April 19, 2014 - The Political Cesspool - James Edwards
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You're listening to the Liberty News Radio Network, and this is the Political Cesspool.
The Political Cesspool, known across the South and worldwide as the South's foremost populist conservative radio program.
And here to guide you through the murky waters of the Political Cesspool is your host, James Edwards.
Welcome back, everybody, to the Political Cesspool Radio Program, our nationally syndicated phenomenon here on the Liberty News Radio Network.
I'm your host, James Edwards.
Keith Alexander is still with me this Saturday evening, April 19th.
It's Holy Week.
And as we begin to celebrate Confederate History Month with this, our second hour coming up in the third, we're going to celebrate the resurrection of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
We're going to be talking about Easter.
We're going to play some of our favorite gospel hymns, at least parts of them anyway.
And we're going to talk about rattlesnakes, too.
So how did we connect the dots between Easter and rattlesnakes?
You'll have to find out, and we'll find out.
We'll have to find out together.
No, it's not a snake handling church.
No.
All right, folks.
Well, basically, we're going to do this hour a little bit differently.
And I'm very excited about this hour because we've got a guest making a debut appearance tonight.
And he's going to be highlighting some, perhaps, not that there's any insignificant or lesser known heroes.
They're all equal in stature as far as I'm concerned.
But, you know, certainly we've talked about Robert E. Lee, Nathan Bedford Forrest, Thomas J. Stonewall Jackson, some of the other well-known heroes of the Confederacy.
Tonight we're going to talk about some that perhaps don't have that type of name recognitions but should.
And I am going to recuse myself at the start of the second segment of this hour, and then I'll rejoin you in the third hour with Eddie the Bombardier Miller.
I'm going to let Keith and his guests have their way with the program this hour.
But first, I want to share, I know we have new listeners tuning in all the time, so even though I read this last year, undoubtedly there are folks who perhaps have forgotten about it and would like to hear it again, or people who have never heard it at all.
But just to give you a comparison, I know last week we played a song, God Bless Robert E. Lee, by Johnny Cash.
It wasn't very long ago at all, even into the 50s, 60s, 70s and beyond, that the Southerners, Confederate heroes, were still properly revered here in the South and in America.
Certainly, it's not nearly to the extent that it should be.
And I want to offer another comparison.
This is a real life history lesson that you might like to know.
It's a letter from the comptroller of the state of Florida that accompanied a Confederate veteran's pension check that was sent to the great grandmother of a listener of our radio program who was at that time a widow, December of 1933.
And listen to the language praising the ideals of the lost cause.
They're words that would never pass the lips of a politician or an elected state official today.
And the difference in attitudes of public officials between then and now is staggering.
And this is exactly what it reads.
I'm going to read it verbatim.
It comes from the state of Florida's Comptroller's Office, December 20th, 1933.
It's addressed to Mrs. Sarah McGehee.
Dear friend, I consider it quite fortunate on my part in being selected as the official charged with the responsibility of mailing you the enclosed pension check.
It's a rare privilege and a pleasure to forward you this token of appreciation of the great state of Florida.
I sincerely wish you and yours a very happy Christmas and a surprisingly good new year.
Personally, I feel the debt of gratitude owing you by the Commonwealth of this state cannot be estimated in material wealth and therefore cannot be composed by mere payment of money.
It is a liability that cannot be expressed in dollars, but can be enshrined in the sacred archives of tradition.
And by teaching the seceding generations that by your actions, experience, and devotion to a sacred principle, you have proved that God does not force us into deep water to drown us, but to cleanse us.
And that adversity is the trial of principle without which one hardly knows whether or not he is honest, unless, like those who fought for the Confederacy, he is sorely tried, smelted, polished, and glorified in the furnace of our tribulation.
If we remain true to the ideals and steadfast to our principles, as exemplified by those who followed the stars and bars, we are reminded that honor is likened to certain herbs and flowers.
They send forth their most delightful odors only after they have been crushed and broken.
Therefore, we should, all of us, profit from the experience and example of you brave souls who have conquered discouragement and despair and have, phoenix-like, risen from the dead ashes of destitution and want to the heights of honor, peace, and tranquility.
May the one whose honor we observe at Christmas comfort and keep you.
Very sincerely, J.M. Lee, Comptroller, state of Florida.
Keith, that was written to the widow of a Confederate veteran from a state official in Florida in 1933.
Could you imagine anyone in state office or a state public official writing something that first reveres God and secondly reveres the Confederacy and to have been written so eloquently?
First of all, people wouldn't even have the ability or prowess or proficiency to communicate in such an esteemed way as this guy did.
But then he honors what should be honored as well.
And that's something that is striking comparing the attitudes of 1933 to 2014.
He would obviously be first fired, then drawn and quartered by the politically correct left of today, unfortunately.
But that shows you how people felt in high places about the Civil War and about the Confederacy and its role in the Civil War back in our parents' and grandparents' days.
And like I said, the triumph of liberalism over the past 60 years has changed things to such a degree that it's hard to imagine that there was ever an America where public officials felt free to express those types of sentiments, James.
One more thing quickly.
Another one of my favorite heroes being a Tennessean, someone perhaps you haven't heard of before, unless you're a regular listener of this show and have caught us in previous Confederate history months, DeWitt Smith Job, a Confederate.
He enlisted in 1861, became part of a Company B in the 20th Tennessee Regiment commanded by Colonel Joel Battle and his cousin Thomas B. Smith.
This is a guy.
He was a scout in the Confederate Army.
He was captured and he ate his correspondence so it couldn't fall into the hands of the Union officials.
And angered by that near miss, the Union patrol first threatened Job and then began to torture him, as the Union was wont to do, in an effort to get the scout to divulge the content of the dispatch.
The Ohio troops first hanged D.S. Job from a bridal rein and then pistol whipped him, knocking out his teeth.
Bound and disarmed, helpless and bleeding, Job revealed nothing.
They were dealing with a man in gray who held the welfare of the Confederacy above his own life, wrote Ed Huddleston in the Civil War in Middle Tennessee.
That's a book.
The torture went on.
They were whooping him now, yelling so loudly that they could be heard at a distant farmhouse.
They gouged out his eyes.
Perhaps then it was when Job heaped epitets upon them.
How much courage, though, did it take to do that when they did?
They cut out his tongue.
The Union then finished off this Confederate scout by dragging him to death behind his own galloping horse.
So once again here, and this is the story of D.S. Job, Confederate scout.
This was the treatment he received once he fell into the hands of the enemy.
You can compare and contrast the nobility of the Confederate soldier to the savage nation, the savage nature rather, of the Union Army.
The thing about Job, we're comparing attitudes of then and now, Keith, he never gave up his countrymen.
He chose rather to die a painful death rather than to betray his fellow soldiers, his men.
And we ask this question rhetorically often on this show, but what happened to the nation that used to produce men like that?
They once existed.
Well, there's no honor for them anymore.
In fact, if that man existed today, he would be excoriated as some type of racist or Klansman or something like this by the people in charge of the high ground in our society today.
In fact, we're seeing it all the time.
PBS is rewriting history.
This new book by Doris Kearns Goodwin that was the basis of the Steven Spielberg biopic on Lincoln that won Academy Awards several years ago.
It's, you know, basically they're trying to say it's called the subtitle is The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.
And what Abraham Lincoln's political genius consisted of is that he lied his fool head off, according to this historian, at every opportunity to mislead people into endorsing him.
But nonetheless, he basically fought just like a modern liberal on all issues, particularly the issues involving race.
We come back, we're introducing our guest, and we're going to go full steam ahead.
Stay tuned, folks.
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And now back to tonight's show.
All right, folks, as promised, we're going to be talking about Easter in the third hour.
Really excited about what we have planned for that with Eddie de Bombardier Miller.
But now I'm tossing it over to Keith Alexander.
I'm actually going to go up to the front of the radio station into the green room, if you will, and we will be back with you, or rather I will, at the top of the third hour because from here on out, this hour is going to be Keith Alexander and his esteemed guest making a debut appearance.
Keith, why don't you tell us all about it and what you have planned?
Thank you, James.
It's my distinct pleasure now to introduce to you Mr. Donald Harrison.
He's a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans Nathan Bedford Forest Camp here in Memphis, Tennessee.
He's also Robert E. Lee.
Excuse me.
I've just been corrected on that Robert E.
But I see him all the time at the Nathan Bedford Forest Camp that I attend.
Donald is a historian.
He specializes in the Civil War around the Memphis area in the western Tennessee and western theater, and in particular, the Civil War as it is related to Elmwood Cemetery, which is an historic cemetery here in Memphis, Tennessee.
And we're going to, without further ado, pass the mic over to Donald Harrison.
But first of all, let me ask you this, Donald.
Why is Elmwood Cemetery important in terms of the Civil War?
Well, first of all, Keith, thank you for having me on your program today.
Elmwood's very important because it has a rich Confederate history, rich Civil War history.
In fact, there are more Civil War Confederate generals buried in Elmwood Cemetery than any other place except for Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia.
In fact, it depends on how you judge an officer to be a bona fide Confederate general.
One standard, the book Generals in Gray was written by Ezra Warner in 1959, and it had two qualifications for an officer to become a general, and that is the Confederate officer being appointed by Jefferson Davis and then nominated and confirmed by the Confederate Senate.
Another is the same regulation with the exception that nomination is not made by the Confederate Senate.
If you go by that qualification, Memphis and Elmwood Cemetery has about 13 generals and Richmond, Virginia with Hollywood Cemetery has 27.
But then on the other hand, there are a lot of different ways to be a Confederate general.
You could be designated a general by the state legislature, particularly at the beginning of the war.
And there were other ways.
You could have a field commission, for example, and based on those relaxed standards, how many Confederate generals are there buried in Elmwood Cemetery?
Well, in the second standard, if you include state generals, which they certainly fought in the war for the Confederate cause, as a total, if you go by the first standard, there are 425 Confederate generals, and of that number, 13 are buried in Memphis at Elmwood Cemetery.
If you go with a more relaxed standard, there are 562 Confederate generals in total, but Memphis has 22 of the 562 Confederate generals.
Well, I know that it's going to, our time frame tonight is not going to allow you to go into an exhaustive history with each of these, but who are some of the more important Confederate generals in your mind, to your way of thinking, that are buried at Elmwood?
Well, I think there's several interesting stories there, but I'll start with the A's, and that's James Patton Anderson.
He was born in 1822 in Winchester, Virginia.
His father died when he was nine years old, and he went to live with an aunt and uncle in Kentucky.
At the age of 13, he was studying in a law school, which is run by his uncle, the Montrose Law School in Frankfort, Kentucky.
His mother remarried, and she moved to Kentucky with her new husband, Dr. Bybey.
James Patton Anderson got around.
This was a day before airplanes, but he was able to get from one part of the country to another throughout his lifetime.
He went to college at Jefferson College in Pennsylvania.
That's Cannonsburg, Pennsylvania.
After that, the family had moved from Kentucky to DeSota County, Mississippi.
And James Patton Anderson, a fresh college graduate, was in DeSota County, which was a new area opening up for settlement about 1840.
It was a growing area, but he was a new attorney.
And unfortunately, there were many other more experienced attorneys in that area at that time.
So he accepted a position as deputy sheriff.
James Patton Anderson fought in the Mexican War.
He arrived in Mexico right a month before surrender, but unfortunately he became ill with malaria and that affected him for the rest of his life, the effects of malaria.
Because of that, well, he returned to Mississippi and DeSota County.
He became political allies with Jefferson Davis.
This was, oh, in the early 1850s.
But the doctors advised him to seek a cooler and drier climate than what is available in Mississippi.
So Jefferson Davis, he was Secretary of the Interior at that point in 1853, and he appointed James Patton Anderson as U.S. Marshal in Washington Territory, way up in the Northwest.
So James Patton Anderson and his wife, they left Memphis, went down the Mississippi River.
You got to understand, in 1853, when he went from Memphis, Tennessee to Washington Territory in the Northwest, you had to go down the Mississippi River to New Orleans, across the Gulf of Mexico to Nicaragua, cross over to the Pacific, and then up the coast in that direction.
Now, James Patton Anderson in Washington Territory had an encounter with a not famous before, but became famous during the Civil War individual who was associated with the Union cause.
Tell us about that.
Well, he certainly did.
This was in his wife's memoirs that were published years later.
James Patton Anderson, one of his first duties was to take a census of the new territory of Washington, which basically consisted of the territory of the present state of Washington with the exception of the western or the eastern third.
He was with a group, a party that was going up the Columbia River, and they came across a group of Union soldiers who were camped along the Columbia River.
And they were quite concerned because their captain was missing, had been missing for some time.
The captain, well, is drunk and he'd been drinking for some time.
In fact, he had gotten to the point where he had the DTs.
And so they couldn't find him.
Let's get back to the rest of this story after these words from our sponsors.
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That was
the OLE MISS pep band or the marching band playing Dixie the way they used to play it before the whole campus.
In fact, the whole state was afflicted with political correctness within the past 10 years or so.
They rarely, if ever, play that full version anymore, but we wanted to treat you to that particularly martial-sounding stirring version of Dixie to commemorate Confederate History Month.
And to further commemorate Confederate History Month, we have Donald Harrison, historian, who is going to tell us about famous Confederate generals buried at Elmwood Cemetery in Memphis, which is important because it is the cemetery that has more Confederate generals buried in it than any other cemetery except for Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond.
And we were just talking about James Patton Anderson, who was another one of the neglected talented generals in the Confederacy, along with Nathan Bedford Forrest, who, had he been given more authority, I think could have really influenced the war, particularly in the West, in the Confederate favor, just like if Nathan Bedford Forrest had had more authority.
Donald, tell us about James Patton Anderson and his experience with the captain of a group of Union soldiers in the state of Washington or in the territory of Washington before it became a state in the 1850s.
Well, certainly, Keith.
But I have to say this, Keith.
I love the song Dixie, but you would have to play Dixie, the old Miss Fight song.
And I'm a Mississippi State grad.
But anyway, back to the story about James Patton Anderson.
While he was taking a survey, a census survey on the Columbia River, he came across a group of Union soldiers who had lost their captain.
The captain was drunk.
He was out of his mind and had been missing for some time.
So they followed the trail of torn clothing through the woods and the underbrush.
And they came to a, Patton Anderson came to the Columbia River to a rocky ledge right at the edge of the river.
And he saw this captain, and the captain was crouched over or standing near the edge.
And who knows what he's thinking?
And, well, torn clothing is what he had.
But who knows what he's thinking?
Maybe he was just looking at the river.
Maybe he was thinking about jumping.
I don't know.
But it was several hundred feet below from the perch where he was.
And Patton Anderson, he climbed up the ledge, came up on one side of this Union captain, made a lunge toward him and knocked him away from that precarious perch on the river and saved his life.
It was very, it could have gone the other way.
Both men could have fell several hundred feet into the river and it would have been the end of both of them.
This captain turned out to be Ulysses S. Grant, who was a major general during the Civil War for the Union, commander of the Union armies in the latter half of the war, and the 18th president of the United States.
Had he fell into the river, history would have been changed.
Yes, in fact, he was chosen specifically by Abraham Lincoln because he was the one commanding general who would apply the terrifying arithmetical reality of the war, which is that the North just had more many material to throw on the pile of dead bodies, and they would win a war of attrition.
Of course, that was totally unlike General McClellan, who was the first commander of the Army of the Potomac, who was a gentleman who saw Southerners as fellow Americans and who wanted as little bloodshed as possible, wanted to win the war with a strategic master stroke.
Grant fought just like Lincoln.
And as Patton Anderson's widow said later on, if he had known how he was going to turn out, he probably wouldn't have taken that step to save him.
But Patton Anderson saved, in all probability, Ulysses S. Grant's life.
U.S. Grant was known to have a problem with drinking when he wasn't in the throes of hot combat.
And as a result, that propensity definitely caught up with him and he was relieved of his command there on the West Coast on the Columbia River.
Now, who else have we got that is of interest here in Elmwood Cemetery, buried in Elmwood Cemetery?
Well, there is William Montgomery Gardner, who was a West Point graduate.
He had an interesting story with his life.
He was born in Augusta, Georgia in 1824.
As a young boy, he would play out in the woods and do a lot of swimming in the Savannah River, which turned out to be a good thing.
When it was time for him to go to college, his parents sent him to Georgetown University in the District of Columbia.
And to get from Augusta, Georgia to Georgetown in the District of Columbia in 1839, it meant you take a carriage from Augusta to Charleston, carriage or stagecoach, get on a boat from Charleston up the Atlantic into the Potomac Bay and up the Potomac River to the D.C. area.
He did so, arrived in the D.C. area, and it was on another stagecoach sitting next to the driver.
There were probably about 12 passengers inside the stagecoach, and they were crossing over the Potomac River Canal.
Unfortunately, the bridge fell in.
And the water was about seven feet deep, but there are high brick walls or stone walls on each side of the canal, which meant that you couldn't swim to shore and climb up because the walls were too high.
There were quite a few people died there.
There were some survivors, and William Montgomery Gardner was one of them.
So he was two years at Georgetown.
He had another close call with death.
Tell us about that.
Well, he did have another close call.
After his two years at Georgetown, he returned home to Augusta, Georgia, and then received an appointment to West Point.
Again, how do you get to West Point, New York from Augusta, Georgia in about 1840?
The same route.
Stagecoach to Charleston and then boat up the Atlantic coast to New York.
Well, he got aboard the boat, the ship the Ashley, was going up the Atlantic coast.
About the third night, he was sleeping and he heard a clatter on the deck above.
He went up on the deck and he saw crew and passengers scurrying around.
The boat was leaking.
Apparently they had hit something underwater, perhaps an old shipwreck or maybe a tree of some sort.
Anyway, there was a big gash in the hull of the ship.
The crew and with the aid of passengers, they were trying to bail water out as much as possible.
Finally, the captain of the Ashley decided to run the ship aground.
This was off the coast of North Carolina near Cape Fear.
When they finally ran the ship aground, the lifeboats were lowered and the women and children were put in the lifeboats and headed for shore.
Before they returned, a big storm came up, a storm that was so severe that waves were brushing over the front over the deck of the Ashley.
And apparently a lot of people drowned in this fiasco that was going on, this shipwreck.
But again, miraculously, our hero survived.
What did he do after this?
Well, he did survive, and he made it to West Point.
The school session had already started, and it makes you wonder what the reaction of the school officials at West Point had to say when William Montgomery Gardner arrived and said, well, I'm late because the ship wrecked.
Did they believe him initially?
Well, eventually they did.
Well, he remained at West Point, graduated in 1846.
Another classmate was George McClellan, who became a very prominent Union general and commander of the Union armies, and also a Democratic candidate opposing Lincoln for the president in the election of 1864.
Okay.
Well, he graduated from West Point, fought in the Mexican War, and what happened to him after that?
Well, what happened to him after that?
He was wounded in the Mexican War.
There was a point, there was a battle.
The wounded American soldiers were put in a cornfield while the battle raged on.
The Mexican Army took control of the battlefield, and they went about killing wounded American soldiers in the cornfield.
Fortunately, William Montgomery Gardner survived this.
Now, it must be pointed out, another atrocity you could call happened just a few days earlier when American soldiers killed unarmed Mexican soldiers under a bridge, such as the horrors of war, so to speak.
Well, okay, this man has a propensity to cheat death.
Tell us about his service in the Civil War for the Confederate call.
Well, he remained in the military until the United States military, until the state of Georgia seceded in early 1861.
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Okay, folks, here we are.
We're back on air.
We're talking with Donald Harrison, local historian, about William Montgomery Gardner, a Confederate general who is buried at Elmwood.
Bring it home for us here, Donald.
Tell us what he did, why it's important, and let's then move on to the next one.
William Montgomery Gardner is one of the two West Point graduates who are Confederate generals that are buried in Elmwood Cemetery in Memphis.
William Montgomery Gardner, after Georgia seceded, he became part of the 8th Georgia Infantry.
At the First Battle of Manassas or Bull Run in Virginia, he was severely wounded.
This wound kept him out of combat for the remaining part of the war.
But he did serve as a commander of the Middle Division of Florida, and he was head of prisons, Confederate prisons east of the Mississippi for a time.
Not a lot of fighting going on in the Middle District of Florida during the Civil War, I don't believe, but nonetheless, he was a brigadier general, a West Pointer, buried at Elmwood.
Now, there's one other West Point graduate buried at Elmwood, Marsh Walker.
Tell us all about him.
Lucius Marshall Walker, and he was called Marsh Walker by family and friends.
He was a nephew of President James K. Polk, a Tennessean.
He graduated from West Point 1850, served in the Army for a couple of years.
After that, he moved to Memphis, and this was probably mid-1850s, was a merchant.
When the war between the states began, he enlisted.
He became a brigadier general in early, I think it was March of 1862.
He missed the Battle of Shiloh because he was ill, but he did fight at Corinth and then was transferred to the Trans-Mississippi Department.
At the Battle of Helena, which occurred in July of 1863, he was ranking general.
But unfortunately, there was a quarrel that occurred at that battle between a Missouri Confederate general, John Sappington Marmaduke.
What a name.
But anyway, Marmaduke accused Walker of holding back, basically accusing him of cowardice.
Now, most historians defend Walker in this.
But anyway, the dispute arose.
Later on, after the Battle of Helena, the Confederate Army was retreating back toward Little Rock.
And again, Marmaduke accused Walker of holding back and cowardice.
Well, the fuse had been lit.
Rumors got around the Confederate camps that Marmaduke had accused Walker of cowardice and that there would be a duel.
And that's what happened.
On September 6th of 1863, with the Union Army just outside Little Rock, two Confederate generals fought a duel.
I mean, my goodness, there's enough Union Army and Yankees around to kill each other, but that's not what happened.
But it had to do with honor.
And unfortunately, Lucius Marshall Walker was killed in this duel.
He died the next day after being shot.
And I also understand that he forgave Sappington, I mean, Marmaduke, before he died.
Furthermore, Marmaduke himself was a very interesting character.
He went to Harvard first, then he went to West Point.
He went to Yale, excuse me, not Harvard.
But he, after the war, he was a very slight man, very slight man.
He was very thin and frail, but apparently had a fierce fighter's heart and was a cavalry general.
In fact, very arguably the best Confederate cavalry general in the Western theater.
And he became the governor of Missouri after the Civil War and by, according to both Confederate and Union partisans, became one of the more excellent governors in the history of Missouri.
That is correct.
Marmaduke, he regretted the whole incident.
In fact, going back to Lucius Marshall Walker, the general who died as a result of this duel, before he died, he forgave Marmaduke for killing him.
That's his words.
He asked that his friends and family to not prosecute nor persecute Marmaduke for killing him.
And that's what it is.
Jefferson Davis later on in probably the 1870s, he was talking to a grandson of Davy Crockett, Bob Crockett, who had witnessed the duel.
And he said it was unfortunate but unavoidable.
Because if a general commanding an army or a brigade is accused of cowardice, something must be addressed.
I mean, it shouldn't have gotten to that point to begin with, but it did.
It was the standards of the time.
It was almost like a mini version of the confrontation between Nathan Bedford Forrest and General Braxton Bragg.
Only Bragg apparently wasn't man enough to call him out and have a duel the way that Marshall Walker was and Sappington.
Sappington was kind of in the role of Forrest, like him, a cavalry general, like him, hot-blooded and a real fighter.
And on the other hand, he didn't feel like he got enough support from the infantry.
And of course, that was not only Forrest's complaint, but the complaint of a lot of other generals in the Western theater about Braxton Bragg.
In fact, it was extremely unfortunate that Albert Sidney Johnson died as early as he did in the Western campaign because Braxton Bragg was not a good general.
He's one Confederate general that I think I have a lot of trouble with.
He was almost dysfunctional, I think, in a lot of ways.
He prevented Nathan Bedford Forrest from winning the Battle of Chickamauga, for example, for the Confederacy.
Yes, there are a lot of complaints you can state about Braxton Bragg.
There really is.
On the other hand, there are generals like Nathan Bedford Forrest and James Patton Anderson and Gardner and Lucius Marshall Walker and Marmaduke, who should have been given more authority by the Confederate high command.
And if they had been, it's very possible that the war could have ended differently.
But that's, you know, water over the dam, nothing that can be done about that now.
But basically, the Union had a better record of recognizing talent within their ranks and promoting it than the Confederate high command did.
For example, U.S. Grant was considered a scapegrace and barely given no authority at the beginning of the war.
But as the war carried on, they found that this Tanner's son actually had a great deal of talent and furthermore was willing to, was on the same page as President Lincoln.
So he got promoted.
Just think of how the Confederacy might have fared if people like Nathan Bedford Forrest had been given high commands.
Instead, they were considered to be mere raiders, not people that had the full strategic sweep of the war.
Unfortunately, they thought that people like Braxton Bragg did, and they depended upon him to the detriment of the Confederate cause.
Well, that's true, but the Confederate military suffered, as many organizations do, from political politics in the ranks.
Braxton Bragg was a friend of Jefferson Davis, and that certainly did play a role.
But Elmwin Cemetery has, besides the Confederate generals, there are six Confederate congressmen there.
There are at least three women spies.
Women's spies played a role in Memphis after Memphis was occupied.
And there are also two Union generals who were buried in Elbwin Cemetery.
One is William J. Smith, who is a Tennessean and fought for the Union.
Another is Milton T. Williamson, who moved to Memphis after the war.
Williamson was from Ohio.
Memphis had all of these people buried here because after the Civil War, Memphis was a very active commercial center.
It was at the terminus of the major inland East-West Railroad in the territory of the old Confederacy, the Memphis to Charleston Railroad.
And furthermore, because it had been captured early in the war, it had not been devastated like places such as Savannah and Charleston were, particularly Savannah, with William Tecumseh Sherman's march to the sea.
Memphis was spared and therefore still intact.
And as a result, it drew a lot of ex-Confederates and ex-Union soldiers as well because it was relatively prosperous according to the rest of the South at that time.
That is correct.
And it was a fast-growing area.
Memphis was before the war, and it continued after the war.
Thank you very much, Mr. Harrison.
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