Logistics Win Wars
I continue to slowly make my way through a book about the Mexican-American war, and looking at how it was so impactful on the American Civil war. It shares the stories of Robert E. Lee, Ulysses Grant, Tecumseh Sherman, Jefferson Davis, and a few others, by sharing their stories from the Mexican-American war. It's a very interesting look at what was the first war fought by the US Military other than England, or the native tribes, etc.
One thing that really struck me is that both Lee and Grant held logistics roles during their time serving in the Mexican-American war. Lee was the Inspector General for the unit under one of the Generals, and Grant was quartermaster.
I'm far from a war historian, but it's no secret that wars are won and lost largely due to their ability to fund, fuel, and feed their armies. And to have the two main Generals from the Civil War shown in such clear comparison, knowing what comes in their future just is very interesting to me.
As for the book, we've reached the point where I am speed skimming rather than forcing myself to read in-depth. The reality is, I don't want to know the details of the urban warfare as the US Military took control of Monterrey, etc. So I'm hoping to finish the book soon so I can move on to something new.
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Inflation during the US Civil War
I am currently reading The Shortest History of Economics by Andrew Leigh. During its section about the Industrial Revolution, it touches on the industrialization of war by discussing the US Civil War. I found the below passage fascinating as the inflation during the war was not something I'd ever heard about before.
During the course of the Civil War, the South funded 60 percent of its costs through inflation (compared with 13 percent for the north). By the end of the war, the South was printing so much money that goods cost ninety-two times as much as they had done when the conflict began.
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Decoration Day - The first Memorial Day
Back in 1996, David Blight, a professor of American History at Yale University, was researching a book on the Civil War when he had one of those once-in-a-career eureka moments. A curator at Harvard's Houghton Library asked if he wanted to look through two boxes of unsorted material from Union veterans.
"There was a file labeled 'First Decoration Day,'" remembers Blight, still amazed at his good fortune. "And inside on a piece of cardboard was a narrative handwritten by an old veteran, plus a date referencing an article in The New York Tribune. That narrative told the essence of the story that I ended up telling in my book, of this march on the race track in 1865."
The race track in question was the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club in Charleston, South Carolina. In the late stages of the Civil War, the Confederate army transformed the formerly posh country club into a makeshift prison for Union captives. More than 260 Union soldiers died from disease and exposure while being held in the race track's open-air infield. Their bodies were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstands.
[...]
And then on May 1, 1865, something even more extraordinary happened. According to two reports that Blight found in The New York Tribune and The Charleston Courier, a crowd of 10,000 people, mostly freed slaves with some white missionaries, staged a parade around the race track. Three thousand Black schoolchildren carried bouquets of flowers and sang “John Brown’s Body.” Members of the famed 54th Massachusetts and other Black Union regiments were in attendance and performed double-time marches. Black ministers recited verses from the Bible.
If the news reports are accurate, the 1865 gathering at the Charleston race track would be the earliest Memorial Day commemoration on record.
The article goes on to highlight that he couldn't find any corroboration from other groups, but then later he gave a talk and had a woman come forward. The article explained there was an event,
After his book Race and Reunion was published in 2001, Blight gave a talk about Memorial Day at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, and after it was finished, an older Black woman approached him.
"You mean that story is true?" the woman asked Blight. "I grew up in Charleston, and my granddaddy used to tell us this story of a parade at the old race track, and we never knew whether to believe him or not. You mean that's true?"
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The South's submarine, the Hunley, sunk one Union ship and then sunk, lost for over 100 years
It was recovered in 1995 and has been turned into a museum/tourist exhibit. Fascinating stuff.
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