Merry Christmas

I'm not going to post a full-length blog post today. It's Christmas Day, after all, and I am going to be spending it with my family. But I didn't like the idea of breaking my once-a-week rule for this blog, so let me just say that I hope you have a lovely holiday and take time to reflect on the deeper meanings of what Christmas is all about.

I'll simply leave you with a quote from Charles Dickens:

Time was, with most of us, when Christmas Day encircling all our limited world like a magic ring, left nothing out for us to miss or seek; bound together all our home enjoyments, affections, and hopes; grouped everything and everyone around the Christmas fire; and made the little picture in our bright young eyes, complete.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Declarations of War

Last Wednesday was the 75th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The following day, logically enough, was the 75th anniversary of the American declaration of war against Japan, which was approved unanimously in the Senate and with only a single dissenting vote in the House of Representatives (cast by Congresswoman Jeanette Rankin, a strict pacifist). The vote came after one of the most recognizable moments in American history: the "day of infamy" speech of President Franklin Roosevelt. Within the space of twenty-four hours, a previously isolationist United States had been forced by history onto the global stage, from which it has never since withdrawn.

Roosevelt was faced with a problem, for he clearly saw that Nazi Germany, and not Imperial Japan, was the greater threat to the United States and to the world in general, yet Germany had not attacked the United States. Hitler solved this problem for Roosevelt in one of the more stupid moves made by a world leader in history when he declared war on the United States, despite not being required to do so by his treaty with Japan. The United States, logically enough, declared war on Germany (and Italy, which made the same mistake) on December 11. Just to make it all a nice packaged deal, the United States declared war on the smaller Axis nations of Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania on June 5, 1942. We never bothered to declare war on Finland, which was sort of a special case.

The American declarations of war during 1941-42 were the most recent occasions that the United States formally declared war on any other nation. It comes as something of a surprise to learn that this took place only four other times in American history: against Britain in 1812, against Mexico in 1846, against Spain in 1898, and against Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1917 (we never bothered to declare war against the other members of the Central Powers, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire, during the First World War). During the American Civil War, the Confederate government formally declared war on the United States, but the reverse never happened as it would have required the Union to recognize the Confederacy as a legitimate government.

A very important point needs to be made about all of these declarations: they were issued by Congress and not by the President. Article One, Section Eight, of the Constitution specifically states that the power to declare war is held by Congress and not the President. Since 1945, America has fought several major military conflicts, including Korea (1950-1953), Vietnam (1964-1973), the Persian Gulf War (1991), the Afghanistan War (2001-present) and the Iraq War (2003-2011). None of these involved a formal declaration of war, yet only a fool would describe them as anything other than a war. In all cases, Congress passed resolutions giving the President permission to engage in military action, although under dubious circumstances in the cases of both the Vietnam War and the Iraq War. What I find troubling is that Congress essentially legislated so as to give to the President the power to decide whether or not to go to war, which certainly violates the spirit, and probably violates the letter, of the Constitution.

Then you have the countless smaller military actions, that might not reach the level of an out-and-out war but which cannot be described as insignificant. The first memory I have of a news event was the destruction of the Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983, during Reagan's ill-fated intervention there. Since then, we have the invasion of Grenada in 1983, the invasion of Panama in 1989, the various interventions in the Balkans in the 1990s, and the intervention in Libya in 2011. Some of these actions were approved by Congress, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, while some were not.

The Founding Fathers lived in an age when kings and emperors still ruled most of the world. Such men were natural seekers of glory and generally cared little for whatever suffering might be inflicted on others as a result. Only a few decades before their time, Louis XIV of France had sought to immortalize his reign through martial achievements and during their lives Frederick the Great of Prussia had done the same. Moreover, being products of an education largely centered on classical history, the Founders could look to the past and see examples such as Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. It was a concession to common sense, therefore, that the delegates to the Constitutional Convention gave the power to declare war to Congress rather than the President. To place such a momentous decision in the hands of a single individual was simply too dangerous.

Indeed, an argument can be made that the delegates to the Constitutional Convention wanted to prevent a permanent standing army from ever being created. Article One, Section Eight, specifies that the Congress has the power to "raise and support armies" and to "provide and maintain a navy". Why this wording? Why didn't the delegates say "provide and maintain an army and navy"? It seems pretty clear to me that the Founders intended the navy to be a permanent force, but only expected armies to be raised in time of war. During peacetime, the state militias were expected to provide whatever military force would be necessary. After all, having a powerful standing army would not only be expensive, but might provide the President with an irresistible temptation to foreign military involvement either for the sake of personal glory or to distract the people from domestic political problems.

The question of whether Congress or the President should have the final say on questions of peace or war has been on my mind lately and not just because of the anniversary of our entry into the Second World War. President-Elect Donald Trump will take office next month and he is a man famous for shooting from the hip and making decisions based on gut instinct rather than long consideration. He has also expressed support for military actions that are clearly illegal, such as torturing prisoners and killing the innocent family members of terrorists. Some have suggested that the military would refuse to follow such orders if President Trump were to give them, which would make for quite the dilemma for a military officer. Frankly, the very fact that we have to ask the question at all is deeply troubling. Upon entering office, will President Trump respect the constitutional fact that Congress, and not the President, is the part of government which has the power to declare war? Based on his past statements, I would have to assume he won't.

This question is about far more than President Trump, however. It's about the presidency in general, no matter which individual happens to be sitting in the Oval Office. Since the Second World War, our country has quietly allowed the presidency to assert far greater authority in the sphere of war and peace than was envisioned by the Founding Fathers. In 1973, after the disaster of the Vietnam War, Congress attempted to reassert its war declaration authority with the War Powers Resolution. Unfortunately, this simply made an already bad problem even worse. It specified that the President must obtain congressional authorization for any military action that lasts for more than sixty days. This implies, obviously, that the President does not need congressional authorization for a military operation of a shorter duration. An airstrike lasts a matter of minutes, so does the President have the constitutional right to order an airstrike against any country he wants, for whatever reason he wants? Can he order a Tomahawk missile strike against a restaurant in Paris if he didn't like their soup?

This becomes all the more frightening when we consider the possible use of nuclear weapons. If Congress has abdicated its war declaration responsibility to the President so completely, what constitutional barriers are in place to prevent the President from ordering a nuclear strike on his own volition? If the President has a gut feeling, absent any real evidence, that China is about to launch a nuclear attack on us, can he unilaterally order a preemptive nuclear strike? Under operational procedures, the Secretary of Defense must confirm any launch order from the President, but this is only to confirm the validity of the order and does not technically give the Secretary of Defense the power to block the order itself.

In 1973, an Air Force major named Harold Hering, who was attached to one of the units operating Minuteman ICBMs with nuclear warheads, asked his superiors whether he would have to follow orders to launch his missiles if he suspected that the President was "deranged, disordered or. . . damagingly intoxicated" or showed some other sign of not being in possession of his faculties. For the simple act of asking this question, Major Hering was discharged from the Air Force.

The Founding Fathers were quite right to invest Congress rather than the President with the power to declare war, for they well understood the danger of granting such authority to a single person. They would be both astonished and horrified to see how the executive branch has gradually accumulated that power to itself over the past few decades, under multiple presidents of both parties. To me, it is terrifying enough to have the lives of hundreds of thousands of American soldiers potentially placed at risk due to the whims of a single person. In an age of nuclear weapons, it's not too much to say that the stakes are raised to the level of the survival of the human race.

The "What Ifs" of Pearl Harbor

Wednesday will mark the 75th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, one of the seminal events in American history. It stands with the fighting at Lexington and Concord, the firing on Fort Sumter, and the 9/11 attacks as an event that marked a sharp dividing line in the course of our nation's story.

The event is so well-documented and so burned into the American psyche that it scarcely needs to be retold here. The Japanese government, dominated by its military, had decided to make a play for imperial domination of East Asia and the Pacific. They had been launched a war of conquest against China a decade earlier, had occupied French Indochina, and were flexing the muscles of their naval power over the American, British, and Dutch possessions to the south. The United States had imposed economic sanctions against Japan, cutting them off from vital imports of oil and various raw materials necessary to continue prosecuting their war in China. Deciding that the direct approach was the best, Japan elected to launch a wide-ranging offensive throughout the Western Pacific, starting with a preemptive strike against the United States Pacific Fleet based at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.

Across the distance of time, even a patriotic American like me can acknowledge that the attack was a masterful military operation. It was extremely well-planned and executed, with the two waves of attacking aircraft arriving over their designated targets almost exactly on time. The logistics involved with fueling and provisioning such a large fleet so far from Japanese bases was a considerable achievement. And the fact that the Japanese achieved complete tactical surprise testifies to their ability to maintain operational secrecy.

Flying from six aircraft carriers, roughly three hundred and fifty Japanese aircraft blew the Pacific Fleet to pieces in a matter of hours. Eight battleships were destroyed or rendered inoperable, along with a number of cruisers and destroyers. Nearly two hundred American aircraft were destroyed. More than 2,400 American personnel were killed. From a military standpoint, it was one of the greatest defeats ever suffered by the United States of America.

President Franklin Roosevelt was correct when he called December 7 "a date which will live in infamy." After all, at the moment that the first Japanese bombs and torpedoes were dropped at Pearl Harbor, the United States and Japan were at peace. The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor was a cowardly, dishonorable act and it has rightly been remembered as such by history.

The United States, of course, took its revenge. Despite the success of its attack and several months of whirlwind victories across the western Pacific Ocean, Japan could never hope to prevail in a war with the United States, whose industrial power utterly outmatched that of the Japanese. Within six months, the Japanese advance had been halted and the Americans, aided by their allies, began to drive their enemies back. The ended with an unconditional Japanese surrender in the summer of 1945, with its cities reduced to smoking ruins by relentless Allied bombings, including the only two instances in which nuclear weapons have been used in warfare.

There has been much discussion of how the events surrounded the attack on Pearl Harbor might have gone differently. Let's a look at some of these scenarios.

1. What if the Pacific Fleet had not been caught by surprise?
As with the attacks of September 11, 2001, the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor generated intensive self-examination on the part of the Americans to comprehend how such a failure of intelligence had been possible. It was subsequently revealed that there had been many chances to have discovered the coming Japanese attack. American radar picked up in the incoming swarms of Japanese bombers, but it was dismissed by inexperienced and poorly trained operators as friendly aircraft. A Japanese midget submarine was sunk by an American destroyer near Pearl Harbor an hour before the attack, but the base was not put on alert.

These warning signs should have been quickly passed up the chain of command, so that fighters could have been scrambled to intercept the incoming attackers and anti-aircraft defenses of Pearl Harbor could have been manned and ready. Had this happened, the damage inflicted by the Japanese attack would have been considerably lessened and the number of Japanese aircraft shot down would have been substantially greater than was the case historically.

This would have been very good news for the United States, which spent the first few months of the Pacific War reeling from the loss of its battleships. If, say, the USS Arizona or the USS California had not been destroyed, they could have served as the main capital ships of a much more powerful Pacific Fleet, which could conceivably have sortied towards the Philippines to rescue their beleaguered comrades. In any case, considering the enormous time and cost required to drive the Japanese from the territory they gained in the opening months of the war, any improvement in the American situation vis-a-vis the historical reality would mean that Japan would be defeated earlier and at a lower cost in American lives.

On the other hand, if the Americans had obtained knowledge of the attack several days in advance, rather than a few hours, the situation oddly could have turned out worse for them then it historically did. For the Pacific Fleet would clearly have sortied to meet the Japanese on the open sea. The Japanese would have had a numerical advantage and events would prove that, in late 1941, they were simply more skilled and experienced in naval fighting than their American counterparts. It could therefore be expected that the Americans would have the worst of any such encounter.

What would make this situation more dire that the actual attack on Pearl Harbor is the fact that any ship sunk on the high seas would plunge to the bottom of the ocean, rather than the shallow waters of the naval base. Of the eight battleships put out of action in the attack on December 7, six were eventually raised and put back into service. Had the battle been fought on the high seas, any American battleship sunk would be gone for good.

2. What the American aircraft carriers had been present at Pearl Harbor on December 7?
While the death and destruction wrecked by the Japanese in their attack was terrible and costly, in truth it could have been much worse. The primary targets of the Japanese attack were the three aircraft carriers of the Pacific Fleet: the USS Enterprise, the USS Lexington, and the USS Saratoga. Had they been in port, they surely would have been blasted to pieces, as aircraft carriers made easier targets than battleships.

As chance would have it, however, none of three carriers were in Pearl Harbor on the day of the attack. The Enterprise and Lexington were ferrying aircraft to American bases farther west, while the Saratoga was near San Diego. All were so far away that they never were in any danger from the Japanese attack. In the months following the attack on Pearl Harbor, these three carriers would be the only effective force contesting control of the Pacific with the Japanese. They played crucial roles in the Battle of the Coral Sea in May (in which the Lexington was severely damaged and had to be scuttled) and the epic Battle of Midway in June, turning the tide of the war in the Pacific.

Had the carriers been in dock at Pearl Harbor, they would have been destroyed and the American war effort in the Pacific over the next few months would have been much less effective than it was historically. It would have allowed the Japanese to solidify their positions in the Pacific and perhaps extend their conquests (although suggestions that they might have invaded Australia seem too far-fetched to be taken seriously). Historically, the American counter-offensive began at Guadalcanal in August of 1942 with the landings on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. Had the American carriers been lost at Pearl Harbor, any American attempt to drive back the Japanese probably would not have been able to begin until sometime in 1943 and would have much more ground the retake.

3. What if the Japanese third wave had been launched?
The attack on Pearl Harbor consisted of two waves of attacking aircraft, both of which had targeted the warships of the Pacific Fleet. It was proposed that a third wave be launched, focusing its attack on the facilities of the Pearl Harbor base itself. These vital machine shops, drydocks, and fuel storage sites later proved crucial not only to repairing the warships that had been damaged in the attack, but maintaining the Pacific Fleet when it fought the Battle of Midway and organized the great counter offensive against the Japanese.

Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, in overall command of the Japanese task force, elected not to launch a third wave. There were several logical reasons for this decision. He did not want to risk having his returning airmen land on the carriers during darkness, something in which the Japanese were not well-practiced. He did not know the location of the American carriers and was afraid that they might be nearby and able to launch a counter strike. Finally, his fuel situation was becoming critical. For all these reasons, Nagumo decided to play it safe and head home without launching a third wave.

Many people on both sides of the conflict, including Admiral Chester Nimitz, later stated that the failure of the Japanese to launch a third wave targeting the port facilities was a crucial mistake. Had the dock facilities been destroyed or several damaged, it might have been a more crushing blow to American operations in the Pacific even than the loss of the warships themselves. At the very least, the later counter offensives would have had to be launched much later, with similar historical results as the hypothetical loss of the carriers.

Conclusion
One thing has to be remembered above all. No matter what changes one could envision in the events surrounding the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, they would not have affected the ultimate outcome of the war. There was no conceivable way in which Japan would have emerged the victor over the United States in the Pacific War, for the industrial power of America  The oft-repeated statement (which is probably apocryphal) of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto that all Japan had achieved at Pearl Harbor was to awaken a sleeping giant was all too true.

The United States had an economy seventeen times larger than that of Japan and its level of industrial production was perhaps seventy or eighty times as large. There was no conceivable way to defeat such odds in the age of industrial warfare. To give an idea of the disparity, consider this. Between 1941 and 1945, the United States produced ten battleships, forty-eight cruisers, and thirty hundred and forty-nine destroyers. Japan, by contrast, produced only two battleships, nine cruisers, and sixty-three destroyers. Counting small escort carriers as well as large fleet carriers, the United States put out one hundred and forty-one carriers of all types, while Japan built only seventeen. Between 1939 and 1945, the United States build more than 324,000 aircraft, while Japan built only 76,000. In the same time frame, the United States built nearly thirty-four million tons of merchant shipping, while Japan achieved a paltry four million.

How on Earth did Japan's war planners expect to have a chance against such long odds? Granted, a large proportion of America's war production was geared towards the defeat of Germany in Europe, but there was more than enough left over to crush Japan into rubble sooner or later.

If the Americans had been alerted to the incoming Japan attack a few hours ahead of time and taken immediate action, the damage to the Pacific Fleet would have been greatly reduced. We could then expect the defeat of Japan to occur considerably earlier than it did historically, perhaps in 1944 or even 1943. This raises a fascinating if troubling question, for the atomic bomb would not have been ready for use by that date. Would the end of the war have seen an invasion of the Japanese Home Islands themselves? If so, the war might have turned out to be both more successful for the Americans, yet also more costly and horrific.

Had the American carriers been in base and destroyed, or had the third wave destroyed the port facilities so vital to the war effort, the Japanese would have enjoyed a much more successful 1942 than they historically did. In such a case, we might expect them to conquer all of New Guinea and more of the islands west of it, and perhaps Midway Island as well. The defensive perimeter envisioned by the Japanese war planners would have been complete and made as strong as possible. The overall war plan of Japan was to create such a strong barrier to an American counter offensive that the United States would have sought some sort of peace agreement rather than endure the cost in lives and treasure required to break it.

By underestimating the political will of the United States and the social cohesion of the American people, the Japanese committed one of the great miscalculations in world history. Even had the attack on Pearl Harbor been more successful than it was historically, the United States still would have built an unstoppable navy and then they would have gone on to win the war. Even if Pearl Harbor had been utterly destroyed and the Americans had had to start from the coast of California, they would have done so and there was nothing Japan could have done about it. The war would have been far longer and far bloodier, but the end result would have been the same.

The moment that the first Japanese plane dropped the first bomb on Pearl Harbor, the fate of Japan was completely and utterly sealed.

Are We the Roman Republic?

History is fascinating in more ways than one. It is, first and foremost, a rollicking good story, with amazing characters and unbelievable plot twists. It is better drama than the works of the finest novelists and filmmakers, made all the more enthralling by the fact that it is true. Yet history also has important lessons to teach, both to individuals and to entire nations and societies. The Roman historian Livy, whose writings I love deeply, said it best when he wrote the following:

The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind, for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see. In that record, you can find for yourself and your country both examples and warnings: fine things to take as models and base things, rotten through and through, to avoid.

Livy is appropriate to quote here, because the historical story I wish to talk about today is one that he witnessed with his own eyes: the fall of the Roman Republic. And the reason I want to talk about it is because I see surprising and worrying similarities between the collapsing Roman Republic of the 1st Century BC and the United States here in the early 21st Century, many of which have been put on display for all to see in the presidential election that has just concluded in our country.

In the 1st Century BC, the Roman Republic had the outward appearance of the most powerful state in the known world. It had risen to power on the Italian peninsula, despite numerous setbacks, between the 6th and 3rd Centuries BC. In a series of three brutal wars between 264 and 146 BC, Rome had crushed the power of Carthage and taken control of the western Mediterranean. In the decades following the destruction of Carthage, Rome had expanded into the eastern half of the Mediterranean, vanquishing the powerful Hellenistic states, defeating the mighty Pontic Empire, and securing its position as the unrivaled master of the Mediterranean world. Nevertheless, foreign wars continued; it seemed as though the more Rome conquered, the more people Rome had to fight. Even after becoming the world's superpower, a seemingly never-ending series of conflicts continued between Romans and assorted Germans, Gauls, Parthians, and other intractable enemies.

Inwardly, the Republic was becoming rotten to the core. Since the Romans had driven out the last king in 509 BC (according to legend, anyway), it had been governed under a system of laws and precedents that had generally served it well, the underlying principle being that no one individual should ever have enough power to subjugate the state. Two consuls held supreme executive power, but each was able to check the other and they held office for only a single year. A myriad of lower offices - praetors, quaestors, aediles, and the like - performed other duties. Everything was presided over by the Senate, ostensibly composed of the wisest and best citizens, buttressed by centuries of tradition. To check the power of the Senate, the people elected officials known as tribunes who had the power to veto legislation.

By the 1st Century BC, however, this system of government was beginning to break down. The Senate had degenerated from an august body of statesmen into a corrupt hive of ambitious and greedy men. The Roman army, once made up of patriotic citizen soldiers, morphed into a professional force more loyal to its commanders than to the state it served. Self-serving men, albeit men of ability and even genius, came to the fore to establish themselves securely in power. In the 130s BC, the Gracchi brothers, both tribunes of the plebs, sought to undermine the power of the Senate in pursuit of populist aims; both ended up assassinated, establishing deadly violence as a central feature of Roman politics. Then came the long struggle between Marius and Sulla, showing that Roman armies were happy to fight against one another if the reward being offered was sufficient enough. Finally, there was the bitter political and eventually military conflict between Julius Caesar and his enemies, in which Caesar emerged the absolute victor after a series of brilliant military victories. Caesar, as is well-known to every educated person, fell to the assassin's knife in 44 BC, paving the way for the emerge of Augustus as the first Roman Emperor and the final extinguishment of the Roman Republic.

We live in a rather cynical and pessimistic age ourselves, with many Americans feeling that their country is on a steady decline. Polling companies regularly ask people whether they feel the country is on the right track or wrong track; for the last few years, those who feel the country is on the wrong track always significantly outnumber those who feel the opposite. There seems to be a palpable feeling that American is decline, that our institutions are failing, that our global power is fading, and that there is nothing we can do about it. The cynicism and anger that characterized the recent election, and which have now propelled Donald Trump into the White House, are impossible to ignore.

Modern American naysayers often rhetorically compare our nation to the Roman Empire in the 5th Century, when it finally collapsed. In truth, they would do much better to look to the Roman Republic of the 1st Century BC for lessons applicable to our own nation in our own time. Allow me to lay out a few unsettling similarities between the United States in the early 21st Century and the Roman Republic as it existed in the 1st Century BC.

1. Government is gridlocked between two rival political factions, neither of which is concerned with the common good.

In the Late Roman Republic, it was the Optimates or "best men" - people like Cato the Younger, Cicero, and eventually Pompey the Great - and the Populares, those "favoring the people" led by Caesar. Generally speaking (and the membership of these factions was vague and loosely defined), the Optimates believed in aristocratic government by the leading families, ruling through the Senate and holding to traditional values, while the Populares asserted the rights of the common people and believed that the land of the rich should be redistributed among all citizens. The Optimates wanted to maintain the status quo in which the wealthy aristocracy ran the state. The Populares were generally ambitious demagogues who exploited the disenchantment of the common people as a vehicle for their own political advancement.

In our time, it is the Republicans, the so-called "conservative" party, and the Democrats, the so-called "progressive" party. As with the Optimates and Populares, both the Republicans and Democrats claim to have the best interests of the nation at heart, yet each seems interested only in amassing the maximum amount of power and influence for itself and thwarting the ambitions of the opposing party than anything else.

In Early 21st Century America, as was done in the Late Roman Republic, both political factions spend an enormous amount of time and effort creating committees designed to investigate real and imagined crimes committed by the other faction. People on both sides constantly try to haul members of the other faction into court. Both sides seem willing to sacrifice the good of the nation if, by doing so, they can embarrass the opposing party or score political points. Republicans have been perfectly content to shut down the government in petty disputes over the budget and cast blame on . Democrats have been happy to accuse Republicans of bigotry over things as trivial as wedding cakes, friend chicken, and which bathrooms people should use.

Nowhere can one find a sense of setting party loyalty aside from the good of the nation.

2. The electoral system has broken down amid massive corruption.

The integrity of the Roman Republic was based on annual elections. All the tribes of the Roman people gathered together on the Field of Mars and voted for the magistrates of the coming year: consuls, praetors, quaestors, and the like. Before each election, auguries had to be taken by priests, a special unit had to declare that the city was in no danger of attack, and other ceremonies had to be done and precautions taken, for elections in the Roman Republic were a sacred event.

By the 1st Century BC, however, elections in Rome had become a farce. Massive bribery was the rule of the day and whether you won or lost an election depending almost entirely on how much money you had and how willing you were to give it away. Financial supporters provided money to use as bribes in exchange for political favors. After serving as consul or praetor, it was customary to give a senator a "proconsul" or "propraetor" assignment as the governor of a province, during which they would tax the provincials to the limit in order to pay off the debts they had accrued getting elected consul or praetor in the first place. Cato the Younger, a man of ironclad integrity, refused to resort to bribery. It should come as no surprise that his one attempt to win the consulship failed miserably, for his opponents had no compunction against engaging in mass bribery. After all, that was just how things were done.

Are we that different? The voting system is indeed rigged, though not in the way President-Elect Donald Trump spoke about. Even before the disastrous Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court in 2010, special interest money was flooding into American political campaigns on an obscene scale. A politician promises to support the special interests, sometimes subtly and sometimes not to subtly, and the lobbyists for that particular interest chalk up the money to fund his election campaign. When the election is over, the office-holder then uses their legislative power to protect and advance the interests of their campaign contributors. Those who see our present system of campaign finance as anything other than bribery on a massive scale are deluding themselves.

Our corrupt campaign finance system is only part of the story, however. The practice of gerrymandering allows office-holders to choose their voters, rather than the other way around, thus making it quite easy for incumbents to remain in office, year after year. Independent candidates or those from third parties are systematically ignored by the media (which is perfectly happy with the status quo) and barred from participating in election debates, which, along with overly rigorous ballot access rules, essentially limits participation only to members of the Republican or Democratic parties. We also have the sickening spectacle of state governments passing laws clearly designed to make it more difficult for people to vote, under the reasonable assumption that fewer people voting works in favor of incumbents.

In other words, elections in the America of the early 21st Century are as much of a farce as elections were in the Late Roman Republic.

3. Populist rabble-rousers are largely driving the public debate.

In the late Roman Republic, there was a whole cast of ambitious seekers of political office who had been stymied in following the traditional path towards the consulship. Rather than accept defeat, they instead decided to ignore legal and constitutional norms and continue clawing for power and influence.

The most famous of these men was Publius Clodius Pulcher. He was a senator, but was disliked and seen as obnoxious, known mostly for a ridiculous sex scandal involving him dressing as a woman to gain access to a religious ceremony in which only females could participate. Unable to advance in the Senate, he bizarrely had himself adopted by a a younger flunky of his who was a plebian, thereby allowing him to run for the office of tribune of the plebs (only plebians could be tribunes). Once he had secured that office, he continually went over the head of the Senate and had legislation rammed through the popular assemblies, which was technically legal but went against all norms of how politics in the Republic was supposed to work. Clodius used his period of legislative dominance to pass legislation designed to destroy his enemies (Cicero being his primary target) and expand his own power until he was assassinated.

The election of Donald Trump to the office of President of the United States marks the triumph of populism in our own society. So, incidentally, did the unexpected success of Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries. While there is a vast difference between Trump and Sanders, in that one is a decent human being and the other decidedly is not, their support sprung from similar sources. Populism is the ideology of the disaffected masses, who have real or imagined grievances against the powers-that-be and look for would-be saviors to magically and painlessly solve all of their problems for them.

Trump's supporters said that they were angry about immigration, so Trump has promised to build a wall along the border with Mexico. They were angry about Muslims coming into the United States, so he has promised that he won't let them come in anymore. Whatever the perceived problem, Trump has simply promised to make it go away. He has never laid out any specific policy proposals, much less suggested how he would get such proposals through Congress or how he would pay for them. It is demagoguery at its clearest. I frankly expect him to be remembered by history as the American Clodius.

Supporters of Bernie Sanders hold more nuanced and less confrontational views, but they share with Trump supporters a dissatisfaction with the status quo and a willingness to believe that the problems they care about could be easily fixed if only their leader were placed in power. College education is increasingly expensive? Sanders promised to make it free. The Affordable Care Act isn't working as well as expected? Sanders promised to simply make healthcare free. Whatever the problem, Sanders told his supporters that he would wave a magic wander and the problem would be fixed. While Sanders never sunk to the xenophobia, misogyny, and borderline racism of Trump, in many ways his support stemmed from similar sources.

To fix the problems facing our countries, we need leaders like Cicero, not Clodius. That needs to be remembered next time we go to the polls.

4. There is a huge and increasing gap between the rich and the poor.

By the First Century BC, the old designations of "plebeian" and "patrician" had ceased to have much meaning in everyday life. A senator or wealthy man was just as likely to be one as the other. Yet Roman society was frightfully unequal. Whether they were plebeians or patricians, those who had money and family connections were in control of the government and economy. Those who didn't were expected to be quiet and do what they were told. While an occasional "new man" like Cicero might sometimes make his way up the political ladder in Roman government, it was exceedingly rare. The same small number of powerful families controlled the Senate and had for centuries.

Roman society had not always been like this. In its heyday, it had been largely a society of yeoman farmers. Indeed, no man could serve in the legions unless he met certain property qualifications, the thinking being that property-owners had the most to lose if Rome were ever defeated in war and so would fight harder than mere mercenaries. As its victories brought more and more territory under Roman control, however, most of the land fell under the control of the wealthy, who established enormous estates and worked them with slave labor. Small freeholders could not compete and gradually began losing their land, crowding into Rome and the other cities and being forced to live off the grain dole.

We are seeing something similar today. Powerful multinational corporations are slowly squeezing independently-owned businesses out of existence, while massive agribusiness entities have made traditional family farms a thing of the past. More broadly, the expanding economy disproportionately benefits those who are already immensely rich, with the status of the poor and the middle-class either remaining static or actually declining. Just as so many Romans became dependent on government support through the grain dole, millions of Americans no dependent on government welfare for their survival. It is no surprise to me that economic anxiety is infecting so much of America these days, creating opportunities in which populists like Trump can flourish.

5. The country is locked in foreign wars from which it can't seem to extricate itself.

As I write this, American warplanes are bombing ISIS positions in Iraq and Syria. American soldiers remain deployed in Afghanistan in a conflict that has been going on for a decade-and-a-half. Having withdrawn from Iraq in 2012, our forces are now being slowly drawn back into the country and are playing a crucial role in the ongoing fighting around Mosul. Special forces raids and air strikes are being mounted in Yemen and Libya. Our military is in the midst of increasing its presence in the Pacific to counter the threat of a rising China and in the Baltic region to counter the threat of a resurgent Russia.

In the First Century BC, Rome was also almost constantly at war. Caesar battled the Gauls and invaded Germany and Britain. In the east, Sulla, Pompey the Great and others battled assorted enemies, including the powerful Kingdom of Pontus that briefly threatened Roman power in the region. Wars against recalcitrant tribes seemed to never end in Spain. And mighty individual leaders rose up to challenge Rome. In Gaul, there was the terrifying chieftain Vercingetorix, the only man in the region who could match himself against Julius Caesar. In Pontus, there was the great King Mithridates, a man so ruthless that he ordered the slaughter of eighty thousand Roman citizens in a single day.

There are eerie similarities between these wars of the Roman Republic in the 1st Century BC and America's military activities in the early 21st Century. They were fought far from home, for just as Italy was never threatened by any of Rome's enemies during this period, so is there clearly no possibility for America to be successfully invaded in our own time. Yet taken together they formed a sort of "perpetual war" of the sort that George Orwell warned us about. A never-ending war served as a means of distracting the people from internal problems and helped the rich become even richer. It also slowly drained away the society's resources, like a cut that stubbornly refused to stop bleeding.

6. Old values of civic virtue are disdained.

The Romans during the glory days of the Republic believed deeply in virtus, which we might roughly translate into English as "civic virtue". People were naturally expected to pursue their interests and seek to enrich themselves and their families, but the idea that anyone would do so at the expense of society as a whole was an almost unthinkable concept. When Rome battled the fearsome Samnites and other Italian peoples, or warded off the terrible threats of Pyrrhus or Hannibal, Romans of all ages and classes served in the army and accepted heavy taxation in service of the Republic. Senators served in their various official positions without receiving pay. There was a common understanding that the good of the community required the collective sacrifice of everyone.

There once was a concept of civic virtue in America. Without it, we never would have won the Revolutionary War, held the country together through the fires of civil war, endured the sufferings of the Great Depression, or rid the world of fascism and communism. Yet it seems to have vanished like the smoke of an extinguished campfire. We have become a society in which everyone is quick to take offense at every perceived slight or "microaggression", where we cast our votes based on what will put the most money in our pockets rather than on what is genuinely good for the country, where we waste of time playing video games or consuming vacuous and inane pop culture products as if they were candy.

If 21st Century America is to avoid the fate that befell the Roman Republic in the 1st Century BC, it needs to rediscover the old civic virtue of the past. We need to turn off our televisions and video games and open our books. We need to remember the ideals on which the republic was founded. We need to again place the needs of our nation ahead of our own individual needs. Restoring our old sense of civic virtue is the prerequisite for fixing all of the other problems, for a virtuous people would choose wise leaders rather than run-of-the-mill politicians and casino moguls, would insist on reforming our broken electoral systems and on extracting us from perpetual war, and would insist on a fair economic system which was rigged for no one, in which everyone had an equal chance at prosperity.

Will we be able to do it? I don't know. It's up to the American people. But history has put these lessons before us and we would be foolish not to heed its warnings. The Roman Republic collapsed into the autocracy of the Roman Empire, but the United States of America still has a chance to save itself.

What If Czarevitch Alexei Had Not Had Hemophilia?

Like many other people who have been fascinated by the tragic story of Czar Nicolas II of Russia and his family, I first encountered it by reading the beautifully written book Nicolas and Alexandra, by Robert K. Massie (one of the best popular history writers in the business). The tale of the decline and fall of the Russian Empire infuses the pages of the book. It is a deep, rich, and fascinating story, one of those historical tales that seems more like a work of epic fiction than a telling of truth. I strongly recommend the book to everyone.

The tragedy of Czar Nicolas II lay not only in his own character flaws - his indecisiveness, his lack of confidence, his dependence on others - but also on the sad tale of his son, Alexei, who was supposed to have been his heir. Czarevitch Alexei suffered from hemophilia, the genetic disorder that prevents the normal clotting of blood and hence can cause a sufferer to bleed to death from injuries that might be trivial to most people. Alexei's hemophilia was the cause of a series of events that contributed to the fall of the Russian Empire, the outcome of the First World War, the rise of the Soviet Union, and much of the history of the world for the remainder of the 20th Century.

Let me briefly recount the sad story from the beginning. Czar Nicolas II took the Russian throne in 1896 upon the death of his father, Czar Alexander III. He was the head of the Romanov dynasty, which had ruled the vast Russian Empire since the enthronement of Czar Michael I in 1613. Among the Romanov rulers were Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, both of whom had massively expanded Russian territory and power, making it one of the great powers of the world. When Nicolas II became Czar, the Russian Empire was the largest nation on the planet and one of the most powerful. Of the great powers, it was the only one which essentially remained an absolute monarchy.

The reign of Czar Nicholas II did not begin well. At celebrations marking the coronation at Khodynka Field in Moscow, a stampede took place and, in the resulting panic, more than a thousand people were trampled to death. This was not an auspicious beginning and unfortunately things only got worse. In 1904-05 a disastrous war was fought against Japan in the east, culminating in the destruction of the Russian fleet at the Battle of Tsushima Strait. Revolution broke out in 1905, with a general strike paralyzing the country and elements of the military mutinying. The Czar was forced to make concessions, resulting in the creation of a legislative assembly called the Duma, the issuance of the October Manifesto, and the appointment of Sergei Witte as Prime Minister. All of this ostensibly put Russia on the path towards being a constitutional rather than an absolute monarchy.

Through all this turmoil, Nicolas II took comfort in his family. He was deeply in love with his wife Alexandra and was a devoted father to his four daughters and his one son, Czarevitch Alexei. All the hopes of the Romanov dynasty were placed in Alexei, who had been born in 1904. It soon became clear, however, that something was seriously wrong with the child and within a short time the Czar's doctors had diagnosed hemophilia. Alexei had inherited the genetic disorder from his mother, who had inherited it from her mother Princess Alice of the United Kingdom, who had in turn inherited it from her mother, Queen Victoria. Nicolas and Alexandra were horrified and put an extensive series of procedures in place to prevent Alexei from hurting himself, since even a minor injury might prove life-threatening. The hopes for the future of the Romanov dynasty and the Russian Empire now seemed to rest on the slender thread of a single boy who might be killed by something as minor as a bruise.

In the fall of 1912, Alexei bumped himself badly while jumping into a rowboat and the hemophilia flared up badly. The situation appeared so grave that the little young was given the last sacraments and his parents prepared themselves for his death. It was at this point that the cryptic, sinister, and thoroughly corrosive influence of Rasputin entered the royal family's life in a major way,

Rasputin is one of those historical figures who seems to step out of a work of fiction into reality. In his case, the fictional work would surely be a Gothic horror novel. Near as can be pieced together, he was born in the 1860s in a small Siberian town. He was known in his youth as a thief and a troublemaker, so much so that the local priests would pay him money to keep him from disturbing Sunday church services. Later on, he claimed to receive visions from God and made a name for himself as a wandering holy man and religious teacher, though he was never recognized as a monk of cleric by any legitimate religious authority. He spent years moving back and forth between various Russian villages, using his mastery of charlatanism to deceive the gullible and live off what he could swindle from them.

Strange holy men of this type were strangely popular in Russia during this period. Word of Rasputin's alleged powers eventually reached Anna Vyrubova, a personal friend of Czarina Alexandra, who in turn introduced her to the Czarina herself. A strange chain of events had brought the peasant charlatan into the company of the autocratic ruling family of Russia.

Rasputin settled in St. Petersburg, where he soon became a favorite among fashionable members of the noble elite, who trotted him out at parties as if he was some sort of mascot. He soon became far more than a joke, however, as his reputation as a mystic spread rapidly through the influential circles of high Russian society. Women, in particular, found Rasputin fascinating and he was said to have bedded numerous aristocratic ladies, despite his own repulsive physical appearance. Rasputin practiced a strange form of personal theology, which required him to sin intensively before he could be properly purged of sin. In particular, his sinful sexual nature required him to have sex with as many beautiful women as possible. An interesting theology, to say the least.

Rasputin soon developed a powerful influence over the Czar and Czarina, for it seemed that he was the only one who could calm Alexei during the Czarevitch's frequent painful battles with his condition and Czarina Alexandra in particular quickly became absolutely devoted to Rapustin, willing to defend him from all critics. When the 1912 accident happened and it seemed all but certain that Alexei was about to die, Rasputin sent the Imperial family a telegram simply saying that Alexei would not die and that the doctors should not bother him. The Czarevitch then began what seemed to be a miraculous recovery. It seems that this coincidence helped persuade both Nicholas and Alexandra that Rasputin was indeed a miracle worker and, moreover, the only person who could help Alexei.

Rasputin, an uneducated and illiterate man who was obviously half-crazed, now wielded enormous influence over the Imperial family that ruled Russia. At the same time, aristocratic society in St. Petersburg began to turn against Rasputin, tired of his antics and jealous of the power he now held. He continued to have some supporters, however, consisting mostly among people wishing to flatter him as a means of gaining the ear of the Czar. Rasputin began lobbying with Nicholas and Alexandra on behalf of his friends and against the interests of his enemies, to the detriment of the nation. The Russian people, from whom the Imperial family had been largely isolated since the 1905 Revolution, were mystified as to why the Czar and Czarina took counsel from a man like Rasputin while the country seemed to be careening from one crisis to the next. Critically, Alexandra was prompted by Rasputin to pressure her husband into resisting any and all moves in the direction of constitutional reform, for the mystic perhaps sensed that anything less than an absolute autocracy in Russia would mean the end of his own influence.

In the midst of all this, the diplomatic crisis over the assassination of Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand in the summer of 1914 exploded into the catastrophe of the First World War. The Russian Empire soon found itself at war with Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire, a conflict for which it was distinctly unprepared. Its armies, while enormous, were poorly armed and poorly equipped. A few generals demonstrated significant talent, such as Aleksei Brusilov and Nikolai Yudenich, but most Russian commanders were distinctly mediocre. The Russian soldiers fought with their traditional stubbornness and tenacity, but suffered defeat after defeat at the hands of the Central Powers.

In this unprecedented crisis, Russia needed a leader the caliber of Peter the Great. Instead, it had Nicholas II, who might be properly known as Nicholas the Easily Manipulated. Rasputin began making suggestions about war policy and personnel, advice which Nicholas often heeded. It seems clear that Rasputin had a much stronger hold on the mind of Alexandra than he did on the mind of the Czar himself, but since Nicholas could never bear to go against the wishes of his wife, it amounted to the same thing.

The most critical, and disastrous, bit of advice that Rasputin gave the Imperial family was that Czar Nicholas himself should take direct command of the Russian armies. This he did in September of 1915. As far as military matters were concerned, this mattered scarcely as all, since Nicholas left actual operations to his chief-of-staff, General Michael Alexeiev, and limited his activities to the ceremonial activities expected of a monarch, such as grand inspections. But the Czar made his home at the front, away from St. Petersburg, placing the Czarina in effective control of the government. Since the Czarina was utterly under the spell of Rasputin, the illiterate charlatan was now, for all practical purposes, in control of the Russian government.

It was soon common knowledge that Rasputin was in charge, with predictable results. If a mother wanted a military exemption for her son, she went to Rasputin. If a contractor wanted a deal to sell the Russian army substandard artillery shells at twice the going rate, he went to Rasputin. If a civil servant wanted a promotion, he went to Rasputin. Because Rasputin's whispers into the ear of the Czarina helped advance the careers of whomever was willing to pay him the most, money from bribes flowed into Rasputin's pockets and financed his increasingly bizarre and wild lifestyle, which apparently included frequent sexual orgies and other associated debaucheries. He also began pestering the Czarina with military advice for her husband, which she dutifully sent on in letter after letter.

The Russian Orthodox Church and most members of the nobility were horrified by Rasputin's activities and repeatedly told the Czar that the man was dangerous and not to be trusted. Nicholas simply ignored their warnings, unwilling to go against the wishes of his wife and perhaps falling more under Rasputin's spell himself. The man seemed untouchable. During an excursion to a restaurant in 1915, Rasputin became extremely drunk and began to loudly brag about his sexual exploits, hinting that he was the lover of the Czarina herself. He then exposed himself and waved his genitals around at the other patrons of the restaurant, causing a massive panic and a dash for the exits. The police finally arrived and arrested Rasputin, whose insulting words about the Romanov family would have gotten anyone else packed off to prison, if not worse. But shortly after his arrest, a message from the Czar arrived, ordering his release.

Government ministers and military officers who cared about the future of the Russian nation were, unsurprisingly, appalled at the extent of Rasputin's influence and its disastrous consequences. They soon found themselves being removed from their positions and replaced with inept sycophants who got their posts through flattering the charlatan. The Russian government fell into chaos, as unqualified men with no interest in actually doing the job were placed in charge of a tottering empire just as it was fighting the most terrible war the world had ever known.

As 1916 wore on, things went from bad to worse for Russia. The success of the Brusilov Offensive in the summer proved only temporary. The competent Minister of War, Alexei Polivanov, under whose leadership the logistics and staff work of the Russian Army had begun to improve, was removed from his position at the insistence of Rasputin and replaced with one of the charlatan's flunkies. Government began to collapse within the country even as the army became increasingly unable to function. Morale among the troops fell sharply and people in the cities and on the farms began openly denouncing the Romanov family. It was even suggested the Czarina Alexandra was a German agent, bent on destroying the country from within.

In December of 1916, Rasputin was assassinated by a conspiracy of noblemen led by Felix Yusupov. It wasn't easy, for the man had to be poisoned, shot, stabbed, beaten, and then simultaneously frozen and drowned in the Neva River before he died. By then, sadly, it was too late. The Russian government had been inefficient and corrupt before the war; Rasputin's activities had damaged it beyond all possibility of repair. Nicholas II, confused and demoralized himself, utterly lacked the ability or confidence to restore the situation. He continued to refuse to appoint competent ministers to critical government positions. Throughout the country, food shortages increased. At the front, the soldiers were being asked to go into battle with pathetically little in terms of weapons or equipment.

In February, revolution broke out in the streets of St. Petersburg, the Russian people having finally become unwilling to endure further leadership by the Romanovs. True to form, the Czar showed no backbone and quickly abdicated the throne. Russia fell into complete and utter chaos and different factions vied with one another to fill the power vacuum. The Provisional Government led by Alexander Kerensky took control and attempted to continue the war against the Germans, but was itself overthrown a few months later by the Bolsheviks, who made a humiliating peace with them. The Imperial family was taken into custody by the Bolsheviks and later executed. The long-suffering Russian people had to endure a long and bloody civil war, which ended with the Bolsheviks in full control of the country. Ahead of Russia was the nightmarish experience of Stalinism.

It is worth asking whether anything like this would have happened had not little Alexei simply not inherited the gene that caused hemophilia. The son of a female carrying the gene causing hemophilia in the X-chromosome has a fifty percent chance of inheriting the gene in question, so when Alexei was conceived he was just as likely to avoid the condition as not. Had the boy not suffered from hemophilia, Rasputin would never have come to the attention of the Romanov family, since it was his apparent ability to relieve the Czarivitch's pain (which might have been entirely due to chance) that allowed the Siberian charlatan to enter the family's good graces in the first place. Take away the hemophilia of Alexei, which was due entirely to an unfortunate case of genetic chance, and Rasputin is essentially removed from the scene of history.

Russia entered the First World War with a number of problems that prevented it from fully developing its war economy or organizing a truly efficient military force. These problems would still have existed had Rasputin never entered the scene. But his corrosive influence exacerbated those problems enormously and played a crucial role in Russia's collapse in 1917. Had Rasputin never become more than a wandering mystic, the Russian government might have gone through the war with ministers who actually knew their jobs and wanted to perform them to the best of their ability, and an army whose commanders were confident in the civilian leadership and whose soldiers were properly armed and equipped.

It should be pointed out that, even facing the severe limitations and disadvantages caused largely by Rasputin's meddling, the Russian armies fought against the Central Powers for three long years. They did not fare well against the Germans, but they did well enough against the Austro-Hungarians and the Turks. Indeed, before the revolution of 1917 caused the Russian army to disintegrate, the Russians had all but knocked Austria-Hungary out of the war and had soundly trounced the Turks in on the Caucasus Front. Had they been properly led and equipped, confident that the country was behind them, they would have done considerably better. This does not necessarily mean that they would have defeated the Germans, which they probably lacked the ability to do even under the best circumstances, but had not done better than they actually did, the Germans would not have been able to deploy their forces so freely on the Western Front and the subsidiary fronts to the south.

If Russia had performed better in the war between 1915 and 1917, it's entirely possible that Germany and the rest of the Central Powers would have been defeated and forced to the peace table a year or more earlier than was the case historically. Aside from the millions of lives this would have saved, it would also have had enormous geopolitical ramifications, especially if it resulted in an Allied victory that did not involve intervene by the United States. There would have been no breaking of the American isolationist tradition and no League of Nations, with its false promise of a peaceful, internationalist world. The long-term impact on Trans-Atlantic relations can hardly be underestimated.

Germany actually won the First World War on the Eastern Front, then went on to loss it on the Western Front. This fact played into the sinister "stab in the back" conspiracy theory in postwar Germany, which blamed the German defeat on Jews and communists. Had Russia remained a full partner with the rest of the Allies and played a significant role in Germany's defeat, it would mean that the loss of war would have been crystal clear to every German and the "stab in the back" notion would have had much less traction. It is at least possible that the rise of fascism within Germany could have been prevented in such a scenario.

Within Russia itself, without Rasputin, the Romanov monarchy might have survived. Indeed, victory in the war against the Germans might have increased its prestige among the people. Throughout the reign of Nicholas II, political and social changes in the country were quickly accelerating, especially after the 1905 Revolution. Might the Duma have slowly increased its power over the course of the 20th Century, becoming to Russia what Parliament had slowly become in England, with Russia evolving into a genuine constitutional monarchy? Or would the Romanovs have insisted on staying true to the autocratic ways of their ancestors? It's impossible to know, but considering the frenetic nightmare of the Russian Civil War, the bloodstained rule of Stalin, the long shadow of Communism, and the present autocratic regime of Vladimir Putin, I think I'm on safe ground in saying that things would have been better than they actually turned out to be.

Whatever would have happened, without the hemophilia of Alexei, Rasputin would never have been able to inadvertently pave the way for the rise of the Soviet Union. This, in turn, means that communism would never have been a credible political and economic force in the 20th Century world but would have remained a fringe belief held only by extremists. Communism earned its place alongside fascism as one of the most sinister political ideologies to have ever plagued the world. When thinking of the terrible human cost exacted by communism in Russia, China and the rest of Asia, Africa, and Latin America during the course of the 20th Century, one cannot help but sigh at what might have been had that single gene in the embryo of Alexis Romanov been different.

To conclude, though, perhaps it's fitting to consider the little boy himself. Alexei Romanov was, by all accounts, a friendly and affectionate little fellow, who liked to play pranks on dinner guests and was very sensitive to the feelings of others. One wonders what he might have been like had he been able to grow to adulthood. In the end, it was the heartless Bolsheviks who killed Alexei, though the hemophilia would likely have done the poor boy in well before his time.

For just a moment, allow yourself to imagine a Russian Empire in the mid-20th Century, with Czar Alexander IV on the throne in St. Petersburg, the Duma debating new legislation and an independent court system passing judgement on the actions of the monarch and the legislature. Europe is at peace. No one in this world has ever heard of Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin, who died in obscurity. The words "fascism" and "communism" are greeted with uncomprehending frowns.

And it might have been, but for a single genetic trait in one very unfortunate boy.

Reflections On a Bowl of Black Eyed Peas

Recently, I sat down with my wife and two daughters to a nice dinner around the kitchen table. Amelia, all of four months old, can't eat the food the rest of us are eating but we bring her to the table anyway. Evelyn, a precocious girl of three-and-a-half years, would prefer to simply stuff her face and then run back to her room to continue playing with her princess dolls, but her mother and I put our feet down and make her stay in her chair so that we can eat together as a family. We plan on continuing to eat dinner together as a family until the day the youngest daughter leaves the house.

This dinner was special, though. The black eyed peas we were eating had not come from a can, nor had they come from the bulk food section. Indeed, they had not come from a grocery store at all. Instead, they had come from a garden that we had planted in our own backyard. All told, the entire "harvest" of peas might have been able to fill up three-quarters of a cup. They tasted fine, though not spectacular. None of that mattered, though. What was exhilarating for us was that, for the first time in our lives, we were eating food that we had grown ourselves.

Being Jeffrey Evan Brooks, I looked to history for an explanation as to why I found this experience so fulfilling. Two epochs of history that I have always found especially attractive are the age of the Roman Republic and the colonial and revolutionary era of American history. Both have deep lessons for us in the 21st Century, when we are watching our individual freedom and our vibrancy as a civilization slowly fade away. In both the Roman Republic and Early America, ordinary people perhaps had a higher level of individual freedom and civic virtue than has ever been the case at other points in history. The fundamental reason for this was that the vast majority of the people were self-sufficient farmers who owned their own land.

In our time, average American citizens depend on a complex network of agribusiness mega-farms, transportation networks, and grocery stores or restaurants to provide them with food. If anything were to happen to disrupt this system, whether intentionally or through an accident, we would suddenly find ourselves without food. We depend on this complex system for our very lives. Self-sufficient farmers in the Roman Republic or Early America didn't have this problem. Owning and cultivating their own land, they could provide themselves with food through their own efforts.

In a 1785 letter to John Jay, Thomas Jefferson had this to say.

Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to the country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bands. As long therefore as they can find employment in this line, I would not convert them into mariners, artisans, or anything else.

In his Notes on the State of Virginia, the only book he ever wrote, Jefferson expounded on this idea.

Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which might otherwise escape from the face of the earth.

In the Jeffersonian vision, America was going to a nation of independent yeoman farmers, who owned and cultivated their own land. Necessities such as furniture and cooking implements would be manufactured on the farms themselves. Luxuries such as the books, musical instruments, and fine wines Jefferson loved so much could be purchased using the profits from the sale of surplus crops. There would be an efficient and locally-run system of public education, and a well-organized militia system would provide for defense. The foundation of it all was the self-sufficiency and civic virtue that Jefferson naturally believed was instilled by the experience of being tied to the land.

The view that Jefferson and many other Founding Fathers held about the virtuous family farmer had been inherited from the Roman Republic. To the Romans before the 1st Century BC, the freeholder who owned and farmed his own land was the ideal citizen. It was the freeholders who filled the ranks of the Roman legions that held off Rome's enemies in the days when the Republic was young and vulnerable, then went on to conquer the whole of Italy. Cato the Elder, a historical figure of whom I have always been quite fond, said that the best compliment a Roman could give another Roman was that he was a good farmer. The poor man who scratched out a living in the slums of the city itself could not be trusted to have the commonweal's interests at heart, for he would not have identified himself with it.

This ideal was personified most clearly in the person of Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus. A well-respected freeholder, he worked his own farm with his family, served the state as a soldier and senator, and tried to cultivate a life of virtue. In 458 BC, when Rome was threatened by a coalition of its Aequi and Sabine enemies, Cincinnatus was called upon to serve the Republic as dictator, given absolute power for a period of six months. He took command of the army, defeated Rome's enemies, and then quietly went back to his farm and resumed his work. About twenty years later, Cincinnatus was made dictator again to put down a domestic conspiracy that threatened to overthrow the Republic. As before, the moment he had achieved what he had been asked to do, he laid down the mantle of dictator and went back to his plow.

The system of freeholder farms in the Roman Republic gradually dissipated over the centuries. Wars of conquest throughout the Mediterranean, especially those against its great enemy Carthage, brought enormous numbers of slaves into Italy. The wars pulled freeholders away from their farms and into the ranks of the legions for years at a time. Wealthy nobles were able to purchase more and more land, creating enormous agricultural estates called latifundia, worked by slave labor, which easily outproduced the decreasing number of smaller farms. Rome's population swelled as displaced farmers moved into the city in search of work. Much of the political disorder that caused the collapse of the Republic in the 1st Century BC can be attributed to the demise of the small farm and the rise of the latifundia, for it was the discontent of the masses and the decline of civic virtue that swept away what had once been the Republic's foundation.

Was this process all that different than what we have seen in America over the last hundred years, with small family farms vanishing and being replaced with agribusinesses run by large companies and corporations?

The simple civic virtue of the freeholders of the Roman Republic was what the Jeffersonians hoped to see take root in the United States. Although we must acknowledge that the Jeffersonian vision probably never had a chance of being fully realized, we certainly could have done vastly better than we have ended up doing. The seemingly irrevocable decline of the family farm is one of the saddest stories of the last century of our history and only about two percent of Americans are farmers today. Small family farms now account for only about a quarter of American agricultural output. The vast majority of people in our country never set eyes upon the land which produced their food and scarcely give it any thought. The decline of the American farmer is matched by the decline of the food itself. There's more of it than ever, but it's generally processed junk, suffused with chemicals, more created than grown. Today, we are stuffing our faces with fast food, potato chips, frozen pizza, and other stuff that could only marginally be described as food. This has not only contributed an out-of-control obesity epidemic, but has removed the wholesome relationship the American people once had with their food, as if by brain surgery.

I'm as guilty as any American when it comes to lacking a real connection with the land and with the food it produces. What, after all, is a single bowl of home-grown black eyed peas when set against the amount of fast food and frozen pizza I have consumed over the last year? Yet as a symbol, these black eyed peas mean a lot to me. They were sort of a test run for the family and, now that they have been a success, we are cultivating a much more extensive garden. Ideally, we will be slowly increasing the amount of food we produce ourselves, season after season. I'm under no illusions that we can fully free ourselves from the prevalent American system of food production and consumption, but every bite of food that we produce ourselves is a step closer to our personal realization of the Jeffersonian dream.

Many people have figured this out long before I did. Farmers whose land has been in their families for generations continue to tenaciously hold onto it against the odds, while city folk with no previous agricultural experience abandon their urban environments to try their luck on a tractor. Old school farmers' markets are increasingly popular throughout the country. Stores and restaurants proudly declare that they "buy local" in appeals to their customers, creating a genuine communal relationship between the people and they food they consume they consume.

My family may be a little late getting on this bandwagon, but now that we are on we don't intend to get off.

President Should Be Chosen By Direct National Vote

It being a presidential election year, pretty much all that the news media is talking about is the contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. It's long been a tradition for the news coverage of the campaign to completely ignore any of the genuinely important issues facing the nation and instead focus on nasty personal insults and scandals each side tries to pin on the other. In this regard, the current campaign differs from those of the past only in unprecedented scale of the slime and the unprecedentedly unorthodox campaign style of one of the Republican candidate.

There is one way, however, in which the 2016 election will be no different from those of the past. The winner will be decided by the anachronistic monstrosity that is the Electoral College.

The Electoral College is the 18th Century system worked out by the members of the Constitutional Convention to select the President. As readers of my blog well know, I stand in awe of the men who wrote the Constitution, which I consider perhaps the greatest intellectual achievement in the history of the human race. But that doesn't mean that they were infallible, for they made a number of mistakes while crafting the document. Of all their errors, however, I think the most egregious one which remains uncorrected is the Electoral College, whose undemocratic structure is a blight upon American democracy that must be erased.

Under the Electoral College system, each state receives a number of electoral votes equal to the number of representatives they have in both houses of Congress (since every state has two members of the Senate, this always comes out to the number of representatives they have in the House, plus two). However, because all but two states cast their votes on a winner-take-all basis, the candidate who actually gets the most votes in the nation as a whole does not necessarily win the election, for he or she might win several states by large margins and narrowly lose certain critical states, all of whose electoral votes will go to the other candidate.

We saw this clearly in the 2000 election. Democrat Al Gore won the popular vote handily, getting half a million more votes than Republican George W. Bush. But because of an infinitesimal Bush victory in the state of Florida (itself the dubious result of an intervention by the Supreme Court), Bush received that state's electoral votes, which was just enough to allow him to win the Electoral College and thus to become the President. Whether Al Gore would have been a better President than George W. Bush turned out to be is, of course, open to question, but the fact remains that the candidate who was the clear choice of the American people was not the one who actually ascended to the office.

On four occasions in American history (1824, 1876, 1888, and 2000), the candidate who received the largest number of popular votes lost the Electoral College. In other words, in about one out of every fourteen elections, the candidate who receives fewer votes actually becomes President. On five other occasions (1948, 1960, 1968, 1976, and 2004) a shift of a relatively tiny number of voters would have handed the victory to the candidate who would still have lost the popular vote. Those who say that the Electoral College is not a problem because it usually reflects the popular will have not read their history books.

Another major problem with the Electoral College is that it gives an individual voter in a smaller state a disproportionately larger influence on the outcome of the election than an individual voter in a large state. This violates the fundamental one-person-one-vote principle that should be at the heart of any representative republic. For example, Wyoming has about 570,000 and three electoral votes, or one electoral vote per 190,000 people. California, by contrast, has 37,500,000 people and 55 electoral votes, or one electoral vote per 680,000 people or thereabouts. Doing the basic math, we can see that a voter in Wyoming has nearly four times the influence on the outcome of the presidential election as does a voter in California. This goes against the principle of "one-man-one-vote", which is one of the foundations of our republic. It's not fair, it's not democratic, and it shouldn't be tolerated.

These two problems would be sufficient by themselves to justify eliminating the Electoral College. But there are many other problems with it as well. One is that it causes presidential candidates to focus all their attention on a small number of "swing states", which are go conceivably go either way in the election, at the expense of those states which are considered reliably Republican or Democratic. As a result, the powers-that-be pay attention to the things that matter to voters in states like Ohio or Florida, while voters in Texas and New York are out of luck.

Consider this. There are roughly the same number of Cuban-Americans in the United States as Vietnamese-Americans. However, the issues important to the Cuban-American community get huge amounts of political attention, while the issues important to Vietnamese-Americans are largely ignored. Why is this? Well, Cuban-Americans tend to live in Florida, a key swing state, whereas Vietnamese-Americans tend to live in California and Texas, which are not swing states. Neither community is inherently more important than the other, but the Electoral College creates an artificial importance for one over the other.

Even in swing states, attention is disproportionately focused on the larger ones, as they have more electoral votes. A farmer in Iowa (which has six electoral votes) or a convenience store owner in New Hampshire (which has four electoral votes) are not seen as important as a mechanic in Florida (which has twenty-nine electoral votes) or a contractor in Virginia (which has thirteen electoral votes).

The Electoral College also effectively disenfranchises millions of voters in every presidential election. Because nearly all the states use a winner-take-all system to allocate their electoral votes, it means the losing side in any given state may as well have not cast a ballot for president. A Republican in New York or a Democrat in Texas effectively has no say in who is elected President, and this goes against the ideals of a representative republic.

The Electoral College is an outmoded and obsolete piece of constitutional machinery. Whatever justifications the Founders might have had when they wrote the system into the Constitution in 1787 have long since faded away and the system should today be done away with. This could be achieved by a constitutional amendment, which would be very difficult. But because the Constitution allows the individual states to decide for themselves how to allocate electoral votes, it can also be achieved more quickly and with greater ease by individual action by the various state legislatures.

The National Popular Vote movement provides a surprisingly easy way out of this morass. Legislation is being enacted by individual states, whereby their electoral votes shall go to the winner of the national popular vote, regardless of the outcome in the individual state, with the legislation taking effect as soon as the number of states equivalent to the winning number of electoral votes have enacted identical legislation. Several states have already passed the necessary legislation, and bills are advancing through the legislative process in most of the other states. But progress is painfully slow and needs to accelerate. There's nothing keeping you from picking up your phone right now and calling your state representative's local office to advocate for it, by the way.

The President of the United States should be chosen directly by the people. Every individual citizen should have an equal say in who becomes the chief executive. It doesn't matter whether it is by constitutional amendment or through the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, but it needs to happen if America is to live up to its ideals of democracy.

What If the Confederates Had Resorted to Partisan Warfare in 1865?

April of 1865 was the month in which the Confederacy was utterly crushed. The first day of the month saw the Southerners suffer a terrible defeat at the Battle of Five Forks, cutting off the last rail supply lines to the Army of Northern Virginia. The following day, the lines of fortifications protecting Petersburg, which had held off Union forces for more than nine months, were shattered by a series of attacks, forcing the Confederate to abandon their capital at Richmond. There followed a frantic week as the Army of Northern Virginia sought desperately to escape to the west, only to be run down and cornered by the irresistible might of the Army of the Potomac. On April 9, as every student in America is taught on 8th grade, Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse.

Down in North Carolina, dramatic events were also taking place, if at a slower pace. There a hodgepodge Confederate army was still in the field, commanded by Joseph Johnston and consisting of the remnants of the Army of Tennessee and troops pulled from the garrisons of now abandoned ports of Charleston and Wilmington. The Union army under William Tecumseh Sherman was steadily moving north, seeking to link up with Grant in Virginia. Although Johnston's men had given the Yankees a bloody nose on the first day of the Battle of Bentonville the previous month, they had shortly thereafter been forced to retreat when Union reinforcements arrived. As Johnston confessed, he lacked the ability to do anything more than annoy Sherman. On April 26, having learned of Lee's capitulation in Virginia, Johnston surrendered to Sherman.

In the midst of all this, President Jefferson Davis refused to admit that the cause of the Confederacy was lost. Moving out of Richmond with his Cabinet and what remained of the Confederate treasury, he fled to Danville, Virginia, where he released a remarkable statement to the press.

Relieved from the necessity of guarding cities and particular points, important but not vital to our defense, with an army free to move from point to point and strike in detail the detachments and garrisons of the enemy, operating on the interior of our own country, where supplies are more accessible, and where the foe will be far removed from his own base and cut off from all succor in case of reverse, nothing is now needed to render our triumph certain but the exhibition of our own unquenchable resolve. Let us but will it, and we are free. 

What President Davis was talking about was, in effect, abandoning a conventional military strategy and resorting to partisan warfare, or what we today would usually call guerrilla warfare. It had a history going back to the emergence of civilization, but it was widely understood even in the more dignified 19th Century. The term "guerrilla" comes from the Spanish for "little war" and was popularized by the Spanish partisans fighting against Napoleon during the Peninsular War. Russian partisans had played a key role in thwarting Napoleon's attempt to conquer Russia and Tyrolean insurgents fighting Napoleon in northern Italy had captured the public imagination. Many Southerners could look back on heroes from the Revolutionary era who had battled the British in the Carolinas, such as Francis Marion and Thomas Sumter. Guerrilla fighters might not have had the mystique in the mid-19th Century that they would gain during the Cold War, personified by Che Guevara, but they were a well-established part of the public imagination. Anyone who read Davis's statement knew exactly what he was talking about.

Davis was not the only person who wanted to resort to partisan warfare. E. Porter Alexander, Robert E. Lee's brilliant chief of artillery, approached his commander before the surrender at Appomattox with a dangerous proposal. Rather than capitulate, Alexander argued, they should simply order their men to disperse in small bands and carry on the fight. Other men in the Southern ranks also remained defiant, in spite of all the catastrophes that had befallen the Confederacy in 1865. The possibility of a widespread partisan war was a very real one.

What would a Confederate partisan war have looked like? Certainly it wouldn't have looked pretty. Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that the men of the Army of Northern Virginia dispersed on April 8, when Lee historically made the decision to surrender to Grant unless they could cut their way out of the trap the next morning. This was also the moment when Porter approached Lee, so it's entirely possible that the great general was thinking the question over. At that point, there were between fifteen and twenty thousand men still with Lee. Had he ordered them to scatter, large numbers of them would have been captured by the Union forces then swarming through the area, especially the large cavalry corps commanded by General Phil Sheridan.

Perhaps half might have escaped, however, either individually or in small groups. Plans might have quickly been laid to meet at designated rendezvous points. Porter himself envisioned the men making their way back to their home states. We would have seen central Virginia flooded with perhaps ten thousand scattered Confederate fighters, but they would have had no ability to supply themselves with food except by taking it from the civilian population. Lee had foreseen this problem and had spoken of it to Porter as a justification for not following his advice. Some civilians would have done their best to help the insurgents, for support for the Confederacy remained strong in many quarters even this late in the conflict. But Virginia had been picked clean by the war and there was little food left to give. Sheridan's vengeful cavalry, experienced in this sort of thing from their fighting in the Shenandoah Valley, would have surely made the ordinary people of Virginia pay dearly for any help they provided to the partisans. It would have been a truly bloody business,

If Lee's army had dispersed rather than surrender, and central Virginia was filled again with the sounds of battle as the partisan bands fought against their Union foes while they desperately sought food, what would Johnston have done? Historically, Johnston surrendered because Lee had surrendered, and the remaining Confederate forces in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi followed suit. If Lee's men were still fighting, albeit now as partisans, we can assume that Johnston would not have surrendered and that his army would have remained intact for at least the time being. Unlike Lee, Johnston did not surrender because his army was trapped and surrounded, but because the war was obviously lost and he was unwilling to see his men die for nothing.

Johnston might have retreated to the southwest, away from both Sherman and Grant, but had he done so, Sherman would have launched a vigorous pursuit and probably run him down in a North Carolinian version of the Appomattox Campaign. Besides, his army was already melting away from desertion. So, for the purposes of our little thought experiment, let's assume that Johnston's orders his men to scatter into partisan bands around April 15. North Carolina would have turned into the same bloodbath that would have been sweeping Virginia at the same time. Thousands of starving men, no longer under any unified command structure, would have been moving to and fro, alternately fighting or trying to avoid the Union forces which would have been trying to track them down.

There were still Confederate forces in the field under the command of General Richard Taylor in southern Alabama and Mississippi, as well as small garrisons in Georgia and Florida. Word of the partisan fighting would have reached them by the time Union forces arrived to gobble them up. We can assume that many of them would have surrendered, or simply thrown away their uniforms and gone home, but many of them might also have elected to take to the woods and join the partisan effort. What would have happened in the strategically irrelevant Trans-Mississippi, where the Confederate remained in a fairly stable position, is anybody's guess, although it should be pointed out the Governor Pendleton Murrah of Texas wanted to continue resistance against the Union even after he learned of Lee's surrender.

Would the Confederates have been able to maintain any kind of organized command structure? It's difficult to say. I find it very unlikely that Jefferson Davis, hiding out in the swamps of Florida or the mountains of northern Georgia, would have been capable of exercising any real control over his remaining forces even if he had avoided capture. Had he achieved his objective of reaching the Trans-Mississippi and found momentary safety there, he could still have exercised no real control over the Confederate partisan bands east of the river. At best, he would occasionally have been able to smuggle out messages encouraging further resistance, rather like Saddam Hussein did between the fall of Baghdad and his capture in December of 2003. Lee and Johnston were good soldiers, but getting on in years and exhausted by four years of toil. Would they have had the endurance to be guerrilla commanders? It's doubtful. I would expect both of them to either give themselves up or wait to be captured and spend the remainder of the conflict in honorable imprisonment.

On a more local scale, however, the situation changes. The Boers maintained a roughly organized partisan effort against the British, when, following the defeat of their conventional armies, their troops scattered into small, fast-moving partisan units known as "commandos" (from which we get the modern name of soldiers in the special forces). The Americans in the southern colonies were able to do so after the destruction of their conventional armies at Charleston and Camden in 1780. Moreover, in Wade Hampton and Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederacy had outstanding cavalry commanders who would surely have made equally outstanding partisan leaders.

If the Confederate had turned to partisan warfare on a massive scale after the spring of 1865, what would have been the reaction from the Union high command? After four years of war, these were men hardened to the strength of iron and granite. Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, and George Thomas were not going to be in the mood for forgiveness. The war had become much harsher in 1864-65 than it had been before, as hundreds of burned out farms in Mississippi, Georgia, Virginia and South Carolina could attest, to say nothing of the smoldering ruins of Atlanta, Columbia and Richmond. Any civilians who actively aided the partisans could be certain that vengeful Union cavalry would soon descend upon their homes and leave them in flames. The Union still had effectively unlimited resources of manpower and material, and the collapse of Confederate authority would have allowed them to recruit untold thousands of freed slaves as well, making their army even stronger.

More importantly, there was an alternative government to vie for the loyalties of the people. Under President Lincoln's "Ten Percent Plan", a state could be brought back into the Union with a functioning government as soon as ten percent of the number of people who voted in the state in the 1860 election had sworn loyalty to the Union, with generous pardons extended to all but very high-ranking Confederate political or military officials. By the time we are suggesting the Confederate armies might have dispersed into partisan bands, there were already functioning Unionist governments in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Tennessee. As the Union army gained control of the cities and towns, with Confederate partisans consigned to the forests and hills, similar administrations would have soon become operational in other states as well.

With Confederate partisans simultaneously trying to fight Union occupation forces and keep themselves fed and supplied, the loyalties of the people would soon become torn between the Confederate "bitter-enders" (to use a phrase from the Boer War) and the emerging Unionist governments. Knowing that Union forces would burn them out if they helped the partisans, and that the partisans might loot them of their food no matter what they did, there would be an inevitable shift towards the Union side, After all, even a temporarily effective partisan campaign would have provided no real chance for an ultimate victory against the Union and this would have been obvious to all concerned.

Throughout the remainder of 1865, we would see scattered Confederate partisan bands battling against Union forces trying to run them all to ground. But history shows that a partisan campaign can only persist in an environment where the partisans enjoy the support of the civilian population. The Southern people had had enough of war, which was aptly demonstrated by the steadily increasing rate of desertion from the Confederate armies during the months before November of 1864 (when Lincoln's reelection ended any realistic chance for a Confederate victory) and April of 1865. Combine with the certainty of terrible retribution, we can be sure that the exhausted civilian population would not have been inclined to support the partisans very much.

An already ugly situation might have been made even worse if Confederate partisans had decided to direct their attention towards Southerners who swore loyalty to the newly established Unionist administrations. Given the now unorganized nature of the Southern partisans, it would have been impossible to prevent all groups from engaging in retaliation against Unionist Southerners, even if what remained of the Confederate leadership had been inclined to restrain them. The result would have been a civil war within the Civil War. This actually happened in East Tennessee and other places historically, but it would have been vastly worse and on a wider scale in the scenario we are describing. We might even have seen former Confederate troops who had surrendered being mobilized by the Union governments to fight against their former comrades.

This, then, would have been the South in the summer and fall of 1865 had the Confederates decided to resort to large-scale partisan warfare rather than give up the fight. Tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers would be at loose across the country, fighting as partisans. Some of these bands might be loosely organized on a local level by leaders such as Nathan Bedford Forrest or Wade Hampton, but communication would be extremely difficult and it's likely that most of the groups would not be under any effective command at all. Without any system of logistics to supply themselves, the partisans would have had to turn to looting to obtain food. Within a short time, there would be very little distinction between the Confederate partisan bands and simple outlaws. Any civilians would supported the partisans would have been burned out of their homes and many of them would have turned against their fellow Southerners in desperate bids for safety and peace. Thousands of more men would have died in a cause that had already perished. Historically, the South took decades to recover from the American Civil War, but in this scenario, the wounds inflicted upon Southern society would have been infinitely worse.

That this nightmare did not come to pass can be attributed above all to three men: Robert E. Lee, Joseph Johnston, and John C. Breckinridge. Lee and Johnston refused to give orders that would have scattered their men into partisan bands. Being Virginia gentlemen of the old school, they had no wish to engage in a guerrilla conflict, especially one they had no chance of winning. Both army commanders cared deeply about their men, and neither was going to be willing to have them killed to no purpose.

On April 20, a paroled General Lee wrote Jefferson Davis a letter, though the President could not have received it before he was captured a month later. In it, Lee states the following:

From what I have seen and learned, I believe an army cannot be organized or supported in Virginia, and as far as I know the condition of affairs, the country east of the Mississippi is morally and physically unable to maintain the contest unaided with any hope of success. A partisan war may be continued, and hostilities protracted, causing individual suffering and the devastation of the country, but I see no prospect by that means of achieving a separate independence. It is for Your Excellency to decide, should you agree with me in opinion, what is proper to be done. To save useless effusion of blood, I would recommend measures be taken for suspension of hostilities and the restoration of peace.

Lee was always very tactful and careful when communicating with Davis. Reading between the lines, it is clear that Lee was doing two things. First, he was trying to make it clear that a partisan war would achieve nothing but add to the suffering of the Southern people. Second, he was leaving a footnote in history to absolve himself of any responsibility in the event that Davis was foolish enough to attempt a partisan war.

Johnston didn't have to write to Davis, for he got a chance to say pretty much the same thing to the President's face. The commander of the Army of Tennessee was probably the last man Davis wanted to see, for they had been bitter personal enemies for years, perhaps as far back as their West Point days in the 1820s, Johnston told Davis plainly that the war was over, that there was no point in continuing resistance, and that attempting a partisan war would simply bring more death and devastation to the people of the South. When Davis equivocated on whether he should allow Johnston to negotiate a surrender of his army, Johnston went ahead and did so without the President authorization.

Breckinridge served as the Confederate Secretary of War in the waning days of the Confederacy, having assumed the position in January of 1865. He recognized immediately that the South no longer had any chance of victory and took it upon himself to guide events towards as easy and honorable a conclusion of hostilities as possible. As he said to Davis, "This has been a magnificent epic. In God's name, let it not terminate in a farce." Yet Breckinridge remained faithfully by Davis's side through the hopeless, grim flight to the south, keeping the cavalry escort that protected the President together, and all the while doing his best to persuade Davis that the war was well and truly lost.

All the while, Breckinridge used his moral authority, and the now hazy legitimacy he held as the Secretary of War of a disintegrating government, to help Confederate soldiers surrender and go home. He assisted Johnston in his negotiations with Sherman and pushed other Confederate government officials and military officers to pressure Davis to cease resistance. As Davis seemed close to losing his grip on reality after the fall of Richmond, everyone turned to Breckinridge for guidance. To everyone, he gave the same message. The war was over. Surrender to the Yankees. Peace with honor is preferably to fighting to the death. In the end, Breckinridge's efforts probably prevented thousands of men who might otherwise have vanished into the woods and hills from doing so.

All Americans should give thanks to Lee, Johnston, and Breckinridge for helping to prevent the nightmare vision of a Confederate guerrilla war from becoming a reality. The American Civil War was the most traumatic experience our nation has ever gone through, yet it would have been even worse had Davis been able to persuade even a sizable fraction of his army to fight on as partisans. Whatever you think of these three men, they do deserve the gratitude of all Americans for preventing this nightmare from becoming a reality.