Today In History: Robert E. Lee Appointed Commander-In-Chief Of The Confederate Forces

From Rebellion:

3:03 PM (9 hours ago)This day in historyfrom feed/http://www.dixienet.org/rebellion/atom.xml by Old RebelIn 1865, Robert E. Lee was appointed commander-in-chief of the Confederate forces.

South Carolina's Palmetto Flag Is 150 Years Old today

From Third Palmetto Republic:

South Carolina flag is 150 years old todayfrom Third Palmetto Republic by MichaelTweetBrian Hicks writes for the HaroldOnline about the anniversary of the adoption of South Carolina’s flag, which now for a century and a half has been a symbol of defiance to tyranny and outside rule:




Robert Barnwell Rhett Jr. believed the South Carolina flag should be simple, elegant, perhaps even majestic.



But the banner emerging from legislative compromise carried none of those traits.



It was January 1861, in the weeks between the state’s decision to secede from the Union and the emergence of the Southern Confederacy, and South Carolina needed a national flag. A committee of legislators had been appointed to come up with the design and, on Jan. 21, 1861, the panel presented a proposal that “the National Flag or Ensign of South Carolina shall be white, with a green palmetto tree upright thereon; and the union blue, with a white increscent.”



Over the course of a week, one senator would suggest that instead, the state adopt a red flag sporting a green palmetto with a brown trunk.



Rhett – a House member, son of secessionist Robert Barnwell Rhett, and editor of the Charleston Mercury – used his newspaper to argue against “the calico appearance” of the Senate’s proposed flag. He renewed calls for his design, presented a week earlier, that called for the flag to be “blue, with a white palmetto tree upright thereon, and a white crescent in the upper corner.”



On Jan. 28, 1861, the General Assembly fell in line behind the newspaper editor, and South Carolina had its flag. With minor changes, the flag has represented the state ever since.



Today, 150 years later, the state celebrates the first South Carolina Flag Day. Last May, the Legislature approved a joint resolution establishing the day at the request of the South Carolina Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.



“Our flag has a rich and fascinating history dating back to the American Revolution and, while adopted after secession, it has continued to be a prominent icon of our state’s heritage and history,” said Mark Simpson, division commander for the state Sons of Confederate Veterans.




“It is a symbol of unity and one that all can equally embrace.”



Fort Moultrie will host a program to honor the flag and the holiday this afternoon. Organizers said it was the logical choice for such an event, since much of the flag’s symbolism can be traced to the fort.



The crescent commemorated those worn on the uniform caps of the Second South Carolina Regiment during the Revolution. The palmetto symbolized the palmetto logs used to build the first Fort Moultrie, which repelled British cannon fire in June 1776, one of the early battles of that war.



For years, South Carolinians have argued about the crescent in the corner of the flag: moon or a gorget? A gorget is a piece of armor shaped like a collar designed to protect the throat.



Rick Hatcher, National Park Service historian at Fort Moultrie, said he can see both arguments, but William Moultrie gets the final say.



“In Moultrie’s memoirs, he calls it a crescent,” Hatcher said. “When the commander of the regiment says he put a crescent on it, that settles it.”



Part of the confusion about the flag’s crescent can be traced to the early years of the 20th century. Originally, the tips of the crescent pointed upward. Eric Emerson, director of the S.C. Department of Archives and History, said that in 1910, Alexander Samuel Salley Jr., secretary of the state’s Historical Commission, angled the crescent, apparently on his own authority.



Emerson will talk about the evolution of the state flag at the Fort Moultrie program at 2:30 p.m. today, along with state Sens. Chip Campsen and Danny Verdin, sponsors of the legislation. Fort Moultrie admission will be free today.

The Sesquicentennial: Why?

From The Ohio Republic:
(In response to the article that follows)

Monday, January 24, 2011The Sesquicentennial: WHY?


Not surprisingly, the 150th anniversary of the war that continues to tear this country asunder is being debated. On the one hand, unionist and "politically correct" historians like Mark Potok at the Southern Poverty Law Center (as reported in the BrightonPittsford [New York] Post) are stressing the war's purpose as the abolition of slavery; while "revisionist" historians like Thomas Woods and Thomas DiLorenzo, are stressing other causes, such as the desire for financial hegemony by New York bankers (a desire quite fulfilled by now, by the way), and a desire to turn the South into a colony to their interests (also largely achieved, but unraveling).



Mr. Potok writes:



Freeing the slaves may not have been Lincoln's original intent, but it became a major aim of the war, as any serious student of Civil War history knows. And the right to own slaves was, most certainly, the primary reason the Southern states seceded from the Union.



Nice, neat, simple, and not quite right. I can agree that freeing the slaves became a major aim of the war, but it was not the major aim of the war. And any serious student of what is inaccurately called the "Civil War" * knows from the history of the preceding forty years, the issues were far more complex than just maintaining what one historian has called the "Peculiar Institution."



It is one thing to say that commemorations of Confederate history attract racists. They undoubtedly do. But it is quite another, and very inaccurate, to say that everyone who wishes to commemorate Confederate history is a racist. After all, the South was invaded. Many poor and middle class people (including my great-great-grandfather in Virginia) saw families broken and impoverished, and homes destroyed, by a Union Army practicing the most horrible forms of destruction known up to that time. And Mr. Potok's analysis certainly does not account for the African-Americans who gave their blood to the Confederate cause, as Champion of Liberty H. K. Edgerton reminds us.



It also fails to account for the Peace Democrats ("Copperheads") in New York City and the Midwest who too often were just as racist as the Southerners at whom Mr. Potok points his finger; but who clearly saw that "Lincoln's War" would begin the systematic destruction of the Constitutional order that continues to this day.



The truth is, the war arose from all of these causes; plus the absolute unwillingness by Lincoln and the Northern financiers to arrive at the kind of reasonable compromises that peacefully ended slavery in Britain, France, and Brazil. There were Southerners, including Alexander Stephens (whom Mr. Potok cites unfavorably), who preferred to remain in the Union. If Lincoln had proposed some plan to buy freedom for the slaves, so that the economic cost to the landowners could have been mitigated, the war probably could have been avoided. But this is not what the Northern radicals wanted. So the rest, as they say, is history.



* Technically, a "civil war" is a conflict between two factions seeking control of a national government. The war we are remembering was one between two independent nations (and the Confederacy was independent).
 
 
Here is the offensive, referenced article, from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC):
 
Online Only: A heritage of shame.Zoom Photos. Other Words.Mark Potok






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Other Words

Posted Jan 23, 2011 @ 05:17 AM





Canandaigua, N.Y. — A Southern heritage group is planning a celebration in Montgomery, Ala., that will feature a parade down the city's historic Dexter Avenue. That's the same street where thousands of civil rights marchers rallied in support of voting rights at the culmination of the historic Selma-to-Montgomery march in 1965. And it's the same street where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. helped ignite the movement a decade earlier from his pulpit inside the small Baptist church, which still sits in the shadow of the state Capitol.



But the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the group sponsoring the Feb. 19 event, isn't interested in commemorating King or the civil rights march. Instead, it will celebrate the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Confederacy. These "sons" plan to reenact the swearing-in of Jefferson Davis as the president of the Confederate States of America and fire off a few cannons to ensure that "the Heritage of the Confederacy… is remembered and portrayed in the right way."



The right way. Whatever can they mean?



The Civil War was the most devastating conflict in our nation's history. At least 620,000 soldiers died, as did some 400,000 civilians. Hundreds of thousands of others suffered horrible amputations and terrible wounds. Over four years, the war cost $2.5 million daily — an incredible amount at the time. In the end, the South was laid waste — its industries, grand homes, roads, and farms largely destroyed. It would be a century before the region fully recovered. Yes, it was a splendid little war.



Many other celebrations around the South will follow Montgomery's anniversary bash to mark the sesquicentennial of various milestones in the war that began with the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861.



As these events unfold, we'll hear a lot of revisionist history about the causes of secession — that it wasn't really about slavery but rather about the defense of "states' rights," tariff disputes, or resisting the imposition of northern industrial capitalism. Michael Givens, the head of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, told The New York Times that "our people were only fighting to protect themselves from an invasion and for their independence."



This idea resonates strongly today among many white Southerners, particularly in this era of Tea Party politics and radical, anti-government sentiment that has sparked a resurgence of armed militia groups.



But it's wrong.



Freeing the slaves may not have been Lincoln's original intent, but it became a major aim of the war, as any serious student of Civil War history knows. And the right to own slaves was, most certainly, the primary reason the Southern states seceded from the Union.



Southern politicians in early 1861 made that perfectly clear. The Texas Declaration of Causes of Secession, for example, explained that the free states were "proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality for all men, irrespective of race or color," adding that blacks were "rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race." Mississippi's declaration talks about little but slavery. Its second sentence reads: "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world."



Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, put it like this in 1862, during his infamous "Cornerstone" speech: "Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and moral condition."



There's no real question about these historical facts. Events celebrating secession, therefore, are effectively glorifying the South's defense of slavery and the white supremacist doctrine that underpinned it. They will undoubtedly offend millions of Americans, and rightfully so. But more damaging is the continuing dissemination of false propaganda that does nothing but prevent an entire region from coming to grips with its history, even after 150 years.



Mark Potok is director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization based in Montgomery, Ala.





Copyright 2011 Brighton-Pittsford Post . Some rights reserved

Jeff Schaara Interview

From Old Virginia Blog:

9:06 AM (6 hours ago)Jeff Shaara Interviewfrom Old Virginia Blog by Richard G. Williams, Jr.




Reader and fellow blogger, Greg Caggiano, just notified me of his recent interview with Civil War author, Jeff Shaara:





There are people who know their stuff, and then there are people who really know their stuff—Jeff Shaara would fall into the latter category. It was an incredible opportunity to be able to interview the author of Civil War novels Gods and Generals and The Last Full Measure, both of which have reached the New York Times Bestseller List. Jeff Shaara has been lauded by readers and historians alike who appreciate his epic style of storytelling, that has included nine novels spanning the American Revolution, Mexican-American War, Civil War, World War I, and World War II, with the fourth part of his WWII series coming out in May.



You may read the rest of Greg's interview with Mr. Shaara here.
From:  From New York to San Francisco

Interview with Best-Selling Author Jeff Shaara


Filed under: Civil War, History by gcaggiano — 7 Comments January 24, 2011There are people who know their stuff, and then there are people who really know their stuff—Jeff Shaara would fall into the latter category. It was an incredible opportunity to be able to interview the author of Civil War novels Gods and Generals and The Last Full Measure, both of which have reached the New York Times Bestseller List. Jeff Shaara has been lauded by readers and historians alike who appreciate his epic style of storytelling, that has included nine novels spanning the American Revolution, Mexican-American War, Civil War, World War I, and World War II, with the fourth part of his WWII series coming out in May. I really learned a lot today, not only about history in general, but what goes into writing a book and how that gets transformed into a film. I also had to ask about his late-father Michael, who wrote the Pulitzer Prize winning historical-fiction novel The Killer Angels, which was turned into one of the most successful war films of all-time, Gettysburg, in 1993.



I knew the interview would be great because right off the bat I told Jeff to feel free to talk as much as he would like, and he jokingly said he felt a bit intimidated by that, and I explained that sometimes interviewees give only a one sentence answer. His response was, “I never do that.” Our main focus today was the Civil War but we covered all aspects of American history in our interview below:







GC: I just want to start off by asking you about your father. I read somewhere that you and him were not close while he was writing The Killer Angels. Is this true?



JS: Actually, the chronology of that is a little bit inaccurate. During the writing of The Killer Angels, we were extremely close. I was a teenager at the time and we went to Gettysburg together and worked on some of the research together, and I stopped way short of taking any credit for the book, that’s not what I’m saying. During the time writing the book, he was suffering physically because of his first heart attack and there were a lot of things, particularly on the battlefield of Gettysburg, that he could not do such as climbing the Round Tops and things like that. I was the kid, so that was my job to go around through the bushes and climb the hills looking for things that he was trying to find. After the writing, when the book came out in 1974, he and I, by that time, had parted ways, so when the book was published we had a very difficult relationship. He had a difficult relationship with almost everyone including his brother and father. He was very dramatic in the way he approached relationships and if you didn’t live up to his expectations or do things the way he thought they ought to be done, he had a tendency to react very dramatically and write you out of his life. He was a difficult man, he was suffering from the effects, not only of his heart disease, but of a motorcycle accident that had happened in Florence, Italy, in the early 1970′s that really cracked him on the head badly—he was in a coma for several weeks and the effects of that changed his entire life; it changed his brain, the way he wrote, the way he thought about things and it really affected his relationship with everyone.







GC: What inspired you to write the prequel and the sequel?



JS: It began, and you probably know some of this, with the film Gettysburg. It was this film being such an enormous success, and for my family, it propelled The Killer Angels to number one on the bestseller list, and it had never been a bestseller at all. When it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975, the book was never successful, which was really a blow to my father. He expected greater things to come from that. Any writer who receives the Pulitzer Prize has the right to believe that his ship has come in and that all the doors will fly open and he can do anything he wants now, and that didn’t happen to him. So it was very ironic and very bittersweet to my family that in 1993 and 1994, when Gettysburg was such a monumental success, he missed all that. He died in 1988 and didn’t live to see any of it. And so when I learned that Ted Turner wanted to do more Civil War films, the idea would be to take my father’s book and go before and after it with some of the same characters. I had never written anything before, I was not a writer, I never wanted to be a writer. I was actually a dealer of rare coins and precious metals down in Tampa, and the idea of continuing his work, the whole point was for me to tackle this, but it was always about a film, about doing the background and research, creating a story that someone else could adapt for a screenplay. Because I’m representing my father’s estate in New York, and the heirs are my sister and I, my sister being an anthropologist, she said to just handle it and that she wasn’t interested in the business side of it at all. Well, I’d been a business man all my life so it was natural to me. So I’m dealing with the publisher in New York, Random House, who now has this number one bestseller, and so they’re taking my phone calls and I’m getting to know these people up there, and when I told them I was working on the prequel to The Killer Angels, their response was, “Send it to us and we’ll take a look at it.” That totally surprised me because I had no expectations. I’m often asked, “How did you know how to write a book?” I had no clue, and secondly, “Were you intimidated by trying to follow your father’s footsteps?” The answer to that is no, because I had no expectations. Ron Maxwell and I agreed that if whatever I wrote was lousy, nobody would ever see it. It would go in the trash can and that would be the end of it. I attacked this with really no sense of destiny or any of that. All I was trying to do was put a story together with the same kind of research my father had done, which I learned with walking with him at Gettysburg, was to put a story together that could be adapted to a screenplay. When I sent the manuscript to Random House in September of 1995, and I’ll never forget this, the phone call I got from Claire Ferraro, who was the publisher then, said, “We don’t care if it’s a movie. We like the book. We think you’re a writer, here’s the contract.” That changed my whole life.



GC: When you write a novel, how much research do you do and how long does it typically take you?



JS: The research is usually twice as long as it takes to write the book. I typically read 50 to 60 books for each book that I write, and it has to be original source material—the diaries, the memoirs, the letters, the collections of writings of the people who were there. That is a big lesson I learned from my father, stay away from modern history and modern biographies. That does me no good at all. If you’re getting into the heads of a character, and you’re speaking for a real historical character, you better get it right because a lot of people out there will get pretty upset about that. I had somebody actually say to me, “How dare you put words in the mouth of Robert E. Lee?” Well, okay, that’s a challenge and if I dare do that, or put words in the mouth of George Washington, or “Black Jack” Pershing, or Eisenhower, or Adolf Hitler for that matter, I had better believe that those words are authentic to that character because if I don’t believe it, neither will you. Then the book deserves to lose credibility. That’s the point of research, to feel that before I even write the first word, feel as though I know the character and that I would speak for them. Once the reading is done, the other part of it, is again, a lesson I learned from my father, to walk the ground. To go walk in the footsteps of people, see the hillsides, see the battlefields, see the homes, the grave sites, whatever there is out there for me to see, and it’s not that it’s mystical—I don’t go to battlefields and look for ghosts, but there really is something very powerful about walking the same ground as the characters I’m writing about. That’s a crucial part of the research as well. Once that is done, only then do I start writing, and typically, it takes me five to six months to write a manuscript because I’m doing it full-time.



GC: You’ve made hundreds of historical figures come alive in your books, but in your two Civil War novels, which of them has been your favorite?



JS: There are some obvious answers there, like Joshua Chamberlain, and the characters that people latch onto and have made popular, but I love the character of Ulysses S. Grant, and to some people he is sort of a non-entity because he’s not as charismatic as Robert E. Lee, he doesn’t have the young charm of Chamberlain, but Grant changed history. Grant changed the world, and he was responsible, primarily, because you can make an argument that Abraham Lincoln had something to do with it, for winning the war, and a lot of people don’t realize just how powerful his role was. I just love his character, I love his relationship with his wife. Writing his death at the tail-end of The Last Full Measure was difficult, I was emotional about it. I did the same with all three of the characters in The Last Full Measure, Lee, Grant, and Chamberlain, and I said goodbye to each of the three of them but Grant in particular, because he was suffering from throat cancer and dealing with Mark Twain and these magnificent scenes at the end of his life, and boy that was hard. So I would pick him above all others.







GC: What was your reaction when you found out that Ron Maxwell wanted to make a movie out of Gods and Generals?



JS: Well, Ron and I had been talking all the way through Gettysburg and I got to know him during the filming, and so we had talked about this for years. We talked about it from the time it was a success in the theaters and from the time The Killer Angels became a bestseller, we were already talking about continuing with this project. We struggled through several years because this was something we wanted to do and no one else cared. We had a lot of verbal support, and a lot of Civil War groups and reenactors thought this was a great idea, but unfortunately none of them had millions of dollars to make this happen (laughs). Even when we started talking with TNT and Ted Turner’s people it was difficult because none of them really believed in this project. So it wasn’t a surprise to me when we started talking about this, it was the point right from the beginning.



GC: Did you have any role in the production at all?



JS: None. We could expand on that but I don’t know that I want to. To this day, I do not own a finished script, and I made some suggestions that were ignored, little historical things that I thought were problematic, and they listened dutifully and ignored everything I said. I realize at the end of the day, this was not my film—it was Ron Maxwell’s and Ted Turner’s film. I really had nothing to do creatively with the film or physically with the production. I mean, I’m in it, in one scene on camera, but really, it’s not my movie, and if I can add, it’s also not my book. It’s based on my book, despite what some historians say, and I’ll leave that alone, but it is based on my book but it is not my book. It is maybe ten percent of my book, and that was really a shock to me because The Killer Angels is about ninety percent of the film Gettysburg.



GC: Yeah, The Killer Angels is almost word for word.



JS: That’s exactly right, it is almost word for word. In Gods and Generals, there are maybe only three or four scenes taken from my book and put in the film, and that’s it. It’s an entirely different movie than I would have written, and would have liked to have seen done.



GC: My next question was actually going to be, for those that have not read the book, how did it differ from the final print of the film? But I guess that would be too much to go into.



JS: It’s enormously different, it’s radically different from the film. There are characters in the film that do not exist in the book, and a great many characters in the book that never made it to the film. It’s just an entirely different story, and I have to tell you, I’ve heard from literally thousands of people through my website, and I get emails every day and try to be as accessible as I can, and the overwhelming percentage of those that wrote me said, “How could you let them butcher your book like that?” I have no answer to that because I had no control or power to change what came up on the screen.







GC: I know you said on your website that right now, there are no plans to make The Last Full Measure into a film, but if they do decide to make it into a film in the next four years because of the 150th anniversary, will you comply with that and let them use your manuscript?



JS: When you say “they”, that’s the big question. Who is “they”? (laughs) We don’t know the answer to that because there is no “they” right now, but the thing is, there were mistakes made with Gods and Generals that I would not allow to happen again. If a film is going to be made from The Last Full Measure, I will have much more involvement or there simply won’t be a film. I’m not saying it has to be a hundred percent my book, I know better than that, some things don’t translate from the book to the screen, I get that. It’s not about ego, it’s about telling the story. The failure of Gods and Generals was to tell a good story and reach out to the general audience. The enormous success of Gettysburg was that it was attractive to a general audience. You didn’t have to be a Civil War buff or reenactor to understand what was going on, the characters were developed for you so you knew who they were, and it was a marvelous film. In Gods and Generals, the film was almost, and I don’t know this, it is my opinion, as though it was geared to the academic historians and the general audience was ignored. I’ve heard that, it’s not just my opinion, from a huge number of people. Like a guy would go to the film all excited because he knew what the story was about, and he would take his wife and kids and the wife and kids would get up and leave because they had no clue what was going on. That was the problem and it will not happen again. I’m not saying I will write the script, I’m not arrogant to suggest that I’m also a screenwriter because I don’t know that I can do it, but I will have considerable input into the script and will make sure it’s a good story and that it does appeal to a general audience, or there will be no film.



GC: Well, let’s hope that a producer steps forward and puts down some money because I would really like to see this trilogy complete.



JS: It has to start there, you’re absolutely right. That’s the other thing I hear, and I get letters on this literally every day, people want to know (which was why I put the note on my website) when the third movie is coming out, and it’s like they’re waiting for the shoe to drop because the story needs to be completed. I’ve had people chew me out and say, “Why aren’t you making the third film?” as though somehow I am stopping this. Gods and Generals cost $60 million to make, and if someone comes up with $60 million, fine, let’s talk. But so far it hasn’t happened (laughs).



GC: Could all of this have been avoided if they made Gods and Generals into a miniseries? Say like five parts, or even two separate films which was talked about?



JS: I don’t think the two separate movie idea would have worked, but I do think the miniseries idea would have worked much better. The problem is, you can’t make a ten-hour movie, I get that, but you can make a ten hour miniseries and I think some of the resistance, originally from TNT, and I don’t know this for sure, but some of the resistance was because they realized there was just too much story to cram into a movie that someone is going to sit in a theater and want to watch. Definitely, it could have been much more successful as a miniseries.



GC: You plan on writing another Civil War trilogy, this time on the western theater. Can you tell us anything about that?



JS: Yes, the book I just finished, which will be out in May, is the fourth and final WWII piece, the end of the war in the Pacific. I am working, right now, on the research, for a new trilogy which will be Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Sherman’s March. Each one will be out in the spring, starting in 2012, ’13, and ’14, with each one of those year’s being the 150th anniversary of those events. It’s a challenge because doing a book a year is tough. I have so much research material already that I think gives me a leg up and I’m very excited about this, as is my publisher and people I’ve talked to around the country. This is funny, and I have to laugh, I’ve gotten a lot of letters from people in Tennessee and Mississippi saying, “You know, we’re kind of tired of hearing about just Robert E. Lee and Virginia.” (laughs) There’s a whole lot more story that no one seems to want to find out about. I’ll respond to that and do the best I can.



GC: I just took a Civil War course in college, and I knew so much about the War previously, but this class just opened by eyes to how much more is out there, and not many people focus on the western theater and it’s always Lee, Longstreet, and Jackson in the east, and I think the west would be a very important part of the war that hasn’t been covered.



JS: I agree completely, which is why I’m excited about doing this.



GC: Aside from the Civil War, you’ve written about the Mexican-American War, the American Revolution, WWI, and WWII. Which of those has been your favorite topic to cover?



JS: That’s a tough question, and the problem in answering that is, if I don’t love the characters and period I’m writing about, I’m not going to write a very good book. When I move into a new era, I get totally swallowed up by that era—I’m totally immersed in it and the characters. Of course, the biggest challenge is finding those characters and who the voices are going to be. I’m very proud of the American Revolution series. A lot of people have said this to me, and I don’t judge my own book, I wouldn’t even know how, that my World War I book is my best book. I don’t know if that’s true, but I’ve heard that. The book I had the most fun doing was the Mexican War story, Gone for Soldiers, because I knew the characters so well from being involved in the Civil War and doing so much research, and going back to their early lives, and all of them with the exception of Chamberlain, talk about their experiences in Mexico and the profound effect it had on them. I didn’t know anything about the subject, most people don’t, and I started doing the research, and found a wonderful story and one that I had no idea existed—the heroism of Jackson, Grant, Longstreet, and Lee, was amazing. I didn’t know any of those stories and it was a lot of fun to write, plus I love the character of Winfield Scott and Santa Anna. I had a great deal of fun with both of them.



GC: I’m actually a big Alamo buff, so would you ever consider writing a story about that, since you mentioned Santa Anna?



JS: There have been two stories suggested to me that I should write. One is the Alamo and one is Custer’s last stand. Because they have been done so many times, I don’t know that I could do that. The thing is, the story of the Alamo doesn’t stop at the Alamo. The rest of the story is San Jacinto and Sam Houston and if I was to do it, it would probably be the whole war for Texas independence. I’ve had a lot of people from Texas write to me about that. As you know, the story is not just the Alamo. It’s hard to compete, especially when you have John Wayne’s Davy Crockett, it’s hard to tell a story and get away from that, and I would have to get away from that.







GC: I’m with the people from Texas, I think the story needs to be told, mainly, because no one has ever gotten it right. The John Wayne version was very inaccurate, to say the least.



JS: Absolutely, even the most recent Alamo movie and some of the books, nobody has gotten it right. Right now I have a pretty full plate and what I really want to do after the Civil War set is Korea and a Vietnam story, so I’m not sure when I would do that, but you’re right, it’s a story that needs to be told right.



GC: One last thing, an email question from “Andy”, and he writes, “Do you ever plan to write a novel that does not deal with war?”



JS: I get asked that fairly often, and it isn’t that I’ve decided to do nothing but war stories but my publisher was very clear, and they’ve told me that I’ve built an audience and it’s the thing my father never did. My father always wrote different topics. People are always asking me what other historical works did he write besides The Killer Angels, and the answer is none. He wrote a baseball story, a Hitchcock sci-fi story, he was all over the map. My publisher was clear that I’ve built an audience with this one theme, the epic historical military novel, and as long as there are readers out there who want this, to stick with it. Now there is a story I want to do, and I don’t want to get into too much, because it’s been done a few times, but I would like to do a story of a 1930′s gangster. The other thing, if I ever went outside of the United States and did a foreign story, it would probably be Napoleon. Even though that’s military, it’s a very different story and one that most Americans have no idea about. But for now, my publisher says, and this looks terrible on paper, but, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” That’s the philosophy that they are employing with me right now. I’ve got an audience and the following is there so until that audience goes away, I’ll stick with what I’m doing.



I want to thank Mr. Shaara for taking the time out of his busy schedule to conduct this interview. It truly was an enlightening afternoon and I hope you all enjoyed reading this rather lengthy and extensive piece. I can only hope that The Last Full Measure will be made one day, but until then, enjoy the terrific books on American wars that Jeff has given us, because the book is always better than the film.





http://oldvirginiablog.blogspot.com/
 

A Criminal Intent To Rewrite History

From Rebellion:

9:42 AM (5 hours ago)‘A Criminal Intent To Rewrite History’from feed/http://lsrebellion.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default by Old RebelWe've exposed the dishonesty of Lincoln idolators before. But this act of fraud takes the cake:






That’s how a spokesman for the National Archives describes the actions of archivist Thomas Lowry, who changed the date on a document that contained a pardon by Lincoln of an army deserter. Lowry admits it. The date was changed from 1864 to 1865 so that Lowry could claim that The Most Compassionate Man in World History pardoned a deserter as one of the very last things he did before he was assassinated. He was a compassionate little angel to the end, says the lying Lowry, author of Sexual Misbehavior During the Civil War.



Lowry is also the author of the book, Don’t Shoot That Boy, which is a ridiculous piece of Lincoln idolatry that goes on and on about how super, super “compassionate” Lincoln was regarding deserters. This is the opposite of the truth. In reality, the Lincoln administration gruesomely executed hundreds, perhaps thousands of deserters, parading them in front of their fellow soldiers to be executed in the last two years of the war.

On the Commemmoration Of The 187th Anniversary Of The Birth Of Stonewall Jackson

From Old Virginia Blog:

Jan 21, 2011 (16 hours ago)

Happy 187th General Jackson

from Old Virginia Blog by Richard G. Williams, Jr.

 

Viriginia Governor McDonnell's Lee-Jackson Day Proclamation

From Old Virginia Blog:

Jan 19, 2011 (17 hours ago)

Gov. McDonnell's Lee-Jackson Day Proclamation

from Old Virginia Blog by Richard G. Williams, Jr.

 

Lee-Jackson Day



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



WHEREAS, Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson are native Virginians, having served our great nation and Commonwealth as educators, leaders, and military strategists; and



WHEREAS, Lee served in the United States Army for more than three decades until he left his position to serve as Commander in Chief of Virginia’s military forces and as Commander of the Army of Northern Virginia; and



WHEREAS, Jackson taught philosophy and military tactics as a professor at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington for nearly a decade before serving briefly in the United States Army and later joining the Confederate Army to fight for his native Virginia; and



WHEREAS, Lee dedicated his life after the Civil War to reforming higher education in the South by serving as President of Washington College, now Washington & Lee University, in Lexington, Virginia, where he helped to greatly increase the school’s funding and expand the curriculum to create an atmosphere most conducive to learning for young men of both Southern and Northern heritage; and



WHEREAS, Jackson’s leadership and bravery enabled him to rally his troops to several improbable victories against numerically superior forces, and Jackson’s inspired “Stonewall Brigade” fought alongside General Lee’s troops in another victory, even after their leader was fatally wounded on the second day of the Battle of Chancellorsville; and



WHEREAS, it is fitting to recognize Generals Lee and Jackson as two of our nation’s most notable military strategists, as beloved leaders among their troops, as pioneers in the field of higher education, and as faithful and dedicated Virginians;



NOW, THEREFORE, I, Robert F. McDonnell, do hereby recognize January 14, 2011 as LEE-JACKSON DAY in our COMMONWEALTH OF VIRGINIA, and I call this observance to the attention of our citizens.