Pajama Pundits

If you'd asked me yesterday where the final battle of the War of 1812 was fought, I'd have confidently answered, "New Orleans."

Not so. The last battle came five days later and more than two weeks after the war was officially over:

Final battle of War of 1812 fought at Point Peter

On Jan. 13, 1815, close to 600 British troops attacked Point Peter, overwhelming its 130 soldiers. The British seized St. Marys, looted jewelry and fine China from its residents, and burned the fort. It was never used again as a military outpost.

The fort was burned down by British troops and its remains had been buried until the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers required an archaeological survey by developers of Cumberland Harbour, a 1,014-acre waterfront subdivision being built on the site. Only a state historical marker, placed on the site in 1953, pointed out the fort's location.

"A few historians knew about this. But this event, which is really significant in the War of 1812, is mostly forgotten to the public," said Scott Butler, who led the excavation for the Atlanta archaeology firm Brockington and Associates. "We're trying to change that."

The areas examined were the barracks, latrine, and well. Over 67,000 artifacts were found, and at this particular moment, I'm not the least interested in learning more about the ones found in the latrine. Maybe after breakfast.

Victor Davis Hanson

Reverence for those who came before us ensures humility about our own limitations. It restores confidence that far worse crises than our own — slavery, the great flu epidemic, or World War II — were endured with far less resources.

By pondering those now dead, we create a certain pact: We, too, will do our part for another generation not yet born to enjoy the same privilege of America, which at such great cost was given to us by others whom we have now all but forgotten.

Sissy Willis posted this morning on Thomas Sowell's Opinion Journal article, "Crippled by Their Culture", on a theme further developed in his book, Black Rednecks and White Liberals.

Intrigued, I headed to the bookstore only to find out it won't be there until Thursday. Remembering the recommendation from a commenter, The Proprietor of Coffeegrounds, I picked up Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America by James Webb and How the Scots Invented the Modern World by Arthur Herman. (They were right next to each other... how could I not?), also quoted by Sisu.

I was immediately hooked by the first paragraph of Born Fighting. Webb describes a drive I made a time or two on the way back to Shreveport from visits to the youngest while she was at William & Mary. It's similar to the routes I travel in my head when I'm working on our family history.

The mountains are beautiful, smoky from the haze that the sun makes when it burns into the pine. My mind plays tricks. I tell myself that I've been right over there, once upon a time, or at least my blood has, taking water straight from a stream and staring out into the wild unknown, dreaming of the majestic deliverance that must be just over the next horizon, hiding in a valley that no white man has ever seen before. Or maybe the next horizon, or the next one, or the next one after that. Which is why my people kept on going, some of them getting hung up, staying behind in the cul-de-sacs of Appalachian hollows while the more adventurous worked their way, ratlike, through the maze until it broke out into Kentucky and then Missouri, Texas, and Colorado, and one day even hit the palm-lined beaches of California.

That's the lure of genealogy for me. I find myself drawn to the stories, imagining as best I can what my ancestor's lives were like, what drove them to pack up and leave land they'd just years before cleared and cultivated to go further west to clear and cultivate more. And... what motivated them to fight?

An example of the Scots-Irish stubbornness and loyalty is Winston County, Alabama and parts of eastern Tennessee during the Civil War.

The people of Winston County, Alabama, hill farmers of modest means, were typical of southern unionists. In 1860, Winston County was the poorest county in Alabama. The per capita value of property was $168 and the county ranked last in cotton production and slaveholding, with only 2 percent of the families owning slaves.

They were largely an isolated mountain people who had little influence on state government. They knew full well that the aristocracy viewed them as socially inferior and saw the impending conflict as “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.”

The leaders of Winston County held a meeting at Looney's Tavern, with attendance in the thousands. There they passed this resolution:

We agree with Jackson that no state can legally get out of the Union; but if we are mistaken in this, and a state can lawfully and legally secede or withdraw, being only a part of the Union, then a county, any county, being a part of the state, by the same process of reasoning, could cease to be a part of the state.

The Looney Tavern group also pled for neutrality, to be left alone by the Confederacy and the Union. They were not. They were branded as traitors and and tories by the Confederacy and persecuted, driving as many as 5,000 Alabamians to serve with various Union regiments, over 2,000 of them in the 1st Alabama Cavalry. Two of these were my great-great-great grandfather, Mordecai M. Cox and his brother-in-law, John Dodd.

The genealogy search led me to an unusual grave last week. Some of the older graves in cemeteries are unmarked, even more have markers with indecipherable names and dates. This grave is 108 years old and not in a cemetery, but on what used to be Pete Gorman's homestead and is now timberland owned by a large corporation.

It was originally marked by a concrete "curb" enclosure. Pete's 2 year old son pressed his hand and foot into the wet concrete.

There are seashells on three of the corners, and you can see where a fourth used to be.

On the 1910 census, his children have "at sea" listed as the birthplace of their father. Family stories have been circulated that he was found floating between two barrels, so possibly he was the survivor of a shipwreck around 1848. A quick internet search tells me that most Gormans that immigrated to the U.S. came from Ireland, and 1848 was in the middle of the potato famine, so that's possibly true, but other than the vague census data, I haven't found any verification.

The grave is here, according to the handheld GPS I had:

N 33.44.153 W094.21.242

I tried using those numbers with Terraserver and it said they weren't "valid".

This is from an 1880 census of Little River County Arkansas, Jackson Township. The column heading reads:

Not surprisingly, in this mostly rural area, the men were usually farmers and almost all the women were keeping house. For the males in this snippet, machinist was the odd occupation. For the females, the non-keeping house occupation is:

Hmm... now let me think, other than schoolmarm, just about any occupation other than keeping house was very rare for a female in those days, especially in a rural area, though I have seen several listed as farmers.

Around 1890, there were two postmistresses in a neighboring county. But objectionable? Could it possibly be... could she have possibly been... a politician?