Page 14 THE VILLADOM TIMES I • March 19, 2014 Curing the disease in the public mind Thomas Fleming refuses to write lopsided history. He insists on telling both sides. As a result, he is respected by people who value the truth and still have the mental watt- age to interpret facts, and reviled by people who want it told the way they learned in it grade school or at Memorial Day speeches often made by people who never served. Fleming’s most recent assault on self-serving mythology is “A Disease in The Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War.” The book begins with a numbers crunch. Fleming says that the deaths on both sides of the Civil War did not total 618,222, but closer to 850,000, and perhaps close to one million. This is in line with research by other historians using a method widely use to re-examine World War I and World War II. Fleming further argues that the Civil War -- usually regarded as a “good war” if ever there was one -- may also have been unnecessary. The saga of how the war began starts with an analysis of the career of John Brown and the abortive attack on Harp- er’s Ferry in 1859, which finally polarized the North and the South. Taken step by step, the attack was a fiasco that began with Brown’s partisans shooting a free black man to death by mistake, shooting the unarmed and kindly mayor of Harper’s Ferry, also by mistake, and then being over- whelmed by swarms of rather brutal citizen militia shortly augmented by Robert E. Lee, Jeb Stuart, and the United States Marines. Brown’s steadfast opposition to slavery distinguishes him as a prescient hero. His methods, however, betray a maniac. In one incident, he captured five “pro-slavers” -- three of whom had never owned slaves or intended to own any -- and hacked them to death with artillery short swords. Some of Brown’s killers suffered from temporary nervous breakdowns, even if they were not witnesses. Brown never faltered. His political heroism was tempered or contami- nated by a lack of normal humanity that verged well into psychosis. The two vital words that Fleming explains and most Civil War historians scant are “Santo Domingo” – also known as Hispaniola, which includes the nations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The French called this island Saint Dominque, but Fleming used Santo Domingo. The French Revolution of 1789 had freed the slaves on the French- owned island of Santo Domingo, but Napoleon -- whose wife Josephine came from Martinique -- would have none of it. A self-educated black ex-slave named François-Domi- nique Toussaint Louverture tried to organize a multi-racial society where blacks were freed from slavery, but construc- tive French whites could retain their land and businesses and pay their free black workers real wages. U.S. President John Adams quietly sent Toussaint Louver- ture money and ammunition and urged him to declare inde- pendence from France. Toussaint Louverture accepted the help but understood that Americans also owned slaves, and he tragically retained his wary allegiance to France. Some atrocities against French settlers had taken place and this suggested to American slaves that a rebellion against slave owners might work. A Virginia slave named Gabriel organized a secret army said to number 1,000 to march on Richmond and kill all the whites except for the Quakers and the Methodists, who opposed slavery. The night attack was rained out and Revolutionary War hero, Governor James Monroe -- later a U.S. President -- called out the militia, destroyed what he could find of the slave rebel army, and executed about 30 of the leaders. He called it a narrow escape. In 1801, Napoleon, morally supported by his wife, sent an army of 20,000 Frenchmen commanded by his wanton sister’s husband to subdue the island of Santo Domingo and restore slavery. Toussaint Louverture’s courageous rebels and endemic yellow fever destroyed most of the French Army, including Napoleon’s brother-in-law and nephew. Before he died, however, General Charles LeClerc lured Toussaint Louverture to a peace confer- ence, seized him, and shipped him back to France. Napoleon was a keen student of Julius Caesar, and the black liberator of Santo Domingo went the way of Ariovistus, who was also betrayed at a peace conference (but cut his way out), and of Vercingetorix, who ended his heroic days by being strangled in a Roman dungeon. Toussaint Louverture, who had advocated peaceful coop- eration between blacks and whites for their mutal benefit, was lodged in a chilly fortress in the Jura Mountains as a common criminal and died within a year. Napoleon sent another 15,000 French troops to the money-producing sugar island to complete the conquest. The black General Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Toussaint Louverture’s embittered successor, soon took a terrible vengeance for the betrayal and the attempt to bring back slavery. Having assembled all the remaining white settlers on the island at Toussaint Louverture’s old headquarters, he singled out five doctors and a visiting American, set them apart, and had the French whites killed down to the last woman and child. Other French families who had hidden away were invited to leave peacefully once they paid a ransom. When the French settlers paid the ransom, they were killed. This comprehensive massacre is seldom mentioned today, but everybody in the American South knew about it. Nat Turner, a slave, organized a similar massacre on a smaller scale: 55 to 65 white men, women, and chil- dren were killed in 1831 without any regard to whether the families had been kind or cruel to their slaves. Several black suspects were murdered in retaliation, in some cases without regard to their guilt or innocence. Other incidents were plotted and exposed. Fear of rebellion and massacre made slavery increasingly brutal. This was what Brown had in mind when he seized Harper’s Ferry. Brown never killed women or children and he may have hoped women and children would be spared. However, he was admit- tedly trying to touch off a race war where thousands of people would die. In the end, he did so. Fleming reserves some of his most biting scorn for the sheltered abolitionists who made a martyr out of Brown but panicked and fled in all directions when their financial support for an armed insurrection was exposed as his lug- gage was searched after one of his men copped a plea and was hanged anyway. Nobody who bankrolled Harper’s Ferry wanted to join the brave and arguably crazy fanatic on the scaffold and share his tragic glory. Britain, Canada, or the shelter of an insane asylum seemed more viable alternative to the abolitionist money men. Meanwhile Edmund Ruffin, a Southern pro-slavery fanatic, obtained the hundreds of pikes that Brown had ordered to be manufactured and distributed them to South- ern legislators with the clear implication that this was what they could expect for their wives and daughters if Lincoln took over as president. Given the influence of fanatics on both sides, men of good will who had argued against secession and had been reluctant to fire the first shot were taken out of the dialogue. As the good men fell mute, a handful of editors and self-serving politicians essentially made the war happen even though many southerners and most sensible northerners realized that slavery was a dying institution, which, as Lincoln said, would not outlive the century. The young men of both sides who would defi- nitely not outlive the century were victims not of the popu- lar will of North and South, but of a comparative handful of fanatics on one side or the other, or both. The idea that slavery was evil in and of itself is still a hard sell in parts of the South due to the carnage inflicted by the Civil War, though it is a no-brainer to the rest of us. Fleming, how- ever, points out that, far from being teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, the American South in the 1850s had a higher per capita income than French, the German states, or Denmark. Defeat brought poverty. Conversely, the thousands of young white officers who were killed putting down the Confederacy left a leadership gap that may have led to the Gilded Age, when honor was dead on the battle- field, money was everything, and gratuitous wars against the Indian tribes and the wanton seizure of the Philippines led to further lethal adventures for young Americans. The Civil War buff will read Fleming’s new book and be able to spot new golden nuggets of truth in the same familiar stream. The newcomer will find an explanation of that most vexing of American questions: Why would the majority of southerners, who never owned slaves, fight to defend the selfishness of the comparative handful of southerners who did? George Washington and Abraham Lincoln remain respected figures, and Robert E. Lee sub- stantially so. Other reputations take quite a beating. Talking about Santo Domingo and noting the cour- age lacking in some abolitionists may not be nice, but it is honest, factual history told by a highly readable and repu- table historian. Read this book if you want to understand America as a reality and not as a collection of myths. Letters to the Editor Expresses thanks for DPW’s commitment Dear Editor: We were very surprised to read the complaint against the Midland Park DPW in the Feb. 26 edition of the Vil- ladom Times. We have lived in Midland Park for 48 years and have always felt our DPW was the best. In winter our streets are usually cleared better than in surrounding towns, and leaf pick-up is done efficiently and in a timely manner. The few times we had problems with the street, the matter has always been taken care of. We say “thank you” to a group of hard working and conscientious men. Ern and Georgia Wiegers Midland Park