Dead Confederates, A Civil War Era Blog

Employees with HRA Gray & Pape excavate a trench near the cruise port as they try to locate the wreckage of the Zavala, a Texas Navy streamship that was run aground and forgotten 174 years ago, shown Monday, Aug. 31, 2015, in Galveston. Port leaders must make sure the cruise port expansion plans won’t disturb the historic wreck. Photo by Melissa Phillip, Houston Chronicle.

As part of a Port of Galveston expansion to accommodate more and larger cruise ships, excavations are being done this week to ensure that the project doesn’t impinge on the wreck of one of the more unusual vessels of the Republic of Texas Navy of the 1840s, the steamship Zavala:

In 1986, novelist and adventurer Clive Cussler set out to discover the remains of the Republic of Texas’ armada. Cussler determined that the Zavala was the only Texas Navy wreck left that he had a chance of discovering. He dug into what was then a parking lot and found what he believed were the Zavala‘s remains, then reburied them; the expedition lacked the money to excavate the wreckage.

Thirty years later they have become a headache for the Port of Galveston, which has hired archaeologists who began digging again Monday to make sure that cruise port expansion plans won’t disturb the historic wreck.

Port leaders want to expand the wharf at Cruise Terminal 2 by 95 feet and install two mooring bollards, posts sunk into the ground deep enough to secure the 138,279-ton Navigator of the Seas, a Royal Caribbean cruise ship, Port Director Michael Mierzwa said. After receiving the plans from his engineer, Mierzwa realized that the posts would be placed in the area where Cussler had dug for the Zavala. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which permits maritime construction, told Mierzwa he would need a permit from the Texas Historical Commission as well.

Cussler’s account of where he found the wreckage is imprecise, so without excavation there is no way to know whether the bollards would be sunk into a historical artifact.

“I’ve seen drawings that had it one in part and in about two or three other locations,” Mierzwa said.

Adding to Mierzwa’s difficulty is the possibility that more wrecks are in the area. Although Cussler’s findings strongly suggested that he had found the Zavala, he never found an artifact that proved it, said Jim Hughey, regional manager for HRA Gray & Pape LLC’s Houston office. The company is supplying the archaeologists for the port.

Michael Tuttle, marine archaeologist and historian for HRA Gray & Pape, said the Confederate Neptune [No. 2], sunk in the 1864 Battle of Galveston, also went down in the area. He said the historical commission believes several other ships of lesser renown also may be nearby.

Cussler is certain that he found the Zavala.

“I don’t know what the hell else it would be,” Cussler said, noting that the head of the Texas Antiquities Committee was present and agreed that it was the Zavala. Cussler said he believes the Neptune sank farther out, and there were no other wrecks close enough to the dig site to be confused with the Zavala.

Well, no; the very document that showed Cussler where to look for Zavala also shows Neptune No. 2 very close by, where she settled in shallow water after the Battle of Galveston. The wreck was subsequently salvaged in place. So the presence of the old cottonclad nearby is highly likely.

The cottonclad Neptune No. 2 lies sunk in shallow water after the Battle of Galveston, New Years Day, 1863. The dark, cylindrical object near the boat’s stern (arrow) is identified on the original drawing (bottom right) as the wreck of the Texas Navy steamship Zavala. It’s definitely close. Image via Rosenberg Library, Galveston.

To be fair, I think it’s more likely that the adventure author located Zavala thirty years ago, rather than Neptune No. 2, given that his coring included what appeared to be copper sheathing, which the converted riverboat almost certainly wouldn’t have had. Still, I’m glad they’re back looking again.

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Jade Helm is here, people. Chris Martin uncovers the irrefutable evidence at the Sam’s Club in San Angelo:

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Early Saturday morning, an activist named Bree Newsome climbed the flagpole on the grounds of the State House in Columbia, South Carolina and removed the Confederate flag flying there. She and at least one other accomplice were quickly arrested, as I’m sure they expected to be. They’re currently facing a misdemeanor charge of defacing a monument.

That particular flag has been the focal point of intense controversy over the past week, as everyone knows. An act like Newsome’s, I’m sure, was not unexpected. And while I would expect various pro-flag groups to denounce Newsome’s actions, I’m also — frankly — not surprised at some of the comments about it left on the Virginia Flaggers’ Facebook page. I’m putting them after the jump because they’re pretty damned ugly:

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Someone observed once that 1968 was a year in which Americans experienced more history than we were able to absorb. That’s what the last two weeks feels like to me.

Y’all have a great weekend.

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If you’re not completely exhausted and burned out by the coverage of events of the past few days in Charleston (and Columbia), I’d like to recommend five essays that are worth your time.

Ta-Nehesi Coates: What this Cruel War was Over:

Roof’s belief that black life had no purpose beyond subjugation is “sick and twisted” in the exact same manner as the beliefs of those who created the Confederate flag were “sick and twisted.” The Confederate flag is directly tied to the Confederate cause, and the Confederate cause was white supremacy. This claim is not the result of revisionism. It does not require reading between the lines. It is the plain meaning of the words of those who bore the Confederate flag across history. These words must never be forgotten. Over the next few months the word “heritage” will be repeatedly invoked. It would be derelict to not examine the exact contents of that heritage. . . .

It is difficult for modern Americans to understand such militant commitment to the bondage of others. But at $3.5 billion, the four million enslaved African Americans in the South represented the country’s greatest financial asset. And the dollar amount does not hint at the force of enslavement as a social institution. By the onset of the Civil War, Southern slaveholders believed that African slavery was one of the great organizing institutions in world history, superior to the “free society” of the North.

The Freedmen’s Patrol Blog: A Murderous Tradition of White America:

This attack does not present us with a mystery. The assassin told us with words and action precisely what he intended to do. The people who tell us otherwise could not have chosen a more obvious lie. He acted alone and isolated only in the narrowest, most literal sense that he did not gather together a conspiracy to help him. He had accomplices, morally at least, all around him. The people who named the streets, who raised the flag, who smiled off camera and took his picture, all played their part. They told the assassin that people who prosecuted the case for white supremacy, to the very point of war, deserved recognition and celebration. We don’t name streets after people we consider villains. We don’t fly flags we view as odious. The assassin has other accomplices who now pretend that the shooting had nothing to do with the persistence of white supremacy in the United States. They might deplore his methods, but by obscuring his ideology they enable it. Whether they cloak their cries of white power in the language of anti-anti-racism, as if one prefix did not negate the other, or say nothing because they dare not alienate what they correctly understand as a key voting constituency, they attend the shooting with more than indifference and less than the abhorrence it deserves. They know full well that if the assassin had different skin color or a different presumed religion, they would have no such scruples. How does one explain any of that, unless the excusers and obscurers are themselves white supremacists? If that doesn’t amount to racism, then nothing does.

Paul Mullins, Imagining the Racist Landscape:

Roof visited all these places in the months leading up to his mass murder at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church (see Corey McQuinn’s analysis of the Charleston Church’s history), yet he did not negate their histories by refuting the sites’ narratives.  Ruff did not engage the critical histories told at Boone Hall, Sullivan’s Island, or McLeod Plantation, and his presence at Elmwood was at best a mute commemoration of Confederate dead with whom he perhaps fancied he had some affinity.  His screed accompanying his “The Last Rhodesian” web page had nothing to say about the specific places he visited; instead, it simply repeated stale racist rhetoric and may betray the desperation of White privilege in the hands of an unreflective thinker.  This is a somewhat different rhetorical approach than Confederate defenders and revisionists who weave historical fact and ideological biases into narratives that re-cast the war, the color line, and Southern heritage; Ruff’s text for the most part simply railed on a host of non-WASP peoples.  Ruff does allude to “an American [sic] to be proud of and fight for,” a nation that apparently existed in some moment before Vietnam, but like many White supremacists Roof’s shallow history romanticizes a segregated world and rails at the perceived erosion of White privilege.

The Cotton Boll Conspiracy Blog, Deep debate cast aside for quick decisions based on ‘perception’:

Prior to the mid-1950s, the national news media didn’t perceive the persecution of blacks in the Deep South as being worthy of more than scant coverage, enabling extremists to kill, maim and intimidate blacks with almost complete impunity. With the murder of 14-year-old Emmitt Till in 1955 that began to change. The murder of civil rights activists in Mississippi in 1964 further prompted national news media to focus attention on Deep South transgressions. Once the major news media began to shine its spotlight on what was going on in the region regarding terror and mayhem, the federal government began to take a greater interest in putting an end to it. There are countless other examples of “perceptions” faced by blacks, along with those other minorities and women, that we now understand were not just misguided but out-and-out wrong. None of the above is to say that the flag issue isn’t worthy of discussion. But it should be done with logic and rational thought, rather than focusing on nebulous feelings that can neither be proved nor disproved.

Robert Moore, Charleston… and observations:

Historians have every right to be passionate and zealous for a “cause”; they can even be activists. It’s just that when that cause intersects with their professional historical era of interests, I find it a little troubling. For one, depending on the advocacy, I begin to question the ability of the same historians to really be objective when they return to the practice of writing and speaking about their historical era (obviously, in this case, I’m talking about the Civil War). More specifically, I find it troubling when, in the course of advocacy… for that common cause… the passionate and (overly?) zealous historians are much more accepting (yes… I’ve seen this in various places on the Web and in blogs) of those who rant and rave with poor history. I find it odd that they don’t keep the others in check. I’d say it might be a matter of one battle at a time, but then… there are also examples where I’ve seen selective dismissal of one ranting of poor history, but not another. I believe the “temporary lapses of forgiveness” of poor history displays compromised professionalism for zeal. I don’t think such compromise, even in the midst of passion for advocacy, is a good thing.

Good reads, and lots to consider.

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In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court held today that specialty license plates are a form of government speech:

History shows that States, including Texas, have long used license plates to convey government speech, e.g., slogans urging action, promoting tourism, and touting local industries. Cf. id., at 470. Second, Texas license plate designs “are often closely identified in the public mind with the [State].” Id., at 472. Each plate is a government article serving the governmental purposes of vehicle registration and identification. The governmental nature of the plates is clear from their faces: the State places the name “TEXAS” in large letters across the top of every plate. Texas also requires Texas vehicle owners to display license plates, issues every Texas plate, and owns all of the designs on its plates. The plates are, essentially, government IDs, and ID issuers “typically do not permit” their IDs to contain “message[s] with which they do not wish to be associated,” id., at 471. Third, Texas maintains direct control over the messages conveyed on its specialty plates, by giving the Board final approva lover each design. Like the city government in Summum, Texas “has effectively controlled the messages [conveyed] by exercising final approval authority over their selection.” Id., at 473. These considerations, taken together, show that Texas’s specialty plates are similar enough to the monuments in Summum to call for the same result.

And this:

The Court has also recognized that the First Amendment stringently limits a State’s authority to compel a private party to express a view with which the private party disagrees. Just as Texas cannot require SCV to convey “the State’s ideological message,” id., at 715, SCV cannot force Texas to include a Confederate battle flag on its specialty license plates.

This is not an outcome I expected. Heretofore the federal courts have upheld plates like these in other states; now that the Supreme Court has ruled the other way, expect moves in those other states to rescind those plate programs. Today’s ruling also underscores the principle that governmental entities have significant latitude to pick and choose what causes or events they promote or commemorate, even when solicited to do so by the public. I have no idea how this will all shake out in the long run. You can download the full opinion here.

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