Heroes, Not Icons

From the time at which both elementary schools and high schools began requiring classes which included “the civil rights movement” and “African-American History,” the famous ‘Tuskegee Airmen’ have become familiar icons alongside Rosa Parks, W.E.B. DuBois, Frederick Douglas, and a host of other famous Black Americans. But aside from the vague notion that these airmen were pilots in WWII, the typical student has no detailed understanding of what they actually did, despite the fact that both documentary films and a Hollywood movie have portrayed their exploits.

Historian William Percy provides insight into who the Tuskegee airmen were, and what they did; this knowledge can transform them from one-dimensional characters in a rehearsed civil rights narrative into the three- or four-dimensional historical individuals they actually were.

The “airmen” actually included commissioned officers, an important step for African-Americans in the Army (no separate Air Force existed until after WII). Their exemplary work in a ‘semi-integrated’ setting, as Percy calls it, gave the Air Corps a head start over the other branches of the military in achieving further integration. The Army itself had operated in a highly segregated manner since the administration of Woodrow Wilson; soldiers recruited from the South, who had already lived under ‘Jim Crow’ laws, were familiar with the system, but soldiers from the North – both white and black – were sometimes surprised by the system, having attended, e.g., the integrated high schools in many Northern cities. Having served and fought in ‘semi-integrated’ settings, returning to segregated Army bases in the U.S. was a rude awakening for some of the airmen.

Higher officers in the Army Air Force, the AAF, acknowledged the accomplishments of the Tuskegee units – the 99th Fighter Squadron and the 332nd Fighter Group – but saw the integration of African-Americans into AAF as a wartime necessity or a political statement, and seemed willing to return to the segregated status quo antebellum.

One reason for the success of the 332nd was their leader, Colonel B.O. Davis, Jr.; he was a West Point graduate and was praised by his superiors, General Eaker and General Dean Strother. The airmen compiled an impressive record; measured by nearly any statistic – number of missions, number of enemy craft shot down, number of medals earned, etc. – they performed as well as, or better than, other units. The only criticism made of them was that they might have more aggressively pursued enemy fighter planes; but this criticism fails to consider the fact that, to make such pursuit, they would have had to leave the bombers which they were escorting, and giving escort was their assigned task at that moment. Thus it was that no bomber escorted by the Tuskegee pilots was ever shot down by enemy fire: this unique statistic is one of their main claims to fame.

Various specific anecdotes serve to illustrate the heroism for which these men became known. On a sixteen-hundred-mile raid to Berlin, bombers were to be accompanied by three different fighter groups: one group for the first third of the mission, another group for the second third, and a final group for the remainder of the flight. The Tuskegee pilots were assigned to the middle third, but when the final group of fighters failed to appear at the rendezvous point to takeover escort duty and relieve the Tuskegee pilots, the Tuskegee fighters continued to protect the bombers for the remainder of the mission, including shooting down at least three ME-262 jet fighters, a feat which earned them a Distinguished Unit Citation.

Among the white officers and white airmen of AAF, there were certainly some whose racists attitudes emoted a strong distaste for working with the ‘Negroes’ – the majority of white fliers, however, respected and appreciated the work of Black airmen and officers. High-ranking AAF officers, including even General “Hap” Arnold, visited the bases and praised the ‘Negro airmen.’ Aside from friendliness and praising the skill of the Black pilots, the crews of the American bombers realized that the Tuskegee airmen had saved their lives in many situations. When a bomber suffered either mechanical difficulties, or damage from enemy fire, and had to separate from the formation and return to its base alone, it was especially vulnerable to German fighters, and especially thankful for the protective escort of the Tuskegee fliers.

The 332nd Fighter Group was formed in January 1942 and arrived in Europe in January 1944. Initially, the 332nd was equipped with P-39 fighter which had inferior technical features, and the missions given to the 332nd were “boring, routine patrols.” Bombers needed protection, however, and the 332nd was re-tasked to escort them, was re-equipped with technically superior P-47 aircraft, and earned its fame protecting the vulnerable B-17 and B-24 bombers.

The 99th Fighter Squadron was older than the 332nd, having been founded in July 1941. The 99th trained at Tuskegee on a variety of non-combat ‘trainer’ aircraft – the BT-13 and the AT-6 – and was then equipped with P-40 fighters. The 99th arrived in Africa in April 1943. (The reader may recall a TV series from the 1960’s called “Rat Patrol” which captured the flavor of the North African Theater of combat.) After training briefly with the 27th Fighter Group, the 99th was assigned to the 33rd Fighter Group; the 99th was with the 33rd for only May and June of 1943. The officers of the 33rd alternated between ignoring the 99th and belittling it; while individual officers, and most of the airmen, of the 33rd were supportive of the 99th, the commander set a hostile tone. The 99th was reassigned to the 324th Fighter Group in June 1943. The 324th was somewhat better to the 99th; the intelligence officers of the 324th “fully credited the black squadron for its escort and ground-support missions over Sicily,” but the 324th seemed more puzzled than anything else at the African-American airmen, and largely ignored them, keeping them segregated and sending them on their own missions apart from the white squadrons. It was during this time, over Sicily, that the 99th got its first confirmed kill, and the highest officers visited the 99th to congratulate: General Eisenhower, General Doolittle, Air Vice Marshal Coningham of the RAF, and other superstars of air power. This demonstrated that the Tuskegee fliers were being supported and watched by the top-level officers, even if the mid-level officers seemed oblivious or antagonistic. (“Ike” Eisenhower also integrated ground troops during the Battle of the Bulge, long before President Truman’s postwar executive order to integrate the armed services.)

In July 1943, the 99th was reassigned back to the 33rd Fighter Group. This time, the 33rd was less hostile to the 99th; instead, the 33rd merely ignored the 99th. In October 1943, the 99th squadron was reassigned to join the 79th Fighter Group. Of the groups to which the 99th had belonged so far, the 79th was by far the best. The 99th was one of four squadrons in the group, and duties were assigned equally. In January 1994, the 99th had twelve confirmed kills in two days, establishing a level of performance comparable to any other unit. While with the 79th, the men of the 99th enjoyed a collegial and professional relationship with the white fighter pilots of the 79th’s other three squadrons; this marks a high point in race relations. Also while with the 79th, the 99th began upgrading to P-47’s to replace their P-40’s, a signal that highly-placed officers had confidence in the 99th and were investing in its future. In April 1944, the 99th was reassigned back to the 324th, were they were largely ignored by the white officers but continued to perform excellently, particularly in support of U.S. Army ground forces in Italy. In June 1944, the 99th was reassigned to the 86th Fighter Group. After June 1944, the 99th was assigned to the 332nd, where it would remain for the duration. With the 332nd, the 99th would have new duties as bomber escorts.

This dizzying summary of the 99th’s history and 332nd’s history suffices to demonstrate two points: first, that the Black pilots performed well; second, that some white officers were hostile and some were friendly. In any event, the Tuskegee fighter pilots certainly earned their places in the history books.

The value of William Percy’s article is this: it transforms vague icons into concrete data. References to “The Tuskegee Airmen” appear in every standard presentation about “the civil rights movement” and about “African-American History,” but remain merely imprecise allusions. It is a disservice to these warriors to allow them to remain icons; such symbols are instruments, carrying little meaning in themselves, and used for whatever goals various rhetoricians may choose. The Tuskegee Airmen were not merely symbols or metaphors, but rather real men, servicemen who saw combat. They are not merely tokens to be used in a game of civil-rights discourse; they protected their loved ones and their nation. Only a presentation of quantifiable and observable data, such as William Percy gives us, confirms that the Tuskegee pilots were honorable and brave, and not merely figments in the imagination of some political leader who creates exhibitions and lectures for schoolchildren. The Tuskegee airmen were flesh-and-blood heroes.

The Second Amendment's Complex Details

The political debates surrounding the Second Amendment lead the reader into many obscure niches of legal history. As a part of the Bill of Rights, the Second Amendment was intended to do more than guarantee to the individual citizen "the right of the people to keep and bear arms." It is the prepositional phrase "of the people" which tells us that this right is for the individual private citizen. However, the same text also preserves for each of the states the right to maintain its own "well-ordered militia," separate from the army of the federal government.

America's military systems were once structured so that the bulk of the nation's military forces was maintained by the states in their own militias. The national government had sometimes a small army, but had also the ability to call the state militias into action. The nation's army consisted then primarily of the combination of state militias, and only secondarily of a standing federal army.

For this reason, then, the Second Amendment guards not only each citizen's right to "keep and bear," but also the right of each state to maintain its militia. Indeed, the federal government depended on each state not only having that right, but exercising it. As Adam Winkler writes in The Atlantic magazine,

For those men who were allowed to own guns, the Founders had their own version of the "individual mandate" that has proved so controversial in President Obama's health-care-reform law: they required the purchase of guns. A 1792 federal law mandated every eligible man to purchase a military-style gun and ammunition for his service in the citizen militia. Such men had to report for frequent musters — where their guns would be inspected and, yes, registered on public rolls.

A few years prior to the Bill of Rights, Thomas Jefferson wrote, while drafting the constitution for the state of Virginia,

No freeman shall be debarred the use of arms.

Jefferson worked through three drafts of the state's constitution, and each draft contained this line (with slight variations in wording). It was apparently important to him.

Although the immediate context of the Second Amendment was the struggle against England for independence, the text came into play at the close of the Civil War. At that time, two things were clear: blacks had gained their freedom, and blacks would not have an easy time keeping that freedom. Adam Winkler continues:

Indisputably, for much of American history, gun-control measures, like many other laws, were used to oppress African Americans. The South had long prohibited blacks, both slave and free, from owning guns. In the North, however, at the end of the Civil War, the Union army allowed soldiers of any color to take home their rifles. Even blacks who hadn’t served could buy guns in the North, amid the glut of firearms produced for the war. President Lincoln had promised a “new birth of freedom,” but many blacks knew that white Southerners were not going to go along easily with such a vision. As one freedman in Louisiana recalled, “I would say to every colored soldier, ‘Bring your gun home.’”

The history of gun-control legislation, i.e., the history of attempts to undermine the freedoms given by the Second Amendment, is rooted in post-Civil War racism. Recall that the war ended in 1865 - Lee surrender to Grant on April 9, and President Johnson declared the war ended on May 9. Between the war's end and Congress's vigorous reconstruction - often titled "Radical Reconstruction" in history books - in 1867, there was little protection for the civil rights of the newly-freed African Americans. Ex-slaves were at the mercy of the same local government who had opposed Lincoln, declared secession, and maintained the war effort.

During this time, Democratic Party officials in the South developed "Black Codes" - laws aimed at reducing the civil rights of blacks. This injustice would not be rectified until the Republican Party enacted three constitutional amendments - the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth - and sent federal observers into the South to verify compliance. This "Radical Reconstruction" beginning in 1867 was the Republican Party's effort to continue Abraham Lincoln's vision.

After losing the Civil War, Southern states quickly adopted the Black Codes, laws designed to reestablish white supremacy by dictating what the freedmen could and couldn't do. One common provision barred blacks from possessing firearms. To enforce the gun ban, white men riding in posses began terrorizing black communities. In January 1866, Harper’s Weekly reported that in Mississippi, such groups had "seized every gun and pistol found in the hands of the (so called) freedmen" in parts of the state. The most infamous of these disarmament posses, of course, was the Ku Klux Klan.

Attempting to address these injustices, before Congress organized the full-blown Radical Reconstruction, northern military officers occasionally intervened during the milder "presidential reconstructions" under Lincoln and during the first months of Johnson's presidency.

In response to the Black Codes and the mounting atrocities against blacks in the former Confederacy, the North sought to reaffirm the freedmen's constitutional rights, including their right to possess guns. General Daniel E. Sickles, the commanding Union officer enforcing Reconstruction in South Carolina, ordered in January 1866 that "the constitutional rights of all loyal and well-disposed inhabitants to bear arms will not be infringed." When South Carolinians ignored Sickles's order and others like it, Congress passed the Freedmen's Bureau Act of July 1866, which assured ex-slaves the "full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings concerning personal liberty … including the constitutional right to bear arms."

It became clear to Congress that Second Amendment rights among blacks in the South needed to be protected. Between the KKK's illegal activities and the blind eye which local Democratic Party officials in the South turned toward the Klan's activities, the African-Americans needed "the right to keep and bear" in order to defend their civil rights.

That same year, Congress passed the nation’s first Civil Rights Act, which defined the freedmen as United States citizens and made it a federal offense to deprive them of their rights on the basis of race. Senator James Nye, a supporter of both laws, told his colleagues that the freedmen now had an "equal right to protection, and to keep and bear arms for self-defense." President Andrew Johnson vetoed both laws. Congress overrode the vetoes and eventually made Johnson the first president to be impeached.

In December 1865, Republican Congressman John Bingham of Ohio proposed the text that would become the Fourteenth Amendment. His co-sponsor, Republican Senator Jacob Howard from Michigan, presented the text in the Senate by reminding his colleagues that in preserving for blacks the "privileges or immunities of citizens," the text of the amendment kept "the right to keep and bear arms" for the ex-slaves:

the men behind the Fourteenth Amendment — America’s most sacred and significant civil-rights law — clearly believed that the right of individuals to have guns for self-defense was an essential element of citizenship. As the Yale law professor Akhil Reed Amar has observed, "Between 1775 and 1866 the poster boy of arms morphed from the Concord minuteman to the Carolina freedman."

As the amendment progressed through the ratification process, and Congress's more assertive vision of reconstruction began to replace President Johnson's milder version,

The aggressive Southern effort to disarm the freedmen prompted a constitutional amendment to better protect their rights.

A century of civil rights progress - from the 1860's to the 1950's - was marred by setbacks during the Progressive Era, when Woodrow Wilson re-segregated federal departments, like the Post Office, which had been already integrated. Wilson also took steps to reduce black enrollments in the nation's universities. Recovering from these blows, African-Americans benefitted from the return to "normlacy" and by 1921, Presidents Harding and Coolidge supported blacks by introducing anti-lynching legislation in Congress, aimed at the state of affairs in the South.

As partial desegregation in the military during WWII continued the positive momentum, the stage was set for the emergence of a vigorous civil rights movement in the 1950's.

Civil-rights activists, even those committed to nonviolent resistance, had long appreciated the value of guns for self-protection. Martin Luther King Jr. applied for a permit to carry a concealed firearm in 1956, after his house was bombed. His application was denied, but from then on, armed supporters guarded his home. One adviser, Glenn Smiley, described the King home as "an arsenal." William Worthy, a black reporter who covered the civil-rights movement, almost sat on a loaded gun in a living-room armchair during a visit to King’s parsonage.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recalls that, as a child, she saw her father organize local black men to patrol the streets of their Birmingham neighborhood. The men were armed as they patrolled. They protected their families this way. Rice recalls:

The way I come out of my own personal experience, in which in Birmingham, Ala., my father and his friends defended our community in 1962 and 1963 against White Knight Riders by going to the head of the community, the head of the cul-de-sac, and sitting there, armed. And so I'm very concerned about any abridgement of the Second Amendment.

Rice continues:

I also don't think we get to pick and choose from the Constitution. The Second Amendment is as important as the First Amendment.

The New York Times confirms:

Ms. Rice's fondness for the Second Amendment began while watching her father sit on the porch with a gun, ready to defend his family against the Klan’s night riders.

For Martin Luther King, for Condoleezza Rice, and for the black civil rights movement as a whole, Second Amendment rights were seen as vital. Carrying that notion forward by several decades,

in 2008, in a landmark ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that the government cannot ever completely disarm the citizenry. In District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court clearly held, for the first time, that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual's right to possess a gun. In an opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia, the Court declared unconstitutional several provisions of the District's unusually strict gun-control law, including its ban on handguns and its prohibition of the use of long guns for self-defense. Indeed, under D.C.'s law, you could own a shotgun, but you could not use it to defend yourself against a rapist climbing through your bedroom window.

The court's ruling in this case muddies the water somewhat, inasmuch as there is a distinction to be made between firearms for self-defense against criminals, and for defense against violation of one's civil rights. The history of the Second Amendment shows that the latter is the stronger current in the narrative of American history.

German Guns - American Freedom

America's war for independence including innovations in both technique and technology. Virtue, noble character, and leadership also played important roles - George Washington and Paul Revere exemplify this, as do the thousands of nameless Minutemen and militiamen.

The technology incorporated into rifles enabled snipers to shoot with accuracy from long distances. Rifles offered an advantage over an opponent armed with a musket or a blunderbuss, both of which were smoothbore weapons. Historian Thomas Sowell writes:

The Pennsylvania Dutch also developed a hunting rifle that was to play a very different role from that intended by these German pacifists. Unlike most European muskets of the time, German weapons had spiral grooves (called rifling) inside the barrel to produce greater accuracy. Some of these rifled muskets were brought to Pennsylvania by German immigrants. Here they developed a new rifle, with a very elongated barrel for even greater accuracy. This product of German craftsmen in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, was originally known as the Pennsylvania rifle. But it acquired fame in the hands of frontier sharpshooters like Daniel Boone and then became known as the "Kentucky Rifle." It later proved very effective in the guerrilla warfare used by Americans against the British during the Revolutionary War.

As the bullet spun, the axis of its spinning was also its flight-path, and the gyroscopic effect keeps the lead ball flying in something very close to a straight line. Projectiles from smoothbore weapons deviate more to the right or left. Historian Geoffrey Norman writes:

The rifled musket was, indeed, a game-changer in the American Revolution, even if it was not quite as decisive as some have made it out to be. American gunsmiths were not the first to cut grooves into the barrel of a musket, thus putting spin to the lead ball it shot. The spin imparted stability to the ball in flight and improved accuracy over the smoothbore by orders of magnitude. German gunsmiths were the first to employ the technique. German immigrants brought it with them to the New World and made the refinements and improvements that became the Pennsylvania (or Kentucky) long rifle and so famously knocked General Simon Fraser out of the saddle at Saratoga and, a few years later, dropped rank after rank of British troops carrying smoothbores that left them outranged and vulnerable to Andrew Jackson’s men at New Orleans. As usual, the British were brave but slow to learn.

The Americans seemed to incorporate rifles into some of their units quicker than the English, and combined with guerrilla tactics, allowed a small number of Americans to effectively harass larger British armies. (The word 'guerrilla' wouldn't be used until later - when Napoleon invaded Spain - but the Americans had effectively conceptualized the technique.) The British army would eventually shift to large-scale use of the rifle, but only after the United States had won independence.

Leadership Skills: George Washington

Perhaps what makes George Washington a great man is not his various accomplishments, nor his noble character, but the combination of the two. Either factor can be found isolated in numerous historical individuals; but the blend is much rarer. James Srodes, reflected on a book written by John Ferling about Washington, writes:

Washington had a fairly prosaic start in life and could have remained a modestly prosperous farmer of little note. He was the son of a second marriage; his father was a successful planter and political figure; his elder half-brother, the heir, had been a well-regarded soldier in the earlier wars of the century. Even when Washington came into his inheritance, real economic advancement depended on marriage to a wealthy widow, and he quickly burned through her fortune as well as his own.

An ordinary gentleman farmer in Virginia: an enviable lifestyle, to be sure, but hardly one which makes the individual a world-historical figure. Washington understood the geographical and economic factors which made North America an exceptional opportunity. Land was an amazing resource in the English colonies, compared to densely-populated Europe. Mapping and organizing the continent was the key to the future:

He became an adept and adventurous land surveyor and through that latched onto a military career.

Washington's insight into the value of this land got him into the French and Indian war, which started in 1754 with a series of humiliating victories for the Englishmen, among whom Washington began with the rank of Major. This North American conflict was the extension or analogue of the Seven Years War in Europe. The French and the English were opposing each other on battlefields in Europe, so their colonies fought each other in North America as well.

He ended what we call the French and Indian War in 1757 as a colonel with the formal praise of his superiors. A year later, he won an expensive election campaign to the House of Burgesses and began his formal career as a politician. For the next 18 years, he fashioned a reputation of deliberate soundness that was long on good judgment and short on the flowery oratory in which many of his colleagues reveled.

Although an excellent military leader, Washington was not the only, or best, military thinker of his time. His greatness came from his ability to lead and inspire, and from his moral character, not from a purely technical military skill.

There were more successful generals — Horatio Gates at Saratoga, Nathaniel Green in his campaign in the Carolinas — but Washington held the army together through personal bravery under fire and adroit politicking that dragged a disorganized Congress to its task of supplying war materials and that checkmated the various critics and plotters against him within his own officer corps.

There were also instances of Providence - what some might call luck - which accompanied Washington's path to greatness. But opportunities given to Washington - whether by Providence or luck - would have remained mere opportunities unless properly utilized. The decisive factor

is Washington's ability to capitalize on good luck. He had, after all, nothing to do with the French sending Jean-Baptiste de Rochambeau and his army to America, or Francois-Joseph De Grasse and the French fleet from the Caribbean into the Chesapeake Bay. However, he was adroit enough to force-march the combined allied army away from its stalemate outside New York all the way to Yorktown and ultimate victory. So too with his presidency, Washington managed to harness the genius of Alexander Hamilton’s invention of a truly national economy and financial system and to hold potential rivals such as the jealous John Adams and the utopian Thomas Jefferson in check long enough to get the nation up and running. It takes a special kind of political genius to do all that.

The obstacles and outright oppositions which faced Washington were immense. Wes Vernon, meditating upon Glenn Beck's book about Washington, writes:

The long political knives were out for Washington - “not a British noose, but an American one.” The Continental Congress tried to micromanage the general's conduct of the war by commissioning a board to oversee it. When its inspector general showed up at the commander’s headquarters, Washington made swift work of him, stopping short of rudeness. The man was stunned.

In addition to the congressional roadblocks, Washington’s burden was increased by the fact that some soldiers had “nefarious intentions in mind.” There were 2,000 deserters during the Valley Forge winter alone. Add to that the 80 colonists who were British spies.

From Benedict Arnold's ultimate betrayal, to cliques of officers plotting to overthrow Washington, to postwar years in which he had to mediate conflicts between Thomas Jefferson and John Adam and Alexander Hamilton, Washington overcame these problems, and overcame them in such a way that his ethical manner was manifest.

Varieties of Abolitionism

In the long history of the abolitionist movement in the United States, which started long before 1775 and separately from the movement toward political independence from England, we see significantly different subgroups within the larger movement. One clear distinction was between the abolitionists in the free North and those in the slaveholding South. Although the two groups admired and supported each other, they operated in very different circumstances.

Even among abolitionists in the South, there was a "broad spectrum of antislavery opinion," according to historian Stanley Harrold. A long list of local abolitionist organizations and societies dotted the map, and various leaders gained public attention for the cause in the South.

Most prominent among them were James G. Birney, Cassius M. Clay, Joseph Evans Snodgrass, John C. Vaughn, John G. Fee, and William S. Bailey.

Some abolitionists worked for the immediate end of all slavery, others took a longer view, supposing that it might take years or decades. Some advocated civil or peaceful means, others were willing to use force or violence.

Of the six individuals whose activities in the slave states drew extended comment from northern abolitionists, three - James G. Birney, Cassius M. Clay, and John G. Fee - are relatively well-known figures. All three were prominent for their activities in Kentucky, and Birney had also been active against slavery in Alabama. Although Birney, was born in 1792, was considerably older than Clay, who was born in 1810, and Fee, who was born in 1816, they had much in common. All three came from slaveholding families, and Birney and Clay had inherited large numbers of slaves. All were educated in the North - Birney at Princeton, Clay at Yale, and Fee at Miami University and the Lane Theological Seminary in Ohio. Each of them based his opposition to slavery on Christian precepts, although Fee's religious commitment was the strongest and Clay's has been obscured by his biographer. Birney and Clay were aristocratic, and they both began their careers as slave-holders who criticized slavery in their state legislatures.

In addition to being united by their antislavery sentiments, abolitionists in the South shared two foundations for these sentiments: first, the generally Christian outlook, and second, a strong sense of the nation's founding documents. To be sure, there was a diversity among them: Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, Roman Catholics, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, etc.; but they shared enough of the common Christian belief to be firm in their opposition to slavery. Politically, they saw abolitionism rooted in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution - including the Bill of Rights. Those texts contained the seeds of the abolitionist movement, and the years from 1776 to 1863 were in some ways merely an unfolding of what had been put into place by 1775.

Evangelical and political abolitionists of diverse backgrounds began to demand a revival of a religious campaign to directly impact the South.

The abolitionists believed that as people in the South were encouraged to consider authentic Christianity - as opposed to the very unChristian ideology of the slaveholding groups, an ideology which loudly proclaimed itself to be Christian but which was in fact not - they would embrace abolitionism.

Cassius M. Clay, calling on every Christian "to bear testimony against this crime against man and God," also suggested the creation of an abolitionist missionary organization for the South. He wanted an interdenominational board of home missions established in New York City to coordinate the project.

Abolitionists in the North would fund and support the activities of the abolitionists in the South. Clay, himself a Kentuckian, understood the dangers of sending speakers from the North into the South, and so looked to the North to support, but not to operate, the movement in the South. Joshua Leavitt and Charles Torrey, two other famous abolitionist leaders, endorsed a more aggressive version of Clay's idea, encouraging speakers to address the problem of slavery most directly.

Clay did well in envisioning the organizational form of the missionary undertaking in the South. When it emerged in the late 1840s as an important facet of abolitionism, the effort was, nevertheless, closer to the hearts of Torrey and Leavitt than to the Kentuckian's. At that time, the American Wesleyan Connection, the AMA, and the American Baptist Free Missionary Society (ABFMS) each initiated measures to spread antislavery religion in the South.

In those years of antebellum history, of course, AMA stood not for the American Medical Association, but rather for the American Missionary Association, one of the chief abolitionist groups.

Organized abolitionist missions in the South, begun in the 1840s, constituted a more aggressive and enduring effort than the mailing of antislavery publications to prominent southerners during the great postal campaign of 1834-35.

Although the effort to abolish slavery by awakening more southerners to the true meaning of Christianity reached its peak in the late 1840s and 1850s, it did not begin at that time. There

was a long tradition of religiously inspired and northern-supported antislavery action in the South. In 1835, Amos Dresser, former Lane Theological Seminary student and disciple of Theodore Weld, distributed antislavery "tracts and periodicals" in Kentucky and Tennessee. He also talked openly with slaves before a Nashville mob beat him severely for his efforts.

The pattern was common: a southern abolitionist spokesman, funded and supported in part from the North, whose message was a blend of New Testament Christianity and the Founding Fathers. The resistance to such spokesmen was also usually the same: based on economics, but cloaking itself in alleged fears of rampant crime by freed slaves, and hiding its anti-Christian hatred behind the verbiage of an insincere pseudo-Christianity.

Abolitionist missionary efforts of another Weld protege, David Nelson, became the focus of confrontation between religiously oriented abolitionism and slavery in Missouri. A southerner, a Presbyterian minister, and a former slaveholder who had freed his slaves, Nelson was president of Marion College in eastern Missouri when Weld converted him to immediatism in 1835. As an agent of the AASS, Nelson contacted slaves, called on slaveholders in his congregations to free their bondspeople, and attempted to attract young northern abolitionists to his college. Driven out of Missouri by mob threats, he established the Missionary Institute in Quincy, Illinois, that produced Work, Burr, and Thompson's slave rescue attempt in 1841.

The AASS was the American Anti-Slavery Society. Oberlin College in Ohio, filled at the time with Presbyterian spirituality, was another major institution among abolitionists. The word 'imediatism' refers to the idea, common among many abolitionists, that the time for waiting was over, no gradualism should be tolerated, and slavery had to be ended immediately.

Although, to the casual observer, the situation presented possible confusion - both abolitionists and slaveholders claiming to be Christians - there is no great mystery. Upon closer inspection, the southerners who defended slavery and called themselves Christians were nominal believers at best, and cynically manipulating their listeners at worst. The abolitionists from the North who often endured beatings by southern mobs displayed, by means of their wounds, the sincerity of their belief. The slaves themselves could easily tell which side manifested true Christian charity.

Pershing Conducts the War

General John “Blackjack” Pershing played a pivotal role in World War One; of this there can be no doubt. Among the many obstacles he faced, the enemy’s soldiers were merely one: he had to deal with a political machinery which, until mere months prior to America’s entry into the conflict, continued to announce its goal of staying out of the war; he had to deal with that same administration when, once it decided to enter the war, was ambivalent about whether it would support the English or the Germans; he had to deal with unwieldy relations with British and French allies, and several other nations as well; he had to deal with a new form of mechanized and industrialized warfare which was not yet fully understood; he had to deal with perpetual shortages of men and material. Despite this, or perhaps because of this, Pershing’s skill and accomplishments have earned ceaseless praise from scholars, including historian Timothy Nenninger, for almost a full century.

Woodrow Wilson’s wartime leadership was either nonexistent or useless. Wilson had famously opposed placing the United States into the war; he changed his mind on the topic because of domestic implications. He discovered that placing the nation on a wartime footing created the urgency – or sense of crisis – which he needed to further his domestic goals: increasing taxes, micromanaging the economy, and regulating various areas of private life. Wilson found that he now favored America’s involvement in the war, but had no strong preference as to which side the United States would support: England or Germany. There were strong reasons for Wilson to consider supporting Germany; a small clique of German scholars had shaped Wilson’s mind. Historian Jonah Goldberg writes:

few figures represent the foreign, particularly German influence on Progressivism better than Wilson himself. Wilson’s faith that society could be bent to the will of social planners was formed at Johns Hopkins, the first American university to be founded on the German model. Virtually all of Wilson’s professors had studied in Germany – as had almost every one of the school’s fifty-three faculty members.

Although Wilson dropped his isolationism and pacifism like a hot potato and eagerly threw America into the war, he offered no leadership or insight – or even interest – in the execution of that war. Pershing deserves full blame or full credit for America’s conduct of the war.

Nenninger’s analysis of the American Expeditionary Force’s mode of command centers in part on Pershing, and rightfully so. But Pershing’s career lasted well past the November 1918 armistice which ended WWI. As Chief of Staff of the Army until September 1924, he was able to codify the AEF’s collective experience in the 1923 edition of the Field Service Regulations and in the re-designation of Leavenworth as the “Command and General Staff School.” Nenninger tells us what, exactly, “the lessons learned” in WWI were.

Pershing’s qualifications to be Commander in Chief of the AEF included his experience, “political connections and political awareness, energy, organizational vision, and character.” He could learn from experience and from mistakes. Nenninger praises Pershing as excellent for the post, arguing that while Pershing was not perfect, there were none better suited.

“The lessons learned” dealt mainly with command and control. In contrast to the AEF, the British armies on the European continent during WWI operated rather independently of each other. The “successful” – Nenninger’s word – AEF commanders “sought centralized, tightly controlled operations” and “considered mission accomplishment paramount.” Nenninger doesn’t tell us what the British commanders “considered paramount.”

The AEF was involved in combat for a rather brief period of time. The United States declared war on 7 April 1917, but large scale entry into combat didn’t take place until June 1918, and the war ended in November of that year. Despite the brevity, “there were nearly two million” U.S. military men in Europe by the end of the war, and some of them had seen substantial combat action, and the AEF’s leadership had gained significant experience. Returning to the theme of “lessons learned,” the AEF encountered factors “beyond the control of American military authorities.”

(It seems to be one of the truisms of military operations that once a battle begins – once the famed “fog of war” sets in – that commanders are inundated by factors beyond their control, and by unexpected events. Despite careful planning, it is wise response to unexpected and uncontrollable events that leads to military success.)

Nenninger identifies three factors which made WWI different from previous conflicts – and therefore constituted challenges for officers who had never encountered these factors before: first, the large scale; second, the role as one nation in a coalition; third, “a three-thousand mile supply line.” The style of command was also different: there was “a War Department General Staff, with organized general staffs in tactical units in the field, and with some officers explicitly trained for the highest command and staff duties.” This command style also made WWI a new setting for U.S. military forces.

Detailed and developed military doctrines had been formulated and taught to officers to a far higher degree than, e.g., at the time of the U.S. Civil War. Organizational structure had been thought out and rehearsed, as well, to greater extent than in previous decades. Finally, technology offered new opportunities for communication and coordination – the value of communication between related military units at the front can hardly be overstated. Yet all of these factors were hindered and disrupted – by the rapid tempo at which massive casualties were inflicted by mechanized warfare, which the U.S. was encountering for the first time. Among the officers, there were in fact different approaches – different ways of doing business – in regard to organization and doctrine: these differences arising in part from the fact that the officers had been trained in different facilities. Some had been trained at the Leavenworth Staff College; some had been trained at the Army War College; some graduated from West Point; still other sources of training were available; diverse sources of training led to conflicting views on command and control. Field telephones and field telegraphs, a relatively new innovation and part of mechanized warfare, integrated units vertically, i.e., field units to their commanding units behind the lines, but not horizontally – neighboring field units to the right and left often had very poor communication. Such electronic communication was also subject to frequent malfunction. “The crucial lesson from the AEF experience was that with organization and doctrine unsettled, technical means unwieldy and not well utilized, personalities became crucial.”

Nenninger’s analysis concerning personalities meshes well with common sense. If a group of officers is supposed to work together in the deafening and chaotic environment of modern mechanized warfare and the PTSD-inducing trauma of casualties on a scale so massive that they are barely comprehendible, despite the fact that they have been given different, or even conflicting, notions about organization and doctrine, personalities will be critical. Will these guys be able to figure out how to work together?

The AEF tried various tactics to overcome some of the obstacles it faced in terms of command and control; one of them was the institution of liaison officers. This was a good move – in Nenninger’s opinion and in fact – but didn’t produce the desired results because the post was not properly understood or regarded by commanders. In order to represent his unit to other units, and communicate in both directions with them, a liaison officer would need to “in the loop” – at least present present at crucial decisive meetings – within his own unit; many liaison officers weren’t. Liaison officers would need to cause information to flow in two directions, but many commanders saw them as only gathering information about the other units, but not providing information to the other units. Finally, an effective liaison officer would need the skills and personality for the task – but many commanders assigned men to that post without regard for their talents or qualifications.

Given both the poor communications and the lack of map-reading skills, AEF units often didn’t know where they were, where or who the units to their right and left were, and knew where the enemy was only because they were engaged with him.

One particular organizational conflict arose between the commanding officers and the staff officers. General staff officers and chiefs of staff formed the team working for the commanders. The extent to which staff officers were to act on their own, but in the name of their commander, and the extent to which the commander delegated authority to them, was not consistent. In particular, the graduates of the Leavenworth Staff College had been instructed to make decisions and issue orders on their own initiative and sometimes without specific approval from their commanders. This was not always acceptable to the commanders.

An additional complexity was introduced by the fact that the Field Service Regulations and the Staff Manual – both texts published for officers – contained different organizational structures for the general staff. Pershing, alerted by English and French allies to the insufficiency of traditional staffing in the face of modern mechanized large-scale warfare, created a third organizational staffing model which he implemented for the AEF. Pershing’s model seems good, but required officers to first unlearn the other two models, and then required time for them to grow accustomed to Pershing’s structure. But time was short; one can argue that, by war’s end, the officers were still growing into a new structure and had not yet fully habituated to it. Like all models, Pershing’s had its ambiguities, which needed time to clarify, and it depended not only on abstract organizational charts, but also on the specific individual personalities which would occupy the spaces in that chart. Pershing’s model proved, after some growing pains, to be effective, and to be growing in effectiveness over time.

Because of the large scale, a doctrine of command was necessary. Such a notion was new for the U.S. military – Nenninger notes that the word ‘doctrine’ was not actually used until later. A key question to be answered by the doctrine of command was this: to which extent, if any, do the chief of staff and the general staff officers receive delegated authority from their commander enabling them to issue orders on their own? The problematic relationship between commanders and their staff officers was never fully clarified during the war. Individuals in some cases managed to carve out successful working relationships, but as a formalized doctrine, no clear arrangement was finally formulated and codified.

The commanders, who were over the staff officers, were largely hand-picked by Pershing. He was concerned to choose commanders who were physically fit and not too old, because of the demands of command duty – lack of sleep, high stress, etc.

Looking at Pershing himself, Nenninger notes both scholars who praise Pershing and those who disparage him. As Commander-in-Chief of the AEF, he kept his “subordinate commanders on a” short leash, but delegated considerable decision-making authority to his staff. He made frequent visits to the front, and encouraged others to do so, so that he could be familiar with troop morale, conditions, and “the state of mind of his commanders.” Pershing was more familiar with, and more involved in, operation than his French and British counterparts. Similar to his allies, however, he “lacked complete understanding of tactical conditions on the Western front, but that hardly set him apart from his contemporaries in other armies.”

In sum, Pershing and the AEF command structure suffered from conflicts arising from ambiguities in structure and from divergent organizational visions arising from different educations, but managed to be effective because it was in the process of improving itself, and because of Pershing’s leadership abilities.

Unpopular But Necessary: Involuntary Military Service

The word "draft" is, in American history, most commonly linked to the Vietnam War. Yet there are quite a few instances of involuntary military service in our nation's history. This practice is never without controversy and resistance; yet it seems also to be necessary in certain circumstances. It is perhaps the elected leader's worst nightmare.

In the very beginning of our nation, the draft was present. Forced military service began, at the latest, in early 1776. By 1778, it was "widespread" according historian John Maass.

Maass writes that conscription and impressment “produced antipathy and resistance to Patriot authorities, and undermined support for” the government. This may remind the reader of the draft’s effects during the Vietnam conflict. Maass defines ‘impressment’ as “the act of seizing property for public service or use,” although elsewhere it has been used to refer to something very similar to the draft or to conscription, i.e., to “compulsory military service,” as Maass defines ‘conscription.’ There may be some slight confusion about terminology here.

It is worth noting that twenty-first century nations, rather than the direct “impressment” of needed wartime supplies, prefer to tax citizens, and then buy the supplies. The net effect is the same, but perhaps citizens are less disturbed by taxes than by officials actually seizing property and goods. Maass points out that “the desperate situation” there “made the enforcement of taxation laws difficult.” Whether they were collecting taxes or goods, the primitive information technology and the difficulty of maintaining any long-distance communication would have created the “confusion that reigned within the state as authorities scrambled to procure the various needs of the army and the militia,” although both confusion and unscrupulous use of such authority are quite possible in our high-tech era as well.

The leaders of the U.S. military were aware of the problems, and “feared alienating the populace, and making the people reluctant” to support the cause of freedom. Although leaders of the Continental Army “regretted” the impressment of goods and property, there seemed to be no other course of action available to them.

Trying to limit the damage – i.e., worried that the public would reduce its support for the cause of liberty – some measures were taken to mitigate the harm done by such confiscations: owners were partially recompensed with vouchers, low-value paper currency, and tax exemptions. Some efforts were made to avoid impressing goods from the same areas more than once. Wisely, procurement agents were directed to take when possible from those who were already against the cause of independence – from whom there was no support to lose – rather than take from those whose support of independence might be lost to the bitterness of impressment.

The chaos of war created opportunities for abuse, and the practice of impressment was abused by military agents for personal gain, and sometimes for wanton destruction. Citizens resisted politically and physically, when possible. Even when impressment was conducted without corruption, it was often done undiplomatically. The practice reduced motivation for productive work, the fruit thereof being uncertain, and damped trade, inasmuch as import and export shipments could be impressed; this fulfilled a principle stated by Thomas Hobbes that productivity declines in warlike circumstances, and agricultural land will be underutilized. Citizens took to hiding their goods.

One North Carolina resident complained that the agents carrying out the impressments were “selected from the dregs of the people.” If impressment had become necessary, it would have been best to devote more attention, and better personnel, to seeing that it was carrying out as diplomatically as possible. It also became clear that counterfeit impressment agents – in no way connected to the Continental Army – were at work, confiscating property, but having no military authority to do so, and keeping it for themselves.

Some officers, like General Nathanael Greene and Thomas Burke, did a commendable job of policing their own soldiers to ensure than impressment did not turn into mere sacking and plunder.

Many of the problems encountered regarding conscription practices were analogues to those encountered regarding impressment practices. Both had a root in a lack of funding; the thirteen former colonies attempted to offer enticements to elicit volunteer troops, but simply weren’t able to offer enough cash to generate enthusiastic enlisters. The practice of hiring substitutes – men hired by draftees to go in their stead – was widespread and legally allowed. Drafting also led to a relatively high percentage of unfit men reporting for duty, only to be returned home. Local ‘draft boards’ – to use a term from a later era – were perhaps tempted to call upon those less fit, because local communities would object less, and because it was foreseeable that they would be returned home in short order. Draft dodgers were common, and those who did not evade the draft often deserted after showing up to be enlisted. Anti-draft riots occurred in a number of places.

We see that the government of North Carolina was placed into an uncomfortable situation. If the cause of liberty was to have even a chance at victory, large numbers of soldiers, and large quantities of supplies, had to be raised. Yet the infant government – both of the state of North Carolina and of the United States as whole – lacked the finances needed to accomplish this in a purely commercial manner. Impressment and conscription seemed then, and seem in hindsight, the only available route. Although necessary, these means undermined popular support for the cause of independence. Had the war lasted longer, it might have been lost due to conscription and impressment: the lesson is that if one must use these means, make sure that the war is over sooner rather than later, because it is a race against the clock as popular support starts to dwindle (cf. the first Gulf war of 1990, in which political planners worked to keep the war short for similar reasons). A second lesson is that if one must procure goods via impressment, keeping the process diplomatic and free of corruption must be a top priority. The feel of the matter is all too familiar, given the nation’s experiences during the Vietnam conflict.