City of Sedition
I keep thinking I'll take a break from the American Civil War, but it just keeps shoving itself in my face. And so I keep shoving it in yours.
I recently finished an extraordinary book. It had me writing notes to myself in the margins: "check what [someone else] has to say, "compare to X", or sometimes just "!!!".* Despite the fact that it looks at the war through the lens of one city, it gave me a new perspective about the war as a whole. Not an easy thing to do given how much time I've spent on the Civil War
In City of Sedition:The History of New York City During the Civil War, John Strausbaugh explores New York City's multi-faceted role in the American Civil War: a role complicated by the city's close financial ties with the South in the years immediately before the war, conflicts (physical and theoretical) between recent immigrants and anti-immigration "nativists," political corruption at all levels and the rhetoric of competing "penny daily" newspapers. He portrays a city that was as divided by the war as any border state. So divided that in the months before the war, some city political leaders proposed that New York become a "free port" on the medieval model, seceding not only from the Union but from the state of New York.
Strausbaugh builds his portrait of the city from a multitude of smaller portraits, all set within the context of the larger story of the war. He tells the stories of well known New Yorkers, such as popular preacher Henry Beecher, journalist Horace Greeley, Tammany Hall politician "Boss" Tweed, and poet Walt Whitman. He follows less known figures over the course of the war, introducing readers to characters such as twelve-year-old drummer boy Gus Schurmann, who enlisted with his father in the all-German Mozart brigade and spent an afternoon playing with Todd Lincoln. He considers the fates of slave ship captains, abolitionist businessmen, war profiteers, and military units from all levels of New York society. (I was particularly taken with the volunteer immigrant militias, which were formed in response to laws that kept them from joining the official militia**)
The final result is a richly layered and often surprising history, as crowded and fast-paced as a Manhattan sidewalk.
*I love books that force me to have a conversation with them.
**We've been officially stupid about immigration from the beginning. [Insert rant here]
The guts of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.
Contrabands
Over the course of the last year I became familiar with the use of the term "contrabands" to describe escaped slaves in the American Civil War. Like many terms of the period, it seemed self-explanatory, in an ugly way. A symptom of the racism that was fundamental in the Union as well as in the Confederacy. I read it and moved on.
In fact, the term "contraband" is derived from the concept of "contraband of war" and was linked to a first step toward the Emancipation Proclamation. According to international law, in times of war goods that can be used for hostile purposes can be legally seized from the enemy or from merchants of a neutral nation who ship such goods to a belligerent power. Typical examples of contraband of war include shipments of arms or the materials needed to make arms.
In May, 1861, only a month after the beginning of the war, lawyer turned Union General Benjamin Butler,* stretched that legal concept to cover three escaped slaves who sought asylum at Fort Monroe, Virginia--a Union fort isolated in newly Confederate territory. The young men--Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory and James Townsend--brought information about an artillery emplacement being built by slave labor across the harbor from Fort Monroe.
Butler was not an abolitionist and the laws regarding escaped slaves were clear: fugitive slaves must be returned to their masters. The Fugitive Slave Act was still in force, and Abraham Lincoln had declared that the purpose of the war was not to overthrow slavery but to keep the union intact. In his inaugural speech, he had explicitly stated "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so."
The law was clear, but Butler felt the men who had asked for asylum represented a special case. They had brought him useful military intelligence. And if he returned them to their master they would be put back to work building an artillery battery that was aimed directly at his fort. When rebel officers arrived at Fort Monroe demanding that he return the slaves, Butler declared them contraband of war--enemy property being used for hostile purposes--and refused to return them.
Two days later, more escaped slaves arrived at the gates of Fort Monroe. By early June, some 500 escaped slaves had taken shelter within the Union lines, where they quickly became an unofficial part of the garrison.
Newspapers throughout the North picked up the story, quipping about what The Times described as "contraband property having legs to run away with, and intelligence to guide its flight." Soon the fugitives were being described as "contrabands", a term that encapsulated the unresolved nature of their legal status as property.
Not the least flattering photo of "Beast" Butler
*Aka "Beast" Butler, not because of his military actions but because of his face and rough manners.
Poor Tipu
Several weeks ago, I realized that I had never written a post about Tipu Sultan here on the Margins and I promised to rectify that shortly. This is me keeping that promise.
Tipu Sultan, the self-proclaimed "Tiger of Mysore", played an important role in my development as a historian. When I first heard his story in Eleanor Zelliot's class on the history of "modern" India,* I was under the influence of heavy-duty cold medicine. I do not do well with cold medicine. I choked up as Eleanor told the story of Mysore's defeat at hands of the British. By the end of the class I was near tears.
"Poor Tipu" became a catch phrase for me and my roommate and fellow South Asian history major. An in-joke with a strong strain of truth. We tend to see Tipu Sultan through the filter of the British Empire. Tipu Sultan's story forced me to see another side of the empire that had long-fascinated me. I'm still fascinated by empires in general and the British Empire in particularly, but I try to remember there is always another side to the story.
Which brings us to Tipu Sultan.
Seen in retrospect, it is easy to forget how precarious Britain's position in India was in the eighteenth century. The British East India Company was only one of several regional powers that competed to fill the power vacuum left by the disintegrating Moghul empire. One of the most powerful of the Company's rivals was the Muslim state of Mysore in south-central India.
When the dynasty's founder, Haider Ali, seized Mysore from its Hindu ruler in 1761, the British saw the new kingdom as a buffer against the powerful Nizam of Hyderabad. They soon changed their minds. Haider Ali and his son, Tipu Sultan, adopted two goals that put them in immediate conflict with the East India Company: aggressive territorial expansion and diplomatic ties with post-revolution France.
Mysore and the East India Company went to war four times between 1761 and 1799.
The East India Company's rivalry with Mysore took on new urgency in 1798, when Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt with the avowed intention of driving the British out of India. The possibility that France would attempt to reclaim a base in India seemed all too likely. British India buzzed with rumors that the French had joined forces with the Tiger of Mysore.
In February, 1799, those rumors were seemingly confirmed. British agents in Madras claimed to have intercepted a letter from Bonaparte to Tipu Sultan. In it, Britain's number one enemy offered aid to his Indian counterpart, "Citoyen Tipou": "You have already been informed of my arrival on the borders of the Red Sea with an innumerable and invincible Army, full of the desire of delivering you from the Iron yoke of England." Scholars have long doubted the authenticity of the letter. Genuine or not, it provided the trigger that Richard Wellesley, the East India Company's Governor-General, had been waiting for.
Forty thousand East India Company and Crown troops invaded Mysore on March 5th. The armies moved quickly across Mysore in a two-pronged pincer attack from the British strongholds of Madras in the east and Bombay in the west. Their goal was Tipu Sultan's capital, the fortified island citadel of Seringapatam.
On May 4, 1799, the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War came to an end when Major-General David Baird (1757-1829) led the final British assault on Seringapatam. According to his biographer, Theodore Hook, Baird volunteered to lead the assault in order to "pay off old scores". Volunteer or not, Baird was a sentimental favorite for the job. Twenty years earlier, he had spent four years as a captive of Tipu Sultan following the British defeat at Pollilur in 1780.
Once British cannons opened a breach in Seringapatam's outer wall, Baird's force crossed the surrounding river under a barrage of musket fire, fought their way into the gap, and took the ramparts. The main body of British and Indian forces followed. Two and a half hours later, Seringapatam was under British control.
That evening, Baird played the central role in an event that captured the British imagination. Acting on reports that Tipu Sultan had been killed in the assault, Baird sought out the Indian ruler's body under a pile of corpses in a gateway that had been a focus of the Mysore defense. Major Alexander Beatson, official historian of the campaign, summed up the moment as seen through Victorian eyes:
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">"He who had left the palace in the morning a powerful imperious Sultaun [sic], full of vast ambitious projects, was brought back a lump of clay, abandoned by the whole world, his kingdom overthrown, his capital taken and his palace occupied by the very man, Major-General Baird, who,,,had been..in irons, in a prison scarce three hundred yards from the spot where the corpse of the Sultaun now lay."</p>
By any standard, Baird's "old scores" had been paid in full.
*In the world of history departments, "modern" India begins with the Moghuls, slightly before the period known as Early Modern Europe. Historical periodization is an artificial construct that obscures as much as it reveals.