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Tag: US Civil War

Fort Point, guardian of the Golden Gate


Immediately under the south end of the Golden Gate Bridge stands Fort Point, a US Army fortress that protected the approach to San Francisco Bay during the Civil War. Fort Point is one of the best-preserved coastal defense forts of its era, and one of the few major sites of Civil War significance on the West Coast.

The Army built Fort Point as part of the Third System of Coastal Fortifications, which were built between the end of the War of 1812 and the beginning of the Civil War. Most of the Third System forts were built on the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts. When I lived in Alabama in grad school ten years ago, I visited several Third System forts; some of my pictures of those forts appear in this video.

While I enjoyed visiting those forts, I was disappointed to find that many of them had ugly concrete batteries from a later era, the Endicott System, built right inside them. Not even iconic Fort Sumter, where the Civil War began, was spared this fate! But Fort Point didn’t have any concrete gun batteries built inside it, as there were plenty of more convenient sites for the big guns elsewhere on the Golden Gate (and they probably wouldn’t have fit anyway). Although Fort Point is hardly in pristine condition (all of its original guns are missing, and the fort was modified in an abortive attempt to convert it into a second prison like Alcatraz), the fort is substantially complete, and it is easier to envision how it was used in the 1800s than it is while visiting many other Third System forts.

When researching this video, I found no shortage of secondary source material about Third System forts in general and Fort Point in particular. Some of this material was produced by the National Park Service for its own use in maintaining and interpreting the site. Another very useful source was (surprisingly) a Master’s thesis from the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, which provided a wide-angle view of Third System forts that other secondary source material lacked.

Fort Point under Golden Gate Bridge

Fort Point is nestled under the southern end of the Golden Gate Bridge. It is easy to miss, but well worth taking the time to pay it a visit if you are in San Francisco.

Fort Point scarp wall

The southern or scarp wall of the fort, which was the only wall that did not face the ocean.

Fort Point gorge wall

The gorge wall in the interior of the fort, on the same side as the scarp wall. This is where the officers and enlisted men had their quarters.

Fort Point powder magazine

The reconstructed powder magazine of Fort Point, in the scarp side of the fort. (This display was under renovation when I shot this video, which is why it does not appear in the video. I took this picture in 2019.)

View of the parade ground inside Fort Point. The three arched tiers around the courtyard are the casemates, where the guns were mounted to protect against enemy ships.

View of the parade ground inside Fort Point. The three arched tiers around the courtyard are the casemates, where the guns were mounted to protect against enemy ships.

Fort Point vaults

The vaults in the casemates.

Fort Point roof

View from the top level of the fort.

Sources

  • Charlesworth, Timothy J. “Defending America’s Shore: A Historical Analysis of the Development of the U.S. Army’s Fortification System, 1812-1950.” Master’s thesis, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, 2000. https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA384106.pdf.
  • Cultural Resources and Museum Management Division. Abbreviated Fort Point Historic Structure Report. San Francisco: Golden Gate National Recreation Area, 2006.
  • National Park Service. Fort Point. N.p.: Government Printing Office, 2017.
  • Smith, Mark A. Engineering Security: The Corps of Engineers and the Third System Defense Policy, 1815-1861. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009.
  • Stephenson, John. “Deterrence in Stone: Seacoast Fortresses of the 19th Century.” Periodical: Journal of America’s Military Past 20, no. 2 (summer 1993): 10-18.

Forgetting the Mexican-American War

This post is a follow-up to my piece from last year, “Remembering the United States intervention.”

The Mexican-American War of 1846-1848 was a hugely important event for both nations involved. At the end of the war, a defeated, humiliated Mexico lost nearly half of its territory. The United States gained this territory, including the strategic harbors of San Francisco and San Diego and the gold- and silver-rich Sierra Nevada. The aftermath of the war would lead to bitter civil wars in both countries, the War of the Reform in Mexico (1857-1860) and the American Civil War in the United States (1861-1865).

Given its importance, it is not surprising that the Mexican-American War is well-remembered in Mexico, with huge monuments in the capital and streets honoring the heroes of the war in cities across the country. In the United States, though, it is another story. There is very little cultural memory of the war, and virtually no monuments to it. (I am not including monuments to the Bear Flag Revolt in California, because the monuments never portray the conflict as a part of the bigger war.) I never even heard of the war before I was in 11th grade, and my students in college-level US History 1 know little or nothing about it.

Why do we not remember the Mexican-American War in the United States, even though it was so important? That is a question I have pondered for some time. I unexpectedly came across an answer to this question when I found an article about memory of the Mexican-American War while researching a different topic.

The article is by Amy S. Greenberg, and it appeared in the October 2009 issue of PMLA, the journal of the Modern Language Association. According to the article, it was between the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the Spanish-American War in 1898 that Americans forgot about the war with Mexico. There were a couple of reasons why collective amnesia set in during this time. One was that the heaviest fighting in the war had taken place in territory that was still a part of Mexico, and there were thus very few soldiers’ graves on US soil to pay homage to on the new holiday of Memorial Day. (To this day, the US government maintains a cemetery of American war dead in Mexico City.)

There was also a political reason. In the Second Party System, the Democrats had been in favor of the war with Mexico while the opposition party, the Whigs, were opposed to it, seeing it as nothing more than a brazen land grab. (Great Whig statesman John Quincy Adams collapsed on the floor of the House of Representatives while railing against a proposal to honor the generals from the war with Mexico. He never recovered and died shortly afterward.) The Whig Party fell apart shortly after the war, splitting north and south over the issue of slavery.

In the North, most former Whigs joined the nascent Republican Party. After the Civil War, Whigs-turned-Republicans maintained their dislike of the Mexican-American War. From their perspective, the Civil War had been a righteous crusade to preserve the Union and liberate the slaves, while the war with Mexico had been a shameful attempt to seize more land for slavery. Republicans blocked the efforts of veterans’ groups to build a national memorial for the Mexican-American War or to preserve battlefields from the conflict.

As it is, I have seen precisely one physical monument to the Mexican-American War on American soil, and it isn’t much of one. The waterfront in Vallejo, California, on the northern end of the San Francisco Bay, has a display of a couple of cannons. One of them has a plaque stating that the gun “participated in the capture of Guaymas and Mazatlan” in 1847.

And that’s it. If you want to see much more than this, you are going to have to go to Mexico!

24-pounder cannon plaque

Plaque for a Mexican-American War cannon on the waterfront at Vallejo, Calif.

Naval cannons in Vallejo, Calif.

The cannon from the USS Independence in Vallejo (foreground). The other cannon is a post-Civil War cannon from the USS Hartford.

References

  • Greenberg, Amy S. “1848/1898: Memorial Day, Places of Memory, and Imperial Amnesia.” PMLA 124 no. 5 (Oct. 2009): 1869-73.

Links

  • https://www.nps.gov/paal/index.htm Palo Alto Battlefield National Historical Park in Texas. The first clash of the Mexican-American War took place north of the Rio Grande on land claimed by both countries. The battlefield was not preserved as a historic park until more than a century after the war.
Stonewall Jackson statue, Richmond.

The Strange Case of the Bronze Confederates

Two weeks ago, workers in New Orleans dismantled a monument that had originally been erected in 1891 to celebrate the fight of white supremacist vigilantes against the city’s police forces during Reconstruction (1865-77). The workers were acting on a December 2015 city council resolution that this monument be removed, along with statues of Robert E. Lee, P.G.T. Beauregard, and Jefferson Davis. Although the city council was overwhelmingly in favor of removing the monuments—the vote was six to one—a minority of the city’s population was strongly opposed to removal. To protect themselves against violent reprisal, the workers removing the monument wore bulletproof vests, helmets, and masks.

Like New Orleans, most major southern cities have monuments to the failed Confederate States of America and its defeated leaders. Although they represent the Civil War (1861-65), these monuments belong to a later period, as they were built after the war’s end and reflect the concerns of the time when they were built.

Monuments built in the first fifteen years after the war were funereal (gravestone-like), usually obelisks with urns or drapes. The symbolism of the monuments, many of which were located in cemeteries for war dead, represented a sense of grief for the great numbers of men lost in battle.1

It was only after 1880, when the horrors of battle receded a little in the collective southern memory, that monumental memorials to the Confederacy began to appear. New Orleans completed its monument to General Lee—now slated for demolition—in 1884. In Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy, city leaders developed a new street for Confederate statues, Monument Avenue. Richmond’s own Lee monument was dedicated in 1890, and a busy (I would say ugly) memorial to Jefferson Davis in 1907. The Davis memorial was the last major Confederate monument built in the South.2

Robert E. Lee monument, Richmond (dedicated 1890).

Robert E. Lee monument, Richmond (dedicated 1890).

Jefferson Davis Memorial, Richmond (dedicated 1907).

Jefferson Davis Memorial, Richmond (dedicated 1907).

Detail of Jefferson Davis statue.

Detail of Jefferson Davis statue.

Before 1880, Confederate monuments commemorated grief and loss; after 1880, they boasted of heroism and moral rectitude. What changed in the last two decades of the nineteenth century was that the South adopted the ideology of the Lost Cause, which claimed that even though the Confederacy had lost the war, it had acted justly and with honor. This ideology was accepted by a North jaded about industrialization and beset by labor unrest and endless crises in its capitalistic economy. In doing so, the North also accepted white supremacy, a decision that continues to haunt the nation more than a century later.3

Confederate monuments have been caught up in the controversies of our own day. Two years ago, after a white supremacist murdered nine members of a Bible study group at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, activists graffitied “BLACK LIVES MATTER” on monuments in several southern cities. The Jefferson Davis memorial in Richmond was one that got the spray can treatment. The monument vandalisms were part of a general rejection of Confederate imagery by much of the South’s white population, in reaction to the shocking mass-murder at the church. At the same time, Confederate flags disappeared from public monuments, the shelves of WalMart, and many private residences.

Alabama Confederate Monument, Montgomery (dedicated 1898). With CSA flags in 2011 (left); without flags in 2016 (right).

Alabama Confederate Monument, Montgomery (dedicated 1898). With CSA flags in 2011 (left); without flags in 2016 (right).

This newfound willingness to reinterpret the Confederate past—especially as it was reimagined decades after the war—is a good thing, and I only wish it hadn’t taken such an appalling crime to bring it about. As for the Confederate flags, good riddance, I say. The use of the Confederate flag to represent the South only dates back to the 1960s, when it was deployed in opposition to Civil Rights activists—so it really is a racist symbol.

The New Orleans city council also made the right decision to dismantle its Confederate monuments. The Confederacy only has a weak claim on New Orleans, because the city spent three-quarters of the war under Union occupation.

Other cities may make similar decisions, and they too may be making the right call. But when it comes to most Confederate monuments, I would not be in favor of demolition. Demolishing the monuments would amount to an attempt to erase the past, which we shouldn’t try to do lest we forget it. Instead, we should change how we remember the past. Rather than destroying monuments we now find distasteful, we should reinterpret them with interpretive signage, plaques, or even extensions to the monument that subvert the original white supremacist message. Some of the monuments can be moved to museums, but others should be left where they are, because it is easy to ignore things in museums, and harder to ignore what is in the middle of the street or in front of the statehouse.

  1. Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865 to 1913 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 41. []
  2. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy, 91, 100-102, 158. []
  3. Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 4. []

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