with Capt. O. H. P. Scott.  At Keosauqua I left 200 guns. The other 300 guns I took to Ottumwa, hired a wagon, and hauled them to Bloomfield, my home, where three companies were promptly raised, and I immediately started back to Keokuk.

“On the way, I received a message from Col. Moore telling me Green’s forces were advancing on him and a battle was momentarily expected. A special train brought a detachment to his aid.

“Moore had barricaded the streets of Athens. Green attacked him but the resistance was so strong that Green retired. For two days my Home Guard continued to arrive at Athens. Then Col. Moore, in command, followed the rebels into Missouri. They never came back to Iowa.

“Having seized the guns without warrant—ordinarily a great offense—I started to get my action legalized. Gen. Fremont said to me, ‘You have rendered a very important service. You have shown fitness for command. Next day he appointed me Colonel and authorized me to raise a regiment of cavalry. In ten days I had 1,100 men in camp, mustered in as the Third Iowa Cavalry.

“But I have never ceased to wonder what would have happened if that wild mustang had not landed on his back in the soft ditch and thus saved his legs to carry me on.”

And that’s how Moore’s men at Athens became better armed than the  much larger force of Confederates and how a little battle in a now-gone northeast Missouri town stopped a Confederate invasion of Iowa.

The battle was the beginning of a distinguished military and civilian life for Bussey. He was Grant’s chief of cavalry at Vicksburg and commanded Sherman’s advance guard at Jackson Mississippi.  He became a wartime Major-General in 1865. For a short time after the war he was a commission merchant in St. Louis and New Orleans before becoming a lawyer. During the Harrison administration (1889-1893) he was Assistant Secretary of the Interior.  At the time of the interview he was described as “a spare, medium-size man, showing few marks of his long life of great activity, he is mentally keen and keeps the dry humor of an Iowa pioneer.”

He died in 1915 at the age of 81.  He and his wife are buried in Arlington National Cemetery under an imposing monument.

The Paul Revere of the west, he was—except that, unlike Revere, he was propelled by a wild mustang and he completed his mission.  And he changed the history of the Civil War west of the Mississippi.

(The picture is from History of Iowa from the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century (1903)

How a Possum Stopped Radicalization 

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We’ve seen something such as this before:

A political party seized by a charismatic leader with radicalized followers at a time of national division sees voter suppression as one of the keys to maintaining its power and threatens to drive the other party into oblivion.  But the party develops an internal fracture between the radical wing and the more traditional element and there are fears that IT will be the party going into oblivion.

From this contentious time there emerges a possum and over time, it rescues both parties.

This was the political situation in Missouri fifteen decades ago.

During the Civil War, the interim government—Governor Price and several members of the legislature had fled to Arkansas to set up a government in exile that finished the war headquartered in Texas—Radical Republicans left in control in Missouri adopted a loyalty oath to make sure Missouri would have only Union-loyal officials in charge.  The Radical movement had begun about the time the Republican Party began in the mid-1850s, their name coming from their demand for immediate end to slavery. During the war, they were opposed by the moderate wing of the party led by Abraham Lincoln, who had run fourth in the 1860 election in this state, as well as by Democrats, who were more oriented toward southern sympathies.

The Radicals confirmed their control of Missouri government with the election of Governor Thomas Fletcher in 1864, thanks in part to the organizational skills of St. Louis lawyer Charles D. Drake who in 1863 argued for a new state constitution and disenfranchisement of all Confederate sympathizers. Carl Schurz, a future U.S. Senator and a leader of Missouri’s German citizens, called him “inexorable” and said Republicans “especially in the country districts, stood much in awe of him,” which might sound familiar today.

Radical Republicans pushed through The Drake Constitution, named because of his influence, in 1865. It contained a harsh loyalty oath that basically denied citizenship rights to anyone who would not pledge that they had given no support to the rebellion. Regardless of loyalty during the war, even if a person were a Union General, citizens could not vote, practice a profession, or serve in positions of public trust unless they swore to that oath. Drake and his Radical Republicans produced a list of 81 actions that defined disloyalty. For six years the Drake-led Radicals controlled politics in Missouri and Drake became a United States Senator.

Missouri’s moderate Republicans were reeling during those years and Democrats feared for their own party’s existence.  And this is when the possum was born that saved both political groups.

Drake’s Radicals began to see rising opposition from those who called themselves Liberal Republicans—remember this was 1870 and the two words, “liberal” and “Republican” were not an oxymoron.

The Liberals had had enough of Drake and his Radicals by the time the State Republican Convention was held in Jefferson City on August 31, 1870.  The Committee on Platforms filed two reports, a majority report from the Liberals favored immediate re-enfranchisement of former Confederates.  The Radical, minority, report favored a statewide vote on the question. With former Confederate supporters banned from voting, the outcome of the election pretty clearly would have maintained Radical Control.  When the convention adopted the Radical position, about 250 Liberals walked out and nominated their own ticket with Benjamin Gratz Brown its candidate for Governor.  The Radicals nominated Joseph McClurg for a second two-year term.

Democrats, still weak shortly after the U. S. Supreme Court threw out part of the loyalty oath, decided not to put up a statewide ticket.  William Hyde, the editor of The St. Louis Republican, a Democratic newspaper despite its name, is credited with creating what became known as “The Possum Policy.”  Instead of running its own slate, the Democrats threw their support behind the Liberal Republican candidate, Brown.

Walter B. Stevens, in Missouri, the Center State, 1821-1915, records an exchange of telegrams after the State Democratic Convention decided to support Liberal Republicans in which former U. S. Senator John Brooks Henderson—who did not run for re-election after voting against convicting President Johnson of impeachment charges—told Brown, “The negroes of this state are free. White men only are now enslaved. The people look to you and your friends to deliver them from this great wrong. Shall they look in vain?”

Brown wired back, “The confidence of the people of this State shall not be disappointed. I will carry out this canvass to its ultimate consequence so that no freeman not convicted of crime shall   henceforth be deprived on an equal voice in our government.”

The Democrats’ “Possum Policy” helped Brown defeated McClurg by about 40,000 votes, effectively ending the Radical Republican reign in Missouri.

The Liberal Republicans, created for the sole purpose of ending radicalism within the party, could not survive on their own. Governor Brown’s Secretary, Frederick N. Judson, reflected, “A party based upon a single issue, called into being to meet a single emergency, could not in the nature of things become permanent…and though its party life was short, it is entitled to the imperishable glory of having destroyed the last vestige of the Civil War in Missouri. A nobler record no party could have.”

National Democrats failed to follow the Missouri party’s “Possum Policy” and in 1872 nominated a presidential ticket of Horace Greeley, the New York newspaper publisher then in failing physical and mental health, and Benjamin Brown of Missouri—-a move that antagonized the national Liberal Republican movement and led to a crushing defeat for Democrats as Liberal Republicans opposed to the Grant administration had no place to go and so supported it anyway. With that, Liberal Republican movement died nationally.

In Missouri, the re-enfranchised Democrats elected Silas Woodson to succeed Brown as Governor, beginning Democratic control of the governorship until Republican Herbert Hadley was elected in 1908.

Missourians adopted a new constitution in 1875, throwing out the punitive Drake Constitution.  It lasted until our present State Constitution was adopted in 1945, the longest-standing constitution in state history.

Republicans paid a price to overcome the radicalization of their party 150 years ago but paying that price made sure that the rights of thousands of people were no longer endangered or no longer remained limited.

Being out of power did not and does not mean being without influence. History tells us we became a better nation because political courage manifested itself at the right time within the Republican Party.  In the long term both parties saved themselves.

We are not advocating that the Republican National Committee adopt a “possum policy” in 2022 or in 2024 to stamp out radicalization within the party nor are we saying splitting the party will be the solution now that it was then. But history reminds us of the dangers of radical politics and the sacrifices that have to be made, sometimes on both sides of the aisle, to make sure it does not overwhelm us.