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some1s-sista · 9 months

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It was so warm today I talked James into taking a hike with me through Pettigrew State Forest. General Pettigrew led his Southern troops in the disastrous (for the South) Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg. He was born here, was mortally wounded in VA, died and was brought back to be buried at the family plantation, Bonarva.

So there’s nothing left of that plantation except the family graveyard. But you can walk the trail between Somerset Place Plantation and the site of Bonarva (they used to face each other). The park TOTALLY lies about the cemetery being 1 mile away. It’s a mile to the next plaque at the corner of what would’ve been the site of the Pettigrew Plantation but another half mile to the site of the cemetery which sits up higher on the trail where the trail gives way from the Forrest to an open farm field.

I opened the gate and walked up the stairs to the grave sites while Jim protested. “You can’t go in there” “Why not? Are the cops gonna jump out from behind that tree over there? Besides, it’s not locked up.” So I stepped inside, wished everyone a Merry Christmas, told them I meant no harm, just interested in history and apologized if I was walking over anyone.

There are three unmarked graves in there for the last surviving members of the family. After the civil war the plantation system fell apart with no free labor to rely on and the family lost their money and lands and couldn’t afford headstones for them. Kharma.

So then we turned around and headed back out. The trail must’ve been beautiful once. There are still some magnolias and such lining it as it would have been the path to walk between the plantations. That last picture is Somerset Plantation making its appearance at the end of the trail.

I find it telling that the generals grave site is still taken care of to this day but they have no idea as to the location of slaves’ gravesite. Told my husband if I were part of the state forest system, or the dept that handles the Somerset site I’d be trying to get some ground penetrating radar out here to find out where it is.

So interesting hike. We also saw tons of deer, bear, and coyote tracks. Some campers. And parts of the canal system (all built on the backs of slaves) some still working, others long abandoned. We’ll go back, with a map next time to explore those at some point.

#hiking #hike #history #state park

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bomberqueen17 · 1 year

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vacation

I'm in Maine with my dude. Our anniversary is around the 4th of July so we kinda try to do stuff around then. This year is 22 years, which marks the point at which it's been more than half of each of our lives. So that's keen. Not to be mushy.

I just saw a thing about celebrating Pickett's Charge Day and it amused me a lot. As an impressionable child I read Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels repeatedly, which is an account of the battle of Gettysburg with alternating points of view from participants on both sides-- it was adapted into a movie but I didn't see that so IDK if it captured any of what I found so poignant in the narrative. (Does the song Kathleen Mavourneen play a big role in the movie? bc it does in the book.) But because of this I knew that it was the 20th Maine Reg't led by Col. Joshua Chamberlain that held the left flank against repeated assaults on that day, so it seems fitting. I looked it up before I posted this, but I did actually know that.

No, I've never been to the battlefield at Gettysburg either, I'm a poor secondhand student of the civil war. My mom wrote a book about it but it's unpublished, she just put it up on the town website. LMK if you want to read it (I'm not linking directly to it because it's on the town website so it's kind of uh doxxy, LOL); it's an extremely dry work, simply recounting the results of her research into the service record, origins, and ultimate fate of every single person she could track down who either served in the regiment our town sent to the war, OR who served in the war and later settled in our town. It was years of research by her including many trips to battlefields. This is my background, is all I'm saying, and the reason why I know the names of like a bunch of the colonels at Gettysburg without checking.

Anyhow. We're not up here for civil war purposes, we're here to sit in a house on a lake and listen to some loons. We went last night and got on a schooner and schooned around Penobscot Bay, which was fantastic; saw the sunset, but not the moonrise, as it was cloudy. It's been mostly rainy here but it stopped raining long enough for that and that's all I care about. If it rains tonight, so much the better, as it'll keep the noise down. Na ha I'm the Grinch of the Fourth of July.

so anyway a couple of photos and some meandery stories behind the cut:

I'm putting the descriptions/captions in the alt, idk how well that works. Ah you can see the lighthouse here-- Camden, ME has a slightly dangerous harbor entry , with two nice wide channels that allow easy entry but a large submerged rock ledge in the middle that at high tide is completely invisible. Every year, our skipper said, some boat forgets about this and runs violently aground. This year's sacrifice was a 50-foot powerboat, and he heard the mayday call as he was on his morning commute. Some lobstermen were in range and managed to haul the boat off the rocks and tow it in to port, but it sank in the launch area-- still, they could easily raise it from there. The passengers were all unharmed, following behind in a dinghy very abashed. A couple weeks later on one of his several-times-daily tours our captain found all the cushions from the wrecked powerboat washed ashore in a nearby cove, and was wondering at the etiquette-- should he collect and return them? He did not reveal whether he had, as conversation moved on.

He was a college kid, raised locally, home for the summers, but in his senior year as a computer engineer up at the U of Maine in one of the campuses about an hour away.

Since it was not very windy we had to use the motor a bit, but we did sail for a goodly while, and in the very light breeze he said "So I'm going to do a controlled jibe here, because the wind is super chill, and if you know a lot about sailing you'll know why I've been taught not to do this move but this is the ideal condition for it. So everybody duck, I'm holding it but the boom is going to move."

A schooner has two masts, so that meant both booms moved. And the mate controlled the forward one admirably, and he the aft, and we were all fine. But as we were coming into the harbor and taking the sails down, the forward boom swung again a little unexpectedly, and the passengers sitting below it had to duck. The mate worriedly asked if everyone was okay, and one woman said "Oh, no, I had a past life regression where I learned I was killed by a sail boom, so I'm really good at ducking!" to which the mate cheerfully, slightly awkwardly, replied "Oh that's great! that! uh! I mean not that you died! But that you didn't this time!" which was extremely gracious of her, especially given that she was about seventeen years old. (She had just been explaining to us that her doctor made her wear glasses full time now because she had gotten her driver's license and he didn't think she should drive without glasses.)

ANYWAY the lighthouse at Camden has been automated since the 1980s, like all US lighthouses, BUT has still had a lighthouse keeper-- a local woman lived there 50 years and raised a family there and only recently at 90 retired as the keeper, and now the assistant harbormaster lives out there. Nobody really needs to be in that lighthouse but it's a point of local pride to have a manned lighthouse.

There are also bell buoys, which I hadn't really noticed as a thing before-- but it's just a buoy with a large bell on it, and the waves' rocking tolls the bell constantly, and it's meant to warn of a hazard. There are several in Camden harbor, because there are a number of very tall rocks that stick up out of the otherwise mostly 180-200ft depth, and some of those rocks are submerged at high tide so you would never see them coming and your onboard depth sensor thing wouldn't catch them in time. (Those rocks, our skipper said, are called The Graves, because of the number of wrecks on them, but they're so steep you can almost touch them from the side of a passing boat; they're used as turning points in some of the tall ship racing that happens locally, and he was aboard one once that turned so tight around one of those rocks and he said he was so terrified the whole time and would never himself sail that close to one.)

It was so calm while we were out there-- Lake Erie is choppier-- but it was sunset, which is when the wind changes direction usually, and the weather here has been heavy rain for days and it was a break in the weather. Anyway that was the Atlantic Ocean, though we weren't really out in it, it was all Penebscot Bay.

Apparently the Olad's original name when commissioned was The Whistle Binkie, which is terrible and hilarious.

OK next slide, good thing I'm only doing two

Good morning, I woke at 5 and noticed the sky was pink and knew it would be fleeting, so I threw my bathrobe on and went out even though I really needed to pee, so I suffered for this art-- I got out a little ways on the dock and listened to a loon calling and took several photos, and then went inside and when I came back out the light had gone, so I'm glad I ran out when I did. Those bridges are narrow though, and I'm not the steadiest when I first wake up, so I was not going all the way out to that last dock. The view is great from that last dock but the great view is to the north, and the pink clouds were to the west, so for this photo, this was the better view anyway.

This is Megunticook Lake.

Today we have no plans; the restaurants downtown were nuts last night, we walked into one place at 4:45 and were told we could be seated around 6:25, so we walked back out and went instead to the Sea Dog brewery, which I had heard of-- I've had their beer somewhere-- but we're thinking tonight will be nuts, so we're going to stay home and eat the stuff we brought for today's lunch instead, and we're going to venture out for lunch today in hopes that it will be less insane.

We'd asked the skipper of the Olad what the 4th of July was going to be like, did he have the day off etc, and he laughed and said no, he works on that day, but it is kiiiind of the worst, because everyone with a boat or access to a boat has to take it out on the 4th of July, and they're all drunk, so he spends most of the day trying to avoid drunk boaters and trying to make sure nobody falls off his boat. (When we'd boarded he'd given us the rules before we pulled out of the berth, and the only actual rule was stay on the boat, and I don't like to think about how emphatic he had to be about that.) I think I mentioned, he was like twenty, and when someone asked him how long he'd been doing this he blithely said "oh this is my first day!" but then admitted it was actually his first season as skipper, but he'd been crewing these kinds of boats for about five years now. Uncommonly among tourist attractions, his job had gotten more busy during the pandemic, because honestly it's an extremely low-risk activity, you could not be any less enclosed, though they had to abide by the same regulations re: mask wearing as airplanes and large commercial ferries, so it was a bit silly-- but absolutely lowest risk of all given that they're wind-operated.

So we know Camden town is going to be insane all day tomorrow, and there's a fireworks display they launch off a boat in the harbor, and we are not going to attempt to go see it! We will hear it from here, and that is fine. We brought our own sparklers, should we be so inclined.

#about the author #maine #vacationing

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47burlm · 3 months

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Pickett's charge

ON this day in History July 3rd, 1863

Pickett's Charge (July 3, 1863), also known as the Pickett–Pettigrew–Trimble Charge, was an infantry assault ordered by Confederate General Robert E. Lee against Major General George G. Meade's Union positions on the last day of the Battle of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania during the Civil War. Confederate troops made a frontal assault toward the center of Union lines, ultimately being repulsed with heavy casualties. Suffering from a lack of preparation and problems from the onset, the attack was a costly mistake that decisively ended Lee's invasion of the north and forced a retreat back to Virginia.[2]

The charge is popularly named after Major General George Pickett, one of three Confederate generals (all under the command of Lieutenant General James Longstreet) who led the assault.

Pickett's Charge was part of Lee's "general plan"[3] to take Cemetery Hill and the network of roads it commanded. His military secretary, Armistead Lindsay Long, described Lee's thinking:

There was ... a weak point ... where [Cemetery Ridge], sloping westward, formed the depression through which the Emmitsburg road passes. Perceiving that by forcing the Federal lines at that point and turning toward Cemetery Hill [Hays' Division] would be taken in flank and the remainder would be neutralized. ... Lee determined to attack at that point, and the execution was assigned to Longstreet.[4]

Lee believed that, after Confederate attacks on both the left and right flanks of the Union lines on July 2, Meade would concentrate his defenses there to the detriment of his center. However, on the night of July 2, Meade correctly predicted to General John Gibbon, after a council of war, that Lee would attack the center of his lines the following morning and reinforced that area with additional soldiers and artillery.

The infantry assault was preceded by a massive artillery bombardment that was meant to soften up the Union defense and silence its artillery, but it was largely ineffective. Approximately 12,500 men in nine infantry brigades advanced over open fields for three-quarters of a mile (1200 m) under heavy Union artillery and rifle fire. Although some Confederates were able to breach the low stone wall that shielded many of the Union defenders, they could not maintain their hold and were repelled with over 50 percent casualties.

Often cited as one of the turning points of the war, the farthest point reached by the attack has been referred to as the high-water mark of the Confederacy.

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#history #Youtube

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mariacallous · 7 months

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The lost cause of British conservatism is like the lost cause of the US Confederacy. Myth-making and evasion dominate the writing of Conservative intellectuals just as they dominated the self-justification of the defeated American south.

To Confederate sympathisers the south did not lose because it was defending slavery. The southern states were a victim of an attack on their rights by the north, a position still maintained today by Nikki Haley and other right-wing politicians seeking southern votes.

Equally, today’s Conservative writers insist that they are not going down to a potentially catastrophic defeat because Conservatism betrayed the UK by imposing Brexit, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss on a country in no condition to take any of them.

No, the right is losing because it is not right-wing enough.

It feels mean to pick out examples when there is so much special pleading to choose from. But as readers need evidence, here is the pro-Brexit historian Robert Tombs (an old friend of this Substack).

Writing in the Telegraph Tombs says that the Tories “have lost much of their middle-class vote and their working class vote too”. So they have. But Tombs hastens to add, not because of Brexit being a disaster, or Johnson turning Downing Street into a pub, or unfunded tax cuts for the wealthy but because along the way the Conservatives embraced policies that Tombs and the Telegraph don’t like.

“High taxes, mass immigration, projects like HS2 and hasty attempts to impose net zero”.

There is no need for right-wingers to ask hard questions of themselves. They weren’t wrong. They were betrayed by cowardly politicians and the civil service.

Henry Hill, the deputy editor of Conservative Home, who was writing in the Guardian this week, exemplifies the determination of modern Conservatives to avoid a reckoning with what they have done.

He asks a good question: how did the Tories go from a landslide victory in 2019 to what looks like being a landslide defeat in 2024. But once again he does not blame Brexit, or Boris Johnson, or Liz Truss or any policy or politician right-wingers endorsed but too many immigrants and too many tax rises.

The modern right-winger is always the victim and never the aggressor. He does not harm others; others harm him.

The great southern novelist William Faulkner wrote in the 1940s about how we use fantasy to blot out history.

To men of his generation the worst moment in the history of the south was on the afternoon of July 3, 1863, during the Battle of Gettysburg. The Confederates were still in the civil war. But then the southern high command ordered Major General Thomas Pickett to lead his men in an insane charge uphill against entrenched Union positions.

The battle was lost, and eventually the war was lost too.

Faulkner wrote

“For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances.”

For every Tory boy today, there is an instant when it is not yet ten o’clock on that October morning in 2022. Kwasi Kwarteng has not delivered his mini budget. It hasn’t happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin …

It is easy to mock. And just because it is easy does not mean one should do it. But once you have stopped laughing at them, it’s worth noting that the future of conservatism is one of perpetual motion to the right.

If American conservatism is dominated by the Donald Trump personality cult, British conservatism is dominated by the Brexit cargo cult.

You cannot say that Brexit has failed and remain a Conservative. It is heresy. Taboo. Question Brexit and the shamans of the Tory tribe will curse you, and its warriors will pick up their clubs and spears and drive you from the warmth of the campfire into the cold, darkness of the real world.

In this know-nothing atmosphere I can see four reasons why Tory radicalisation is inevitable

1/ The power of fantasy

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The inability of Conservatives to face what they have done delivers the first shove to the right. They believe that a public sector conspiracy explains their lamentable record in government rather than their own ideologies.

Liz Truss (see video above) and Kwasi Kwarteng, forced out the permanent secretary to the Treasury and sidelined the Bank of England and the Office for Budget Responsibility before they crashed the economy. They now pretend that the fault lies with the institutions they ignored, not themselves.

British deference, our awful class inferiority, means that we assume that establishment politicians are moderate and respectable. But Rishi Sunak has chosen to waste his time trying to enact a spiteful and unworkable policy of deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda. He is pushing his party to the extreme.

You cannot say that the British radical right is being constrained or having its ideas contested by a sensible centre-right.

2/ The perverse triumph of progressivism

And yet if you take conservatives on their own terms, some of what they say is true. They are genuinely furious that, despite 14 years of Conservative rule, taxes and immigration rates are at record highs. And they genuinely fear cultural change.

Yet, rather than confront their fears, Conservatives are engaged in aimless rage.

Taxes are at a record high because of covid, whose costs will pass eventually, and because of an ageing population, whose cost will only rise.

Conservatives might find the money for tax cuts by reducing the old-age pension or by demanding more money from the elderly for health care. Because the old vote Conservative, they do neither.

Immigration covers the UK’s acute labour shortages. Conservative writers complain but offer no alternatives to bringing in new workers.

As for woke culture, anyone who works in the arts, academia, the charitable sector and other liberal institutions knows that there has been a cultural revolution. No one who has witnessed the attacks on gender-critical feminism can doubt that it can be, like all revolutions, viciously authoritarian.

But in a free society there is very little a government can do about, for instance, liberal newspaper and book publishers censoring feminists. Cultural battles are largely fought outside politics. Politicians can change laws but they cannot force people to think the way Conservatives want them to think, and impotence adds to Tory anger.

Rage without purpose drives you to extremes. There is no need to stop and work out practical policies. You are free to revel in the purity of your anger.

3/ The media-political complex

In our interview Tim Bale described how new media encouraged extremism. The right has given the UK GB News our own version of Fox News, even though we all assumed the law prevented politically biased broadcasting.

Tory MPs have become TV presenters producing sound bites for social media. Extreme postures and simple solutions attract attention. Demagoguery has now become the smart career move on the right. If a Tory gets thrown out of Parliament, he or she can work as a loudmouth in the media until fresh political openings arise.

As Tim Bale said, new media…

“…gave opportunities to Conservative MPs who otherwise would've been fairly unknown. Conservative voices who probably would've been shouting into the void now make a name for themselves, much faster and much more frequently than would've been the case. It’s made the party much more difficult to manage. And it's also put pressure on the leadership to move to the radical right.”

4/ The wave of the future

Everywhere in Europe and the Americas radical right politicians and parties are driving out the centre-right politicians.

The UK seems to be about to elect a moderate centre-left government. But the forces that are driving conservative politics rightwards – mass immigration, the rise of authoritarian liberalism, new media technologies – will continue to drive the British conservatives rightwards too.

If Labour fails, they will be waiting to take over

#Youtube

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