Eternity Street: Violence and Justice in Frontier Los Angeles
Historian John Mack Faragher has spent his career writing about frontiers in general and the American West specifically. In Eternity Street: Violence and Justice in Frontier Los Angeles, he considers the structure and culture of violence in a frontier society, how violence reproduces and polices itself in a so-called "honor culture,"* and the slow development of an official justice system in Los Angeles in the mid-nineteenth century. The result is a fascinating look at the competing forces of official justice and vigilantism as southern California moved from Mexican to American control.
Drawing on a combination of official records, contemporary newspaper accounts, personal papers, memoirs and autobiographies, Faragher tells individual stories of murder, retaliation, domestic violence, racism and greed. At the same time, he never loses sight of the larger history of the region. He sets detailed accounts of conflicts between individuals within the contexts of the conquest of southern California by first Mexico and then the United States, the Texas rebellion, the American Civil War** and the gold rush of 1848.
This is not the American West of American fable. Faragher's Los Angeles is a frontier outpost with no white-hatted heroes and plenty of ethnic conflict. Native Americans newly freed from control of the missions, native angeleños, African-American slaves and freedmen, North American adventurers, and the United States Army and Navy compete for resources, political control, and women with blades, guns and lances.***
Eternity Street is an ugly story, beautifully told.
*We've seen this concept before here in the Margins. It's easy to idealize honor culture in the past:medieval knights, eighteenth century duelists, and samurai warriors all enjoy a certain glamour in popular culture. A quick look at how it plays out in street gangs makes it clear that honor culture centers on male violence. It's cock fighting, with men instead of roosters.
**And you thought I'd taken a break from the Civil War!
*** At one point in the narrative, the United States Army and Navy came close to armed conflict with each other over who was in charge, suggesting an honor culture of a different variety.
Most of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.
Mercy Street and M*A*S*H
A BIT OF NEWS: On Monday, January 25, from 4 to 5 PM Eastern Standard Time, I'm going to be the guest host at #LitChat, a real time Twitter chat that brings authors and book lovers to talk about bookish things. If you're a Twitter user, it's a great chance for you to ask me questions about Heroines of Mercy Street or anything else you've been wanting to known. If you're not a Twitter user, maybe this will inspire you to join. (This link gives you all the details about #LitChat and how to participate: http://litchat.com/ )
Hope to "see" you there.
And now to the topic at hand:
Volunteers tending the wounded in the field of battle. Alfred R. Waud
My Own True Love and I watched the premiere episode of Mercy Street last week. Early in show, the main character, Mary Phinney von Olnhausen,* walked into the lobby of Mansion House hospital in Alexandria, Virginia, for the first time--past the bleeding bodies of wounded soldiers waiting for help. My Own True Love turned to me and said "Isn't that a little over the top unless they are right next to a battlefield?"
My first thought was Alexandria was next door to a battlefield for much of the war. That was one of the reasons that it became an administrative, transportation and medical hub for the Union Army
My second thought was that the scene was actually pretty tame compared to the first-hand accounts I had read of wounded soldiers arriving at Civil War hospitals--accounts that reminded me of scenes from M*A*S*H in terms of the blood, sense of urgency, and confusion. (No helicopters, though.)
The historical equivalent of the scene from Mercy Street is a case in point. The real life Mary Phinney von Olnhausen arrived at Mansion House Hospital in August, 1862, only a few days after the Battle of Cedar Mountain**and was plunged into medical chaos.
On August 9, a corps of Union soldiers led by General Nathaniel P. Banks stumbled across Stonewall Jackson’s infantry at the base of Cedar Mountain, near Culpeper Court House, Virginia. Hostilities ensued. Out-numbered three to one by Jackson, Banks lost more than a third of his men: 314 killed, 1,445 wounded, and 622 missing.
As was too often the case in the early days of the war, the horror continued after the battle was over. Thomas A. McParlin, medical director of the federal Army of Virginia at the time and later medical director of the Army of the Potomac, established dressing stations near the battlefield and an evacuation hospital at Culpeper Court House. The intention was that military trains*** would take on wounded soldiers and carry them the fifty miles to Alexandria for treatment. By the next day it was clear to McParlin that the surgeons on the ground, overwhelmed by the numbers of wounded, had lost track of the primary goal: sending the wounded to Alexandria. Instead they focused on amputations they believed were needed to save men’s lives; one doctor alone performed twenty-two thigh amputations and an uncounted number of arm amputations in a twenty-four-hour period.
No one had the time to attend to soldiers with relatively minor wounds. Supplies and tempers ran short. Even though trains were available, every building that could be turned into a shelter—churches, the Masonic hall, private homes, and even a tobacco barn—was filled with hundreds of wounded men. Hundreds more lay in the hot August sun awaiting evacuation, many of them dehydrated and groaning for water. McParlin sent the orders a second time, reminding doctors that the wounded were to be sent on by train as soon after they arrived as possible. Hours later, he discovered that nothing had changed; he went to Culpeper Court House himself and saw to it personally that the first train of railroad cars was loaded with men and on its way. After nine days of hell, the last trainload of wounded from Culpeper Court House reached Washington on August 18.
Von Olnhausen expected her first assignment to be helping the wounded at Culpepper Court House. Instead she was sent to Mansion House Hospital, arriving just in time to see the wounded from Cedar Mountain arrive, still in the condition in which they had been taken off the battlefield. Some had lain outside in the summer heat for three or four days “almost without clothing, their wounds never dressed, so dirty and so wretched.” Those who could walk were helped on foot into the hospital. The worst were carried in on stretchers. Those who died in the hospital were carried out almost as quickly.
Von Olnhausen had no chance to find her way around the hospital or learn her duties. Instead an orderly showed her into the surgical ward, where someone told her what to do, but not how to do it. Her informal experience nursing family and friends was not adequate preparation for dealing with the effects of cannon shells, bayonets, and the new deadly bullets known as minnie balls on the human body. Faced with carnage on a scale she had not been able to imagine, she wanted to throw herself down and give up. It seemed like a hopeless task. The only thing she could do for the soldiers now was learn: she followed the doctors and watched as they examined and dressed soldiers’ wounds. “So I began my work,” she wrote in her unfinished memoir, “I might say night and day.”
Similar scenes appear in the letters and memoirs of Louisa May Alcott, Hannah Ropes, Amy Bradley, and others. Again and again, the wounded flooded into hospitals: ragged, mud-caked and bloody, carried on stretchers or staggering on their own feet, their faces drawn with exhaustion and pain. In short, incoming!
*Based on a real Civil War nurse of that name whose story, drawn from her letters and memoir, forms the backbone for Heroines of Mercy Street. (Commerical over. You may now return to your regularly scheduled blog post.)
**Also known prior to the way as Slaughter's Mountain. After the battle, one Union army surgeon remarked that it was "truly named, for the slaughter was tremendous on both sides.)
***In some ways the helicopters of their day
Clara Barton, Act III: The American Red Cross
[WARNING: For the next few weeks, it's going to be all Civil War all the time here at the Margins as we lead up to February 16, when Little Brown releases Heroines of Mercy Street into the world. I'll try to keep the My Book! My Book! to a minimum and focus on the stories instead, but I may slip now and then because I'm excited. On the upside, there will be a couple of chances to win copies of the book and possibly other swag if I can get my act together.]
Clara Barton in 1904
When we last saw Miss Barton, she was in Switzerland, recovering from the exhaustion of her war efforts. She didn't rest for long. When the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870, Barton leapt back into action. Constrained by her lack of political connections in Europe, she did not try to work on her own the way she had in the American Civil War. Instead she traveled to Strasbourg as a volunteer of the International Red Cross, wearing a cross she improvised from a red ribbon and a Red Cross pin given her by the Grand Duchess Louise, daughter of Kaiser Wilhelm I.
The International Red Cross had been founded several years before. In 1863, while the United States was locked in its internal struggle, Swiss businessman Henry Dunant, who had witnessed the aftermath of the Battle of Solfierno in the Italian War of Independence several years before, called a conference of thirty-nine delegates from sixteen nations to Geneva to discuss questions of battlefield relief and humanitarian aid. The group met again in 1864 and created the set of recommendations that would become the Geneva Treaty, now the Geneva Convention. The guidelines called for the humane treatment of wounded soldiers and universal recognition of the neutrality of medical personnel, ambulances, and hospitals in time of war. The convention adopted a reverse Swiss flag, a red cross on a white ground, as an emblem of medical neutrality that would be easily recognized. They also urged each country to create its own national society of volunteers to provide battlefield relief when needed. Twelve European governments ratified the treaty. The United States refused to sign on the grounds that it was a possible “entangling alliance.”*
Barton’s experience in the Franco-Prussian War was very different from her experience in the American Civil War. Instead of caring for wounded soldiers, she worked with the war's civilian victims. For her first several days in Strasbourg, she dutifully served soup and distributed supplies to survivors. But as she spent more time in the burned-out city, she realized that more than soup and soap were needed. She organized women into sewing workrooms as a first step in reestablishing the city’s economy. She organized a similar relief effort in Paris the following year.
When she returned home in 1873, Barton took on the task of lobbying for the United States to ratify the Geneva Treaty. It took her nine years and three presidents to convince the government. President Chester Arthur signed the treaty in 1882, and the Senate ratified it several days later.
Barton founded the American Red Cross in 1881 and led it for the next twenty-three years. At her initiative, the American Red Cross proposed an amendment to the Geneva Treaty calling for the expansion of Red Cross relief to include victims of natural disasters. The so-called American Amendment, perhaps more accurately the “Barton Amendment,” was passed in 1884.
Under Barton's leadership, the American Red Cross helped victims of the Johnstown flood,** hurricane victims in the Sea Islands of South Carolina, both Armenian and Turkish victims of ethnic unrest in the Ottoman empire,***and famine victims in Russia. (If you can't be described as a victim or something, you probably don't need the Red Cross.) She traveled with nurses to Cuba during the Spanish-American War in 1898 to nurse the wounded and provide supplies. Her last relief operation with the Red Cross was distributing supplies and financial assistance to survivors of the hurricane that wiped out Galveston, Texas, in 1900.
After she retired from the American Red Cross in 1904 at the age of 82, she founded an organization to teach basic first aid and emergency preparedness, wrote several books, and went on a speaking tours.**** She died at home on April 12, 1912 at the age of 90.
A life well-lived by any standard.*****
*The same reason we failed to join the League of Nations after World War I.
**The 68 year old Barton personally led fifty volunteers on the first train into town following the disaster
***In 1896, well before the Armenian genocide of 1915. Obviously a long-standing conflict.
****Do you feel like a slacker yet?
*****If you're interested in learning more about Clara Barton-- including the slightly scandalous bits that I didn't have room for in either these blog posts or Heroines of Mercy Street--I strongly recommend Stephen Oate's excellent biography, A Woman of Valor: Clara Barton and the Civil War.