Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s not entirely unexpected death is the liberals’ worst nightmare. For how many months have we dreaded turning on our devices to see the news that Ruth Bader Ginsburg had passed away? Nonetheless, Mitch McConnell is going to have to play this one very carefully. The President will likely want to ram through a conservative nominee to mobilize his base believing that he will benefit from a heated nomination battle. Moreover, if his plan is to contest the election in the courts Should he lose, he will want a reliable conservative vote on the court as insurance. McConnell is also licking his chops at another appointment opportunity. However with less than two months before a presidential election, McConnell’s notorious word from 2016 are echoing in the air, “ The American people should have a voice in the selection of the next Supreme Court Justice. Therefore, the vavacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.” The American people are many things and believe in many. But most of all what they are is fair and believe rules should be applied equally. I think if he tries to ram it through before the election there will be a terrible backlash. I think that even those who may not have a strong feeling about the court, but believe what is good for the goose is good for the gander, will see such an attempt as patently unfair. Ultimately it will lead to the loss of the presidency and control of the Senate for the GOP.
Moreover, it’s not clear McConnell has the votes to get a nomination through the Senate. Several GOP Senators are behind in the polls. Some by a big margins others in a close fight. These include Susan Collins in Maine, Martha McSally in Arizona, Corey Gardner in Colorado, Tom Tillis in North Carolina, Steve Daines in Montana, Joni Ernst in Iowa and Leslie Graham is tied in South Carolina. Graham is also record as being against replacing a Supreme Court Justice in an election year. As Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman, he would be responsible for the running the nomination hearing and his hypocrisy would be on parade front and center should he deviate from his word. These candidates are going to be loathe to cast a vote that will put their reelection at risk. Look at the Cavanaugh hearing in 2018, everyone though the nomination battle would benefit the GOP in the mid term elections. The wound up losing 40 seats in the House of Representatives and all kind of elections at the state level. Additionally other senators like Lisa Murkowski, and Charles Grassley are on record making similar statements as Graham. And then there is always Mitt Romney.
LINDSEY GRAHAM on Oct. 3, 2018:
"If an opening comes in the last year of President Trump's term, and the primary process has started, we'll wait to the next election.”pic.twitter.com/WjmIiWbTeo
Assume that Biden wins, McConnell could try to fill the seat in the lame duck period after the election. However, if he goes this route there will be tremendous pressure on President-Elect Biden to expand the size of the Supreme Court, presuming the Democrats win control of the Senate, from his base. The Democrats will end the Senate filibuster and increase the size of the court to 13 to balance things out. I don’t think Biden wants to go this route, but he will find it difficult to resist the pressure under these circumstances.
If Trump wins re-election all bets are off.
Safe to say, buckle in now because the battle is just beginning.
It’s time we stop. Hey, what’s that sound? Everybody look what’s going down!
It was a mid-September morning in 1862 along the Antietam creek in Western Maryland. The sun was beginning to rise as the nighttime sky slowly gave way to the blue and orange hues of the morning. An overnight rain ended and a morning ground fog was dissipating as the first Union soldiers broke camp and began moving south toward the Miller family’s cornfield. Confederate artillery from the high ground on the Union right opened fire as the the Yankees trampled through the cornfield, warning both sides that a battle had commenced. At the opposite end of the cornfield two brigades of battle-hardened Confederate veterans, patiently waited, poised to stem the advance. As the first blue coats emerged from the cornfield, the Confederates rose from the ground unleashing a thunderous volley, ripping through the Union ranks in what would become the opening engagement in the bloodiest day in American history.
At Antietam, close to 23,000 American soldiers were either killed or wounded in a roughly twelve hour period. The casualties from Gettysburg, Shiloh, Chancellorsville, Chickamauga and Spotsylvania exceed those of Antietam but these battles were multi-day affairs. If Shiloh was a loss of innocence, a demonstration that war was not some kind of lark or noble adventure that one entered into lightly, then Antietam was another wake-up call for both sides.
Antietam is an epic battle in every sense of the word. It is one both in terms of it’s importance and consequences. One that is epic in the sense that key points of the battle— the cornfield, Bloody Lane, and Burnside’s Bridge—are forever etched in U.S. military history. It is a battle where the men of both sides were pushed to their limits and beyond. On the Union side alone, 20 Medals of Honor were awarded for acts of bravery during the battle. It is also the first time where the battlefield carnage is recorded by photograph for the American public to see.
Confederate dead near the Dunker Church and along the Hagerstown Pike.
The drama of that fateful September morning was set in motion less than a month earlier. At the end of August, General Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia soundly defeated Union forces at the Second Battle of Manassas while scoring a tactical victory at the Battle of Chantilly, that sent the Yankees scurrying back behind the defenses of Washington. With only 55,000 troops under his command, Lee’s army posed no serious threat to Washington DC. Moreover, his army was badly in need of food and other supplies and the Virginia countryside had been ravaged by the war. Faced with this reality, Lee opted to take the war North. He would invade Maryland and if possible Pennsylvania with goal of securing supplies, undermining Northern morale, and encouraging Maryland to join the Confederacy. Lee also calculated that his advance into Maryland would draw out the Union army from its defenses and supply base in Washington DC where he could deliver a decisive blow.
On September 4, his rag-tag Confederate army crossed over the Potomac River into Maryland near Leesburg Virginia and advanced rapidly north toward Frederick, Maryland. However, things began to go wrong immediately for the rebel invaders. A large number of confederate forces refused to crossover into Maryland claiming that they joined the army to defend the South against Northern aggression, not to invade the North. Confederate forces also did not receive the warm welcome they expected. Unlike Baltimore and southern Maryland where there were a considerable number of Southern sympathizers and slaveholders, Western Maryland was a center of pro-Union sentiment. Lee also expected that when he entered Frederick, that the supply line to the Federal garrison at Harpers Ferry would be cut and force the 14,000 troops there to withdrawal. They did not and the garrison posed a continuing threat to Southern supply lines. Consequently, Lee was forced to divide his already depleted army. He ordered General Stonewall Jackson and his Corps to seize Harpers Ferry. He then sent General James Longstreet and 10,000 men ahead to Hagerstown, leaving a smaller contingent of forces behind at South Mountain to guard the army’s rear and protect the mountain passes at Fox, Turner, Crampton gap.
News that the Confederates had crossed the Potomac into Maryland, set off alarm bells in Washington but the Union commander, General George McClellan was slow to respond. On September 7, the 87,000 strong Army of the Potomac began their pursuit of the Confederate Army but did not reach Frederick until six days later. As luck would have it soldiers from the 27th Indiana infantry regiment found a copy of Lee’s plans wrapped around three cigars in a field. Emboldened by his good fortune, McClellan boasted, “Here is a paper with which if I cannot whip Bobbie Lee, I will be willing to go home.” With that critical information, McClellan knew that Lee’s army was divided and their locations. He ordered his army to advance West with all deliberate speed toward the mountain passes, near South Mountain. He would now destroy Lee’s divided army piecemeal.
On 14 September, the advancing Union army clashed with the rear guard of Lee’s army for control of the three mountain passes — Fox, Turner, and Crampton’s Gap, at South Mountain. The fighting was fierce as the Union army moved up the jagged rocks against determined Confederate resistance. The smaller Confederate detachment held firm against repeated Union assaults. The fighting would continue non-stop into the evening with the outnumbered rebels eventually retreating and ceding the passes to the Union army. When the battle ended a combined 4,000 Union and Confederate soldiers were killed including Federal Ninth Corps commander, General Jesse Lee Reno, and Confederate Brigadier General Samuel Garland. The next day Harpers Ferry succumbed to Confederate forces.
Having dislodged Confederate forces from the mountain passes, McClellan and his army passed over South Mountain and were within striking range of Lee’s vulnerable army. However, McClellan continued to operate with his customary lack of urgency. He failed to press the vulnerable Confederates and allowed Lee time to regather his divided army and assume a defensive position behind Antietam creek, just east of Sharpsburg. Stonewall Jackson and his men rejoined Lee on the 16th after securing the surrender of Harpers Ferry. However, Jackson left behind a division under Major General A.P. Hill to complete the turnover. Longstreet and his men had begun their return march from Hagerstown after hearing the sounds of battle echoing from South Mountain. Union forces continued to outnumber the Confederates by a 2:1 margin but McClellan still erroneously believed he was outnumbered.
The Battle Begins
Lee expected that the overly cautious McClellan would not attack before September 17 and McClellan did not disappoint. The Union commander diligently spent all day September 16 carefully developing his battle plan around Antietam Creek’s three crossings: the Upper, Middle, and Lower bridges. McClellan’s opening attack would use the Upper Bridge to strike Lee’s left flank followed up by a coordinated attack on his right across the Lower Bridge. These two attacks were expected to thin out the Confederate Center, where Union forces would cross over the Middle Bridge and strike a final blow. With the flank attacks cutting off his avenues of retreat, Lee would be compelled to surrender. That evening, two Union I and XII corps crossed over the Upper Bridge with orders to strike Lee’s left early the next day. Despite McClellan’s meticulous preparation, few things would go as planned.
Shortly after daybreak on the morning of September 17th, Major General Joseph Hooker and his three divisions of the I Corps emerged from their bivouacs on the Poffenberger farm and moved south toward the North end of the Miller family’s 30-acre cornfield. At the opposite end of the field, in unknown strength and location, waited the Confederate forces of Major General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson for their expected attack. Over the next four hours, this cornfield would become ground zero for some of the worst carnage in U.S. history. The battle here would be marked by a series of attacks and counter attacks in which neither side was able to gain the upper hand. The field would change hands no fewer than six times but when all was said and done the fighting ended in a stalemate as the focus of the battle shifted south.
1.) Hooker’s brigades begin their attack on the cornfield; 2.) Hood’s division counter attacks; 3.) General D.H. Hill sends reinforcements from the Sunken Road; 4.) Mansfield’s Twelfth Corps drives Hood’s men from the field
Hooker’s battle plan was simple and uncomplicated. There was no deception or complex maneuvering involved. The I Corps would carry out a direct assault on the Confederate left flank and drive it back past a small white stone structure on raised ground known as the Dunker Church. Hooker positioned his forces for battle in the shape of an inverted pyramid. He deployed Brigadier General James Ricketts’ division on the left, Brigadier General Abner Doubleday’s division on the right and placed Brigadier General George Meade’s division behind the two in reserve.
General Ricketts’ division would lead the attack and around 6:00 am Brigadier General Abram Duryee’s brigade deployed into a double line and entered the cornfield. Moving forward, they disappeared amongst the head-high cornstalks, unsupported but undaunted. As Duryee’s men neared the end of the cornfield, a brigade of Georgians, under the command of Colonel Marcellus Douglass, rose from the ground about 200 yards away and unleashed a deafening volley, knocking dozens from the ranks. Duryee’s brigade stood toe to toe with the Georgians firing behind the for cover of an old wooden fence. Men in the ranks of both sides fell rapidly but after 30 minutes of intense fighting and 300 casualties Duryee’s men slowly began to fall back.
Three regiments from Douglass’ brigade pursued the retreating Federals and they were soon joined by Brigadier General Harry Hay’s brigade from Louisiana, whom Jackson sent to bolster the Georgians. As Hays’ brigade advanced, they crashed into one of Ricketts’ other brigades under the command of Colonel Richard Coulter. Coulter’s brigade just emerged from the East Woods and was moving to support Duryee’s men. In some of the fiercest fighting of the battle, Hay’s men drove Coulter’s brigade back into the East Woods, where it rallied, strengthened by reinforcements. Exhausted and running low on ammunition Hays’ brigade was forced to retreat.
On the Union right, Doubleday’s division began its attack about the same time as Duryee’s men were falling back. Brigadier General John Gibbon’s “Iron Brigade” led the attack with the brigades of Colonel Walter Phelps and Brigadier General Marsena Patrick close behind on the left and right. Gibbon’s men were all Midwesterners of hearty stock and earned their sobriquet as reliable and determined fighters the previous month at Manassas. Advancing south along the Hagerstown Pike, Gibbon’s brigade entered the cornfield around 6:30 am led by the 6th Wisconsin regiment with the 2nd Wisconsin regiment following on its left. Behind them were the 7thWisconsin and the 19th Indiana. Pushing its way through the dense corn, the 6th Wisconsin was suddenly hit by an unexpectedly strong volley from its right flank. A battle line of Virginians emerged from the West Woods and delivered a second volley tearing into the 6th Wisconsin, killing and wounding dozens. Both the 2nd and 6th Wisconsin wheeled to meet this new threat, taking cover behind a wooden rail fence. Gibbon also redeployed the 7th Wisconsin and the 19thIndiana west of the turnpike to drive the Virginians from the field, while Doubleday sent Patrick’s brigade in support. The Virginians were soon pushed back.
With the immediate threat to their right eliminated, the 2nd and 6th Wisconsin, along with Phelps’ brigade, continued to move forward toward the Dunker Church. As they approached the end of the cornfield, they were met with the same deadly fire that Duryee’s brigade received 30 minutes earlier. Three regiments of Georgians, from Douglass’ brigade rose up and unleashed a powerful volley. The men of Gibbon and Phelps’ brigades closed ranks behind a wooden fence and returned fire with equally devastating effect. Pressed hard by Doubleday’s division, the Georgians began to fall back opening the door to the Dunker Church. Suddenly, two brigades of Louisianans and Virginians emerged from the depths of the West Woods under Brigadier General William Starke. Starke’s men took up positions along a wooden rail fence on the east side of the Hagerstown Pike and fired into the Union flank, slowing their advance. Gibbon and Phelps’ men pivoted to meet the new threat. At one point the two battle lines were only 30 yards apart blazing away at each other. They fell by the score, including Starke who was shot three times and would die within the hour. The 7th Wisconsin and the 19th Indiana, which had earlier driven the Confederates from the Northern edge of the West Woods now appeared on Starke’s left inflicting heavy damage. Their position no longer tenable, the rebels retreated back behind the West Woods.
As the Confederate line began to crumble, Jackson turned to only remaining reserve, Brigadier General John Bell Hood’s Division. Hood’s division was made up of three brigades of Texans and two from Georgia and South Carolina, who had proven themselves in previous battles to be reliable and tenacious fighters. Shortly after 7:00 am Hood’s men poured out of the West Woods behind the Dunker Church howling their dreaded rebel yell. They drove Hooker’s First Corps back across the Cornfield, to just about where the Union attack began. Hood, however, was unable to consolidate his gains. Around 8:00 am, Mansfield’s twelfth corps, with its 7000 troops entered the battle. They pushed Hood’s men and additional reinforcements from General Daniel Harvey Hill’s command back across the field, south to the Dunker Church. Hood’s Division suffered grievously with 1,380 dead and wounded, about 60 percent of its strength. Mansfield’s command also paid dearly for the ground it reclaimed at the cost of over 1500 casualties, including Mansfield himself who was mortally wounded.
Around 9:30 am, the Union Second Corps under General Edwin Summer, entered the battle, launching one last assault to smash Lee’s left flank. Sumner sent General John Sedgwick’s division forward towards the West Woods. As Sedgwick’s men advanced into the woods, they collided with Confederate Major General Lafayette McClaws division that was rushing to bolster the Confederates reeling left flank. Instead of delivering a crushing blow, Sedgwick’s men found themselves catching fire from three sides and were ripped apart. In less than 20 minutes, Sedgwick’s division suffered over 2,200 casualties and forced to retreat.
With Sedgwick’s retreat, fighting around Miller’s cornfield and the West Woods began to wane with both sides exhausted from the ordeal. Over 8,000 dead and wounded from both sides littered the ground around what remained of the cornfield, West Woods and the Dunker Church. General Hooker would later somberly write, “It was never my fortune to witness a more bloody, dismal battlefield.” That evening, after the battle concluded, General Lee would ask Hood where his division was. He responded, “They are lying on the field where you sent them. My division has been almost wiped out.”
The Sunken Road
The focus of the battle soon shifted from the left to the center of the Confederate line. Here 2,600 Confederate troops from Alabama and North Carolina hunkered down in a fence-lined sunken road waiting for a Union attack. The road had been worn down from years of wagon use and formed a natural trench. Nevertheless, despite these formidable defenses, the center was the weakest part of the Confederate line. For the next, three hours, Confederate forces here fought back repeated assaults by 10,000 Union troops in what would become known as “Bloody Lane.”
Shortly after Sedgwick’s attack on the West Woods, Summer ordered a second division under General William French forward to support him but upon learning of Sedgwick’s predicament, French was ordered to turn south and attack the Confederate center. French directed a series of brigade level attacks beginning around 9:30am. Two of the attacks were carried out by relatively inexperienced brigades and were beaten back. A third attack was launched by a more veteran brigade but met with similar results. In one hour, French’s division suffered over 1,700 casualties.
1.) 2,600 Alabama and North Carolina troops under the command of General D.H. Hill, 2.) French’s three assaults, 3.) Richardson’s division arrives, 4.) Anderson’s reinforcements arrive.
Both sides began to send in reinforcements demonstrating the gravity of the situation. Around 10:30, Lee sent his last reserves, Major General R.H. Anderson’s division, to extend the Confederate line on the right. About the same time, 4,000 men of General Israel Richardson’s division arrived on French’s left. The fourth attack on the Confederate position would come from Richardson’s Division and led by the Irish Brigade of Brigadier General Thomas Meagher. Armed with obsolete smooth bore muskets that had limited range and their distinctive emerald flags waving in the wind, the Irish Brigade was cut down by heavy volleys losing over 500 men before withdrawing.
Confederate Dead in the Sunken Road
Increasingly desperate, Richardson sent General John Caldwell’s veteran brigade to attack Anderson’s men on the Confederates’ right. Two regiments of Caldwell’s brigade managed to swing around the right of the Confederate line and seized an elevated position that allowed them to pour a murderous fire down upon the entire Confederate line. The effect was devastating. Several Confederate brigade and regimental commanders went down causing havoc in the ranks. The Confederate line began to break under the sheer weight of the Union attack and a broken command structure. Soon the Confederates were fleeing back towards Sharpsburg with Richardson’s forces in hot pursuit. Scrambling to stop the Union advance, Confederate First Corps Commander General James Longstreet hastily massed an artillery barrage sending Richardson’s forces back reeling. The situation was so dire that Longstreet and his staff manned one of the rebel artillery pieces. Longstreet would later remark, “We were already badly whipped and were only holding our ground by sheer force of desperation.” This is a critical moment in the battle. The center of Lee’s army is broken and on the ropes but McClellan fails to recognize the opportunity. Sumner’s corps is spent but McClellan still has two extra corps in reserve. McClellan, still believing he is outnumbered by Lee, refuses to commit his reserves. When the action around this portion of the battle finally ended, over 2500 Confederate dead and wounded lined the sunken road. Union casualties totaled just under 3,000.
The Battle for Burnside’s Bridge
After the fighting around the sunken road subsided, the focus of the battle shifted further south for the final action of the day. Under McClellan’s battle plan, Major General Ambrose Burnside and his 12,000 strong IX corps were tasked with launching a diversionary attack on Confederate forces behind Antietam Creek that comprised the right flank of the Confederate line to prevent Lee from reinforcing his left. However, Burnside didn’t receive his orders to begin his assault until close to 10am, after most of the action against Lee’s left had finished.
Confederate forces in this sector of the battlefield consisted of four thin brigades totaling only 3,000 and were badly out numbered by Burnside’s Corps. An entire division and a brigade were pulled from here as reinforcements during earlier fighting in the cornfield and the sunken road. Nevertheless, the Confederates occupied a formidable position commanding the heights overlooking a small stone bridge, the southern most crossing point over Antietam Creek. Here were deployed two Georgian regiments, under Brigadier General Robert Toombs with a clear line of fire from above targeting the bridge.
The third Union assault on the Rohrbach Bridge
Burnside’s plan was to storm the bridge while enacting a crossing further downstream to attack the Confederate right flank. Around 10am, he launched the first out of what would be three attempts, to seize the bridge. At the same time he ordered General Isaac Rodman’s division South in search of an identified crossing point at Snavely’s Ford. The first attempt to take the bridge was a fiasco. According to Burnside’s plan, skirmishers from the 11th Connecticut Regiment were supposed to clear out rebel sharpshooters from the heights allowing the 8th Ohio Regiment to storm across the bridge. The Connecticut regiment, marched down an exposed road that paralleled the creek and came under a withering fire from the 500 Confederates occupying the bluff. Within 15 minutes the regiment lost 139 men, a third of its overall combat strength. The Ohio regiment became lost and got caught in a firefight further upstream. The second attack came shortly thereafter with the 2nd Maryland and 6th New Hampshire regiments leading the way. They followed the same exposed path as the first attack with the same results.
1.) In the early hours of the battle, Lee moved soldiers from this part of his line north toward the Cornfield and the West Woods. This shift resulted in one division, numbering about 3,000 men protecting his right; 2.) Fewer than 500 Confederate troops, commanded by Gen. Robert Toombs, lined Antietam Creek from this point southward to Snavely Ford; 3.) Here Burnside carried out three assaults to take the bridge; 4.) Burnside sends Rodman’s division to flank the Confederates.
In two hours, Burnside’s corps made little progress and the Union high command was growing impatient. McClellan sent an aide to Burnside instructing him to take the bridge at all cost. He next turned to Brigadier General Edward Ferrero’s brigade to lead the next assault. Ferrero selected his two best regiments the 51st New York and the 51st Pennsylvania to lead the attack. The Pennsylvania regiment was a raucous unit of hard-drinking men who loved their whiskey. Ferrero had suspended their whiskey ration in an earlier disciplinary action but promised to restore it if they succeeded. The Confederates, who had fended off attack after attack, were starting to run low on ammunition. Around 12:30, Confederate volleys began to slack off as the troops exhausted their ammunition. Sensing an opportunity, the New York and Pennsylvania regiments stormed the bridge under a cover of heavy canister and musket fire. With their ammunition depleted and word that Rodman’s division was crossing at Snavely’s Ford, the Confederates withdrew. Burnside had won his bridge and the 51st Pennsylvania their whiskey.
Up Came Hill: The Final Attack
Burnside had finally taken the bridge but failed to press his advance with the necessary urgency. Burnside spent two hours moving three of his divisions, his artillery and supply wagons across Antietam Creek before resuming his offensive. This delay provided Lee with valuable time to reorganize his beleaguered defenses. It also bought time for Major General A.P. Hill’s division, which had been left behind at Harpers Ferry to complete the Union surrender, to reach the battlefield and save the day. Once the battle began, Lee sent word to Hill and his division to begin the 17 mile march to Sharpsburg as quickly as possible.
1.) The Confederates lone under strength division under General D.R. Jones; 2.) Burnside’s Corps advances; 3.) Hill’s counter attack
Around 3:00 pm, 8,000 Union soldiers, under Burnside’s command swept forward in a mile-wide battle line across the undulating fields south of Sharpsburg. Their objective was to roll up the Confederate flank and cut Lee’s army off from Boteler’s Ford, their only escape route across the Potomac River. The only thing in the way of their advance was Brigadier General D.R. Jones under strength 2,500 men division and 28 pieces of artillery. As Burnside’s three divisions continued to advance forward, led by the colorful Zouaves of the 9th New York Regiment, the rebels’ flank was collapsing. Lee and his staff were trying desperately to rally their broken forces and stave off a rout but just then, in a most dramatic fashion, A.P. Hill’s division arrived from Harpers Ferry, exhausted but ready for a fight. Approximately, 3:30, the lead element of Hill’s division, Brigadier General Maxcy Gregg’s brigade of South Carolinians, slammed into Burnside’s exposed left flank. The relatively inexperienced troops of Burnside’s left flank proved no match for Hill’s grizzled veterans and they were sent reeling back down the hills and across Antietam Creek. One Union soldier from the 4th Rhode Island Regiment later described Hill’s counter attack, “They were pouring in a sweeping fire as they advanced, and our men fell like sheep at the slaughter.” By 5:30pm the Battle was over.
Gathering the Dead
Both sides fell back that evening battered and bruised. The end of the fighting brought the grim reality of that day sharply into focus as both sides tallied their loses. For the next 24 hours, pitiful groans of agony from the wounded still on the battlefield and the fetid smell of death filled the air. Surgeons, stretcher-bearers, and burial details worked feverishly around the clock attending to the dead and wounded. On the Union side, casualties totaled approximately 12,400 including 2,100 killed in action and another 10,300 wounded, missing, or captured. Confederate loses reached 10,300 to include roughly 1,560 dead and 8,770 wounded, missing or captured. These totals represented 25% of the Federal force and 31% of the Confederates.
The next morning, Lee’s army prepared to defend against a Federal assault that never came. After an improvised truce for both sides to recover and exchange their wounded, Lee’s forces began withdrawing across the Potomac that evening to return to Virginia. On September 19 elements of General Fitz John Porter’s V corps, which were held entirely in reserve during the battle, crossed over the Potomac River at Boteler’s Ford and attacked Lee’s rearguard. The following day Porter sent additional forces across the river to establish a bridgehead. General A.P. Hill’s division counterattacked while many of the Federals were crossing the river, inflicting heavy casualties. Porter pulled back to the Maryland side of the river. This rearguard battle near Shepherdstown, Virginia discouraged further Federal pursuit of Robert E. Lee’s defeated army back to Virginia.
The Importance of Leadership
In many ways, Antietam is a tale of failed opportunities, mostly for the Union. The Battle was in effect a draw but is generally considered a Union victory because the South was turned back and denied it’s overall strategic objectives. It’s become fashionable today to re-examine Lee’s record to find fault with his military leadership and decision making to compensate for the myth making of the Lost cause era. However, as Stephen Sears argues in his account of the battle, “Landscape Turned Red,” one would be hard pressed to find fault with how Lee and the rest of the Confederate high command conducted the battle or could have better employed all the means at their disposal.
Left: General Robert E. Lee; Right: General George B. McClellan
The same cannot be said for the Union and it’s commander George McClellan who proved woefully inadequate. McClellan, in his typical self-important fashion, cabled a situation report back to Washington the day after the battle writing, “Those in whose judgment I rely tell me I fought the battle splendidly and that it was a masterpiece of art.” In reality, he fought the battle not to lose rather than trying win. As a result, he squandered opportunity after opportunity to inflict a decisive and catastrophic defeat on the rebel army. Throughout, the battle McClellan had kept two army corps, between 20,000-30,000 troops, in reserve. He mistakenly feared he was badly outnumbered by Lee and that should he be defeated he would need a reserve force to prevent Lee from moving further North. Had McClellan deployed those reserves in support of the attack on the Sunken Road, Burnside’s efforts to roll up the Confederate right flank, or even to launch a series of new attacks the following day most likely would have resulted in a decisive Union victory and possibly shortening the war by two years. McClellan would pay a steep price for his timidity. Two months later he would be relieved of his command by President Lincoln.
“All lives matter!” or so they say. On the surface it’s reasonable claim. One that is hard to deny or argue with, especially for a nation that was conceived on the premise that all men are created equal. But that’s not really the point, is it? Of course all lives matter, but do they matter equally? History would suggest otherwise. In reality, the phrase “All lives matter” has become a trope to reject and deny the increasingly disturbing trend of unarmed African-Americans killed by police under dubious circumstances and the fact that throughout our country’s history, black lives have been devalued systematically. It’s an expression of fear, based on the erroneous perception that Black Lives Matter is a zero-sum movement that seeks racial advantage rather than the equality promised in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, a redress of historical grievances and a more equitable system of justice.
The Peculiar Institution
The African-American experience has been one of exploitation and marginalization. Since the first ship arrived in the Jamestown colony in 1619, carrying some 20 plus Angolans against their will, black lives have been devalued. Over the next two hundred years, more than 400,000 additional Africans would be kidnapped from their homes, brought to North America in the squalid hulls of slave ships, and forced into bondage as a source of cheap and captive labor. Often toiling in dangerous and inhospitable conditions, where few would do so of their own choosing, these slaves brought tremendous wealth not only to those that enslaved them but the entire country through the large scale cultivation of rice, tobacco, indigo and cotton. Slavery became so woven into the economic fabric of the country that by 1860, 80 percent of the U.S. GDP was tied to the “peculiar institution.” Yet as Carole Anderson points out in her book White Rage, that in return for almost 250 years of forced labor, African Americans received nothing but rape, whippings, murder, the destruction of families, illiteracy, and poverty.
As slaves, African-Americans were a commodity to be bought and sold and once purchased their lives ceased to be their own. They were the property of the slave owner. Slaves had no legal or occupational safety protections, no rights to education, healthcare or religious instruction. They labored six days a week from sun-up to sun-down, with a reprieve on Sundays for rest and worship. They were at the whim and mercy of their owners, who were free to do as they pleased with their property. Disobedience was punished brutally and severely, often at the end of the whip. And if a slave was killed while being “corrected,” the owner was free of any responsibility for their death. Marriages between slaves were not considered legally binding and traditional family ties were not respected. Owners were free to split up families as they liked often with tragic consequences for the slaves involved. Husbands and wives, parents and children were separated, sold elsewhere for profit or some times gifted or transferred for other reasons without any restrictions.
A slave auction advertisement in Charleston, SC
Adding insult to injury, the slave’s subordinate status was given legal standing in the disastrous 1857 Dred Scott decision in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that slaves were indeed property and therefore had no rights which the white man was bound to respect. Chief Justice Roger Taney, who delivered the majority opinion, argued that at the time the constitution was adopted, blacks were regarded as “beings of an inferior order and unfit to associate with the white race.” He further added that the words in the Declaration of Independence, “all men were created equal,” were never intended to apply to blacks and that “the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.”
Even amongst those who believed slavery to be immoral and unjust there was still a strong tendency to view blacks as inferior. For example, President Abraham Lincoln, at least initially, did not believe in racial equality. During the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln argued, “I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races,” Lincoln further added that he opposed blacks having the right to vote, to serve on juries, to hold office and to intermarry with whites. Lincoln’s views were consistent with those of the times. However, they would evolve and by the end of the Civil War he was openly speaking of limited black suffrage for the “very intelligent” and those who fought for the Union cause.
The Civil War and Reconstruction
The Union victory in the Civil War brought peace and an end to the four year conflict. It did not lead to a new racial reckoning, atonement for past sins or level the playing field for blacks and whites going forward. For if the North won the Civil War, the South surely won the peace. Over the next ten or so years following the Civil War, embittered former Confederates waged a guerilla style war against Federal Government efforts to grant equal rights to blacks, while seeking to resurrect the plantation economy, perpetuate slavery under another name, and reassert white supremacist rule in the South. Aided and abetted by an openly racist President Andrew Johnson and a U.S. Supreme Court that would undercut major legislative acts and protections for blacks, the end result was not racial equality but segregation, exploitation, oppression and intimidation or what would become known as the “Jim Crow South.”
“This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I’m President, it shall be a government for white men.”
President Andrew Johnson
To continue exploiting the newly freed African-Americans as a captive source of cheap labor, the Southern states passed restrictive laws called “Black Codes.” These laws required that blacks sign annual labor contracts with plantation, mill, or mine owners to work for pitifully low wages. If they refused and had no other gainful employment, which was impossible because blacks were only allowed to work as laborers or domestics, they would be charged with vagrancy and rented out as laborers to pay off their fines. Apprenticeship laws forced many minors (either orphans or those whose parents were deemed unable to support them by a judge) into unpaid labor for white planters. After ratification of the 14th Amendment, these laws were replaced by another odious form of peonage, sharecropping, which consigned African-Americans in the South to a life of abject poverty for most of the 19th and 20th century. Fewer than 20 percent of sharecroppers ever made a profit and challenging the system could easily result in being lynched.
Unrepentant southerners violently resisted the Federal Government’s efforts to protect and expand the civil rights of former slaves and to extend the franchise to black men, through the 14th and 15th Amendments. They opposed the idea of political and legal equality between the races and regarded black suffrage as a threat to their political power that would lead to “nigger domination.” In all fairness, the 15th Amendment also encountered considerable resistance in the North as well for similar reasons. Nevertheless, groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, the White League, Red Shirts and simple mobs carried out acts of terror and violence to intimidate African-Americans and their white Republican allies and to prevent them from holding political office or exercising their right to vote. Lynchings, with the blessing and involvement of local law enforcement, rose dramatically and would persist as a means of intimidation and control long after the failure of Reconstruction. At the same time, large scale violence such as the 1873 Colfax Louisiana Massacre achieved or overturned what couldn’t be won at the ballot box. By 1880, all Federal troops were withdrawn from the South and the Southern white elite were in control again. The antebellum social, political, and economic order in the South was restored as if the Civil War never happened.
A lynching in Texas
Several important U.S. Supreme Court decisions in the later-half of the 19th century eviscerated the 14th and 15th Amendment protections for African-Americans, opening the door to an extended period of legally sanctioned racial discrimination that would endure for almost a century. In United States v. Cruickshank (1876), United States v. Reese (1876) and United States v. Harris (1883) the court essentially hollowed out the federal government’s ability to prosecute hate crimes committed against African-Americans, allowed state governments to implement poll taxes, literacy tests and other means to disqualify black voters, and gave a greenlight to acts of terror and violence while limiting freedmen’s ability to enforce their rights in federal court, the only forum where they stood a chance of a fair hearing. In Plessy v. Ferguson (1898) the court established its infamous separate but equal standard, ensuring that segregation would increase and endure at least till 1964. These rulings would essentially allow blacks to be segregated lynched, and disenfranchised without anyone ever being brought to justice. African-Americans were once again at the mercy of southern whites and relegated to second class citizens.
“By narrow and ingenious interpretation [the Supreme Court’s] decisions over a period of years had whittled away a great part of the authority presumably given the government for protection of civil rights.”
C. Van Woodward
Life in the Jim Crow South was increasingly bleak and brutish for African-Americans and in many respects was no better if not worse than slavery. Blacks were trapped in a vicious racial hierarchy that denied them the most basic human dignity and freedoms. Deprived of control over the means to earn a living, Southern blacks were still forced to toil for white landowners under a sharecropping system that became a form of debt slavery and offered no economic mobility. Segregation increasingly took hold and Blacks were systematically excluded from everything from schools to residential areas to public parks to theaters to pools to hospitals, asylums, jails and residential homes. Almost every aspect of Southern society was segregated to the disadvantage of blacks and served as a constant reminder of their inferior status. Effectively stripped of their right to vote and denied protection at the Federal level by the U.S. Supreme Court, African-Americans were at the mercy of a legal system stacked against them with former Confederates working as police and judges making it difficult win court cases and gain a fair hearing.
Violence against blacks in the South also increased in frequency and cruelty, uninhibited by the legal system. Lynchings became a public spectacle and the preferred method of southern whites to intimidate blacks and to assert their dominance over political and economic power. Southern whites often showed little mercy. Records include at least one incident where two brothers in Texas were burnt at the stake and one in Georgia in which a pregnant woman was hanged, her belly slashed open and the head of her unborn child crushed under a boot. An estimated two or three blacks were lynched each week in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In Mississippi alone, 581 blacks were lynched from the late 1800s to 1955. Nationwide, the figure climbed to nearly 5,000. This tragic combination of violent repression, a lack of economic opportunity and no legal recourse ensured blacks would remain impoverished, endangered, and without rights or hope in the South.
A family of Texas sharecroppers, the Arthurs, arrive in Chicago homeless and without money fleeing Paris, Texas after two of their sons were burned alive, at the Lamar County Fairgrounds, on July 6, 1920.
The Great Migration,World War I, and the Red Summer
Up until the end of the 19th century, 9 out of every 10 African-Americans lived below the Mason-Dixon Line. As a result, most racism towards blacks was concentrated in the South. That’s not to say that whites in the north were free of prejudice and racist sentiment. In fact, the callous and cowardly attacks on African-Americans during the 1863 New York City draft riots showed otherwise. Nonetheless, things began to change around 1916 as African-Americans began leaving the South en mass, fueled by poor economic conditions, an increasing availability of jobs in the North’s booming manufacturing industry and a desire to escape the pain of Jim Crow. Over one million African-Americans from the South would make the long journey northward by the end of 1919. That number would reach 6 million by the year 1970.
An African-American family leaving Florida for New Jersey
African-Americans would soon find that the North was not the promised land they hoped and in the summer of 1919, racial violence exploded throughout the country, in what would become known as “The Red Summer.” It was some of the worst white on black violence in U.S. history and demonstrated that racism was not simply a regional problem indigenous to the South but a national one. Race riots erupted in Chicago, Arkansas, Washington DC, New York City, Omaha, Charleston, Memphis, Philadelphia, Texas and elsewhere. Hundreds if not thousands of African-American men, women, and children were brutally shot, hanged, and beaten to death by angry white mobs threatened by black advancement and intent on preventing them from asserting their equality. As one black sharecropper remarked, “they just hated to see niggers livin like people.”
The outbreak of violence was the result of competing social forces: Black men were returning from World War I expecting the same rights they had fought and bled for in Europe, and African Americans were moving north to escape the brutal Jim Crow laws of the South. Whites saw blacks as competition for jobs, homes and political power. In Chicago, riots broke out in late July after a 17 year old African-American boy was attacked by a white mob for violating the unofficial segregation of the city’s beachfront. Four days of fighting between black and white mobs in Chicago’s predominantly black south side left 15 whites and 23 Blacks dead, and an additional 1,000 Black families were left homeless after rioters torched their residences. Newspapers reporting the events would claim that blacks were rioting and that anarchists were allegedly operating in the black neighborhoods, but there is not real evidence of any of that. These actions were overwhelmingly by white mobs.
In Elaine, Arkansas, over 200 poor black sharecroppers were killed in a police-led white rampage because they dared to unionize and break free from unscrupulous white landowners who cheated them out of cash and crop. In Washington DC white mobs — many made up of members of the military — rampaged through the city beating any black they could find after false rumors of a white woman being assaulted by black men spread. Black military veterans organized and retaliated The Washington Times newspaper described the situation as such, “Bands of whites and blacks hunted each other like clansmen throughout the night, the blood-feud growing steadily. From nightfall to nearly dawn ambulances bore their steady stream of dead and wounded to hospitals.” These scenes were repeated elsewhere throughout the country in the summer.
Racial tensions and white mob violence continued and did not really begin to wane until 1923. Two of the most heinous acts of racial violence against African-American communities occurred shortly after the Red Summer. In May of 1921, a race riot broke out in Tulsa, Oklahoma after a young black man allegedly assaulted a white woman. Hundreds of white people descended upon the Black neighborhood of Greenwood. Whites killed more than 300 African-Americans. The Tulsa police did nothing to quell the violence and some actively participated in it. It was also reported that white men flew airplanes above Greenwood, dropping kerosene bombs. More than a hundred businesses and other buildings were destroyed, including a school, a hospital, a library, and dozens of churches. More than 1,200 Black-owned houses burned. The economic losses in the Black community were stunning, amounting to more than $1 million. In January 1923, more than 10,000 angry white men from across the state of Florida rampaged through the prosperous black community of Rosewood after a white women claimed she was raped by a black man. The number of deaths from the massacre remains unknown but the town was entirely destroyed by the violence, and the residents never returned.
Covenants and Redlining
The rapid influx of African-Americans in northern cities prompted a white backlash in other less menacing but still disturbing ways. Although there was no official policy of racial segregation in the North, unofficial segregation existed, especially in the housing market, which exacerbated racial tensions. In the major northern cities, African-Americans were often funneled into areas of the cities that were overcrowded ramshackle slums, through the deliberate policies of restrictive covenants and redlining, which prohibited blacks from owning or renting property in certain neighborhoods and discouraged banks from investing in predominantly black areas. These policies inhibited any upward mobility for African-American families, relegating them to a life of urban poverty. Any efforts to escape these confines and relocate to better and more prosperous white suburban neighborhoods met with violent resistance. As Richard Rothstein points out in his book, The Color of Law, white families sent their children to college with their home equities; they were able to take care of their parents in old age. They were able to pass on their wealth to their children. None of these advantages were available to African-Americans who were prohibited from owning homes in the suburbs.
Returning Home from World War II
Approximately 1.2 African-American men again answered their nation’s call to service, putting life and limb at risk in the fields of Europe and the islands of the South Pacific, only to face an even greater danger when they returned home. Black soldiers returning home from the war found the same socioeconomic ills and racist violence that they faced before. Despite their sacrifices overseas, they still struggled to get well-paying jobs, encountered segregation and endured targeted brutality, designed to eliminate any expectation of racial equality.
In February 1946, Isaac Woodard, a Black veteran who served in the Pacific theater, got into a heated argument with a bus driver while traveling from Georgia to South Carolina. Woodard, in his uniform, was ordered off the bus in a town now known as Batesburg-Leesville, S.C., and beaten so terribly with a billy club by the local police chief that he was permanently blinded. John C. Jones, a Black veteran, was lynched in Louisiana after he was accused of looking at a young white woman through a window of her family’s house. Two other Black veterans, Richard Gordon and Alonza Brooks, were murdered in Marshall, Texas, after a labor dispute with their employers. The violence became so pervasive and brutal that civil rights activists lobbied President Truman for a federal anti-lynching law, but Southern Democrats shut down Truman’s efforts.
African-Americans Veterans also struggled to benefit from the G.I. Bill, upon their return. Many black veterans were denied access to a college education and were largely relegated to vocational programs. By comparison, 28 percent of white veterans went to college on the G.I. Bill, compared with 12 percent of Blacks. Of that number, upward of 90 percent of Black veterans attended historically Black colleges and universities — institutions mainly in the South that were already underfunded with limited resources. During the summer of 1947, Ebony magazine surveyed 13 cities in Mississippi and discovered that of the 3,229 V.A. home loans given to veterans, two went to African-Americans.
Civil Rightsand the Death of Jim Crow
In the late 1940s, cracks began to appear in the legal foundation of Jim Crow segregation. In 1948, President Truman issued an executive order to begin the integration of the United States’ armed forces, a process that would be accelerated by the Korean War. Earlier that year, Truman, a native Missourian, delivered a civil rights speech before a joint session of Congress. He called on Congress to adopt a civil rights package that included federal protection against lynching, better protection of the right to vote, and a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission, despite strong opposition from he southern wing of the Democratic Party. The Supreme Court, which was complicit in the enactment of the Jim Crow system with its earlier rulings, also began to re-examine it’s separate but equal doctrine that served as the foundation of legal segregation. On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court turned the country upside down with its ruling in the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. In a unanimous opinion, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote, “in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place,” as segregated schools are “inherently unequal.” As a result, the Court ruled that the plaintiffs were being “deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.” The ruling drove a stake through the heart of Jim Crow but it would take a decade long struggle for civil rights to bring about its demise.
The Supreme Court’s ruling outraged segregationists through out the South while energizing civil rights activists. Over the course of the next ten years, African-Americans waged a campaign of non-violent civil disobedience to end institutionalized discrimination, disenfranchisement, and segregation but were repeatedly beaten, bombed, shot, imprisoned, humiliated and degraded by a southern power structure determined to resist their efforts at all costs. Fourteen year-old Emmett Till would pay with his life for no reason other than allegedly whistling at a white woman. In Greensboro North Carolina, four young African-American men staged a sit-in at an all white lunch counter, enduring heckling and harassment from white patrons, sparking similar actions across the city and rest of the South. Freedom Riders protesting against segregated interstate travel were beaten and shot at by the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama. Four young African-American girls lost their lives in the despicable 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham Alabama. James Meredith’s desire to attend the University of Mississippi touched off a brutal battle on the streets of Oxford between Federal Marshals and segregationists. Six hundred protestors were beaten by the police on the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma Alabama for simply demanding their constitutional right to vote. These are just some of the individual and collective acts of bravery and the suffering that helped lead to the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act that closed the curtain on the Jim Crow era.
Clockwise: White youths protesting protesting the Brown ruling; Protestors at a Greensboro sit-in being heckled and harassed by whites; Freedom Riders in 1961 protesting segregation of interstate travel were savagely beaten and bombed by the Klu Klux Klan in Alabama; the four young black girls murdered in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama; Demonstrators in Selma Alabama are beaten by the Alabama State Police for demanding to exercise their right to vote.
All Lives Don’t Matter!
There is probably no other idea or concept more central to the American identity or ethos than the notion of equality. It’s at the forefront of the Declaration of Independence and it is the foundation of the American dream, the idea that we all have equal access and opportunity to better ourselves. It is also a key feature of our legal system, the idea we are all equal under the law. Yet when we peel away the onion, that is our history and when we are honest with ourselves, can we really say that there is racial equality in modern American society. We would all like to believe that 13th Amendment outlawing slavery leveled the playing field for blacks and whites while the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act purged racial discrimination from our society but that is not the truth. We still want to see ourselves as that “ the city upon a hill” that John Winthrop wrote about in the 17th century but we continued to fall short of our aspirations.
Today, in America we are at another historical crossroads regarding race. We have another opportunity to confront our past, warts and all, to make amends, and to lay the foundation for a new racial reckoning, a third Reconstruction if you like. When we defiantly say, “All lives matter,” we refuse to acknowledge that past. When we say “All lives matter,” we deny and delegitimize all the pain, suffering and indignity that African-Americans have endured for the past 400 years. When we say, “All lives matter,” we are saying aren’t listening and African-American concerns are not valid. At a time when racial tensions are being deliberately inflamed maybe we should stop talking and start putting some meaning behind that empty phrase.
In the summer of 1814, the fledgling U.S. republic was on the brink of a catastrophe, one that would test its resiliency as a nation and its ability to sustain its sovereignty and independence for the long haul. The war that it declared on Great Britain two years earlier, with considerable enthusiasm, was proving to be a debacle. Many of the strategic assumptions that underpinned the U.S. march to war were erroneous, while poor military leadership, a lack of professional soldiers and an overall shortage of supplies and equipment led to defeat after defeat. With each passing setback, opposition to the war increased and there was growing talk of secession amongst the New England states who were always opposed to what they called “Mr. Madison’s War.”
By July 1814, American fortunes had taken another turn for the worse. For two years the British regarded the conflict with the United States as a side show while they battled Napoleon for mastery of Europe. Consequently the American war was fought with whatever money, manpower and naval force that could be spared. With Napoleon’s defeat and subsequent exile in May, the British were now able to shift their focus. Thousands of battle-hardened redcoats began arriving in the Chesapeake ready to strike a decisive blow. By the end of August, the American capital of Washington D.C. would be in flames and the entire American experiment under siege.
August 30, 1814, British Troops Burn the White House
The March to War
The War of 1812 is perhaps one of the least known and least understood wars in American history. It is the United States first war, post-independence, and one the country was ill-prepared to fight. It is a conflict that seems as if it could have and should have been avoided. Understanding the reasons and rationale for the war and how and why the decision to declare war was made are critical for appreciating how the United States found itself in such a terrible predicament in the Summer of 1814.
The United States declared war on Great Britain on June 18, 1812. Anti-British sentiment in the country had reached a fevered pitch by this time and there were strong voices, including that of President James Madison, clamoring for war. Other officials, mostly Federalists from New England that benefited from trade with Britain, were less enthusiastic. In his call to arms, Madison presented a detailed summary of hostile British conduct towards the United States denouncing the practice of impressment and Great Britain’s continued harassment of U.S. shipping. He also accused the British of inciting Indian attacks on frontier settlements in the Great Lakes region and Mississippi territories. In the end Madison and the War Hawks argued that Great Britain forced the United States to either surrender its independence or maintain it by war. One prominent War Hawk, Congressman Felix Grundy from a Tennessee declared that he would rather have war than further “submit” to British insults.
President James Madison
Of all the causes of the war, the British practice of impressment was the most important and most vexing for America. Great Britain’s ongoing war with Napoleon put increased manpower demands on the Royal Navy. Unable to meet these quotas through voluntary enlistments, the Royal Navy resorted to impressment. For almost a decade the United States suffered the ignominy of having its neutral merchant ships boarded by the Royal Navy and crew members suspected of being British subjects removed and forced to serve on British ships of war. According to estimates, between 5,000-10,000 seamen were taken from U.S. ships from 1806-1812 with approximately 1,300 of them born in America. Although American politicians rattled their sabers in public, in private they admitted that fully half of the sailors on American merchant ships were actually British subjects who had either abandoned or avoided service in the Royal Navy, which was often cruel and harsh. Nonetheless, many Americans continued to view these actions as an insult to the young nation, a challenge to its honor, and evidence that Great Britain did not accept the independence of the United States.
A British Press Gang at work
Many of the War Hawks in Congress were also driven by territorial ambitions and viewed war with Great Britain as on opportunity to seize all or at least part of Canada. Since 1775, when Generals Richard Montgomery and Benedict Arnold led a military expedition across the frozen wilderness of Maine to seize Quebec, American politicians dreamed of acquiring Canada. Speaker of the House Henry Clay, a Kentuckian, argued that Canada was so vulnerable that an attack on the British colony would force Britain to make concessions. At the same time, he claimed that the conquest of Canada would remove a longstanding threat to America’s security on the North American continent and restore national honor. “I believe that in four weeks from the time a declaration of war is heard on our frontier, the whole of Upper Canada and a part of Lower Canada will be in our power,” bragged South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun.
A Not Ready for Prime Time Military
In June of 1812, the United States had neither the army nor the navy to fight and win a war against Great Britain, despite the bravado of American politicians. In the years following independence, the creation and maintenance of a large standing professional army was not a priority for the young republic and there was little interest in investing in one. The prevailing assumption was that state militias would form the basis of any army in times of need, so at the outbreak of the war the regular army consisted of less than 12,000 men. Congress authorized the expansion of the army to 35,000 men as war sentiment increased but service was voluntary and unpopular because it paid poorly. Moreover, because of the heavy reliance on state militias there were few professional and experienced officers. President Thomas Jefferson authorized the establishment of the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1802 but it’s primary purpose early on was to produce a corps of engineers to drive infrastructure improvements.
The U.S. Navy was in just as poor shape as the army. Never large to begin with, the navy consisted of less than a dozen ships at the outbreak of the war and included only three frigates. Rather than appropriate funds for a Navy capable of defending U.S. maritime interest, Congress preferred to go the cheaper route and rely on privateers during wartime. In terms of manpower, the U.S. Navy had roughly 5,000 sailors and 1000 marines. The Royal Navy, on the other hand, had 130 ships of the line with 60-120 guns and 600 frigates and smaller vessels as well as 140,000 sailors and 31,000 well trained marines. However, the British had only a fraction of their fleet for use against the United States in the summer of 1812 — one ship of the line, seven frigates, and a dozen smaller vessels — because most of their navy was focused on fighting the French.
U.S.S Constitution, “Old Ironsides”
War Along the Borderlands
During the first two years of the war, the primary theater of combat was the border lands between the United States and Canada. That fighting would center in this area was hardly surprising. American politicians and military leaders had long coveted Canada and many of the War Hawks in the country were quite transparent about their territorial ambitions. They believed American forces would be welcomed by the Canadians as liberators. Canada was also the closest and easiest place to strike at Britain. On paper, the United States had a clear advantage. The U.S. population totaled roughly 7.5 million compared to about 500,000 Canadians, which included 300,000 of French descent that were not considered reliable. The United States had about 10,000 men under arms at the start of the war with thousands more available for call-up compared to 4,500 British troops spread along the border. Nonetheless, the British were better led, better trained, and better equipped which the Americans would soon realize.
Less than a month after declaring war on Britain, the United States carried out a three pronged invasion of Canada that would ultimately end in failure. The entire operation was marred by gross military incompetence, an over reliance on militia, and poor coordination. On July 12, 1812, a combined force of 2,000 U.S. Army regulars and militia, under the command of General William Hull, a 59 year old veteran of the Revolution crossed into Canada from Detroit. Hull lost his nerve after a series of attacks by Britain’s Indian allies and retreated back to Detroit. Hull later surrendered Detroit to a small British force after being deceived into believing he was surrounded by a larger army. He was later court-martialed and convicted of cowardice and neglect of duty.
In October, General Stephen Van Rensselaer, an inexperienced political appointee, and 3,5000 men, crossed the Niagara River into Canada and attacked a much smaller force of British Redcoats, and their Indian allies at Queenston Heights. The attack was foiled by political infighting amongst the army commanders, a refusal by a large body militia to cross into Canada, and the exploits of a more capable and adept British commander.
In November, General Henry Dearborn, another older veteran from the Revolution, led a 6,000 man force from Albany to the north shore of Lake Champlain. Their goal was to capture Montreal but once again the militia refused to leave the United States. The force retreated without ever entering Canada. The results of the entire Canadian operation were best summed up by a Vermont newspaper, it produced nothing but “disaster, defeat, disgrace, and ruin and death.”
The United States regrouped the following year and with the help of new commanders and more experienced troops attacked Canada again with better results. However, it was still unable to score that decisive victory that would force Britain to the negotiating table. In April, the Americans capture York (now Toronto) and burned several government buildings, an act that later would be avenged when the British burned Washington D.C. in 1814. In September, Admiral Oliver Hazzard Perry destroyed the British fleet on Lake Erie, famously declaring “We have met the enemy and they are ours.” The following month, American troops re-captured Detroit and defeated a combined British-Indian force at the Battle of the Thames, which drove the British from southwestern Ontario. American troops ended the year with the capture of the strategically important Fort George near the mouth of the Niagara River. More fighting took place along the Niagara River in 1814, but the conflict’s center of gravity shifted southward to the Chesapeake by August 1814.
Admiral Oliver Hazzard Perry on Lake Erie
The Chesapeake Shuffle
Following Napoleon’s defeat in April 1814, Britain was now free to focus all its military might on the United States and the target of that focus would be the Chesapeake Bay where American defenses were weak and the British could exploit their greatest advantage, their navy. The previous year, British naval forces under the command of Rear Admiral George Cockburn instituted a naval blockade of the Chesapeake Bay and began raiding coastal towns up and down the Bay in an effort to relieve pressure along the US-Canadian border. Cockburn’s raids made him the scourge of the Chesapeake, and the target of much animus from the U.S. press but they did little to draw large numbers of American troops from the Canadian border.
Cockburn resumed his raids on the coastal Chesapeake towns in early 1814 but he believed the only way to force the Americans to see that the war they were fighting wasn’t worth pursuing was to lead a large force against the US capital itself. In August, an army of 4,500 veteran British troops who’d fought the French for the last 20 years, anchored in the lower Chesapeake under the command of Major General Robert Ross. The arrival of Ross’ army in the Chesapeake unnerved the American leadership prompting heated debate over where the army was likely to strike. Secretary of War John Armstrong strongly believed that the British would most likely try to attack Baltimore because of its commercial importance and did little to strengthen the defense of the capital. In 1814, Washington, DC, had roughly 8,200 residents and many of its major structures, including the Capitol Building, were still works in progress. Nevertheless, it presented an appealing means of retaliation for an American attack against the Canadian Capital of York a year earlier.
British Commanders: Rear Admiral George Cockburn and Major General Robert Ross
On August 19, Ross’ army landed at Benedict, Maryland on the shores of the Patuxent River and began their 35 mile march north toward Washington D.C. In less than a week, they would be at the gates of the capital. A hastily cobbled together force of 6,500 soldiers, sailors, marines, and militia, under the command of General William Winder, engaged the British at Bladensburg, Maryland just five miles from the capital. Although Winder’s men outnumbered their British foes, they were mostly poorly trained militia and no match for the battle-hardened British. Under heavy British pressure, the left flank of the American line of defense crumbled. With their left flank enveloped, the Americans fell back in chaos and a rout that would become known as the “Bladensburg Races” ensued. By 4:00 pm the battle was over and the door to Washington wide open.
Winder’s defeat put the capital in a panic. President Madison, who was at the battle with Winder retreated back to Washington. In his absence his wife supervised the evacuation of the White House. Foregoing their personal items, Mrs. Madison gathered important papers and some national treasures, such as Gilbert Stuart’s revered portrait of George Washington and left the city that evening just before the arrival of the British.
Dolly Madison directing the evacuation of the White House.
The British Army entered Washington only to find the city largely abandoned. Under orders from General Ross and Admiral Cockburn the British troops proceeded to burn Washington. One British officer described how the British soldiers “proceeded, without a moment’s delay, to burn and destroy every thing in the most distant degree connected with government.” The Capitol was the first building set aflame followed by the White House. Around midnight Ross and Cockburn entered the White House to find that the president’s dinner was still on the table undisturbed. The men proceeded to enjoy their first hearty meal since departing their ships with Cockburn facetiously offering a toast “Peace with America, Down with Madison.” After finishing their meal, the chairs were placed atop of the table and lit on fire. Before the British were done, the Treasury, State Department, and other federal buildings were on fire as well as the Navy Yard. One British officer remarked that if it hadn’t been for Ross, who urged caution, Cockburn would have burned down the whole city. In what can only be viewed as an act of divine providence, Washington was saved from further destruction when a very heavy thunderstorm and tornado passed over the city the following day and put out many of the flames. President Madison returned to the city two days later. Congress briefly considered abandoning Washington to make a capital somewhere else but the city was eventually rebuilt.
On to Baltimore
After the storm had passed, the British army returned to their ships and prepared to contemplate their next move. Following intense debate within the British command over their next course of action, the British fleet sailed north to Baltimore. Baltimore, unlike Washington, had formidable defenses, including Fort McHenry which guarded entry to the city’s inner harbor. Its 13,000 defenders were not just militia but U.S. Army Regulars, Dragoons, sailors, and marines. They were also more ably led by Major General Samuel Smith, a sitting U.S. Senator, who commanded the Maryland militia before the outbreak of the war.
The British plan was to land troops on the eastern side of the city while the navy reduced the fort, allowing for naval support of the ground troops when they attacked the city’s defenders. Encountering no opposition, the British landed a combined force of soldiers, sailors, and Royal Marines at North Point, a peninsula at the fork of the Patapsco River and Chesapeake Bay, on September 12. Determined to conduct an active defense of the city, Major General Smith, sent Brigadier General John Stricker and his 3rd Brigade to Patapsco neck to delay the British advance. Stricker’s brigade numbered about 3,000 and was one of the most capable of all Baltimore’s defenders. Around 1:00 pm Stricker deployed 250 skirmishers and engaged the advanced guard of the British army at North Point. Upon hearing the sounds of battle, the British commander, General Ross, rode forward to evaluate the situation and to order his men to drive the Americans from the field. In the midst of battle, Ross was shot in the chest by an American marksman and fell to the ground mortally wounded.
U.S. Army Infantry at the Battle of North Point.
Command of the British land forces now passed to Colonel Arthur Brooke who gathered the main body of the British army and pressed the attack. Expecting the American forces to flee as they did at Bladensburg, the British were surprised when they held strong and inflicted heavy casualties on their ranks. By the late afternoon the Americans began to give way after repeated assaults by the British and retreated back to Baltimore in good order. The British were forced to pause their advance and regroup allowing U.S. time to prepare better defensive positions. The next day the British would find their advance blocked by 10,000 American troops and 100 cannon. Outnumbered 2 to 1 the British would need naval support to dislodge the defenders and Fort Mc Henry would have to be neutralized.
The Rockets Red Glare…
The British began their bombardment of Fort McHenry early in the morning of September 13. For the next 27 hours British warships hammered the fort with cannon balls, shells, and the relatively new Congreve rockets, seeking to pulverize the fort into submission. Francis Scott Key, a Baltimore lawyer, who was held on board a British warship, negotiating a prisoner release, watched the nighttime attack on the fort from the ship’s deck. At that moment he would compose the famous words, “the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,” that would go on to become our national anthem in 1931. Over 1,500 pieces of ordnance were fired but it inflicted only minor damage to the fort. The shelling ceased by 7:00 am and an enormous American flag was raised over the fort, signaling victory. Following the failed bombardment of Fort McHenry, Colonel Brooke was forced to abandon the land assault on Baltimore. The British troops returned to their ships, defeated, and set sail, leaving the Chesapeake Bay.
The Bombardment of Fort McHenry.
Give Peace a Chance!
Great Britain’s defeat at Baltimore and the United States’ inability to make greater headway in Canada served as great impetus for both sides to sit down at the negotiating table and hammer out a peace agreement. Peace talks between the two sides had started in early August in the Belgian city of Ghent, even before the British attacks on Washington and Baltimore. However, negotiations hit an immediate impasse because of the maximalist positions of each side. British representatives demanded that the United States give control of its Northwest Territory to its Indian allies. They also asked that the United States give part of the state of Maine to Canada, and make other changes in the border. The Americans made equally tough demands. The United States wanted payment for damages suffered during the war. It also wanted the British to stop seizing American sailors for the British navy. And the United States wanted all of Canada. The British representatives refused to even discuss the question of stopping impressment of Americans into the British navy. And the Americans would surrender none of their territory.
Word that the British attacks on Baltimore and Plattsburgh, NY failed, combined with the financial strain that the war was putting on both sides brought a new flexibility to the negotiations. Both Great Britain and the United States struggled to finance the war. The British Prime Minister was aware of growing opposition to wartime taxation and the demands of merchants in Liverpool and Bristol to reopen trade with America. He realized that Britain had little to gain and much to lose from prolonged warfare. On the American side, the country’s finances were in shambles and national debt was ballooning because of the war. In the Spring, Congress had authorized Madison to borrow $32.5 million to pay for the war but by summer the investment climate for U.S. Treasury bonds was dismal, and the government’s inability to borrow money hampered its ability to pay for the defense of Washington. In addition, opposition to the war was growing and the New England states were organizing a convention in Hartford Connecticut to discuss the possibility of secession.
After four months of difficult negotiations the two sides agreed to a peace on December 24, 1814. Remarkably, the treaty said nothing about two of the key issues that started the war–the rights of neutral U.S. vessels and the impressment of U.S. sailors. There were also no territorial concessions. In the end, all the treaty did was establish a return to the antebellum status quo. They simply agreed to end what both sides had come to view as a colossal mistake.
The Republic Lives On!
Even though the War of 1812 ended in a stalemate with no territorial concessions or other prizes, just a return to the antebellum status quo, it doesn’t mean the war was without importance. In the simplest terms, the United States proved it could survive. The war also taught the young republic valuable lessons and opened the door to future territorial expansion.
The United States went toe to toe with arguably the strongest military power of the day and fought it to a draw. In doing so, it demonstrated it could and would fight to preserve its sovereignty and independence. It confirmed the separation of the United States from Great Britain once and for all and forced the British to accept United States as a legitimate national entity.
In the military sphere, it proved that a well funded professional military was necessary and that the young nation could no longer rely on state militias and privateers for its security. Future President John Quincy Adams would write, “The most painful, perhaps the most profitable, lesson of the war was the primary duty of the nation to place itself in a state of permanent preparation for self-defense.”
Lastly, the war opened the door to further territorial expansion. For decades, the British strategy had been to a create a buffer to block American expansion and incited Indian attacks along the United States Western frontier. With the smashing of the Tribal Confederacy, Britain’s Indian allies, a major obstacle to further U.S. expansion West was eliminated.
August 21, 1940- On this day Leon Trotsky died from wounds he suffered in an assassination attempt, the previous day by a Spanish born NKVD (pre-cursor to the KGB) agent Jaime Ramon Mercader in Mexico City. The attack was organized by Pavel Sudoplatov, deputy director of the foreign department of the NKVD. Sudoplatov claimed that, in March 1939, he was ordered by Stalin that “Trotsky should be eliminated within a year.” The previous year Sudoplatov ran an operation that assassinated Yehven Konovalets, head of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, in Poland, under orders from Stalin.
León Trotsky
Two previous attempts to kill Trotsky had failed, one in March 1939 and one in May 1940. A new plan was hatched to send a lone assassin against Trotsky. Mercader, who had been recruited by the NKVD during the Spanish Civil War, gained access to Trotsky through his lover Sylvia Ageloff, a confidante of the former Bolshevik leader, and posed as an admirer. On 20 August 1940, Mercader was alone with Trotsky in his study under the pretext of showing him a document. Mercader struck Trotsky from behind and fatally wounded him on the head with an ice axe while Trotsky was looking at the document.
The blow failed to kill Trotsky, and he got up and grappled with Mercader. Hearing the struggle Trotsky’s guards burst into the room and beat Mercader nearly to death. Mercader was handed over to the police and Trotsky was taken to a hospital and operated on but died the next day as a result of severe brain injuries. During his trial, Mercader recounted the assassination, “I laid my raincoat on the table in such a way as to be able to remove the ice axe which was in the pocket. I decided not to miss the wonderful opportunity that presented itself. The moment Trotsky began reading the article, he gave me my chance; I took out the ice axe from the raincoat, gripped it in my hand and, with my eyes closed, dealt him a terrible blow on the head.” Mercader was later convicted of murder and sentenced to 20 years in prison. He was released from prison in 1960 and was presented with the USSR’s highest decoration, Hero of the Soviet Union, personally by Alexander Shelepin, the head of the KGB.
Jaime Ramon Mercader after his arrest
Trotsky’s assassination, while remembered for its brutality, was not the last time the Kremlin had political enemies or other problematic individuals abroad assassinated. In 1955 a KGB asset Bohdan Stashynsky poisoned prominent Ukrainian nationalist figure Stepan Bandera with cyanide gas in Munich, under orders from Soviet KGB head Alexander Shelepin and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev. In 1987 Bulgarian dissident and defector Georgi Markov was killed with a ricin-tipped umbrella most likely by a KGB assassin while walking on London’s Waterloo Bridge. The 1981 assassination attempt against Polish Pope John Paul II by Turkish-citizen Mehmet Ali Ağca is also believed to have been organized by the KGB and its Bulgarian counterparts, who viewed the Pope as a threat to communist rule in Eastern Europe.
In today’s Russia, directed assassination against Kremlin foes at home and abroad are on the rise once again punctuated most recently by the suspected poisoning of leading Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny and the 2018 attack on a former Russian military intelligence officer, Sergei Skripal, in the United Kingdom with a high-tech nerve agent. These attacks are not only increasing in their frequency but their brazenness and sophistication, once again proving the power of Stalin’s famous quote, “Death is the solution to all problems. No man, no problem.”
The attempted overthrow of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev on August 19, 1991 by a group of hardliners was the tragic culmination of five very tumultuous years in which Gorbachev attempted to reform and reinvigorate the Soviet political-economic system but in doing so unleashed centrifugal forces that accelerated its demise. Gorbachev’s dilemma was the same one that confronted every modernizing Russian leader since at least Peter the Great, how to conduct effective reform of the system without jeopardizing or relinquishing political control. He was thrust into power with the expectation that he, unlike his geriatric predecessors, would be the young vibrant tonic needed to revive the Soviet system, the one to humanize it and make it more competitive with the West, not to preside over its whole-sale destruction and the collapse of the Soviet state. Gorbachev evolved from a measured reformer to a radical deconstructionist and back to a conservative reactionary having lost control of the reform process which soon became bigger than him. Gorbachev’s trademark slogans, Glasnost and Perestroika (openness and restructure), that inspired so much hope for meaningful reforms in the beginning of his rule quickly became insufficient in the face of demands for something more than tinkering at the edges. In the end, Gorbachev tried to put the genie back in the bottle, but it was too late.
August 1991: Boris Yeltsin at the Russian White House
Gorbachev instinctively understood that any successful reform effort would need to overcome an entrenched state and Communist Party bureaucracy resistant to change. He would also need a relaxation in tensions with the United States to focus on domestic challenges, break with the policies of the past that were bankrupting the state and to undercut the arguments of his opponents that reform would leave the USSR vulnerable to the United States.
Like any new leader, Gorbachev’s first task was to consolidate his power. Within a month of taking power he set about overhauling state and party cadres removing ossified plutocrats and replacing them with a younger generation of party leaders who shared his reform impulses. Gorbachev ousted two of his main rivals in the Politburo, Victor Grishin and Grigoriy Romanov, promoting close peers in their place. He replaced long standing Soviet Foreign Minister, Andrei Gromyko, with the relatively unknown First Secretary of the Georgian Communist Party Eduard Shevardnadze. He also rounded out his foreign policy team by promoting a close confidant, Aleksandr Yakovlev to be a foreign a foreign policy advisor and full member of the politburo. Yakovlev would be a key architect of Gorbachev’s “new thinking” in foreign policy.
Soviet president Mikhail Gorbatchev
Nonetheless, personnel changes alone were not going to overcome the bureaucracy. Gorbachev needed to create new institutions and expand civil society to gain greater control over the party apparatus. In doing so he created alternative centers of power and unleashed a wave of pent up nationalist sentiment in the non-Russian Republics of the Soviet Union that subverted Party authority and led to the fragmentation of the country. Gorbachev essentially created created Boris Yeltsin and at each part of the drama gave him a soap box to challenge the central government. In the non-Russian republics of the USSR, Gorbachev supported the creation of popular fronts as a way for people to mobilize society in support of his agenda. The Sajudis movement in Lithuania, Rukh in Ukraine, the Karabakh Committee in Armenia, and Birlik in Uzbekistan and others all started as vehicles in support of Gorbachev’s reforms. Eventually, these popular fronts assumed a more nationalistic character and began to agitate for greater political rights and independence from Moscow. So much so that the last two years of Gorbachev’s rule were dominated by the nationalities problem and the proximate cause underlying the coup attempt. The coup attempt was to prevent the signing of a new union treaty that Gorbachev had conceded to that would have devolved more power to the republics. It’s ironic that in attempting to stave off what the coup plotters saw as the dismantlement of the USSR, accelerated its collapse.
In 1914, as all of Europe’s statesmen and diplomats girded themselves for the coming calamity that would become known as World War I, others labored below the surface seeking to head off this descent into the abyss. One such figure was Jean Jaures, leader of the French Socialist party. In the weeks before the outbreak of the war, Jaures tried to organize general labor strikes in France and Germany to force their governments to step back from war and negotiate a peace. He urged all socialist to resist their nation’s call to arms and to unite in the interest of the working class and stop the march to war. Jaures was perhaps Europe’s best and last chance to avoid the coming cataclysm, a chance that was snuffed out by an assassin’s bullet on July 31, 1914.
Jaurès was born into a lower middle-class family that had been impoverished by business failures. He was a towering intellect and a professor of philosophy and historian. However, he was more drawn to politics than teaching. Because of his life experiences, Jaures was always drawn to the plight of the working class. He was a socialist but not in doctrine. His socialism did stem from Marx it was he argued, “the product of history, of endless and timeless sufferings.” He believed that man was good, that society could be made good and the struggle to make it so was to be fought daily. In a sense he was closer to Eduard Bernstein and the evolutionary socialists who argued that the working class was not sinking into impoverishment but making gains and that socialism cold be achieved by working within the system than the more revolutionary Marx who believed it could only be achieved through violent revolution.
As leader of the French socialist party and a brilliant orator, Jaures exercised a powerful voice in the Second International, an organization of 33 socialist parties from around the world working to advance the proletarian revolution. As Europe’s diplomatic crises multiplied in the early part of the 20th century, Jaures tried to move the Second International to focus more on how the socialist parties of Europe might prevent a European wide conflagration that seemed increasingly imminent. In 1907 the Second International adopted a resolution stating, “If a war threatens to break out, it is the duty of the working classes and their parliamentary representatives in the countries involved, supported by the coordinating activity of the International Socialist Bureau, to exert every effort in order to prevent the outbreak of war by the means they consider most effective. The resolution further added, “In case war should break out anyway, it is their duty to intervene in favor of its speedy termination and with all their powers to utilize the economic and political crisis created by the war to rouse the masses and thereby to hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule.” However, the resolution did not answer the question of how.
For Jaures, the answer was clear, the general strike. The concept of the general strike which provoked heated debate amongst the various members of the Second International. The idea was divisive, especially amongst more orthodox Marxists who believed that war was a natural and unavoidable consequence of capitalism and necessary for advancing the proletarian revolution. At the August 1910 Congress of the Second International in Copenhagen, James Keir Hardie a member of the British Labour Party, proposed a new resolution, which called for a general strike in case of war, in order to simultaneously paralyze mobilization in the relevant countries. The delegates agreed that it was necessary to discuss the resolution, but decided to defer that to the next congress, on August 1914.
As war became increasingly more likely, in the wake of Archduke Frank Ferdinand’s assassination, Jaurès tried to rally the forces of international socialism to prevent a war. Jaurès prophetically warned earlier that a war would unleash the most terrible holocaust since the Thirty Years war An emergency meeting of the executive International Socialist Bureau in Brussels in July 1914 with all the big-wigs of the international socialist movement attending. All the leaders talked about all-out resistance but it soon became clear that the last chance for peace was slipping through Jaurès’ fingers. Jaurès pressed all the attending leader to call a general strike but there would be no general strike. There was no support. All preconceived notions that class interest would supersede nationalism were shattered. One by one all the great socialist leaders rejected Jaurès’ call. Victor Adler, the great Austrian socialist noted the war was popular in Austria, and the Austrian socialists would no resist it. Adler’s comments were echoed by all the other great socialist leaders. What every one failed to grasp was that in all the countries of Europe, everyone believed some one else was responsible for the coming conflict.
Frustrated and dejected, Jaurès returned to Paris. He spoke passionately at one of the last anti-war rallies. Two days later on July 31st Jaurès was assassinated by a over zealous French nationalist, Raoul Villain, who was fearful of Jaurès’ power to prevent France from going to war.
World War II in Europe ended in May of 1945, a titanic six-year struggle between good and evil that would lay waste to the entire continent. The defeat of Nazi Germany would quiet the guns that had brought so much death and destruction to Europe but the war in the Pacific would continue with a Japan still determined to fight to the last man if necessary. Alone but undaunted, Japan would continue to stubbornly defend its island footholds in the Pacific, inflicting ever increasing casualties on U.S. military forces as they inched closer to the Japanese mainland. At the same time, questions and challenges regarding the post-war peace continued to mount as the deep seated distrust between the allies that had been suppressed by the common interest in defeating Nazi Germany were coming to the fore. As the Cold War set in, the accepted truth in the United States that the two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki compelled Japan to surrender, allowing the United States to avoid a costly land invasion of Japan. This version of events downplays the key role the Soviet declaration of war on Japan on August 8 in Hastening Japan’s surrender.
The Beginning of the End
By September 1944, if not sooner, it had become increasingly clear that the defeat of Nazi Germany was no longer in doubt. The Soviet victory at Stalingrad in February 1943 blunted any further German advances eastward and the Red Army would steadily push westward reaching the outskirts of Warsaw, Poland by August 1944. In the West, the June Normandy landings succeeded and by the end of August US, British, and Canadian forces had liberated France. It had now become a question of who would reach Berlin first and when, the United States and its allies or the Soviets.
In the Pacific, the United States continued to make advances with its island hopping strategy but at great cost. By the end of June 1944, U.S. Marines had taken the strategically important island of Saipan but at the cost of over 13,000 casualties. The capture of Saipan would allow the United States to launch B-29 bomber strikes on the Japanese mainland but the ferocity of the Japanese resistance, 29,000 killed in action including 5,000 suicide attacks, would be a harbinger of what a U.S. invasion of the Japanese homeland might encounter. Estimates of the time suggested that such an operation could last a year and result in upwards of one million casualties.
Focus on the Post-War Order and Japan
As their military fortunes continued to improve, the Allies gradually shifted their attention to shaping a post-war Europe and the defeat of Japan. In November 1944, President Roosevelt called for convening a conference to address numerous post-war issues and to enlist Soviet assistance in the war against Japan. The previous year the big three—Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin—had met in Tehran where the United States and Great Britain committed to opening a long-awaited second front in France and Stalin agreed in principle to declare war against Japan after Nazi Germany’s defeat. Roosevelt wanted to press Stalin to make his pledge more concrete. After much debate, Roosevelt and Churchill agreed to meet Stalin in early February 1945 at Yalta on the Crimean Peninsula in the Soviet Union, despite warnings from Roosevelt’s physicians that such a long and onerous trip could kill the weakening president.
Churchill, Roosevelt, an Stalin at Yalta, February 1945
Each of the leaders arrived at the conference with competing agendas. For Roosevelt, securing Soviet entrance into the war against Japan was a top priority. Roosevelt worried U.S. casualties at Saipan and increasing Japanese suicide attacks in the Pacific were signs of things to come should the US attempt an invasion of the Japanese homeland. These apprehensions would be reinforced later that month at the battle of Iwo Jima, where the US would suffer another 25,000 casualties. Stalin’s goals were more single minded and aimed at the post-war period. He wanted Allied recognition of a Soviet sphere of influence over Eastern Europe. As Stalin told one of his Yugoslav communist allies, “This war is not as in the past; whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach.” The previous October Stalin and Churchill had cynically divided Eastern Europe into spheres of influence and Stalin sought Roosevelt’s acquiescence to this agreement. He also demanded territorial concessions from Japan to include South Sakhalin Island and the Kuril Islands, which would allow him to avenge Russia’s defeat in the 1904 Russo-Japanese War. The United States’ desire for Soviet assistance in the war against Japan provided Stalin with strong leverage. In many respects the United States was playing a weak hand at Yalta. As one U.S. diplomat would remark “it was not a question of what we would let the Russians do, but what we could get the Russians to do.”
Roosevelt left the conference content with a concrete promise from Stalin that the Soviet Union would declare war on Japan exactly three months after the defeat of Nazi Germany and that the Soviet Union would support free elections and democratic governments in Eastern Europe. He wouldn’t live long enough to see the Soviets enter the war against Japan or renege on their pledge to support free elections and democratic governments in Eastern Europe. On April 12, 1945, Roosevelt passed away from a cerebral hemorrhage, while recuperating from his Yalta trip in Warm Springs, Georgia.
An Enormous Burden
Harry S. Truman would succeed Roosevelt as the 33rd president of the United States ill-prepared for the job at hand. Truman, a plain-spoken haberdasher from Independence Missouri, stood in direct contrast to the patrician, larger than life, Roosevelt. Truman, a junior senator, was selected as a compromise candidate to replace Vice President Henry Wallace as Roosevelt’s running mate in 1944 because Wallace was seen as a socialist and too sympathetic to the USSR. Roosevelt had deliberately kept Truman from many of his sensitive diplomatic dealings and major initiatives related to the war, including the top secret Manhattan Project. Roosevelt rarely contacted him and they met together only twice during their time in office. So when the time came for Truman to step up, the learning curve was steep. Shortly after taking the oath of office, Truman spoke to reporters: “Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now.”
American Marines with a captured Japanese flag on Iwo Jima
Nonetheless, Truman was quite cognizant of the human costs of the continuing war against Japan. US casualties in the Pacific continued to mount. U.S. marines and soldiers encountered tenacious Japanese resistance on the island of Okinawa, which would serve as a staging ground for the invasion of Japan. U.S. forces would suffer close to 75,000 casualties taking Okinawa. Truman was afraid that an invasion of Japan would look like “Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other.” By February 1945, the Japanese military leaders had concluded that they could not win the war but their honor dictated that they could not accept the ignominy of unconditional surrender. Japan’s war ending strategy became clear, inflict so many casualties on a war-weary America that it would relax its demands for unconditional surrender and negotiate a lenient peace. This strategy, it was hoped would, at a minimum, safeguard the Emperor, and potentially preserve the armed forces and shield them from prosecution for war crimes. Japan still had at least 700,000 soldiers in Manchuria and had begun to transfer some of these forces home to bolster homeland defenses against an expected U.S. invasion. Soviet assistance would be needed to pin down these forces.
A Not so Secret, Secret
Truman had learned of the Manhattan Project only after being sworn into office but it was at the Potsdam Conference on July 25, 1945 where he was informed that the first atomic weapon had been tested successfully. Truman told Stalin at Potsdam that the United States was about to use a new kind of weapon against Japan. Stalin feigned surprise and interest in Truman’s announcement but he was already quite aware of this new weapon. The Soviets had earlier infiltrated the top secret program. Klaus Fuchs, a German-born British physicist, who was working on the project passed on detailed information about its progress to Moscow. At the end of the conference, the allies issue a stern ultimatum calling for the immediate and unconditional surrender of Japan, warning that Japan would face “prompt and utter destruction” if it failed to comply.
Dawn of the Atomic Age
With Japanese leaders rejecting the Potsdam ultimatum, Truman grappled with the idea of using the bomb to hasten and end to the war without invading Japan. Returning home from Potsdam on the cruiser Augusta, Truman and his advisors carefully considered the moral and ethical questions surrounding the use of the atomic bomb, especially against civilians, and balanced these concerns against political and military interests. Some advisors suggested conducting a demonstration of the bombs destructive capabilities as a warning, hoping that Japan would come to its senses and surrender without having to use the bomb. Others dismissed this approach, doubting that a demonstration without a loss of life or property would be sufficient to compel the Japanese to surrender. In the end, Truman authorized the use of the bomb over the moral reservations of Secretary of War Henry Stimson, General Dwight Eisenhower and a number of the Manhattan Project scientists. “It is an awful responsibility that has come to us,” Truman wrote. On the morning of August 6, the first atomic bomb, nicknamed Little Boy, was dropped on the city of Hiroshima. The bomb immediately devastated its target. Approximately 80,000 people were killed as a direct result of the blast, and another 35,000 were injured. At least another 60,000 would be dead by the end of the year from the effects of the atomic fallout. The atomic age had begun.
Detonation of the Atomic Bomb over Hiroshima
With confirmation that the bombing of Hiroshima was successful, Truman informed the American public of this new destructive weapon. In his address Truman explained that the secret project had been in development for some time and that the United States and its allies had been engaged in a race with Nazi Germany to determine who could develop it first. He added that it had the destructive power of over 20,000 tons of TNT. Truman also expounded on why he decided in favor of using the atomic bomb, “Having found the bomb we have used it. We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor, against those who have starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war, against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international laws of warfare. We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans. We shall continue to use it until we completely destroy Japan’s power to make war. Only a Japanese surrender will stop us.”
The Soviets Make Good on their Word
In the meantime, the Soviets were preparing to honor their promise to enter the war against Japan, despite having signed a five year neutrality pact in 1941. Soviet planning for operations in the Far East against Japan began as early as March 1945, after Stalin’s commitment at Yalta. Articles denouncing the Soviet-Japanese non-aggression pact and accusing the Japanese of engaging in aggressive actions against the Soviet Far East soon began appearing in Soviet newspapers. In April, the Soviets informed Japan that they would not extend their non-aggression pact, set to expire in 1946, and began shifting their military might eastward. They were expecting to face close to 1.5 million Japanese soldiers in theater. It would take three months to move sufficient military force to the east and preparations were never fully completed. Nevertheless, true to its word, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan on August 8, exactly three months to the day, after Nazi Germany was defeated. On August 9, the Red Army began offensive military operations against Japanese forces in Manchuria. Japan was surprised by the speed and timing of the offensive. The Japanese had had been monitoring Trans-Siberian Railway traffic and other Soviet military activity east of Manchuria but they did not believe a Soviet attack was likely in August 1945 and they had no confirming evidence of where a Soviet attack would occur. Invading on three fronts with 90 divisions, the Soviets penetrated deep into Manchuria as the Japanese defenders quickly collapsed. With the destruction of its largest remaining military force and losing much of its economic base in Manchuria, Japan’s prospects for parlaying a prolonged war into a conditional surrender and lenient peace grew dimmer.
B949MT A Soviet tank column crossing the Greater Hingan Range in August 1945 to rout Japan s Kwantung Army in one of the last actions of the war.
Endgame
The destruction of Hiroshima alone did not have the intended effect of compelling an immediate and unconditional Japanese surrender, an outcome that was not unexpected in Washington. The willingness of the Japanese military to fight to the bitter end was abundantly clear and the United States had at least two more atomic bombs it was prepared to drop on Japan. On August 9, a second atomic bomb, nicknamed Fat Man, was dropped on the city of Nagasaki with similar devastating effect. Upwards of 70,000 people were killed from the blast in Nagasaki and tens of thousands would die later from radiation poisoning. The United States was preparing to drop a third atomic bomb on the city of Kokura if Japan did not surrender. However, further attacks would prove unnecessary. The specter of additional atomic bomb attacks along with the ongoing Soviet offensive in Manchuria was enough to convince Emperor Hirohito to accept an unconditional surrender, against the wishes of Japan’s military leaders. After several days of behind-the-scenes negotiations and a failed coup d’état by the military, Hirohito gave a recorded radio address across the Empire on August 15 announcing the surrender of Japan to the Allies. One September 2, aboard the United States battleship USS Missouri, the Japanese government signed the Japanese Instrument of Surrender, officially ending the hostilities.
Why Did Japan Ultimately Surrender?
For the United States, its long been accepted that the two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the primary factors in compelling Japan’s surrender and without their use the United would have been forced to carry out a prolonged and costly invasion of the Japanese homeland. However, more recent scholarship suggests that the Soviet declaration of war and subsequent offensive against Japanese forces in Manchuria may have been more instrumental in convincing Japanese leaders to sue for peace. Complex existential decisions, such as the one that confronted the Japanese leadership in August of 1945 rarely are driven by a single cause or reason but are the synthesis of competing and complementary factors shaped by the interests, biases, and perceptions of the individual decision-makers. Japan’s decision to surrender probably was a sober calculation weighing the likelihood of further Atomic bomb strikes and the impossibility of fighting a two-front war with the United States and the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, we should re-examine the Soviets role in the Pacific War, short-lived as it may be, and consider that the Soviet Union deserves greater weight in the accepted historical narrative of how the war ended.
The Soviet declaration of war fundamentally altered Japan’s strategic calculus. Japan’s war fighting strategy was predicated upon Soviet neutrality and avoiding a two front war. It had also hoped to use the Soviets as intermediaries in negotiating a more favorable end to the war. News that the Russians would not extend the non-aggression pact unnerved the Japanese military leadership some of whom who now expected that the Soviets would monitor Japan’s declining military strength and enter the war at an opportune moment. In June 1945, Deputy Chief of the Imperial Japanese Army General Staff Kawabe Toroshiro said, “The absolute maintenance of peace in our relations with the Soviet Union is one of the fundamental conditions for continuing the war.” Japan would continue to dangle proposals to the Soviets to maintain their neutrality, such as offering territorial concessions, but Moscow repeatedly rebuffed these overtures. In one single stroke, the Soviet declaration of war negated bot Japan’s warfighting and diplomatic strategy leaving it few other options than surrender.
Tragedy and Farce 