After Lincoln: How the North Won the Civil War and Lost the Peace

By A.J. Langguth. Simon & Schuster, 352 pages, $28.

Reviewed by Jules Wagman

It took 10 years, but the South reversed virtually everything the North won at Appomattox except slavery. The ending of slavery meant that whites had to pay blacks for their work but they didn’t have to provide food, clothing or shelter because their workers were not slaves.

After Lincoln is the fourth book on American history A.J. Langguth has written. He was Saigon bureau chief for the New York Times and later taught at the University of Southern California.

There is nothing new on the “How the North Won the Civil War” part, but Langguth takes us through the decade-long process during which the South restored a shadow of the antebellum life, sans slavery. It was pinched and ultimately proved to be self-defeating.

For 10 years, the North had attempted to impose its views of morality, economics and politics, only to be defeated in skirmish after skirmish in the cities and towns, the fields, the ballot boxes and the courts.

At the end of that time, the white upper class had recovered its position of land ownership and political power. Poor whites remained trapped on their pre-war treadmill, and the upper class constantly reminded them that the former slaves were worse-off in every way than they were.
For 10 years, the North had attempted to impose its views of morality, economics and politics, only to be defeated in skirmish after skirmish in the cities and towns, the fields, the ballot boxes and the courts.

Weary from the battle and, by 1876, more interested in its increasing wealth and industrial power, the North turned its back on the old Confederacy, satisfied to let those states act pretty much as they pleased.

That culminated in the 1890s with the U.S. Supreme Court holding that “separate but equal” schools for whites and blacks were constitutional. State after state, both North and South, also adopted laws banning mixed marriages. Jim Crow became the law of the South and was practiced throughout the nation.

Langguth describes efforts made since then to break down the barriers, notably the civil rights movement and laws of the 1960s. He finished his book too early to assess the significance of the killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Mo., in August. Ironically, Ferguson is the name of the case by which the High Court legalized school segregation in the South.

So now we have a black president, and too many of us have broken our arms patting ourselves on our backs over that.

In Jacksonville, Fla., where I live, black firefighters are still being confronted by racist signs and emblems in their fire stations. Jordan Davis’s killing over loud music on a car radio is a separate matter. Are race relations better here than when I moved here in 1985? I think not.

Though the black middle class is expanding (and we can break our other arm patting ourselves on the back over that) I saw some economic statistics during the Labor Day weekend that put blacks as a bloc in worse shape vis a vis whites, than they were at the end of the 20th century.

The votes in 1876 of the special election commission that gave the presidency to Rutherford B. Hayes and not to Samuel J. Tilden also ended Reconstruction. There were eight Republican commissioners voting for Hayes, seven Democrats for Tilden.

Was Lincoln the only white in the country who wanted to free the slaves?

Jules Wagman has been reviewing books since 1966.

©2014 by Jules L. Wagman

Gaza: A History

By Jean-Pierre Filiu. Oxford, 422 pages, $29.95.

Reviewed by Jules  Wagman

It starts on the dust jacket with two boys, presumably Arab, crawling through a barbed wire obstacle course while an armed, hooded instructor watches. It continues on the flyleaf with a photo of the author, in jacket and chinos, squatting in a tunnel, which looks for all the world like one in Gaza.

Author Jean-Pierre Filiu, a former French diplomat in Arab capitals and a historian, knows the Middle East, but Gaza, written in French, suffers from a wooden translation. Filiu’s English is excellent; he had a well-written op-ed piece on Gaza in The New York Times Aug. 26.

Filliu’s approach favors the Arab viewpoint, which would be expected, given his background. But that doesn’t mean that he would be incapable of preparing a balanced history.

Gaza is a fertile agricultural oasis where citrus flourishes. It is also a strategic crossroads, being subjected since antiquity to invasions and occupations, still happening today. Egypt, Gaza’s next-door neighbor, wanted no part of Gaza. Israel would take Gaza but not its people.

Filiu’s book on Gaza tells only part of the Arab side of the problem and virtually none of the Israeli side.

The Arab-Israeli wars are not much more than blips on Filiu’s radar. His red meat is the Palestinian battle for self-rule and the fighting and killings between rival Palestinian gangs and militias. He also reports the rocket and suicide attacks on Israel, followed by Israeli reprisal raids.

The 1948 Israeli War for Independence, which the Arabs call the Catastrophe, is hardly covered. How and why Arabs fled their homes for refuge in Gaza is considered only in passing.

This was less than four years after World War II displaced millions. Most Arab nations refused to succor the refugees, believing their refusal would pressure Israel into allowing the refugees to return home. Israel did not do that and many descendants of the original refugees are living in camps like the eight around Gaza.

In Gaza, Egypt was hampered by “internal repercussions stemming from the Palestinian tragedy.” Gaza’s original population of 80,000 had to absorb 200,000 refugees. Today its population is estimated at 1.6 million.

It wasn’t until 1969 that a Gaza section of the Red Crescent was established. Filiu describes the political activities of the Gaza Red Crescent since then but not its humanitarian work as the Muslim face of the Red Cross.

During this past Labor Day weekend The Wall Street Journal ran a photo of Gazans swimming in the Mediterranean as the latest truce took hold. In the background are several high-rise buildings, 10 to 20 stories tall.

Who built them? Are they residential, commercial, or both? The funds had to come from hard-nosed bankers and investors who expect a return on their money. Who are they? What role are they playing in Gaza? Filiu doesn’t look into that sort of thing at all.

He writes that as Israel left Gaza in 2005, “The settlers demolished or rendered unusable…the agricultural greenhouses.” Contemporary news reports ignored the Israeli actions and told only of the Gazan depredations.

In reality, while perhaps 30 percent of the greenhouses were destroyed by the departing Israelis, another 30 percent were destroyed by the Gazans as they took over.

This book was finished well before the latest fighting broke out. Israel’s aims included destroying the tunnels. Perhaps the one where Filiu posed for his flyleaf photo was found and destroyed. Perhaps not.

Filiu has told only part of the Arab side of the problem and virtually none of the Israeli side.

Jules Wagman has been reviewing books since 1966.

©2014 by Jules L. Wagman

A World Elsewhere: An American Woman in Wartime Germany

By Sigrid MacRae. Viking, 310 pages, $27.95

Reviewed by Jules Wagman

The box held her father’s letters. As Sigrid MacRae read them, “The voice of my mother’s young lover, so long silent, emerged from his letters like a genie out of a bottle.”

Her mother, Aimee, was a Mayflower descendant and Hartford heiress, Heinrich a poor baron. She was on a lark in Europe; he wanted to become a diplomat. They were 24 years old and it was the Roaring 20s.

Sigrid MacRae relates a beautiful tale of love, loss and fortitude.

To Heinrich’s letters from a year’s courtship, author MacRae added family lore and library research to create this elegy. Four letters from her mother were found through a near-miracle.

Her parents’ love and comparatively short life together heightens the unspoken love of a daughter for her mother and the father she couldn’t know.

Aimee Ellis’s own mother died when she was three, her father at 23. A grand tour after schooling convinced Aimee that Europe was her future. She returned in 1927 with a schoolmate who knew Heinrich from a party and planned a Paris rendezvous.

They did meet again, but when her friend left, Aimee stayed. Heinrich shared bicycle rides with her, “opening dimensions…in almost everything they saw… She was suddenly, overwhelmingly in love.”

Heinrich of the “unpronounceable last name, von Hoyningen-Huene,” was virtually penniless. The Russian revolution expelled aristocratic Baltic Germans who were tsarist functionaries. Vivid word pictures described his family and “St. Petersburg’s long dark winters, where night came early and dawn dragged its feet.”

Their courtship blossomed. There was “that fragrant May meadow…The flowers and grasses bending over them, the stars turning in the night sky, had conspired with her own desire.”

They married on her 25th birthday, in October 1928; she was pregnant. Her new family teemed with relatives recounting stories of St. Petersburg and their ancestral home in today’s Latvia.

Reality brought the worldwide depression. Heinrich took up translating, Adolf Hitler came to power, the children kept coming and Aimee’s mother’s trust fund fed them.

Heinrich joined the Nazi party but was ejected within a year for opposing party policies. They bought a farm and struggled through the 1930s when he failed to become a diplomat. Ms. MacRae reveals the life of ordinary Germans under Hitler.

A reserve army officer, Heinrich served in France then the Eastern Front where he was killed in July 1941. Aimee was pregnant with their sixth child, Sigrid.

When Germany declared war on America, Aimee learned that U.S. law considered her four older children enemy aliens; the two younger ones, under a 1934 law, were Americans. Refusing to split her family, she remained in Germany.

Far from air raids and politics, the farm was her anchor. As the war ended they fled west. The oldest boy escaped military camp during Germany’s collapse.

In 1947 she learned she must return to America within six months or lose her citizenship; only her two youngest could accompany her. They emigrated and she began battling to reunite the family in America.

Bowdoin College in Maine helped out. The dean said, “If you can find a place to live and the boys are up to it scholastically, I guess we can help.” Maine’s congressman sponsored two bills to admit the four older children. They were together again.

In 1966 a former Dutch prisoner of war sent Aimee letters she wrote in 1927. Trudging home in 1945, the ex-POW had found them in an abandoned tunic where Heinrich was killed.

Though there are gaps, MacRae relates a beautiful tale of love, loss and fortitude.

Jules  Wagman has been reviewing  books since 1966.

©2014 by Jules L. Wagman

Franco’s Crypt: Spanish Culture and Memory since 1936

By Jeremy Treglown. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 320 pages, $30.

Reviewed by Jules Wagman

In dealing only with “Spanish Culture and Memory Since 1936,” British author and part-time resident of Spain Jeremy Treglown studies the intellectual side of life under dictator Francisco Franco. He ignores the financial crisis that hobbles everyday life.

Treglown’s approach differs from that of mainstream chroniclers in that he worries about the painters, authors and filmmakers, leaving to others the messy stuff of getting along in the rest of the world. That makes Franco’s Crypt both fascinating as well as a work wearing blinders.
Without being an apologist for the Franco regime, Treglown lets us know that, through lackadaisical officials and an indifferent and inefficient bureaucracy, art, literature and films developed in a limited atmosphere of independence, even resulting in some sly opposition to Franco.

The Spanish civil war, from 1936 to 1939, still hangs heavily over the country.

The painting on the book’s cover is a sample of Treglown’s approach. It is by Antonio Saura, titled “El grito No. 7.” Painted in 1959 and acquired by the Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art, it is of a creature part human, part wolf.

“Like most of Saura’s paintings, this one is in black and white, but what is unmistakably blood drips (bursts) from the figure’s unprotected head and left hand. Its teeth…are bared, and the face and body, shown in full, are moving forward rather than down, legs and feet windmilling, tail swinging—sheer fury in action. The painting’s title is usually translated as ‘Shout,’ but the noise of ‘El grito’ is surely a yell, a scream, a howl of rage.”

Treglown relates it to Juan Miro’s mid-1930s “savage paintings” as well as Picasso’s “Guernica” and Julio Gonzalez’s works “Montserrat gritando” (“Montserrat Shouting”) both done in 1937. He adds, “The variety of Saura’s titles…can seem whimsical beside the grim reiterativeness of the canvasses themselves.” Saura titled a similar stark work, “Brigitte Bardot.”

Many novelists went into exile. They included Max Aub (Mexico), Arturo Barea (England), Manuel Lamana (Argentina), Jorge Semprun (France) and Ramon Sender (Mexico and the United States.) Though they wrote in exile, Treglown points out that “they all in different ways suffered the same war” and their work has been written in relative freedom.

Then, there is Camilo Jose Cela, 1989 Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature, who stayed to duel with the censors. His first novel, Pascual Duarte’s Family, depicted “rape, matricide…premarital sex and pregnancy, abortion, prostitution and adultery.” It was published in 1942 despite negative themes.

Censors rejected his second novel, The Hive, several times between 1946 and 1950 until the secretary general of the Instituto de Cultura, “prompted in part by the book’s appearance in Argentina, intervened to let it through.”

Spanish filmmaking had nothing to match Italy’s “The Bicycle Thief.” (1948). Today’s Pedro Almodovar “has made the most out of the combined parallels and differences between life and performance, what lasts and what, as soon as it arrives, is lost.”

The Spanish civil war, from 1936 to 1939, still hangs heavily over the country. Though it is a lifetime (78 years) since it ended, it is only 39 years from Franco’s death. Sites of mass killings by both sides are being uncovered and the wounds are still healing.

For those who have paid scant attention to Spain Franco’s Crypt is a good way to view the country today and begin to learn what it went through in its civil war and the subsequent Franco dictatorship.

Jules Wagman has been reviewing books since 1966.

©2014 by Jules L. Wagman

Shouting Won’t Help: Why I–and 50 Million Other Americans–Can’t Hear You

By Katherine Bouton. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 272 pages, $26.

Reviewed by Jules Wagman

Katherine Bouton is totally deaf in her left ear and her hearing is getting progressively worse in her right. She worked for The New York Times for 22 years, eventually becoming theater editor. She heard less ——and less as time went by until a new culture editor, not among those who knew about her handicap, told her she wasn’t a “team player.”

While the Americans with Disabilities Act forbids discrimination, Ms. Bouton put herself between a rock and a hard place by not publicly acknowledging her disability. Instead, she “walked out.” She is now a regular reviewer and contributor to Science Times.
As a perceptive reporter and editor as well as an accomplished writer, Ms. Bouton studies the entire field of hearing loss, translating the jargon and medical terms into understandable everyday English.

She was 31 when her left ear suddenly went dead. She gradually regained some of the hearing but didn’t do anything about it. She didn’t know that she had a loss that was caused by a defect in the hair cells in the inner ear.

Vowel sounds give Katherine Bouton difficulty: “Bit or bet; prim or prom; life, left, loft, laughed. They’re all one to me.”

Let her describe people with moderate to severe hearing loss: They “can’t hear if they can’t see the speaker face-to-face. They can’t hear in a group. They can’t hear in an airport terminal or on a noisy street.” It’s not the lack of sound, it is the inability to translate those sounds into usable words.

Her prescription for people who deal with the hard of hearing: Speak slowly and distinctly. If you have to repeat something, use different words. Face the person you are speaking to. As the population ages, those with age-related loss increases.

Ms. Bouton points out that natural hearing includes the ability to pick out a voice or sound from a multitude, even to know the direction from which it is coming. That is lost among those with hearing loss; hearing aids still fail to sort out voices and directions.

Unlike Ms. Bouton’s loss, the most common cause of hearing loss, she tells us, is noise—noise in sports stadiums and arenas, restaurants, concerts, both rock and symphonic, but also, she notes, public address systems, television in doctors’ offices, traffic.

Cochlear implants (electronic devices which provide a sense of sound) are not the full answer. When it comes to music, “People with implants can generally hear rhythm but very few can hear pitch.” Vowel sounds give her difficulty: “Bit or bet; prim or prom; life, left, loft, laughed. They’re all one to me.”

Hearing aid costs are roadblocks for many. A set of aids can run $6,000 and very few users report that they are satisfied. The price tag and reports from friends and relatives of unsatisfactory results also keep many from acquiring hearing aids.

Lip-reading is only part of the answer. The trick to lip-reading is to know the context of the conversation. She turns to journalist Henry Kisor, who has been deaf since he was three years old. He notes that m, p, and b all look alike, as do t, d, n, and l.

Words using those letters include bat, bad, ban, mat mad, man, pat, pad and pan. “Combine that with low-frequency hearing loss where the vowel sounds fail, and they all sound alike.”

Her final example: “’When are we eating?’ my husband says. ‘Chicken,’ I answer.”

Jules Wagman has age-related and genetic hearing loss, worse in the right ear than left. He wears hearing aids and doesn’t like them.

©2014 by Jules L. Wagman

Foreign Correspondent: A Memoir

By H.D.S. Greenway. Simon & Schuster, 272 pages, $26.

Reviewed by Jules Wagman

They say money goes from rags to riches to rags in three generations. The first generation makes it, the second enjoys it and the third blows it all. Things worked out differently for foreign correspondent H.D.S. Greenway.

An accomplished writer and first-class reporter, Greenway had the additional advantage of starting out with big family connections behind him. His mother’s great-grandfather was president of the Pennsylvania Railroad; his father’s grandfather, a first cousin to Andrew Carnegie.

Greenway last visited Vietnam in 2000. He said he was surprised by the lack of bitterness.

Their wealth “provided the resources that have sheltered the two families from the worst of financial vicissitudes ever since.”

After Yale and a tour in the Navy via ROTC, he married, applied to Oxford University and set sail with his bride. They summered on the French Riviera before he matriculated.

As a lark, he became campus correspondent for Time Magazine. Editor Henry Luce made him a trainee after reading his story in Sports Illustrated about the rising price of wolf urine. Oxonians who held drag hunts were upset, “a drag being a bag soaked with wolf’s urine pulled by a horse over a predetermined course.”

That was typical of Luce. My own mentor, Theodore White (The Making of the President…) told me Luce hired him when they met at an American Embassy New Year’s Eve party in Chunking in 1940.

In those days Time didn’t use bylines. Reporters filed their stories and editors rewrote their work to fit. They also, on occasion, rewrote it to fit Luce’s directives and notions. White, while advising me on my own journalistic dreams in 1947, said one reason he left Time was because his stories were being turned on their heads.

Greenway reported from Washington during the Kennedy years: “I could appreciate what a commanding physical presence he had. President Clinton had the same ability to dominate a room just by walking into it.”

He asked for a Saigon posting in 1967. A foreign correspondent then was much different from World War II. Time-Life flew Greenway’s wife and children to Hong Kong where they lived while he covered Vietnam and periodically visited with them.

He credits an American diplomat in Hong Kong with bringing China’s Deng Xiaoping to his attention in 1967. Deng’s statements then differed markedly from Mao Tse-tung’s. Greenway called them among “the most important pronouncements of the century.”

But it wasn’t all fun and games. “Vietnam was a helicopter war like none other before, and maybe since. Certainly reporters covering Iraq and Afghanistan never had the ‘lift’ at their disposal to get around the country as we did in Vietnam.”

Survival trick: “You didn’t walk too close to the guy carrying the radio because its bulky shape and long antenna were targets for Vietcong snipers hoping to black out communications.” He suffered a leg wound in Hue during Tet in 1968. He was awarded a medal for aiding a wounded Marine.

In 1972, Greenway joined The Washington Post to return to Asia. He was on one of the last helicopters leaving Saigon when it fell to North Vietnam in 1975. He last visited Vietnam in 2000 and was “surprised by the lack of bitterness.”

In addition to Time-Life and The Washington Post, Greenway reported for The Boston Globe and Global Post. He has also written for influential magazines and periodicals.

A graceful writer and raconteur, his raft of stories, comments and descriptions will keep any cocktail party going indefinitely.

Jules Wagman has been reviewing books since 1966.

©2014 by Jules  L. Wagman

The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It

By John W. Dean, Viking, 746 pages, $35.

Reviewed by Jules Wagman

To mark the 40th anniversary of the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon, John W. Dean, counsel to Nixon and author of Blind Ambition, which describes his own role in Watergate, thought he ought to write another Watergate book.

He ought to have thought twice about that.

Dean’s book may be worthwhile to a new generation unfamiliar with Watergate.

Dean went to the infamous Nixon tapes and uses them to fashion the story of the Watergate break-in on June 17, 1972 and subsequent events, culminating in the downfall of the Nixon presidency and his resignation on Aug. 9, 1974.

The tapes provide practically all of the narrative and Dean adds only bare-bones connective sentences, except for the portion that comes after the taping system was uncovered. The result is that the book is a monochrome, the operative tone being dull. I never thought I would find the Nixon tapes dull.

There is an entire library of titles which deal with every aspect of Watergate, leaving nothing of real importance for Dean to put into this book.

Perhaps I’m the problem. During the 1970s I was one of two book reviewers at The Cleveland (Ohio) Press who read practically everything published on Watergate. I also interviewed many of the guilty as they came through Cleveland, flogging their mea culpa books.

Those interviews included Chuck Colson, John Ehrlichman, Dean himself and other miscreants whose names escape me. Also on a publicity tour was Judge John Sirica, who held the burglars’ feet to the fire until one of them broke.

In 1979, I asked Judge Sirica how, if a judge is supposed to be impartial, he could pressure the Watergate defendants into talking. He replied that the court always seeks justice and he felt justice had been denied in the trial. He offered leniency in sentencing to those who would talk. James W. McCord sent a letter to Sirica describing perjury and cover-up. That blew up the Watergate scandal and the rush downhill to resignation set in for Nixon.

The tapes reveal that Nixon regularly declares that he was not involved in the break-in. There are also unexpected expletives by Nixon and others which dot Dean’s manuscript. When I first learned of them in 1974, I confess that I was shocked that public officials were using such language in the Oval Office, a place I revered. Silly me!

Colson went to jail where he found religion and wrote Born Again. When I interviewed him after his book was published in 1976, I asked how he could use such language in the Oval Office. Nixon’s former hatchet man shrugged and offered a weak grin. I had trouble believing his profession of faith.

Dean’s book has provided one worthwhile thing. His footnotes frequently mark passages from the tapes that have not previously seen the light of day. And so, my best advice is to read the footnotes first, the relevant passages second and then tackle the rest of the book.

Jules Wagman has been reviewing books since 1966.

©2014 by Jules L.  Wagman

The Second Amendment: A Biography

By Michael Waldman. Simon & Schuster, 224 pages, $24.

Reviewed by Jules  Wagman

In writing a concise history of the Second Amendment, Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, attempts to show that the Supreme Court was wrong in 2008 when it struck down the District of Columbia’s strict gun control law.

Waldman’s point, iterated and reiterated, is that the Second Amendment’s opening clause, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state,” limits the right to bear arms.

The first portion of Waldman’s book sifts through the colonial roots of militias and is worth studying.

The trouble with Waldman’s view is that the Supreme Court, by a 5-4 decision, held that the amendment’s operative language is at its end in “the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” Author of the majority opinion was Associate Justice Antonin Scalia and “It remains Scalia’s most important majority opinion.”

Under the legal and political system of our country, what the Supreme Court says the law means is what counts. That has been the law of the land since 1803 when Chief Justice John Marshall claimed ultimate supremacy for Supreme Court decisions.

Scalia’s opinion says in part, “Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited…[C]ourts routinely explained that the right was not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose…[N]othing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government  buildings…”

In the main, Waldman stays on an even keel, giving both sides careful attention. But he falls off the wagon discussing Heller, the case in which the Court struck down the D.C. gun law. “After all, the Framers added the Second Amendment to the Constitution not because they solemnly believed it necessary, but as…a concession to popular discontent.”

To back up his argument, Waldman quotes conservative federal appeals court Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III: “After decades of criticizing activist judges for this or that defalcation, conservatives have now committed many of the same sins.”

Wilkinson adds, “The Constitution’s text has as little to say about restrictions on firearm ownership by felons as it does about the trimesters of pregnancy”, the medical methodology used by Justice Harry Blackmun in the landmark abortion rights case Roe v. Wade.

Waldman scoffs at Scalia’s “originalism” as being a false doctrine and quotes Scalia from an article he published two years after joining the Court. Scalia, Waldman declares, called himself a “faint-hearted originalist” who characterizes originalism as “the lesser evil.”

Waldman calls Scalia’s Heller opinion “emphatically an opinion focused on a closely parsed text.” He writes that Scalia ignores the prefatory clause which was “so important to the Framers.” Instead, “Scalia simply lopped off the first half of the amendment” as does the National Rifle Association in emblazoning the amendment on the walls of the NRA headquarters lobby.

Later, Waldman writes, “Scalia shrank from writing solely based on the original intent of the Framers.” And, ”Even in these writings, Scalia never quite got around to explaining why the original intent of the Framers was the guidepost to follow.”

Waldman’s study won’t change anyone’s mind, but the first portion of his book, which sifts through the colonial roots of militias is worth studying.

Jules Wagman has been reviewing books since 1966.

©2014 by Jules L. Wagman

 

Independence: The Tangled Roots of the American Revolution

ByThomas P. Slaughter. Hill and Wang, 487 pages, $35

As if there hadn’t been enough written about the American Revolution, history professor Thomas P. Slaughter (University of Rochester) looks things over and finds “tangled roots” going back to the first settlers in the early 17th century.

Prof. Slaughter points out that the settlers came here for different reasons. Puritans sought their version of religious orthodoxy. Patrician Virginians wanted to create an American landed gentry. Pennsylvania brought Quakers, Maryland favored Roman Catholics, New York started out Dutch, and South Carolina established plantations run with slave labor.

Slaughter finds connections between the American colonies and India.

What he doesn’t mention is the fact that, except for the slaves,  all were infected with a sense of adventure and daring that those they left behind did not have. What he does describe is the feeling of independence the colonists developed by striking out to tame the wilds of America.

Slaughter finds connections between the American colonies and India. He writes, “On June 23, 1757, the American Revolution also commenced on the other side of the world” in a place that American colonists, including George Washington, never heard of.

That was Plassey in rural Bengal where the British defeated the French, forcing them to begin withdrawing from India. He adds, “Plassey, along with victories in North America in 1759, helped to transform Britain’s imperial ambitions and, in short order, to bring further conflicts to the colonists in the New World.”

The British defeated the French in the battle of Quebec in 1759, driving them out of Canada. That freed the colonies from French threats along the frontier and increased pressure by settlers to cross the Appalachians and open territories as far as the Mississippi River.

But Britain’s victories had come at a huge cost and, Slaughter writes, Parliament sought to pay its bills by shifting some of the burden onto the North American colonies. The colonists, grown accustomed to smuggling and to  paying low or no royal taxes for more than 100 years, objected—strenuously.

The Stamp Act, levying a tax on virtually all transactions and legal documents, was defied to the point of tarring and feathering the king’s collectors. Parliament eventually repealed the measure, but the war debt remained.

Additionally, the pressure to open the West required more troops, but the colonists, with no representation in Parliament, refused to pay the taxes to support them. There followed the Boston Tea Party, from which there are echoes even today.

After the end of the French and Indian War in 1763, the colonists were still declaring their love for King and Mother Country. Their one caveat was that their needs were not being considered by Parliament. In London, the government believed the Americans were pulling away from the Crown.

Things went from bad to worse—for the British—until events climaxed at the Battle of Concord and Lexington. Even then many Tories clung to the Crown. It was not until the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, that the die was finally cast.

Slaughter’s tangled roots thesis might hold true for the first 100 years of English settlement in North America, but roots have a way of coming together to feed a single trunk, which resulted in the United States of America.

Jules Wagman has been reviewing books since 1966 and grew up not far from Concord and Lexington.

©2014 by Jules L. Wagman

 

Give Me a Fast Ship: The Continental Navy and America’s Revolution at Sea

By Tim McGrath. NAL Caliber, 532 pages, $26.95.

Reviewed by Jules Wagman

For the nautically inclined, here’s a book that‘s fun!

Give Me a Fast Ship is less a history of the birth of the U.S. Navy at the outbreak of the Revolution than it is a rousing collection of tales describing battles against the British, the Continental Congress, and amongst rival captains.

Philadelphia author Tim McGrath is a storyteller writ large, putting together in (occasionally) nautical language the origins of the Navy, how it struggled against costs the Continental Congress could not meet, as well as losses to the British which could not be replaced.

Philadelphia was the capital of the infant nation, its biggest city and its financial center. Philadelphian Robert Morris, who headed Congress’s Marine Committee, provided one of his ships, the Black Prince, as the Navy’s first ship, renamed the Alfred.

McGrath relates the cruises of most of the original captains along with their jockeying for a good ship and choice assignments that is always attendant upon such endeavors.

John Paul Jones (of “I have not yet begun to fight” fame) gets his due, though it turns out that he is not as accomplished as several other captains, aside from being something of a scoundrel (murder). It was Jones’s luck to parlay his aggressiveness into a victory in 1779 over the British frigate Serapis in full view of terrified Yorkshire residents on shore.

Jones acquired his ship, Bonhomme Richard, through Benjamin Franklin, who represented the U.S. in Paris. Jones named the ship, a converted East Indiaman, in honor of Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac.

Jones’s battle was part of his second cruise around Great Britain, during which he  terrorized the inhabitants and seizied ships and cargoes as prizes. After the battle, the Continental Congress had no funds to pay him or his crew. Discouraged, Jones went to Russia where he became an admiral in Catherine the Great’s navy.

He died in France in 1792. During Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency, his body was exhumed and brought to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., where it was eventually entombed in the Academy chapel in 1913.

McGrath also devotes considerable space to John Barry. As the first commissioned officer of the U.S. Navy, he commanded the brig Lexington in the first battle between American and British ships, defeating the British tender Edward.

Barry also fought on shore with George Washington at Trenton and Princeton in 1776 and 1777. As the Revolutionary War ended, he was commodore aboard the USS Alliance. He fought and won the war’s last battle between American and British ships in March 1783, off Cape Canaveral, Fla.

Naval warfare in the days of sail was a matter of chase as well and cat-and-mouse in an effort to “cross the T” and smash the enemy with a broadside, leaving him able to respond by firing only his bow or stern guns. A major cause of wounds among sailors were splinters sent flying by cannon balls smashing wood decks, masts, spars and bulkheads. Sharpshooters high up on platforms surrounding the masts fired down onto enemy decks.

Muzzle-loaded cannon and muskets meant there was down time between volleys and shots. Training concentrated on shortening that time. At the start of the Revolution, the Americans were not very speedy and suffered accordingly.

McGrath explains the details of 18th century navies with a deft pen and a decidedly nautical viewpoint. This is a delight to read.

Jules Wagman has been reviewing books since 1966.

©2014 by Jules L. Wagman