NEXT MEETING
The
next meeting of Captain James W. Bryan Camp 1390 will be from 6-8 p.m. Tuesday, July 10, at the Pitt Grill Restaurant,
102 Benoit Lane, Sulphur, (near the intersection of I-10 and Ruth Street).
Cmdr.
Archie Toombs will give part two of his program on Confederate general and
Secretary of State, Robert Toombs.. Please come and enjoy the meeting if you
can make it.
Pvt. John M. Sellers, Company G, 16th Louisiana Infantry. (Courtesy of Robert Albanese and Dan McCollum.) |
Confederate image identified
A
descendant, Dan McCollum, saw a copy of this photo of
Private John M. Sellers of Company G, 16th Louisiana Infantry in the June issue
of Calcasieu Greys, which was then unidentified, and contacted Archie M. Toombs, commander of Capt. J. W. Bryan Camp, and identified it as being
his relative. Another descendant, Robert Albanese, a great-great-grandson, provided the excellent quality copy seen at left.
According to Mr.
McCollum, Sellers is listed in the Soldiers and Sailors of the Confederacy of the National Park Service system, as a
member of the 16th. Mr. McCollum said Sellers was living in north Alabama, where his family comes
from, when the war started. He left Alabama and went back to Louisiana where he
had been living and enlisted. After the war he returned to Alabama and died there
June 8, 1895 in Blount, Alabama.
According to Sellers military service record, he was present for the Battle of Shiloh, April 6-7, 1862, and
was wounded in action at the Battle of Murfreesboro, Tennessee on December 31,
1862.
Sellers was absent in the
hospital recovering from his wound and he returned to duty in July,
1863. He was then present for the Battle of Chickamauga, September 19-20, 1863
where nearly one-third of the regiment was captured. Sellers then fought at the
Battle of Missionary Ridge on November 25, 1863. He was then absent in the
hospital from January 6, 1864 until May 1, 1864 when he returned to duty.
Sellers was then present
for the Atlanta Campaign and fought at Mill Creek Gap, May 7; Resaca, May
14-15; and New Hope Church, May 25-28. He
was also present when his regiment participated in the battles of Atlanta, July 22, Ezra Church, July 28; and Jonesboro, August 31. The
16th helped capture Florence, Alabama on October 30, 1864 and Sellers was in the Battle of Nashville,
December 15-16, 1864.
The regiment was then stationed as part of the garrison of
Mobile, Alabama in February, 1865. Sellers was present for duty on the last
roll of the war from April 20-30, 1865. John M. Sellers was truly a faithful soldier and a Southern
hero.
Confederate Memorial Day
Members of Captain James W. Bryan Camp 1390 observed Confederate Memorial Day, June 3, in Calcasieu Parish by decorating graves of Confederate Veterans and holding a memorial ceremony at the South's Defenders Monument at the Calcasieu Parish Court House in Lake Charles. Cemeteries all over the parish were covered in the grave decoration effort, including Niblett's Bluff Cemetery to the west to the historic cemeteries in Lake Charles. Many others around the parish were covered as well. Thanks go out to all who took part in this effort and did our duty as a camp for our Southern heroes.
Sick
from Freedom
African-American Illness and Suffering
during the Civil War and Reconstruction
University of Oxford Press, USA
Jim Downs
Bonds people
who fled from slavery during and after the Civil War did not expect that their flight
toward freedom would lead to sickness, disease, suffering, and death. But the
war produced the largest biological crisis of the nineteenth century, and as
historian Jim Downs reveals in this groundbreaking volume, it had deadly
consequences for hundreds of thousands of freed people.
In Sick from Freedom (University of Oxford Press, USA, 2012), Downs recovers the untold story of one of the bitterest ironies in American history--that the emancipation of the slaves, seen as one of the great turning points in U.S. history, had devastating consequences for innumerable freed people. Drawing on massive new research into the records of the Medical Division of the Freedmen's Bureau-a nascent national health system that cared for more than one million freed slaves-he shows how the collapse of the plantation economy released a plague of lethal diseases. With emancipation, African Americans seized the chance to move, migrating as never before. But in their journey to freedom, they also encountered yellow fever, smallpox, cholera, dysentery, malnutrition, and exposure. To address this crisis, the Medical Division hired more than 120 physicians, establishing some forty underfinanced and understaffed hospitals scattered throughout the South, largely in response to medical emergencies. Downs shows that the goal of the Medical Division was to promote a healthy workforce, an aim which often excluded a wide range of freedpeople, including women, the elderly, the physically disabled, and children. Downs concludes by tracing how the Reconstruction policy was then implemented in the American West, where it was disastrously applied to Native Americans.
The widespread medical calamity sparked by emancipation is an overlooked episode of the Civil War and its aftermath, poignantly revealed in Sick from Freedom.
In Sick from Freedom (University of Oxford Press, USA, 2012), Downs recovers the untold story of one of the bitterest ironies in American history--that the emancipation of the slaves, seen as one of the great turning points in U.S. history, had devastating consequences for innumerable freed people. Drawing on massive new research into the records of the Medical Division of the Freedmen's Bureau-a nascent national health system that cared for more than one million freed slaves-he shows how the collapse of the plantation economy released a plague of lethal diseases. With emancipation, African Americans seized the chance to move, migrating as never before. But in their journey to freedom, they also encountered yellow fever, smallpox, cholera, dysentery, malnutrition, and exposure. To address this crisis, the Medical Division hired more than 120 physicians, establishing some forty underfinanced and understaffed hospitals scattered throughout the South, largely in response to medical emergencies. Downs shows that the goal of the Medical Division was to promote a healthy workforce, an aim which often excluded a wide range of freedpeople, including women, the elderly, the physically disabled, and children. Downs concludes by tracing how the Reconstruction policy was then implemented in the American West, where it was disastrously applied to Native Americans.
The widespread medical calamity sparked by emancipation is an overlooked episode of the Civil War and its aftermath, poignantly revealed in Sick from Freedom.
Features
Reveals that the moment of emancipation triggered
widespread illness and death among African Americans. 2012 marks the 150th anniversary of the unofficial
liberation of the slaves during the Civil War and 2013 the anniversary of the
Emancipation Proclamation. The first in-depth study of the Medical Division of
the Freedmen's Bureau, the first system of national medical care created by the
federal government.
Connects the federal government's response to emancipation
to the displacement of Native Americans on reservations.
Product Details
280 pages; 6-1/8 x 9-1/4;
ISBN13: 978-0-19-975872-2ISBN10: 0-19-975872-7
About the Author(s)
Jim Downs is Assistant Professor of History and
American Studies at Connecticut College. He is the editor of Taking Back the
Academy: History of Activism, History as Activism and Why We Write: The
Politics and Practice of Writing for Social Change.
‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’
What It Really Means
By
Michael
Dan Jones
One of the most enduring
traditional American hymns and patriotic songs is Julia Ward Howe’s “The Battle
Hymn of the Republic.” It is a staple with many Christian church choirs and
hardly a patriotic holiday passes without this song being sung and played at
ceremonies nationwide. But is “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” truly
appropriate for religious hymnals and patriotic ceremonies? Who was the author?
What motivated and inspired her? What message was she trying to convey? What do
the words mean? What meaning do they have for us today?
The author, Julia Ward Howe,
was born in 1819 in New York City. She married a prominent physician, Dr.
Samuel Howe Gridley (1801-1876) in 1843 and they lived in Boston, Mass., where
they raised five children. She was a much celebrated author, a tireless
supporter of the anti-slavery movement, preached in Unitarian Churches, and was
a zealous worker for the advancement of women, prison reform, world peace and
other humanitarian movements. She died October 17, 1910 at her summer home in
Oak Glen, Rhode Island.
News reporters of her day
delighted in describing this unusual woman. She was diminutive in stature,
barely over five feet; invariably wearing a white trimmed, black dress and lace
cap and had the habit of peering over her silver-rimmed glasses as she read her
lecture in a crisp Boston-Yankee accent.
But her literary works had dark
themes, such as murder, suicide and betrayal, perhaps reflecting her own
unhappy marriage with her domineering and unfaithful husband. Her church, the
Unitarian Church, although it claimed to be Christian, denied the divinity of
Jesus Christ, the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity.
And although she was devoted to the
anti-slavery movement, like many other Northern radicals of her time, such as
Abraham Lincoln, her own words reveal her to be a hypocrite on the subject of
race. Julia Ward Howe believed and wrote the “ideal negro” would be one
“refined by white culture, elevated by white blood.” She also wrote “the negro
among negroes, is coarse, grinning,
flat- footed, thick-skulled creature, ugly as Caliban, lazy as the laziest
brutes, chiefly ambitious to be of no use to any in the world….He must go to
school to the white race and his discipline must be long and laborious.” Her
own disgusting words expose the kind of hypocrisy that was rampant in the
abolitionist movement.
Mrs. Howe and her husband, Samuel
Gridley Howe, were supporters of the most radical and violent wing of the
anti-slavery movement. These “disunion abolitionists” wanted to tear apart the
American republic of sovereign, independent states, and reconstruct it along
their own radical political, cultural and religious ideals. History records
only how too well they succeeded with their treason.
Her husband and her pastor,
Unitarian Rev. Theodore Parker, were conspirators in the treasonous group known
as “The Secret Six.” These wealthy Northeasterners financially supported
terrorist and murderer John Brown in his insane Harpers Ferry raid, and
advocated slave rebellion that would destroy the original American republic.
Brown’s Anti-Southern terror
campaign started in Kansas in the mid-1850’s. There, on May 23, 1856 Brown and
his murderous band descended on a settlement of Southerners at Pottawatomie
Creek. They carried with them newly sharpened swords, an image that played a
prominent part in Mrs. Howe’s song (her hero and his fellow terrorists
literally hacked to death five innocent men). Northern historians try to excuse
this crime by saying Brown was exacting revenge for atrocities committed by
pro-slavery “Border Ruffians.” This is a lie!
The first three victims, James P.
Doyle and his sons, Drury and William, were Catholics from Tennessee who moved
to Kansas to get away from slavery. They never had a thing to do with the
institution. But because they spoke with a Southern drawl, and possibly because
they were Catholic, Brown marched them to a clearing where their heads were
split open with the sharpened swords. Drury’s arms were chopped off. Mrs. Doyle
was later asked why her husband and sons had been so brutally murdered. She
replied, “Just because we were Southern people, I reckon.”
The other victims of Brown’s
murderous rampage were Southern settlers Allen Wilkinson, executed while his
wife and children stood by in horror, and William Sherman, whose mutilated body
was found floating in the creek with his left hand hanging by a strand of skin
and his skull split open with “some of his brains” washed away.
When she got word of the massacre,
Julia Ward Howe’s own words reveal her to have been perversely thrilled and inspired
by this grisly crime. The “terrible swift sword” in her song was terrible
indeed, but hardly reflecting Christian values. Mrs. Howe and Brown mutually
admired one another, as their own words demonstrate. Mrs. Howe wrote Brown was
“a Puritan of Puritans, forceful, concentrated, and self-contained.” Brown
wrote of Mrs. Howe, in a letter to a friend, that she was “a defiant little
woman” and that her personality was “all flash and fire.” After the failure of
Brown’s bloody raid on Harper Ferry, her husband, who was deeply involved in
the treasonous conspiracy, like a coward
in the night, fled to Canada until he was assured he was safe from prosecution
in Massachusetts.
Mrs. Howe, in a letter to her
sister at the time, made it clear she was in complete sympathy with the attempt
to start a slave rebellion in the South, and tear the nation apart. She wrote, “I
have just been to church and hear [James Freeman] Clarke (another Unitarian
minister) preach about John Brown, whom God bless, and will bless! I am much
too dull to write anything good about him, but shall say something at the end
of my book on Cuba; whereof I am at present correcting the proof-sheets. I went
to see his poor wife, who passed through here some days since. We shed tears
together and embraced at parting, poor soul… [Brown’s] attempt I must judge
insane but the spirit heroic. I should be glad to be as sure of heaven as that
old man may be, following right in the spirit and footsteps of the old martyrs,
girding on his sword for the weak and oppressed. His death will be holy and
glorious--the new saint awaiting his martyrdom, and who, if he shall suffer
[execution], will make the gallows glorious like the cross.
What “martyrs” could Mrs. Howe have
been speaking of in her letter? Surely she could not mean the early Christian
martyrs who were slain in many perverse, cruel and cold-blooded ways by the
ancient Romans, just as her hero, John Brown, slew the Southern martyrs in
Kansas. Her fascination with his sword is also revealed in the letter. This
grotesque and warped view of Christian values is reflected in her violent and
bloody war song.
Here we have the author of the much
revered “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” condoning murder and treason by a
ruthless and brutal killer. Her dark fascination with Brown’s bloody sword and
the killer’s unbridled violence seemed to thrill the diminutive author.
Clearly, the seeds of inspiration for her “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” had
been planted in the poisonous soil of murder, rebellion and treason.
But what was the final inspiration
for the famous lyrics? In November 1861, after the start of the tragic war that
the Howe’s had for so long worked to instigate, a party which included the
Unitarian Rev. James F. Clarke and Mrs. Howe, visited an outpost of the
invading Union troops in Northern Virginia. However an unexpected Confederate
attacked cancelled the review. Mrs. Howe and her party were waiting in a buggy
while Northern troops came marching by, returning from the skirmish. The camp
visitors heard the Yankees merrily singing an obscene version of “John Brown’s
Body.”
When the party returned to
Washington, D.C., the Rev. Clarke asked Mrs. Howe if she could supply more dignified
words for the popular tune. So, inspired by the memory of her late, “martyred
hero” John Brown, and the skirmish that so rudely interrupted her review of her
beloved invading Northern vandals, she wrote the words for the famous
Anti-Southern abolitionist anthem, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” by
candlelight in the middle of the night at the Willard Hotel.
James T. Fields, the editor of the
Atlantic Monthly, accepted the song and published it as a poem in the February
1862 issue. This bloody, hate-filled song has been marching on ever since. The
“hymn” sung by so many church and school choirs, was inspired not by the Bible
or a stirring religious sermon, but by a dastardly killer, John Brown, and by
the march of Northern invaders trampling over Southern soil, Southern lives and
Southern rights, in quest of subjugating or killing the Southern people. And
what horrible crime was the South guilty of to warrant its extermination?
The people of the South were guilty
only of wanting independence for a government of their own choosing, a
pro-Christian, God-based government that safeguarded states’ rights, individual
liberty and put strict limits on the national government. This was the type of
government the founders established in 1776, and the South was trying to
preserve it as handed to them.
It was Abraham Lincoln, who is said
to have cried the first time he heard the abolitionist war song, and radicals
like Mrs. Howe who were the real revolutionaries. It was their forces who, by
brute force of arms, destroyed the original voluntary union of sovereign,
independent states at the cost of 620,000 dead Americans, and changed the
nations into an involuntary union of defeated, militarily occupied, captive
states.
In 1863, Mrs. Howe recited, “The
Battle Hymn of the Republic” at a gathering of fanatical abolitionists. One of
those who saw and heard her commented that she had a “weird penetrating voice.”
Considering the bloody, ungodly history of her war song, what a chilling
experience that must have been.
In summary, here is a “hymn”
celebrating the killing of Southerners on Southern soil, written by someone
involved in the most radical causes or her day, who supported the most extreme
and violent response to the South, who wrote the song after being inspired by
the murderous career of John Brown and her northern vandal invaders of the
South. Whenever “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” is played, five innocent men
hacked to death by the “terrible swift sword” of John Brown should be
remembered. It is also a dirge for the 620,000 Americans who died in the War
for Southern Independence and which war transformed America into a despotic
centralized state with practically unlimited powers.
What meaning does the song have for
the South today?
It is, in effect, a
"stealth" heritage attack. It is conditioning Southerners to accept
the Yankee myth of history: that their Confederate ancestors were wrong, and
their Northern “betters” were right and they should be glad 260,000 Southrons
were slaughtered in the War for Southern Independence. The message of the song
is, “Believe in Mrs. Howe’s almighty centralized government to tell you what is
right and what is wrong.” Don’t listen to the founders of 1776 or 1861, is the
message of this hymn. Yes, Mrs. Howe’s abolitionist hymn is still doing her
work, quietly and covertly, of destroying Southern heritage by conditioning
Southerners to accept her fanatically leftist cultural and religious
philosophy.
How ironic that such a joyous
traditional Southern song as “Dixie” is now all but banned throughout the
South, while a vicious Anti-Southern war song such as “The Battle Hymn of the
Republic” is sung by churches and patriotic ceremonies all over the Confederate
states.
What meaning does it have for the
Church?
Did Jesus Christ teach that God is
a vengeance seeking, sword-wielding maniac that slaughters innocents and
tramples people under His wrathful feet, as Mrs. Howe’s violent and bloody
lyrics would have you believe? No, such lyrics don’t fit in with any Christian
liturgy I’m familiar with. They do fit in the theology of radical
egalitarianism which says everyone must be equal in all aspects of life, or the
full force and power of the federal government will destroy you. It also fits
in the philosophy of giving to the government god-like powers to declare a
whole segment of humanity as non-persons, such as the unborn, who can then be
legally slaughtered by the millions at the whim of the mother and abortionist.
If Americans truly care about
individual liberty, limited, constitutional government, and the sacred right of
self-government of the people in their assembled states, then all such false
icons as “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” must be exposed and rejected.
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