Tag: Civil War

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West Virginia

In West Virginia we’re staying at Elk Springs Resort & Fly Shop on the Elk River to fish for trout, non-native brown and rainbows most likely.  When I called to book, I asked the reservations lady how far it was from the lodge to Washington D.C. .  She didn’t know.  However far it is, I suspect in some ways it’s further.

Virginia and Maryland share a lot of things, but most of all they share geography. Because of a compromise over the national bank that put the nation’s capitol in the South, they share Washington D.C.. On the east they share the Chesapeake Bay. Coastal Tidelands in each state rise from the Chesapeake and both states turn into a fertile Piedmont region above a fall line.  On the west of both are the Allegheny Mountains, which are part of the Appalachian Mountains.

Interestingly, the Appalachians were named by a Texan, Cabeza de Vaca. Not really, but they were named apparently by de Vaca’s Narvaez expedition.

The Southern Appalachians, the mountains of West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina, are what I think of culturally as Appalachia, but who knows?  Appalachia may stretch from New York to Georgia. I used to think of the area as isolated, violent, poor, and uneducated, with clan feuds and moonshining. Now I can throw in opioids, meth, and Trump voters.

Some of that stereotyping is fair, too. West Virginia, in the heart of Appalachia, became the bellwether state for articles on why white working class voters were voting for President Trump. And they did in West Virginia, by 67.9 percent to 26.2 percent. My guess is they voted for President Trump because they knew Mrs. Clinton thought them a basket of deplorables.

West Virginia had the highest rate of opioid deaths in the U.S. in 2016, at 43.4 deaths per 100,000. Actually, at 75.4 years, West Virginia has the lowest life expectancy of any state except Mississippi.  The only measured category of death where West Virginia isn’t running with the front of the pack is Alzheimers, one supposes because people don’t live long enough to die of Alzheimers. You want to die by accident? Move to West Virginia. You want to die by suicide or gunshot or meth or black lung? Move to West Virginia. Your chances are usually right up there at the top.

Here’s the oddest thing about West Virginia: it’s 93.6 percent white. If someone told me that a state was 93.6 percent white, I’d assume we were talking about Idaho or Utah. Virginia is 68 percent white, 19 percent black.  Maryland is 58 percent white, 29 percent black. West Virginia is 93.6 percent white. That’s a lot of white folk.

Settlement by whites was pretty thorough, but it didn’t really kick off until the mid-18th century.  The French and Indian War was fought in part over the Ohio Valley, which stretches from Pennsylvania down to Kentucky, with West Virginia at its heart. After the release of claims by the Iroquois and Cherokee (surely absent violence), settlers started in. Ok, they started earlier, but they started in now with England’s blessing.  First were Germans, and lots of Scots via Ulster, the Scotch-Irish.

From early on, West Virginia was different from the rest of Virginia.  It was subsistence living that didn’t support slaves, at least until coal mining.

Louis Hine, 1911

During the Civil War there were two areas in the seceding states that were strongly pro-Union, Western Virginia and Eastern Tennessee.  It was Lincoln’s dream that Eastern Tennessee would separate from the Confederacy, but it never did.  West Virginia did. On Amazon you can still find books about why the separation of West Virginia from Virginia was unlawful and unconstitutional.  Get over it.

Coal was the 18th century’s oil. It was the rural industry that turned us into a modern nation. It was and is a bloody, dangerous, unforgiving industry. Coal gave us some of the most violent labor disputes in the nation’s history: think machine guns mounted on train cars and fired into union strikers. Over 150 years coal gave us Mother Jones, strip mining and mountain-top removal and other ecological destruction, mine deaths, and a purchased West Virginia supreme court. it’s all Hatfields and McCoys, one way or the other. It’s always The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia, but sometimes at the corporate level.

Hills and hollers. It’s beautiful, a friend said. People use words like hollers when they talk about West Virginia.

When I put together my playlist of songs for West Virginia, it wasn’t very long. There was one person who I greatly admire but didn’t expect, Bill Withers, and there was lots of Mountain Music. And of course there was that John Denver theme: take me home.  It’s the most common theme of West Virginia songs: “My Home Among the Hills,” “West Virginia My Home,” “I Wanna Go Back to West Virginia,” “Green Rolling Hills.”  In our minds we love West Virginia. In our minds West Virginia is the idyllic wildness we yearn for.

I also put Appalachian Spring on the play list, and Mark O’Connor’s brilliant Appalachia Waltz.  O’Connor is from Seattle, and of course Copland was a Jewish kid from Brooklyn.  We all have our notions about Appalachia. Take me home.

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I did finally get a decent photo of a bluegill, a tiny thing that hit a tiny yellow popper and as is their want hit it hard enough to take in the whole thing.  Lepomis machrochyrus. I originally misidentified the fish because it didn’t look like the pictures of a bluegill on the Texas Parks and Wildlife website, and maybe my fish is something entirely different.  Sunfish are wanton little devils, spawning from May to August, and apparently they hybridize readily among species.  This one has the wrong color fins and the colors generally seem off. It’s just as likely that this fish is the product of some unfortunate parental liaison between two breeds of sunfish.

I caught a nice bass on the same tiny fly,  next to the grass in a pond backwater.

 

 

 

 

 

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Maryland

Steven Johnson, Wikimedia Commons

I suspect that Maryland has always felt the curse of being so close to Virginia, both in geography and demeanor, but always coming off as a bit the lesser. It got started  later, 1630 instead of 1607. It wasn’t quite as English, being a haven for Huguenots and Catholics and other non-Anglicans. For us outsiders looking in it feels more foreign, less so than Louisiana but still, foreign. Baltimore ain’t an Anglo Saxon sort of word. It was settled by more tradesmen and fewer gentlemen. It was more urban, with Baltimore the major Southern City in the 18th Century. Even it’s most famous corpse, Edgar Allan Poe, was raised in Virginia. Virginia produced George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, Zachary Taylor, and Woodrow Wilson. Maryland produced Spiro T. Agnew.

Virginia shows up in the state song, Maryland My Maryland:

Dear Mother! burst the tyrant’s chain,

Maryland!
Virginia should not call in vain,
Maryland!

What Maryland seems to have done in the modern world better than just about anybody is produce slightly quirky but immensely influential musicians (and also John Waters, who fits right in): Cab Calloway, Billie Holiday, Eubie Blake, Frank Zappa, Phillip Glass. I really like Phillip Glass. I really like Phillip Glass. I really like Phillip Glass. I really like Mr. Glass.

Sorry.

Maryland, with +6 million residents and about 12,400 square miles, ranks sixth among states in population density. Modern Maryland is an urban state. Modern Marylanders do not identify as Southern, but historically Maryland was a slave state, with 87,000 slaves in 1860. Had Lincoln not suspended habeas corpus, declared martial law, and arrested the Confederate sympathizers in the Maryland Assembly, Maryland would likely have seceded. Not that there’s anything wrong with Mr. Lincoln, notwithstanding the Supreme Court ruling against him on the whole habeas thing. About a third of Maryland volunteers in the Civil War fought for the Confederacy. Of course the other two-thirds fought for the Union.

Again, Maryland My Maryland: 

She is not dead, nor deaf, nor dumb-
Huzza! she spurns the Northern scum!
She breathes! she burns! she’ll come! she’ll come!
Maryland! My Maryland!

So Maryland, like Missouri, Kentucky, and Delaware–the other slave states that didn’t secede–was a bit on the cusp. It had always been different than its Southern neighbor. It had 87,000 slaves in 1860, but it also had 84,000 free blacks. However, if you asked Frederick Douglass, another Maryland famous son, whether Maryland was North or South, I’m pretty sure Mr. Douglass would say South, no question. It was in Maryland that Douglass was enslaved. It was from Maryland that Douglass escaped.

What Maryland is now is tougher to say. There are the D.C. bedroom communities: relatively wealthy, educated, urban. There’s agriculture, and there’s the Chesapeake Bay. There’s Baltimore, a city built to hold tens of thousands of stevedores but now coping with container shipping. It takes a lot fewer people to operate a crane. In 2017, Baltimore had the highest per capita murder rate of any city in the nation.

Notwithstanding its troubles, Baltimore is a fun city. Camden Yards is great, and the Astros won when I saw them there. I also had two great dinners in Baltimore, at a classic restaurant, Charleston, and an edgier place, Woodberry Kitchen. I’ve eaten the crab cakes while drinking local beer. We also had some good hipster donuts. If Brooklyn were in the South, it would be Baltimore. And in Maryland, on the Chesapeake, we’ll fish for stripers. I’ve never caught a striper. Don’t get your hopes up.

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Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia

 

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So far Florida and Louisiana have been pretty interesting, but a bust when it comes to fishing.  But our son Andy finishes his masters in May in Washington D.C., and we’ll hit graduation and three states, Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia.

We were in Maryland last year to watch the Astros play the Orioles and poke around Baltimore.  Astros won, and we fished a lovely little tailwater below the Baltimore water supply called the Gunpowder, which is the best river name ever.  We both caught small rainbows, didn’t take any pictures, and liked Baltimore well enough.  This time though we’re fishing the Chesapeake near Annapolis for whatever saltwater stuff happens to be going on in mid-May.

I’ve been to Virginia twice, once to interview students at the University of Virginia–who sticks a university in such a hard place to get to?–and once to have Thanksgiving in Jamestown.  I had all sorts of ancestors in Jamestown and thereabouts 400 odd years ago, and it seemed right to go see it.  We stayed on the Chesapeake but didn’t fish, but this time we’ll go inland. We’ll try for trout I think.

I’ve never been to West Virginia, and only know that it split from Virginia during the Civil War, and is famous for coal miners and voters for President Trump and John Brown’s raid.

Meanwhile our skiff’s still in the shop and I’ve been fishing a lot for bass and sunfish.  Kris birdwatches every day on the Coast: it’s the annual warbler migration.  I can’t manage a decent picture of sunfish because the little devils flop and flip, but Kris has taken some great photos of warblers.  They’ll have to do.  She could even tell you what kind of warblers they are.

And she did.  The first is a Baltimore Oriole, the second is a Summer Tanager, the third a thrush of some sort, or a thrasher, and the final an Indigo Bunting.  But they all come with the warblers.  I’ve heard the warblers migrate from the Yucatan across the Gulf of Mexico–800 miles?–where they fall into Galveston, rest a bit (and by a bit I mean hours) then take off for further north. Some will migrate as far as Alaska.  If you’ve ever seen the movie The Big Year where all the birdwatchers show up in Ohio? They’re there for the warbler fall. Paparazzi.

In addition to birds, in our photo files we also have thousands of interesting photos of sticks and leaves.

Autofocus and burst photography has its downside.

 

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Four New Orleans’ Statues: Battle of Liberty Place Monument

Dorothea Lange, Farm Security Administration, LC-USF34- 009389-E [P&P] LOT 1680, July 1936, New Orleans

Getting ready for our quick trip to New Orleans, sometimes I read about Louisiana and wonder what the hell were those people thinking.  Sometimes I think they’re just like the rest of us only more so.  Unfortunately with the Battle of Liberty Place and its monument I’m pretty sure I know what they were thinking, and I’m pretty sure they’re like the rest of us at our worst.

Early in the Civil War New Orleans was a Union target, and Union forces captured the city in April 1862. It remained occupied by federal troops until April 1877, the end of Reconstruction. Before they were dismantled by the Supreme Court, Congress enacted a series of forward-looking civil rights laws to protect and enfranchise former slaves, but after Grant’s presidency, the country’s leadership was too tired or indifferent or hostile to be bothered, and violence to control race relations became a marker of the Post-Reconstruction South. Louisiana did its part.

The Battle of Liberty Place wasn’t the only Louisiana violence (and Louisiana wasn’t the only location where violence became commonplace). In 1866, at the Republican Party Convention in New Orleans, police fired into the crowd killing 34 blacks and 3 whites. In 1868 in Opelousas, St. Landry Parish, an unknown number of blacks were killed after a confrontation between black Republicans and members of the Knights of the White Camelia. In 1873, in Colfax in Grant Parish on an Easter Sunday approximately 150 black men were murdered by white Democrats in the worst instance of racial violence during Reconstruction. Racial violence didn’t end with Reconstruction. Louis Armstrong remembered hiding in his home as a child because white gangs roamed black neighborhoods after the black boxer Jack Johnson defeated the white boxer Jim Jeffries in 1910. In 1900, Robert Charles murdered a white policeman, and then shot an additional 27 whites, with seven deaths. The resulting white riots resulted in 28 deaths and more than 50 casualties, mostly among blacks.

The Liberty Square riot saw 8,400 members of the Democratic White League attacking approximately 4,000 mainly white Metropolitan Police and mainly black state militia (commanded by former Confederate General James Longstreet who was shot trying to stop the riot) over, more or less, a disputed gubernatorial election between Democrat John McEnery (supported by the White League) and Republican William Pitt Kellogg. Eleven police and militia and 21 members of the White League were killed. After three days federal troops arrived and quelled the riot, but it signaled the end of Reconstruction.

Wikimedia Commons, Battle of Liberty Place, Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 1874

When it comes to Louisiana race violence, two numbers are particularly telling. Largely as a result of violations of racial . . . etiquette, whites lynched 335 blacks between the end of Reconstruction and 1968 (though most lynchings occurred before 1940). Texas had more by the way, 352, and neither state could hold a candle to Georgia, 492, or Mississippi, 539. Lynchings didn’t result in the prosecution of the instigators. At the same time, the number of African American voters declined from a bit more than half of the state’s registered voters in 1880, 88,024 voters out of 173,475, to 1,342 in 1904. The decline was caused largely through laws restricting the rights of African Americans to vote and out-and-out violence. How can anyone wonder why African Americans still see voter ID laws as racist, or that the apparently institutional police violence that spawned Black Lives Matters resonates still? The Civil War was our most violent moment, and we still carry around that violence.

Wikimedia Commons, Michael Begley, Battle of Liberty Place Monument

The Battle of Liberty Place Monument was erected in 1891 by the New Orleans city government. It was removed in 2017. In 1974, the New Orleans City government erected an adjacent marker that stated “Although the ‘battle of Liberty Place’ and this monument are important parts of the New Orleans history, the sentiments in favor of white supremacy expressed thereon are contrary to the philosophy and beliefs of present-day New Orleans.” I like that. I like that New Orleans realized that there was a problem with the Battle of Liberty Place Monument 40-odd years ago.

The world changes, and I think, other than the whole global warming thing and fake news, it’s mostly a better place. Last Saturday Kris and I drove down to Freeport and walked the jetty. We were the only folk carrying fly rods, but since it’s hard to cast off a jetty in high wind they were mostly useless. After 20 or 30 casts I didn’t lose a fly in the jetty granite, but I didn’t catch anything either.  On the other hand it’s a terrific walk through a diverse and lively America. And the Liberty Place monument is gone.

Meanwhile we found a great breakfast taco stand in Angleton, Taco Loco #2.

I don’t know where Taco Loco #1 is located.  We also found a good bakery in Angleton, the Paris Texas Bakery, on the way back to Houston, almost directly across the street from Taco Loco.  The staff was well prepared for Easter.