Alonzo Cushing as a West Point cadet, Class of June 1861
On Tuesday the White House announced that President Obama will award the Medal of Honor to Alonzo Cushing on September 15 of this year, which will be 151 years, two months, and twelve days after Cushing was shot through the mouth standing at what would become known as the Bloody Angle as the Confederates of Pickett's Charge charged right at him.
From the White House press release:
First Lieutenant Cushing was killed in action on July 3, 1863, at the age of 22. On that day, the third day of the battle, in the face of Longstreet's Assault, also known as Pickett's Charge, First Lieutenant Cushing's battery took a severe pounding by Confederate artillery. As the rebel infantry advanced, he manned the only remaining, and serviceable, field piece in his battery. During the advance, he was wounded in the stomach as well as in the right shoulder. Refusing to evacuate to the rear despite his severe wounds, he directed the operation of his lone field piece continuing to fire in the face of the enemy. With the rebels within 100 yards of his position, Cushing was shot and killed during this heroic stand. His actions made it possible for the Union Army to successfully repulse the Confederate assault.
President Obama yesterday signed the defense authorization act that passed Congress last week, which means that, along with all the rest of it, Section 569 becomes law. Here it is:
SEC. 569. AUTHORIZATION FOR AWARD OF THE MEDAL OF HONOR TO FIRST LIEUTENANT ALONZO H. CUSHING FOR ACTS OF VALOR DURING THE CIVIL WAR.
(a) Authorization.--Notwithstanding the time limitations specified in section 3744 of title 10, Unites States Code, or any other time limitation with respect to the awarding of certain medals to persons who served in the Armed Forces, the President may award the Medal of Honor under section 3741 of such title to then First Lieutenant Alonzo H. Cushing for conspicuous acts of gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of life and beyond the call of duty in the Civil War, as described in subsection (b).
(b) Acts of Valor Described.--The acts of valor referred to in subsection (a) are the actions of then First Lieutenant Alonzo H. Cushing while in command of Battery A, 4th United States Artillery, Army of the Potomac, at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on July 3, 1863, during the Civil War.
Alonzo Cushing, member of the West Point Class of 1861, was only 22 and had already fought at Fredericksburg and Antietam. The battery he commanded at Gettysburg was stationed at what would become known as the Bloody Angle, an area enclosed by a zigzagging section of the stone wall on Cemetery Ridge and including the copse of trees that was the target destination of Pickett's Charge. He had already been wounded twice, but not incapacitated, during the hour-long artillery duel that preceded the Charge, and had lost so many men that he had only enough left to operate two of the battery's six guns. Ordered at first to fall back to where his wounds might be attended to, he instead asked for and received permission to move his two workable guns forward to the stone wall itself. Cushing's sergeant, Frederick Fuger, wrote later:
The
Confederate Infantry . . . now began their
advance. They were the best troops in Lee’s army, namely Pickett’s Division,
consisting of three brigades, Garnett’s, Kemper’s and Armistead’s in
the center supported on the left by General Heth’s Division and on the right by General Anderson’s.
Kemper
was on the right, Garnett in the center and Armistead on the left,
marching in close order with measured steps, as if on parade. They moved
toward us solidly and deliberately, and when they were within 400
yards, Battery “A” began firing at them with single charges of canister,
mowing down gaps in their lines which appeared to me the front of a company, this they filled up and still came on.
As Pickett's Charge neared its climax, with the Confederates within 150 yards, Cushing was shot through the mouth and killed instantly.
The Bloody Angle today
This is heroic enough, certainly, but over the decades Cushing's story has been embellished, mostly due to Sergeant Fuger's campaigning for his own Medal of Honor (it used to be acceptable to do that), which he won in 1897. Fuger apparently had a few different versions, and details survive in online accounts today: we are told that one of Cushing's earlier wounds was so grievous that it exposed his intestines and he held them in with one hand while, no longer able to shout orders loud enough to be heard over the shooting, he leaned on Fuger and whispered commands which the sergeant faithfully transmitted to the battery. Please. The Gettysburg National Military Park blog surely has it right:
What Cushing did at Gettysburg needed no embellishment. His gallantry
was recorded in after-action reports by every officer that served near
his battery. . . . Fuger’s embellishments to Cushing’s tragic story gained traction over
the years, largely because no one questioned the sergeant’s account, and
maybe because we all wanted to believe what he wrote and said about
Cushing. After all, Fuger had been awarded the MOH. But this did not
mean he was above spinning romances about the battle like others we have
discussed on this blog. In this case however, how Cushing led and how
he died needed no spin or embellishment [from] Fuger. As Colonel Norman
Hall wrote two weeks after the battle, “Lieutenant Cushing, of Battery
A, Fourth U.S. Artillery, challenged the admiration of all who saw him.”
[Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, 27, 1:437]
The Medal of Honor had been created in 1861 and as of 1863 was not yet awarded posthumously, so Cushing was not eligible at the time. Decades later this criterion was changed, but no one proposed Cushing for the Medal until 1987, when Margaret Zerwekh, from Cushing's birthplace of Delafield, Wisconsin, wrote to her senator, William Proxmire. Zerwekh, now 93, has campaigned on Cushing's behalf for 26 years and has been through a lot of Wisconsin senators; a recent one, Russ Feingold, calls Cushing and Zerwekh both heroes and pushed in Congress for Cushing's medal for a decade. It almost happened in 2010--a lot of online sources actually say that it did happen then--but at the last minute House-Senate negotiators for some reason dropped the provision from the final version of that year's defense bill. The provision in this year's bill has backing from both current Wisconsin senators, Ron Johnson and Tammy Baldwin.
And now the president has signed the bill with the provision intact, so it seems like a sure thing. The two steps left should be no problem: Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel is expected to make the formal recommendation, and President Obama is expected to accept it. Whenever the ceremony is finally held, Alonzo Cushing will have waited longer than any other Medal of Honor recipient.
The numbers from the election give Andrew Sullivan's theory that we're in what he calls "a Cold Civil War" a mixed
verdict. As we know, Obama carried Virginia and Florida, so Sullivan's precise prediction did not come to pass. And for what it's worth,
Romney's average margin of victory in the twelve former slave states he
won was 15.9%, actually less than his 23.7% margin in the
other states (two free states in 1861 plus ten that were then territories) he won.
"For what it's worth" is a meaningful qualifier in this case, however, because the percentages above don't separate out the African American vote, 93% of which went nationally for Obama. Sullivan is talking about the white vote. There are a lot more blacks in the South than in the western states where Romney had most of the rest of his victories, and once this fact is adjusted for, Sullivan's theory may well be vindicated.
That
involves more research than I am willing to do on his behalf, but here
are a couple of quick and rough sets of calculations. Census data from 2010 says
that black population in the twelve states Romney won that were
neither in the Confederacy nor border states averages only 3.2% of
population in those states. Assuming that this percentage is roughly
reflected in voter turnout, subtracting 93% of the black vote from
Obama's total share in those states--38.15% to Romney's 61.85%--adjusts
Romney's winning margin in those states up to 28.5%, not all that different from his actual 23.7% margin there.
By
huge contrast, the census says the black population of the fourteen
former slave states--including Virginia and Florida, the two Obama
won--averages 19.5% of the total population of those states. Making the
same assumption about voter turnout, and making the same adjustment by
removing Obama's 93% of the black vote, Romney's margin of victory
across that region of the country--even still averaging in the two
states he lost there--jumps from 15.9% all the way to 41.1%.
Does
this prove Sullivan's inference that much opposition in the South to
Obama's re-election was racially motivated? No it doesn't, but it seems
to leave the question open.
Andrew Sullivan and George F. Will disagree about the Civil War's impact on next week's Presidential election, and in doing so demonstrate that discussions about the war's continuing resonance in our national life are frequently at bottom discussions about race.
Both their heads were talking on This Week this week when Sullivan laid out his theory that the U.S. is in "a Cold Civil War," by which he seemed to mean that the polarizing political division in the country is to a large degree geographically reflected in old national maps of free states and slave states. The next day he made the same point on his Daily Beast blog: "if Virginia and Florida and North Carolina flip back to the GOP from
Obama this November, as now looks likely, Romney will have won every
state in the Confederacy." He gets into more detail by showing this map of his election-day prediction
juxtaposed with this map of how things stood in 1861:
On both maps, the grey areas are those that were not states in 1861 and therefore not part of the point he's making (Washington State was admitted in 1889 and therefore should be grey in the first map). On the second map, the blue states are 1861's free states, all of which of course stayed in the Union. The yellow states are the four slave states that also stayed in--Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware. The red are the eleven slave states that seceded.
On the first map, he predicts that the Republicans will take all of the old Confederacy, split the border states 50/50 with the Democrats and pick up only Kansas and Indiana from the free states. By using 1861 as his base year, he neglects to account for West Virginia, which broke away from Virginia in order to stay in the Union and was admitted as a separate state in 1863. By rights he should have used a Civil War map that had it yellow, but he has it right that West Virginia is expected to go red this year.
He may be wrong about Virginia. Nate Silver, the most meticulous analyst of polls there is, currently gives President Obama a 62% chance of carrying it, which would reverse part of Sullivan's equation: West Virginia, which fought for the North, would vote with the South, and Virginia, state of the Confederacy's capital city, would vote with the North.
But his broader point--that the states of the old Confederacy have realigned themselves politically with today's Republican Party--is both interesting (in that it illustrates how the two parties have shifted over time) and unremarkable (in that the realignment has been in process since the 1960s). What set Will off was the conclusion that Sullivan did not quite state, but also did not disclaim when Will disputed it: if the three formerly Confederate states that Obama carried in 2008 vote for Mitt Romney this time, there might be a racial element to that fact. Whether that's so or not, Silver's weighted averages of state polls show that if the Confederacy were a real country right now, Romney would be coasting toward a landslide win there.
Sullivan's implied conclusion is not logically rigorous, built as it is from a less than ironclad prediction and a hunch about its causation. It was an easy mark for a sharpshooter like George Will. "Democrats have been losing the white vote since 1964, so that's not news ," Will responded. "Here's what we're trying to talk about. In 2008, Obama gets this many [hand held high] whites, this time the polls indicate he might get this many [hand held lower]. We're trying to explain this difference. Now there are two possible explanations. A lot of white people who voted for Obama in 2008 watched him govern for four years and said, "Not so good. Let's try someone else." The alternative--the Confederacy hypothesis--is those people somehow for some reason in the last four years became racists."
Will here commits his own logical fallacy by excluding the middle. Are these two mutually exclusive options, one of which he has phrased to make sound ridiculous, really the only two possibilities? One imagines not.
Will is also not the best spokesman for the position that race does not play a part in voting decisions, as he had, in his Washington Post column only 26 days earlier, attributed support for Obama to racial motives. He found no reason in Obama's record to explain why he is favored to win re-election and so offered this theory:
That Obama is African-American may be
important . . . the nation, which is generally
reluctant to declare a president a failure — thereby admitting that it made a
mistake choosing him — seems especially reluctant to give up on the first
African-American president. If so, the 2012 election speaks well of the
nation's heart, if not its head.
Some aspect of support for Obama is identifiably racial, but it is absurd to say that some aspect of opposition to him is? Well.
Will gave the game away--except that Sullivan didn't seem to notice--by mentioning that the loss of the white vote to Democratic presidential candidates dates from the year a Democratic president signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Certainly no one maintains that the exodus of Southern whites to the Republican Party was triggered by the Nurse Training Act or the Wilderness Act, both of which LBJ signed that same year.
Neither party has a history to brag about as regards its willingness to tolerate racism. After being on the wrong side of the slavery issue, the Democrats spent a century courting the votes of Southern white racists. Franklin Roosevelt brought Northern blacks into the Democratic coalition (Southern blacks mostly couldn't vote), but it was only when the strength of the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s forced the Democrats to choose between these two parts of their coalition that they became clearly the party of civil rights. The Republicans' successful "Southern strategy," originated by Richard Nixon and carried on ever since, welcomed the disaffected racists into the party of Lincoln with code words rather than with open invitations. It's why Ronald Reagan spoke of "welfare queens" and why George H. W. Bush ran the Willie Horton ad.
Surely Reagan, Bush, Romney, Paul Ryan, Will, and the great bulk of Republicans are not racists. They have the same political differences with Obama that they would have had with President Hillary Clinton. Just as surely, however, the 30% of the Republican electorate who say they believe Obama is an African-born Muslim are motivated by something other than evidence. That support for the Romney/Ryan ticket spikes in the area of the country with its least fortunate racial history suggests that there are things less fluid than political party affiliations.
Now that President Obama has acquiesced to a fundamentally Republican plan to raise the debt ceiling, which means federal spending cuts that will contract the economy when it needs to be expanded, it may be worth pointing out a couple of Civil War connections to the whole fiasco.
One, of course, is the Fourteenth Amendment, much in the news lately as Obama rebuffed suggestions he invoke its clause that the “validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law . . . shall not be questioned” in order to keep paying the country’s bills no matter what the Congress did. In a position to need all the leverage in his fight with Congress that he could get, he threw this lever away and had his spokesman say that he didn’t think the amendment applied in this situation. He’s the constitutional scholar, not me, but there are plenty of other experts who thought he was wrong, and a look at why the clause was written suggests they might have been right.
The Fourteenth of course was one of the Reconstruction amendments, put into place as the states of the old Confederacy took their places again as part of the Union. Fearful that Southern federal legislators might someday acquire a voting majority in Congress and get it to vote to refuse to pay the U.S. war debt, or to take on some or all of the Confederate debt, Section Four—forbidding both—was included in the amendment. That is to say, one explicit reason it was written was to prevent Congress from taking a vote that would prevent the federal government from paying its bills.
How is that different from the recent situation? I dunno, but the question brings us to the other Civil War connection. Obama’s hero Lincoln more than once took executive action that he believed crucially important to the nation even when he couldn’t have sworn he had a winning argument for the Supreme Court were he to be challenged there. His biggest gamble was the Emancipation Proclamation itself. He knew that as Commander in Chief of the military during a time of armed rebellion, he had the military right to seize private property that was necessary to the war effort, and that the legal status of enslaved blacks as property meant that he could seize them from their owners. But with all other types of property, after the military necessity has passed, the property is returned to its owner. The Proclamation declared that the slaves under its jurisdiction were “forever free,” which was essential but constitutionally suspect. If, after the war was over, a plantation owner whose slaves had been emancipated were to sue the federal government for their return as property, and fought the case all the way up to substantially the same Supreme Court that had issued the Dred Scott decision, the odds might well have been good he’d be given his slaves back. Lincoln might not have had the authority to make emancipation permanent.
He was aware of this, and worried about it. Thankfully, we’ll never know how that hypothetical former slave-owner’s case would have turned out, because Lincoln rushed to send to the states the Thirteenth Amendment outlawing slavery; its ratification meant the Proclamation’s full legality never had to be tested.
We’ll also never know if the Fourteenth Amendment gambit would have cut the Gordian knot in the debt ceiling crisis, because Obama declined to find out.
Lincoln's courage is part of his greatness. Obama, a profile in caution, cannot plausibly have been worried that he might be successfully impeached for continuing to uphold the nation's credit by paying its bills. John B. Judis of The New Republic has an article online headlined "If Obama Likes Lincoln So Much, He Should Start Acting Like Him." Well, yes.
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