A complaint from Kenyatta: "There are soldiers everywhere! In the bathroom! On the kitchen table! On the couch! What is going on!"
To clarify, I have a copy of North And South magazine in the bathroom, A Grand Army Of Black Men is on the kitchen table, and a Cannons: An Introduction To Civil War Artillery is on the couch.
It's funny. I'm still the kid, I was in school. I was a terrible student, and yet I had a curiosity that would border on obsession. I failed eleventh grade English, because my teacher would give me a zero every time I forgot to bring my copy of the Odyssey to class. What did I need with that book? I had read the whole thing the first week of school, as soon as I saw it on the syllabus.
We don't change, do we?
On another note, a colleague has informed me that he has a second home near Sharpsburg. I have already told him, that he should have kept that to himself. I'm going to camp out on his porch. Kenyatta insists that she isn't coming with me. She'll learn...
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
hah...I've been there brother.
Sharpburg! Sweet!!
The sunken road at Antietam was haunting, I swear I could feel something standing in that road.
The Cornfield...Burnsides Bridge...East and West Wood...
Gotta do it. Let me know when your going. You can fit all us commenters on that front porch can't you?
If not we can spread out along the ridges like the armies had to do...
btw, my wife told me she wasn't going and didn't.
Made my time on the battlefield longer. I still remember looking over the sunken road towards the ridge where the yankees were approaching from. Awesome.
The sunken road at Antietam was haunting, I swear I could feel something standing in that road.
Standing in the sunken road, you can see north over that little rise about a hundred feet away, then a quarter mile slightly downhill towards the woods along the creek. The Union soldiers under French and Richardson formed up on the low ground, marched in line, shoulder to shoulder, across that field and over the rise. The Rebs, in double ranks, were dug into the road. The Union soldiers couldn't see them until they walked over that rise, as the Rebs opened up at point blank range and shot them down in rows. Four times they came on, about twenty minutes apart, each battle line walking up over that little rise over the bodies of the dead and wounded, so thick you had to step on them or fall out of ranks, to face that same blast of point blank fire.
Amidst the skirmishing and smoke Colonel Francis Barlow and two New York Regiments got over to the left and discovered that just where the Confederate line turned away south there was another little rise that allowed his men to fire straight west down the length of the Sunken road, so a minie ball couldn't help hitting flesh once or thrice before it was spent. The Confederates were routed.
Most of the 2600 hundred Rebs who fell lay in the 800 yard ditch of the Sunken Road, about three men per yard of road. 3000 dead and maimed Union men lay mostly in the field along the crest of the rise in front of the Confederate line.
You can walk Bloody Lane on foot and then look the battlefield over from the tower at its eastern end.
She'll learn...
Speaking of "lost causes"...
That war has yet to be fought. Give me some time.
You need to up the ante and start collecting civil war figurines (i.e., toy soldiers). Then dial it back down once she realizes how bad it could get if you become a hardcore Civil War nerd.
I was going to say that if I heard you going to reenactments I would give up all hope. Then I remembered that you played D&D and realized it was just a matter of time.
My sympathies to Kenyatta.
Go there! Sharpsburg and Antietam are both fascinating and moving places.
Also! And for the non-historically obsessed, patient with your nonsense fellow traveler, if any: historic Shepherdstown, across a sweeping bend in the river on the West Virginia side, is a comfortable college and theater town with a bunch of little jewelry, antique stores, and some mighty fine restaurants, including the well-known Yellow Brick Bank. I went with one friend who was equally a photo and history nerd, and when we insisted on getting up at dawn to catch the mist on the battlefield, the rest of our party decamped for a fine day of browsing, dining and shopping. We didn't catch up with them till martini hour.
Be careful -- first it's a weekend at a friend's house in Sharpsburg, then it's a trip to Gettysburg to see the reenactors, and before you know it you're off on the Civil Wargasm with Tony Horwitz.
I would join Horwitz on that trip ANY TIME. And have been tweaking TNC to read Horwitz's book as a companion to all the other stuff: http://alyssarosenberg.blogspot.com/2009/07/ta-nehisi-coates-needs-to-read.html
My aunt and uncle are originally from Connecticut but moved to Virginia to retire. They live in Spotsylvania, basically in the middle of where the battle of the Wilderness occurred. You can still find bullets around, and they do re-enactments. I just hope they don't overdevelop it.
You can hope in one hand and sh*t in the other, and see which one gets full first...or you can raise your voice on this very issue, right now:
http://www.civilwar.org/take-action/speak-out/wilderness-walmart/
The elected Board of Supervisors in Orange County, Va., wherein lies the Wilderness battlefield, are dead-set on plopping a big ol' Wal-Mart right on the edge of it. They recently fired the head county administrator (in a closed session) because he had the temerity to suggest they consider putting it elsewhere.
http://www.orangenews.com/ocn/news/local/local_govtpolitics/article/rolfe_fired/42588/
Ugh. Yeah, to be honest, I wasn't thrilled when I found out that's where they were living, let alone in a new development. It is cool to be able to see it, but it's a tragedy of the commons situation. I'll check out that site.
But Donald, the attitude is not appreciated, and I don't think anything I said warranted it.
No attitude intended, indeed. It was an attempt at using an old saying, but I meant no offense.
Think rather, as is true, that I am just angry about those Mayberry developers pissing all over the historic site they had the dumb luck to be born in middle of.
And for the record, I was raised out in the country, within about 40 miles of the Wilderness - so I here speak ill of my own kind.
Those old sayings can be ruthless if you don't know the connotations behind them. :)
Sorry Donald, no worries
My dream vacation; Civil War and Napoleonic war battlefields! I think I'm in a better position than you though, my girlfriend has tepidly agreed to come with! Seriously though, many Civil War battlefields are in trouble, and everyone who wants to ever see them needs to go soooooon. A Wal-Mart may be going up on a spot where the battle of the Wilderness was fought; A Comfort Suite is now being constructed on CEMETERY HILL in Gettysburg. Better go while the gettings good. http://www.civilwar.org/history-under-siege/history-under-siege.html
Also cool are the efforts of National Park Service to scale the information for several age levels. In particular the new Antietam Vistor's Center has a decent mix of artifacts, maps and movies to engage kids and grown-ups. But, truly, to just stand on the battlefield in the dusk says the words most potent.
TNC, from the description of your school based academic struggles and the fact that you have 3+ things you are reading at any time, you strike me an awful lot as someone who has ADD. I do too, and went through most of school scoring at or near the top of every assessment (95% and up usually) and coming close to flunking classes every year. And it usually had nothing to do with a mastery of the material. Seems like you've found a medium that really uses the strengths of the disorder in blogging. A lot of people with high intelligence and ADD end up bouncing around for a while through their youth since they are unable to truly be successful in a normal academic setting and end up finding themselves in their work in the years that come. Congrats!
I've considered this. But when I wrote my book, I had very little trouble concentrating. It's the weirdest thing.
Not to totally play armchair shrink here but it's called hyperfocus. When something really grabs your imagination/attention you will be much more locked into it than a normal person, oftentimes finishing books/papers/etc much more quickly than normal people. If you can get to the point in your life where you can organize your ADD (not everyone can without help), this is one of the things that can really be beneficial. I often find myself having casual conversations with people about their interests, and then the next time we speak I've learned more about their interest than they knew. Once I get excited about learning something it's pretty hard to get me to stop.
I spent years wondering if child number two had ADD, and always saying "couldn't be, because she engages so completely with things she cares about." When we finally arrived at the psychologist's office, she laughed at me and gave me stacks of the books confirming Shwa said.
Ten books into a reading spree (books on the couch, books in the bathroom), I was convinced that child two was merely a slightly more intense version of my side of her genetics. We can invest great, intense, maybe too-much, attention in things we care about: my spouse calls it "falling into a keyboard." We find it harder than most folks around us to pay enough attention to things we find dull, including lots of what happens in school. I actually took to calling it "attention-excess disorder," because my daughter WAS focusing intensely--but not on the teachers' agenda.
I too have severe ADD; your experience gels with many of my own.
Yes, this. When not flunking out, skipping grades by acing the respective material so thoroughly. I've been told it's part and parcel of being low end Asbergery. Some quasi-autistic superfocus, and also some quasi-autistic difficulty or inability to just "do the thing" that everyone is expected to do, unless a conscious effort is repeatedly expended to remember to do it.
You'd look great walking down Lenox Avenue in one of these...
http://www.civilwarcommand.com/category_s/55.htm
Sharp looking coats, but they seem a bit pricey. I got my Union enlisted sack coat for $80 from a sutler at a re-enactment event,pants for $45, and a pair of rather sexy Cavalry boots for $150.
I fear I may have revealed far too much about myself just then...
Have fun. My sympathies to you're other half. No one should ever marry a writer. :)
Incredibly expressive pic, where can it be found?
Ha! TNC, Kenyatta should commiserate with my wife, who long ago gave up any hope of having any surfaces in the house without books on them. The upside is that they are a great conversation piece when guests are over: "hey, I see you have Frankenstein and Pursuit of Glory in your bathroom. How did you come up with that combination?"
Heh, yeah, it's all fun and games until moving day. I've been spending the last month preparing for a move from a 5-bedroom to a typical Baltimore rowhouse, and I've been regretting every book, notepad, archive, clips forming a tsumani of paper from over 20 years as a writer. Good thing we have The Book Thing, a book exchange whose shelves have been blessed with dozens of books from my house.
Beware of the other confluence of D&D and an interest in history - wargaming. Before you know it, you'll be sitting around a table with a bunch of nerds, sending the Iron Brigade to Little Round Top so you don't have to sacrifice Sickles to keep from being flanked by Hood...oh, it is addictive. Beware. Beware!
TNC, I feel ya.
I have been studying and learning about the Civil War, slavery, reconstruction for a long time.
My gf at the time (now my wife) picked up on it and starting making good for me at holidays and birthdays. A signed Lincoln letter, battlefield artifacts etc.
Well, three years ago she put a whole package together for me that included 2 days at a B&B in Gettysburg. She loved touring the batlefield (we are both obseeives when it comes to history, art, architecture) and really developed a new passion for the subject matter.
On our second night there we had dinner at an Inn that was built in 1776. After the desert of red velvet cakes I proposed to her.
Six months later we got married.
epilogue: Our combined libraries are something to behold and we are visiting Antietem this Summer and are going to Springfield sometime in the near future.
In her defense, taking care of a small kid on a trip like that also seems like a real p in the b.
So what do you think about George B. McClellan? Good or bad? I'm a fan of his actually. Not as bad as people think.
Dear Tah-Nehisi,
Antietam is the 'best' Civil War battlefield I have toured. It is isolated enough that development has not encroached upon it, and--along with Gettysburg--it is a battle where Union and Confederate lines remained relatively static throughout, thus it is easier to get a real understanding of how the battle was fought from surveying the terrain. (I tried to get a feel for a far more fluid battle, The Wilderness, when I toured the site. Forget it!) Also, unlike Gettysburg there is not a monument to this or that regiment every ten &^$$#%# yards. It is exceptionally well preserved. The Burnside Bridge is in near-perfect condition, and one can still see the impressions of the Confederate rifle pits hastily dug to oppose the Union crossing. (One can also see that the water is knee-deep, and wonder wtf the Union soldiers didn't just forget the bridge and charge over Antietam Creek, but I digress.)
As a reader suggested earlier in this thread, Tony Horwitz' superb, funny and most illuminating Confederates in the Attic is essential reading! Also, I would recommend Battle Cry of Freedom, and the Negro's Civil War,* both by James M. MacPherson. The maps in the former are excellent. Take 'Battle Cry with you to any battlefield you tour; you'll want to refer regularly to them.
Robert Murphy
* I am not patronizingly suggesting you read this book just because you are black; I believe ANY serious student of the war should read it. It is first-rate, trust me.
Interesting that you called it Sharpsburg. Antietam to me, yankee that I am. Just saw this too and thought you might be interested -- http://bit.ly/gQlcw. About a new monument in Lynchburg, VA to some Union soldiers killed there. Apparently some are up in arms about "foreigners" being commemorated...
Oh, and check out the freakin' comments at that post. Frightening.
Wow wow wow. But not surprising at the same time. You grow up living a line of BS and never move away from it you'll keep spouting that line.
Yup, if you couldn't "follow the directions" in 11th grade, you probably can't follow them now either! At least, that's been my experience.
My wife and I had a similar moment recently. I was actually reading one of your posts regarding the CW that had a photo of some soldiers in it. She walks by and looks over my shoulder and, with complete exasperation, cries "Isn't the Civil War over? I mean, really." I thought about quoting Faulkner or Gadamer on the intractability of history, etc. but decided against it.
These posts always seem to involve book recommendations. A good bathroom book is Kenneth Stampp's "The Causes of the Civil War." It's a collection of editorials and speech excerpts from the period and afterwards. Fascinating windows into the era that can be enjoyed a few minutes at a time.
I guess I vaguely suspected, but now I am sure that many commenters here are total nerds. No wonder I feel so at home.
The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we're uncool. (Lester Bangs, Almost Famous)
Beautiful quote. RIP Lester
I think that is one of the most poignant photographs I have ever seen. As soon as I saw the first post with this picture, it became my wallpaper (even before I knew TNC had it as wallpaper) and I left it up for about a week.
That gaze into the camera of the three soldiers in the front row is a story unto itself, but not one that we will ever know. We can only imagine what their lives were like and what it meant to them to be fighting.
We see here how pictures are often so much more powerful than words. I think that this picture raises the universal question that we usually have to ask ourselves when we see the pictures of war and other human conflicts.
That is, "Why do our best people have to die this way? Why do we waste them?"
Any visit to Antietam has to be combined with perfectly preserved, fantastic Harper's Ferry. This gets you into the world of John Brown - then good luck to you and your obsession!
With this:
you just bought my love. That is the shit.