Whipped Cream Difficulties

My opinion of the Civil War is well known within my circle of friends. In brief, I find the Civil War for the most part a rather uninteresting area of history, and think far too much attention is given to it. I would rather see 1/10th of the amount of attention devoted to the Civil War given to the American Revolution. Or Vietnam. Or Prohibition. (Don’t ask me about the Compromise of 1850. Just don’t.)

That said, I was shocked at how much I liked James Swanson’s Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer. I think part of the reason I enjoyed it so much is that Swanson chose to write his book more in the style of a true crime work, rather than a standard history. I’ve been waiting for his sequel, Bloody Crimes: The Chase for Jefferson Davis and the Death Pageant for Lincoln’s Corpse, since I finished Manhunt, and I’m happy to be able to say that Bloody Crimes is a worthy successor.

Swanson tells two parallel stories in Bloody Crimes. The first story is: what happened after Lincoln’s death? Swanson does give us some preliminary material about the last few days of Lincoln’s life: his visit to Richmond, his premonitions of death, and briefly recaps the assassination itself. But his main focus is on the after death pageant, the decision making that went into it, how it was pulled together, and how it was carried off. Part of Swanson’s argument is that Lincoln’s funeral train went a long way towards healing the wounds of the Civil War. The exhibition of Lincoln’s corpse, and the public grief that accompanied it, in some way gave the nation closure, and permission to mourn the Union’s Civil War dead. In some way, Lincoln wasn’t just a martyred president; he was a symbol of all the Union soldiers who fell, and his funeral train was exactly the national catharsis the United States needed at the time.

The other half of Swanson’s story is Jefferson Davis. What happened to him, and to the Confederacy, after Lee’s surrender? Davis was at one point the most wanted man in the country – probably even more so than Booth, while Booth was still alive – and his capture ended the Confederacy. Yet within two years of his capture, Davis had gone from “sure to be tried for treason and executed” to free man. What happened? And how did Davis live out the rest of his life? How do you go from leader of a free nation to private citizen, especially after you’ve lost much of your wealth in the war? I’ll confess that I really never thought about these questions with respect to the late Jefferson Davis, but Swanson answers them, and makes the answers interesting. One of Swanson’s great accomplishments in Bloody Crimes is that he manages to make Davis a sympathetic and honorable figure (as Swanson shows, Davis was more honorable than some of his captors) without apologizing for the Confederacy and what it stood for.

I commend Swanson’s books to your attention. But I do wonder what he’s going to write about next, now that he’s seemingly exhausted the possibilities of the late Civil War period?

Another recent book that I’ve mentioned previously, finally managed to find, and enjoyed the heck out of, is Max Watman’s Chasing the White Dog: An Amateur Outlaw’s Adventures in Moonshine. You might be surprised to know that there’s basically two branches of contemporary moonshine making. On the one hand, you’ve got contemporary American micro-distillers, some of whom are fully licensed (such as Stranahan’s Colorado Whiskey, which Watman covers in depth), and some of whom operate just outside the law thanks to stupid government regulations. (It is perfectly legal to produce up to 300 gallons of beer yearly for your own use. But God forbid that you try to distill your own booze, even for personal use; there’s no legal way to do that without expensive government licensing and paperwork.) On the other hand, you have the descendants of the old moonshiners in places like the Smith Mountain Lake area of Virginia, who are still producing shine and skirting the law. Except the shine that they produce now is of much lower quality: basically, industrial strength hooch designed to get you messed up fast and cheap, and sold mostly in poor urban areas. Watman does an excellent job of presenting the case for legalized micro-distilling, while at the same time acknowledging that moonshine production has lost much of the luster it had in the Junior Johnson days. (Yes, he does talk to Junior, who’s licensed his name to a fully legal micro-distiller, and is producing his own branded moonshine.) Watman also discusses his own adventures in moonshine production; he makes me want to see if I can find (or build) a small still of my own. (A quick search of Smartflix does not turn up any how-to videos on still building, though, darn the luck.)

Watman’s book also gets an enthusiastic recommendation from me.