Gerrymanding Must Be Abolished

It's a presidential election year and it has already proven to be one of the most bizarre elections in living memory. I know for whom I'm going to cast my vote in November, but haven't decided if I'm going to mention it in my blog. I'm not a member of any political party, nor do I fit the generally accepted definition of either a liberal or a conservative. When anyone asks me to define my political views, I usually reply that I am a 21st Century Jeffersonian. So I don't think I will be posting blog pieces that support or oppose Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, though I reserve the right to change my mind later on.

I don't want to ignore the election altogether, though, so I have decided to write about various proposed election reforms that I think are urgently, even critically, needed here in the United States. I personally feel that election reform on all levels of government is the single greatest issue facing America today, for the lack of such reform has been the root cause of our national inability to deal with the great challenges such as climate change or the national debt. The media, ever the guardians of the status quo, rarely bring the subject up, because the last thing they want to see is substantial change in the way politics works in America. Unfortunately, unless we can enact such reforms in the very near future, I fear for the survival of ultimate survival of democracy in our nation.

Today, I'm going to write about what I think is the most urgently needed measure: the abolition of gerrymandering.

The principle of government in a republic is that the voters choose their legislators. In most of modern America, however, we are faced with the absurd reality that legislators choose their voters. This is due to the process known as gerrymandering, by which the majority party in a state legislature draws the lines of congressional districts in such a way as to pack as many voters who support the opposition party into as few districts as possible. This has the effect of maximizing the number of districts their party will win and minimizing the numbers of districts the opposition will win, regardless of the actual difference in the number of votes each party gains. In pursuit of partisan advantage, absurd district shapes are created, usually taking no account of such things as natural borders or keeping communities such as towns or cities within the same legislative district.

Gerrymandering is not a new invention. During elections for the very first Congress in 1788, Patrick Henry tried to gerrymander James Madison out of a congressional seat in Virginia (thankfully, Henry was unsuccessful). Indeed, the very term "gerrymander" comes from Elbridge Gerry, a governor of Massachusetts in the early 19th Century who used the gerrymandering of his political enemies as a standard tactic. But the fact that it has been done for a long time is no justification for its continuation, for partisan redistricting is blatantly undemocratic and should be abolished as soon as possible.

Because of gerrymandering, the vast majority of congressional districts in America have become extremely skewed towards one of the two major political parties, usually by a ratio of around 70% to 30%. This means that if a person is unfortunate enough to be a Republican in a Democratic district or a Democrat in a Republican district, he or she has no real representation. A member of Congress who represents such a district can safely ignore the concerns of a constituent who supports the opposition party and suffer no electoral punishment for doing so. A reasonable case can be made for the idea that the majority of Americans are not genuinely represented in Congress at all. In that case, we might fairly ask whether America is really a republic anymore.

Another negative consequence of partisan redistricting is that a shockingly large number of representatives face no competition on election day. Since the minority party in a gerrymandered district sees little chance of victory, they often decide it is not worth the effort and resources to contest the election and either don't run a candidate at all or simply put up a token candidate who they know stands no chance. This means that the incumbent need not fear the judgment of the people, and can act in ways that would otherwise get him thrown out of office by his constituents. The easier it is for an incumbent to remain in office, the less attention he needs to pay to the wishes of his constituents, thus degrading the very principles of representative democracy.

Gerrymandering also contributes to voter apathy. Seeing the incumbent win reelection over and over again, citizens often see little or no value in casting their vote on election day. Why bother, when the outcome has already been settled ahead of time by the gerrymandering process? Even worse, since a representative in a heavily gerrymandered district is more likely to have to worry about a challenger from his or her own party in a primary election than a challenger from the other party in a general election, office-holders are pushed into more extreme positions, with Republicans increasingly moving to the far right and Democrats to the far left. This increases partisan gridlock and rancor in Congress, making it more difficult for the two parties to compromise on important issues and alienating the moderate voters, who have no one for whom to vote.

The essence of any democracy is that the wishes of the people form the basis for the actions of the government. Through gerrymandering, however, partisan factions can achieve decisive political power even if the majority of the people do not want them to have it. Gerrymandering stifles political debate and allows incumbents to be free from the threat of defeat by their constituents. In most years, well over 90% of incumbent members of Congress win reelection, even though polls suggest that less than 20% of the people approve of the job Congress is doing. For a country that is supposed to be a vibrant democracy, this is ridiculous.

I've been speaking about the gerrymandering problem in terms of Congress, but it is equally detrimental to democracy in terms of drawing the district lines for state legislative races, where precisely the same problems apply on a more local scale. Indeed, incumbency is perhaps an even bigger problem in state legislative races than in congressional races, since the constituents are ironically less likely to have information their representative due to lack of media coverage. Most people, frankly, are hard-pressed to name their congressman, let alone their state legislator, which is a state of affairs the office-holders are usually fine with, though they would tell you otherwise.

Rather than allowing state legislatures to keep the power to draw congressional and state legislative districts, which will inevitably result in the continuation of the practice of gerrymandering, each state should have a nonpartisan committee of citizens to undertake the redrawing of district maps after each census. This, in my opinion, is the single reform measure most urgently needed in the United States today.

Seven states - Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, New Jersey, and Washington - currently have redistricting commissions which possess full authority to draw congressional and legislative districts. Three others, Florida, Maine, and New York, have commissions which draw up proposed plans, though the legislature still has final say. Iowa has a unique system in which a bipartisan group of legislative staff draw up district maps and, if the legislature rejects them, the state supreme court makes the decision. It's no coincidence that congressional elections in those states have become more competitive, resulting in greater attention paid by incumbents to the wishes of their constituents and more fruitful debate and discourse in their political campaigns. Indeed, of the 25 most competitive congressional districts, sixteen are in one of these eleven states (and Montana doesn't really count here, since it only has one representative in the House).

The legislation creating such commissions must be carefully crafted to prevent the politicians from pulling a fast one on the people, giving them the appearance of a reform without its reality. As an example of a good piece of redistricting reform legislation, consider the bill repeatedly introduced in the Texas Legislature by State Senator Jeff Wentworth, a San Antonio Republican. Wentworth's bill envisioned a nine member commission, with four members each from the largest and second largest parties in the legislature (the Republicans and Democrats, for all practical purposes), with a ninth member being chosen by the other eight. Membership on the commission was barred to people who held elected office or people who held official positions with political parties. The legislation required that whatever plan put forward by the commission creates districts of roughly equal population, must be "compact" and "convenient", and (most important) not be designed to discriminate against any political party of group. Had this bill become law, the days of packing members of one political party into as small a number of districts as possible would have been over.

Redistricting reform could happen on the level of the individual states, as has already taken place in many states. It can also happen on the federal level. Under the Constitution, Congress has the authority to require the states to create independent redistricting commissions. Indeed, during the last few sessions of Congress, well-intentioned congressmen (there are a few, believe it or not) have proposed legislation which would do exactly that. However, it should come as no surprise that the bills have gone nowhere in Congress. After all, because the members of Congress are the ones who benefit from gerrymandering, why should we expect them to vote against their own individual self-interest?

What must happen is a comprehensive grassroots effort by American citizens to put enough pressure on both state legislators and their congressmen and senators to get them to get these bills passed. As seen above, many states have already done so, and as more follow suit momentum will be built to the point where it will be like a snowball rolling down a hill. If enough momentum is built, it can overcome the political inertia that currently holds the process back. We, as citizens, must make redistricting reform a priority, because until we do, the idea of a true representative democracy will remain a mere dream. More to the point, until the power of the ruling political elite is broken, the country's most pressing problems will remain unaddressed.

Don't Invade Russia

Last Wednesday was the seventy-fifth anniversary of the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany. If I made a list of mistakes to avoid if you want to conquer the world, it would have just three things on it. First, don't mess with the Royal Navy. Second, don't underestimate American resolve. And third, whatever you do, absolutely never, never, never invade Russia.

Hitler broke all three of these rules, and a good many others, in his bid for world domination. He underestimated British resolve and, crucially, failed to understand the advantage the British had in the form of the Royal Navy. He terribly misunderstood the character of the American people and foolishly declared war on the United States after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, even though he was under no treaty obligation to do so. His interference in military procurement led to countless delays in the development of new weapons systems that could have greatly impacted the course of the war. He thought that the Italians would be a useful ally, he ordered foolish offensives when his generals urged caution, he diverted critical resources away from the war effort towards his sinister program of industrial-scale murder, and generally made a thorough mess of being a war leader. Indeed, there have been some suggestions that proposals to assassinate Hitler were rejected by the Allies because removing him from the stage would only help the German war effort.

But of all his mistakes, none matched the sheer stupidity of his invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. It was a mistake that would bring to ruin Hitler's sick dreams of a European empire centered around his conception of Aryan racial purity, as well as cost him his life. True, the Soviet victory would not have been possible without the crucial contribution of the United Kingdom, the United States, and the other Allied nations (most directly in the form of Lend-Lease supplies sent directly to the USSR, without which the Soviets would not have been able to resist the Nazis). But we can see that the invasion of the Soviet Union was the event around which the outcome of the Second World War swung. From the moment the panzer divisions crossed the border, Nazi Germany was probably doomed.

Hitler was fully confident that his armies could crush the Soviet Union quickly and easily. After all, they had already conquered Poland, Denmark and Norway, the Low Countries, and the Balkans. Most impressively, they had defeated the French, believed before the war to have the strongest army in Europe, in a mere six weeks of fighting. The might of the German panzers on the ground and the Luftwaffe in the air had appeared to be invincible. The Red Army, by contrast, had had a humiliatingly difficult time defeated the Finns in 1940, despite outnumbered them by a massive margin, and many of the best Russian commanders had been executed in Stalin's political purges.

The invasion led to the most brutal and nightmarish war that the world has ever seen, a titanic struggle between two equally evil dictators and two equally malevolent political ideologies. At the onset, it seemed that nothing could stand in the way of the Germans, whose panzer divisions sliced through the Soviet lines as though they were butter and whose Luftwaffe obliterated the Soviet Air Force before it could take off. For months, the German armored spearheads advanced, killing or capturing millions of Soviet soldiers, taking Kiev and Minsk, and coming within a hairsbreadth of Leningrad and Moscow.

It was then that two crucial elements played into Russian hands. First, the weather turned on the Germans, trapping them at the end of their supply lines in subzero temperatures beyond anything they had ever experienced. Second, Russian reserve armies launched a massive counteroffensive, for the Germans had failed to grasp the power of the Russians to raise armies of enormous size almost at will. In nightmarish fighting around Moscow in the winter of 1941-42, the Germans were hurled back.

They tried against the following year, launching a spring offensive that drove eastwards towards the Volga River, threatening the city of Stalingrad and the crucial Russian oil fields in the Caucasus Mountains. This ended in complete disaster that winter, with the massive Russian victory at the Battle of Stalingrad, which snuffed an entire German army out of existence. The following year, a last ditch German offensive was turned back in the Battle of Kursk, by some accounts the largest land battle in history. After that, the Russian steamroller really got going. Soviet war production, by itself, now significantly outstripped that of the Germans and the Soviet armies seemed to have almost limitless reserves of manpower. By the spring of 1945, the shattered remnants of the German forces were utterly defeated in the Battle of Berlin, Hitler shot himself inside his famous "Fuhrerbunker", and the Soviet flag was raised over the Reichstag. The Second World War in Europe was over.

The German Fuhrer wasn't the first man to invade Russia with dreams of an easy victory. One hundred and twenty-nine years ago almost to the day, the enormous army of Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of the French, had crossed the Neman River to begin the invasion of the Russian Empire. His army of six hundred thousand men, not only Frenchmen but Germans, Italians, Poles, and Dutchmen, was quite possibly the largest army ever marshaled in European history up to that point. Napoleon had defeated Russian armies in the past, at Austerlitz and Friedland, having always found them poorly led and slow to maneuver. The French Emperor, perhaps the greatest military genius in history, had no doubt that his invasion of Russia would succeed and leave him master of the world.

Napoleon's invasion of Russia went off in much the same way as that of Hitler's a century-and-a-quarter later. The Russian armies withdrew in the face of the overwhelming onslaught of Le Grande Armée trying to avoid being pinned down and losing much territory in the process. Eventually, the Russians stood and fought at the cataclysmic Battle of Borodino, the largest and bloodiest single-day battle of the 18th Century. Napoleon won a tactical victory, but a Pyrrhic one at best, for he suffered massive casualties and the Russian army withdrew to survive as a fighting force. Napoleon entered Moscow a week later, but the city almost immediately began to go up in flames thanks to Russian arsonists. He found that he had taken not a grand city, but a charred ruin.

The great retreat began a month later. It was a nightmare almost without parallel in human history. The Russian winter engulfed the French and allied soldiers, like the icy grip of the Grim Reaper, to the point where men who fell out of the ranks from exhaustion froze to death on the side of the road. Food ran short and many men starved; there were scenes of men frantically rushing towards any horse that fell down to cut away its flesh and consume it in a frenzy, whether or not the poor animal was dead. The Russian army constantly sought to interpose itself between the French army and its route of retreat, nearly succeeding in November at the Battle of Berezina, where the French suffered heavy losses as they crossed the river from which the battle took its name. Through it all, Cossacks and rural partisans swarmed around the French army like white blood cells attacking bacteria. The horrific tortures they inflicted upon French prisoners are almost too terrible to bear reading about and I shall not repeat them here.

Napoleon had entered Russia with an army of 600,000 men. When it limped out of Russia six months later, only about 100,000 had survived. Although Napoleon would miraculously raise another army and fight on for another three years, the disaster in Russia spelled the true end of his dreams for dominating Europe. He was never able to recover from the disaster of 1812 and the combined might of the British, Russian, Austrian, Prussian, and Swedish armies gradually wore him down. Napoleon met his final defeat at Waterloo in the summer of 1815, but his doom had probably been sealed when he had invaded Russia three years before.

Hitler and Napoleon are the two best known would-be conquerors who came to grief in the snows of Russia, but they are not alone. Just over a century before Napoleon's invasion, the Swedish king Charles XII had tried his luck. A figure almost unknown to modern Americans, Charles XII was one of the most fascinating people of the 18th Century. He led his nation through the long and bitter Great Northern War for the first two decades of the 18th Century, fighting against an alliance of Denmark-Norway (then united as a single realm), the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, various German states, and the Russian Empire. Against such a coalition, no one gave Sweden much of a chance.

Yet Charles XII quickly proved himself to be one of the most gifted military leaders of his time. At the Battle of Narva in 1700, with only 10,000 men, he destroyed a Russian force four times his strength, seemingly knocking them out of the war altogether. That accomplished, Charles turned to campaigning in Germany and Poland for the next several years, winning many victories and attempting, with varying degrees of success, to place friendly monarchs on the thrones of the various states.

Unfortunately for Charles, the Russian Empire at this time was led by the most ferocious and implacable man who would ever sit on the throne, Czar Peter the Great. Stung by the humiliating defeat at Narva, he embarked upon a massive military reform program, slowly building up the strength of the Russian army, improving its training and tactics, and equipping it with up-to-date weapons. With his new forces, Peter began attacking Swedish holdings along the Baltic Sea, slowly chipping away at vital Swedish territory.

Realizing that he had been wrong to write Russia off after the victory at Narva, Charles XII now decided upon a full-scale invasion. With a battle-hardened army, he set off on his march to Moscow in January of 1708. At first, everything went well. Despite superior numbers, Russian forces were defeated in a number of battles, including the Battle of Holowczyn that summer, in which 12,000 Swedes trounced twice their number of Russian troops. But inevitably, things began to go wrong. An anticipated anti-Russian uprising by the Cossacks was thwarted by a devastating preemptive Russian attack. A reinforcing Swedish army was intercepted by the Russians and defeated at the Battle of Lesnaya. Worst of all, the Swedes were forced to endure what the French and Germans in future turns would endure, as the winter of 1708-08 turned into the coldest in living memory, resulting in countless Swedish soldiers freezing to death amid the wastes of Russia.

With a weakened army reduced to less than 25,000 men, Charles XII faced off against Peter the Great's much larger army at the Battle of Poltava in the summer of 1709. The result was probably a foregone conclusion. Attacking with great gallantry, the Swedes fought as hard as men could fight, but against vastly superior numbers, strongly entrenched and backed by strong artillery, they had no chance. The Swedish army was crushed in one of the decisive battles of history, forever ending Sweden's status as a great power and marking the emergence of Russia on the stage of the world. Charles himself would escape into the Ottoman Empire, to pursue further adventures in the years left to him, but his dream of conquering Russia ended in the bloodbath at Poltava.

Adolf Hitler. Napoleon Bonaparte. King Charles XII. In each of the last three centuries, a mighty warlord has attempted to conquer Russia. Each of them failed, and for remarkably similar reasons. In each of these three examples, the same three factors inevitably led to failure.

First, the Russians were always able to put into the field enormous numbers to resist the invaders. Even if the invaders were qualitatively superior in fighting capability, Russian numbers often proved able to turn the tables. No matter how many Russians were killed by the Germans of Hitler, the Frenchmen of Napoleon, or the Swedes of Charles XII, there were always more to replace them. This was due not only to the large Russian population, but to the autocratic nature of the Russian government under both the Czars and the Communist dictatorship of Stalin, which could mobilize an unimaginable proportion of their people into military use. Anyone invading Russia can expect to be at a severe numerical disadvantage.

Second, Russia is simply too big to be conquered. Invaders might inflict defeats upon the Russians, but there was always enough territory behind the Russians for them to retreat and regroup.This is why several serious defeats, such as the Battle of Holowczyn during Charles XII's invasion, the Battle of Smolensk and the Battle of Borodino during Napoleon's invasion, and the Battle of Kiev during Hitler's invasion, did not turn out to be truly decisive. The Russians were able to regroup and reorganize their forces father to the east and continue their resistance. Even Napoleon, who actually was able to capture Moscow, simply discovered that the Russian army withdrew to the east and remained ready to fight. There was simply too much land in Russia for it to be taken under any kind of occupation.

Third, and finally, the Russian winter played a critical role in defeating all three of the invasions. It's entirely likely that more German, French, and Swedish soldiers froze to death as were killed in battle. It not only killed and maimed men, but it destroyed morale and made the movement of food and supplies all but impossible. The Russians were quite familiar with this extreme form of weather and operated much more freely under its constraints. Making a bad situation even worse, the spring thaw following the winter turned the roads into a morass of mud and sludge, almost immobilizing the movements of the invaders. This was especially problematic for the mechanized German forces in the Second World War.

These underlying three aspects of Russia - its ability to mobilize immense numbers, its vast size, and the terrible ferocity of the winter - make the country effectively immune to direct invasion. So please take my advice. If you're in the world-conquering business, don't invade Russia. Trust me on this one. It's just an all-around terrible idea.

Unless, of course, you happen to be the Mongols.

Room 40

A week-and-a-half ago, the world commemorated the one hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Jutland, the largest naval battle of the First World War. During the famous engagement, the British Grand Fleet sortied to intercept the main force of the German High Seas Fleet, which itself was trying to catch what they thought was an isolated portion of the Royal Navy.  The Germans were mystified when they were suddenly and unexpectedly confronted with a superior British force that seemed to know their exact location and course. At the time, they put it down to an unlucky coincidence. They could not have been more mistaken.

In fact, the Royal Navy knew exactly where the German fleet was and where it was headed because they had pulled off one of the greatest intelligence coups in military history. They had successfully broken the secret codes of the German Navy. This victory, bloodlessly achieved by brains rather than brute force, was one of the most important of the entire war.

Wireless telegraphy, what we today call radio, was still a new factor in warfare when the Battle of Jutland was fought. After all, it had been barely a decade since the experiments of Marconi proved the usefulness of long-range wireless transmitting. The advent of wireless technology made possible instant long-range communication, and with it, the coordination of military operations on a scale much larger than that ever achieved before. A commander was now able to give instant commands to armies or fleets hundreds or even thousands of miles away.

The problem with wireless is that anyone can listen in on it. It thus became necessary to deny the enemy knowledge of what was being said through the use of codes and ciphers. Failure to do this would allow the enemy to listen in on one’s own radio transmissions and could conceivably lead to disaster. Earlier in the war, the 1914 Russian invasion of East Prussia had resulted in a catastrophic defeat largely because the Russian commanders had communicated in the clear, without any attempt at using codes or ciphers, and the Germans therefore knew almost as much about Russian troop dispositions and movements as the Russians did themselves.

It was recognized quite quickly that wireless would be of particular use in naval warfare. While generals could communicate with their forces on land by cable or written message, admirals had to coordinate the activities of warships across vast stretches of ocean, and wireless was the only way to accomplish this. Before the war, in order to safeguard the security of its wireless transmissions from prying British eyes, the German Navy had carefully created a complex encryption system that consisted of three different codes.

Each code was known by a two-or-three letter codename. Perhaps the most important German code was SKM, which the Germans used only to communicate with important naval units during major operations. It was made up of more than 34,000 three-letter groupings, each of which represented an order, a name of a ship, or some other piece of information the German admirals would need to communicate to their vessels. A code of lesser importance was HVB, which the Germans used to issue various routine commands that were done on a regular basis, and also when warships needed to communicate with German merchant vessels. The final code, VB, was used by the German Admiralty to communicate with its naval attachés overseas, and also used by flag officers when they were at sea.

Wireless telegraphy was such a new innovation that few countries had put much thought into intercepting and decrypting enemy transmissions. When the war broke out, the British knew that the maintenance of their naval superiority was going to be a critical factor in the final defeat of Germany. If the Germans were able to seriously challenge British mastery of the seas, it would be impossible to maintain the naval blockade of Germany and the British Isles might find themselves threatened with invasion. Very early in the war, therefore, it was decided that an operation had to be set up to break the German naval codes.

The Royal Navy turned to a somewhat unlikely person to tackle this key problem: Sir Alfred Ewing, a Scottish engineer who taught at the University of Cambridge and had spent many of his pre-war years working in Japan. At the outbreak of the war, he was the Director of Education for the Royal Navy, helping develop better methods for recruitment and training of naval officers. He had absolutely no professional experience in cryptography, but Rear Admiral Henry Oliver, the Director of Naval Intelligence for the Royal Navy when the war broke out, simply had an intuitive feeling that Ewing was the man for the job. As it turned out, Ewing was an excellent choice.

As a first step, Ewing did what any intellectual would do when faced with such a challenge: he went to the British Museum and began reading books on cryptography. He also began to assemble a staff of quirky eccentrics to help him in his task. Since no one had ever assembled a team to break wireless codes before, Ewing essentially made things up as he went along. Among the men he recruited were mathematicians and linguists, but there was a heavy dose of intellectuals who were well-versed in classical languages and ancient history but had no knowledge of code breaking. Many of them were academics on leave from their universities, and there was a bit of culture shock as these civilians began working with officers of the Royal Navy.

The men recruited by Sir Ewing gathered in the quarters he had found for them in the Admiralty Building, Room 40, which was soon the unofficial name for the operation as a whole. The very existence of Room 40 was a highly-classified secret. Outside of the high councils of the Admiralty, only the top two British admirals, John Jellicoe and David Beatty, were allowed to know about it.

As it turned out, by the end of 1914, the men of Room 40 had a lot of material to work with.  Immediately upon the outbreak of the war, the Royal Navy and its Dominion counterparts had begun the straightforward task of ridding the world’s oceans of German merchant ships. Unless they were lucky enough to find refuge in a neutral port where they could sit out the war, any German steamship was soon to be captured by the British. All German merchant ships, of course, were under strict instructions to destroy their copies of the HVB code the moment it looked like capture was likely.

On August 11, a Royal Australian Navy ship boarded the German-Australian merchant vessel Hobart, whose captain was not even aware that war had broken out. The Australian officer commanding the boarding party presented himself as the head of a quarantine inspection unit, thus gaining control of the ship before the captain had a chance to destroy his codebook. The Australians then tricked the German into revealing the location of the codebook, which was soon on its way to London.

Only days later, Room 40 received another stroke out luck, courtesy of their Russian allies. In the Baltic Sea, the Germans and Russians fought a largely isolated naval war with one another, in which superior numbers and tactics gave the Germans a decided advantage. The Russians restored to the naval equivalent of a guerrilla war, launching occasional hit-and-run attacks, striking only when targets of opportunity presented themselves, and otherwise keeping their ships in well-fortified bases. 

During a sortie against the Russians in the first month of the war, the German light cruiser Magdeburg ran aground in heavy fog. Frantically, she tried to free herself before Russian warships could arrive and attack her in her vulnerable state. When it became clear that she was well and truly stuck, and that the Russians were indeed on their way, the captain of the Magdeburg decided to destroy the ship rather than see it captured. Being aground, it couldn’t be properly scuttled, but charges were set to blow the ship up. Two Russian cruisers soon approached and, as soon as they were in range, began firing at the helpless Magdeburg. In the confusion that reigned as the German crew abandoned ship, the charges apparently went off too soon, killing many of the German sailors while not fully destroying the ship. Some of the Germans were rescued by a nearby German destroyer, while the others were taken prisoner by the Russians.

When the firing died down, the Russians sent a boarding party onto the charred remnant of the Magdeburg. Onboard, they discovered the codebook and current key for the SKM code, and almost immediately recognized their significance. Figuring that the priceless codebook would be of much more use to the British than to themselves, the Russians made a copy of it and then generously sent the original to London, where it soon found its way to Room 40.

The final German code was said to have fallen into Allied hands through a bizarre coincidence. On November 30, in an incredible stroke of luck, a British fishing trawler accidentally hauled up a metal chest that had earlier been dumped into the North Sea by a damaged German destroyer. Upon investigation, it was found to contain the VB codebook. It’s not clear why a humble destroyer was carrying the VB codebook, which was used for communications to overseas naval attachés and consulates, or by Flag Officers, but the British certainly weren’t going to complain. (I have sometimes wondered if this story was cooked up by the British to conceal the fact that they acquired the VB codebook by stealing it from an overseas German embassy, which would have been a massive violation of diplomatic protocol and international law.)

Before the end of 1914, therefore, the British had acquired the three most critical German naval codes. Clearly, Room 40 led a charmed life. But simply having the codebooks did not allow the British to decrypt the German messages, because the Germans were using ciphers as well as codes. A code is basically just another language written down in a codebook, in which combinations of letters are substituted for regular words and numbers. A cipher, on the other hand, is a system of scrambling up those letters so that they appeared to be gibberish to anyone who doesn’t possess the cipher. The men in Room 40 may have obtained the German codes, but unless they could unlock the German ciphers, the messages they were intercepting still were incomprehensible.

The men at Room 40 set to work. There were no established methods and procedures for the work they were doing, so they simply starting building up their operation from scratch. They were helped by the fact that the Germans made excessive use of wireless and did not change their ciphers regularly. By assembling vast numbers of intercepted German messages and comparing them with one another, over time the ciphers began to be broken. By the end of 1914, Room 40 was beginning to read German messages with increasing ease.

One of the mysteries of the First World War is why the Germans never fully realized that their codes had been compromised and that the Royal Navy was, in effect, readings its mail. When the Magdeburg was captured, concerned messages fluttered around the German Admiralty regarding whether the vital SKM codebook had been successfully destroyed. No one could say for sure, but the Germans went right on using the code anyway. In all three of the German codes, ciphers were often not changed for weeks at a time, and as Room 40 gained in experience, each new cipher would be broken within a few days.

When the Royal Navy appeared as if from thin air to attack a German naval unit or intercept a German vessel, rather than consider the possibility that the British had broken the German codes, the German naval commanders ascribed these events to either unlucky coincidence or reports sent to Britain from spies in Germany. Indeed, in the entire German Navy, only Captain Looff of the Konigsberg, hiding in the Rufiji Delta in German East Africa, seems to have realized that the British could read the German codes. Supply ships clandestinely sent from Germany to assist the Konigsberg were intercepted by the British, who could only have known about them by breaking the German codes. But while Looff realized this, no one else in the German Navy seemed to comprehend it.

The first hint of what Room 40’s capabilities came during the Battle of Dogger Bank, when the Royal Navy was able to intercept a powerful German flotilla with an even more powerful flotilla of its own. Only good luck and poor British command and control during the battle allowed the Germans to escape a potential severe defeat. As it was, the Germans had been forced to flee for home with undue haste. The British victory at Dogger Bank was made possible only by the intelligence provided by the men in Room 40.

Eventually, the man who emerged as the guiding spirit of Room 40 and its devoted band of code-breakers was the new Chief of Naval Intelligence, Captain Reginald Hall, truly one of the unsung heroes of the First World War. He professionalized and reorganized the staff of Room 40, transforming the ad hoc group created by Sir Ewing into a proficient unit that not only provided critical intelligence for the British throughout the war, but laid the foundation of the future code-breaking operations at Bletchley Park during the Second World War.

In the middle of 1916, Sir Ewing took his leave from Room 40 and returned to academia, whereupon Hall officially took over Room 40 in his capacity as Director of Naval Intelligence. If the code-breaking operation had one weakness, it was organizational ambiguity, but Hall now cut through the red tape and greatly improved operations.

Room 40 would play a tremendously important role in the war. It would not only help the Royal Navy keep the German High Seas Fleet cooped up in its North Sea bases, but would help them defeat the U-boat threat that posed such a great danger to the survival of Britain. It would also help bring the United States into the war as a member of the Allied powers, for it was via the codebreakers in Room 40 that the notorious Zimmerman Telegram came to be revealed to the public, raising American anger against Germany to a fever pitch in the early months of 1917.

If ever there was proof that the simple power of the human mind, carefully applied, can change the course of history, it was in the work of the men in Room 40.

Ten Good History "Beach Reads" for the Summer

It probably won't surprise any readers of my blog that most of my spare time - the time not taken up in being a full-time teacher, writer, father, and husband, in other words - is taken up with reading history books. My ratio of reading nonfiction to fiction is probably around twenty-to-one. If you ask me, a well-written history book is better than the best novel, with the added attraction of being a true story.

As the summer begins and we all try to relax a bit, I thought I'd offer a few modest suggestions for good history books to read over the summer, perhaps while lounging around on the beach. None of these are overly academic. Each is written by a good historical writer, tells a rollicking good story, and is intended for the general public. They tell important stories, to be sure, but aren't so heavy as, say, books about the Holocaust or the Soviet gulags. It's important to read those books, but maybe not on the beach during summer vacation.

Of course, my first recommendations would be my own books, Shattered Nation: An Alternate History Novel of the American Civil War and Blessed are the Peacemakers: A Shattered Nation Novella. Trust me, I have read both of them very carefully and consider them quite good. But this is not about tooting my own horn. Let's talk about what I think would be the ten most fun history books to read over the summer.

First up is The Neptune File, by Tom Standage, published in 2000. I loved this book, which tells the remarkable story of how Neptune was discovered in the late 19th Century. Mathematicians and astronomers, armed with their understanding of Newton's laws of gravity, had noticed something odd about the orbit of Uranus, the first planet invisible to the naked eye to be discovered, which suggested that an object of enormous mass was "tugging" on it with its gravity. Yet no such planet was known to exist. Much of the drama of the story comes from the controversy over whether English mathematician John Couch Adams or French astronomer Urbain Le Verrier deserves the credit for the discovery. It may sound cerebral, but I can assure you it's a delightful, entertaining book that you won't regret reading. It also leaves one with a profound respect for the ability of the human being to comprehend the universe in which we live.

Next is the wonderful book Longitude, by Dava Sobel, published in 1996. Like The Neptune File, it's a story of a complicated problem being solved by human ingenuity. The problem of finding longitude at sea might seem insignificant today, but it was a matter of life and death to the people of the 18th Century, not to mention extraordinary profits and military supremacy. Parliament offered an astounding monetary reward to anyone who could devise a solution. Amazingly, this task fell to an amateur clock-maker and choir director, John Harrison, a man from rural Yorkshire rather than London. But it was far from an easy task. In this lovely volume, easily read in a single day, Sobel details hows Harrison solved each technical challenge as it came up, as well as how he navigated the corridors of scientific and political power in the British Empire to claim the prize against all odds.

Another wonderful summer read I would recommend is The Great Game by Peter Hopkirk. In prose that flows like fine wine, Hopkirk details the clock-and-dagger struggle that took place in Central Asia between the Russian Empire and the British Empire during the mid-to-late 19th Century. British spymasters in India feared that Russia, steadily pushing down from the north, might one day penetrate through the Khyber Pass and invade Her Majesty's most valuable colonial possession. The stories of daring escapes, secret missions, espionage, and counterintelligence that Hopkirk describes makes one feel as if James Bond or Jason Bourne had been dropped down into the imperialistic age of the 1800s. Honestly, I have no idea why half a dozen different movies haven't been made out of this material.

We now come to Queen Victoria's Little Wars, by Byron Farwell. This book is by one of my favorite authors, who tells stories of soldiers in the British Empire in such an engrossing and entertaining way that one feels less like they are reading a book and more like they are on a rollicking amusement park ride. Yes, war is terrible, yet somehow the gentlemen of the Victorian army made it all seem like a game. With stories of adventure and glory as far afield as Canada, China, India, Africa, and the Middle East, filled with the most colorful characters in all of military history, this book is sure to delight anyone who reads it.

Next up is Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies, by Ben MacIntyre. The deception campaign by the Allied against the Germans before the D-Day invasion, leading them to believe that the landing would be at Calais rather than Normandy, is arguably the greatest counterintelligence effort of all time. It had many aspects, but perhaps the most important was the "turning" of literally every German agent operating in Britain at the time, using them to feed false information to Berlin. It's a story of colorful characters and dramatic escapades, masterfully told here in highly entertaining prose.

The next book on my list of recommendations is City of Fortune: How Venice Ruled the Seas, by Roger Crowley. There is something about the Republic of Venice that fascinates me and fills me with wonder. It's the story of a small city on an island in the middle of a great lagoon, which through courage, daring, skill and a head for business, comes to dominate the Mediterranean world and become one of the great powers of Europe. It then held the line for Christian Europe against the Islamic power of the Ottoman Turks, engaging in a series of wars that eventually exhausted it. With highly entertaining writing, the story comes alive in the pages of this book.

A Short History of Byzantium, by John Julius Norwich, comes next. It's a one volume abridged edition of a three-volume work. Norwich's witty, always clear and often amusing writing style takes what is often seen as a boring and esoteric subject and makes it easily accessible and hugely entertaining. The history of the Byzantine Empire is a subject deeply fascinating and this lovely volume is a magnificent introduction to it.

Another lovely book to read in the summer appeals to though who, like me, like wine along with their history. It is Passions: The Wines and Travels of Thomas Jefferson, by James Gabler. This book describes in loving detail the travels of Jefferson in Europe, through France, northern Italy, southern England, and the Rhine Valley. Its primary focus is wine, for Jefferson was the greatest wine connoisseur of the late 18th Century, but it also gives attention to the gardens and architecture that Jefferson so loved. Politics is touched on only fleetingly, for this is a book about Jefferson the Renaissance Man, not Jefferson the revolutionary. The last few chapters detail how Jefferson's European experience impacted his time in the White House and in his retirement at his beloved Monticello.

A book I cannot recommend highly enough is Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic, by Tom Holland. If you're looking for epic drama in history, you can't do better than the collapse of the Roman Republic in the First Century BC. In Holland's skillful hands, the story comes alive in all of its complexity and its astonishing cast of characters. When you come to the end of the book, you'll have been taken on a fantastic ride, yet find yourself shaking your head at the thought that such events were even possible.

We come to the end of the list with Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe, by Laurence Bergreen. I've always loved stories of the great explorers and this one certainly ranks among the best. The story of Magellan's heroic crew and the suffering they endured during the first circumnavigation of the world, it is a gripping adventure story that leaves one astonished. Of course, the one "fact" that everyone knows about this story is false; Magellan was not the first man to sail around the world, because he died halfway through the voyage. Yet a few skeleton survivors did make it back to Spain and the story they had to tell defied imagination. In the capable hands of Bergreen, it comes alive in this wonderful history book that is written like the best novel.

And that's the list. Happy reading, everyone!

The Fall of Constantinople

Five hundred and sixty-three years ago today, Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks after an epic siege that lasted fifty-three days. It was one of the epochal events in world history and one in which I have always been deeply fascinated. As I mentioned in a previous blog post, it was one of those stories from history that is simply dying to be made into a well-produced cable mini-series. I thought I would take the opportunity to give the reader a quick account of this amazing story.

By the middle of the 15th Century, the once proud Byzantine Empire had faded into near-insignificance. It had persisted for more than a thousand years after emerging from the collapse of the Roman world in the 4th and 5th Centuries. Indeed, as far as the Byzantines themselves were concerned, they were the Romans. It is was they called themselves and they had every right to the title. After the Roman Empire had split permanently into western and eastern halves upon the death of Emperor Theodosius I in 395, the western half had collapsed under the weight of barbarian invasions in less than a hundred years, while the eastern half had survived and thrived. Eventually it developed its own character, rather more Greek than Roman and entirely Christian rather than pagan, morphing into the Byzantine Empire. But the Emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos, who had taken the Byzantine throne in 1449, saw himself as being of a line that went all the way back to Augustus Caesar.

The empire over which Constantine ruled, however, was but a shadow of its former self. In its heyday, the Byzantine Empire had ruled over Asia Minor, the Balkans, southern Italy, and many of the major islands in the Mediterranean. Its army had been respected, its navy feared, the brilliance of its artists admired and envied, the genius of its scholars and theologians held in awe, and the wealth of its capital city on the Bosporus positively the stuff of legends. The violence and upheaval of the Crusades fatally weakened the Byzantine state, however, culminating in the brutal sack of Constantinople by fellow Christians in 1204. Although the Byzantines recaptured their capital in 1261, their empire had been shattered by the experience like a fine china set cast down onto the floor. By the time Constantine XI came to the throne, the Byzantines controlled only the city of Constantinople itself, the Peloponnesian peninsula in southern Greece (then known as Morea) and a few scattered islands in the Aegean. Oh, how the mighty had fallen.

Worse, a deadly threat to Byzantine survival had emerged from the Islamic lands to the east. Following the chaos of the disastrous Mongol invasion of the Middle East in the 13th Century, a series of small Turkish states had set themselves up in Asia Minor, fighting one another for supremacy. Over the course of a century-and-a-half, beginning around 1300, the mighty Ottoman Empire had emerged as the winner of this Darwinian struggle, subjugating Asia Minor and crossing into the Balkans as it crushed a succession of Christian and Muslim enemies. When a young and dynamic Sultan, Mehmed II, came to the throne in 1451, he let it be known that the fabled city of Constantinople was first on his list of desired conquests.

The Ottoman army mobilized and arrived at the walls of Constantinople in early April of 1453. His army numbered upwards of one hundred thousand men, including thousands of ferocious Janissaries, perhaps the most feared warriors in the world. While the bulk of Ottoman infantry came from the tough hill tribes of Anatolia, many of Mehmed's troops were, ironically enough, Christians from the Balkans, lured to the force by pay or driven by compulsion. Most terrible of all was the artillery that Mehmed brought to the siege. Much of it created by an infamous Hungarian cannon maker named Orban, it was the most extensive and powerful collection of artillery yet assembled in world history.

The Byzantines, by contrast, had a mere seven thousand men to defend the city. Yet their cause was not seen as hopeless, for Constantinople was one of the most easily defended cities in the world. Roughly triangular in shape, it was faced on the south by the Sea of Marmara, the north by the wide bay known as the Golden Horn, and could only be approached by a land army from the west. Its walls had stood for ten centuries and had repelled enemies as diverse as the Persians, the Arabs, the Bulgarians, and the Vikings. Only the Crusaders had managed to break through the walls, and that had been from the sea. The Ottomans themselves had failed to take the city during two previous attempts, in 1411 and 1422.

Moreover, although the defenders were heavily outnumbered, no one could question the quality of their leadership. Emperor Constantine XI was himself quite a competent warrior, having fought against Muslim and Christian enemies in Greece during his time as Despot of the Morea before becoming Emperor. Nor did anyone question his courage, for he could easily had fled the city before the Turks encircled it. Instead, he choose to remain and defend it with his life. As the first Turkish troops appeared over the horizon, the Emperor had clearly already made the decision that the siege would end only when he was either victorious or dead.

Alongside him, Constantine XI had a remarkable assembly of Christian warriors. There was the Castilian nobleman Don Francisco de Toledo, who would serve bravely and faithfully. There was the Venetian sea captain Gabriele Trevisano and several other Venetian sailors. There was the mysterious military engineer alternately named Johannes Grant or John Grant, who was said to be a German but whom some historians (including Steven Runciman, one of my favorite historical writers) had speculated might have been a Scot, whose genius would prove pivotal in the fighting to come. Indeed, of the seven thousand defenders, fully two thousand were volunteers from overseas, willing to come and fight even as their own governments shamefully turned a blind eye to what was happening.

Of all the foreign fighters who came to the defense of Constantinople, however, none was as legendary as Giovanni Giustiniani. He was a Genoese soldier renowned throughout the Christian world for his military skill and daring. Having recruited hundreds of men at his own expense and sailed from Italy to Constantinople to protect the fabled city, the Emperor gave him the command of the land wall defenses. He would be the pillar around which the other defenders of Constantinople would rally in the difficult weeks to come.

The Turks quickly overran two forts that had long ago been built beyond the city walls. The prisoners, rather than receiving mercy from the Sultan, were impaled within full view of Constantinople. If Mehmed II thought that this would terrify the defenders, he was sorely mistaken. By seeing what their fate would be if they failed, Constantine and his men steeled themselves for the storm that was about to break upon them. They had to conquer or they would perish.

The siege artillery Mehmed had brought to the fight began a long, slow, but steady bombardment of the walls. It was unlike anything that had ever been seen before in warfare. Thought the Christians did everything they could to repair the damage at night, the walls that had withstood so many previous attackers were steadily worn down into rubble. Several infantry assaults were made against the walls as well, but these were repelled with heavy losses, Giustiniani knew his business well and led his troops with exceptional skill and courage.

A long chain drawn across the entrance to the Golden Horn had prevented the Turkish fleet from gaining access to that body of water, allowing the Byzantines and their allies to leave the sea walls on the north side of the city comparatively undefended. Numerous Turkish naval attacks on the chain had been repelled by Trevisano. Indeed, Turkish naval actions had been humiliating for Mehmed, for several Christian supply ships had managed to slip through his blockade, much to the delight of Constantinople's defenders. However, on April 22, the Turks put their effectively unlimited manpower advantage to good use and simply hauled their ships across land to a portion of the northern coast of the Golden Horn under their control, thereby establishing a Turkish naval presence in the bay. An attempt by the defenders on April 28 to attack the Turkish fleet with fireships turned into a fiasco. From that point on, the Turkish ships controlled the Golden Horn and the Christian defenders were stretched ever more thinly along the walls.

It was probably obvious by this point that the defenders had little chance of actually winning the battle. Their only hope was to hold out long enough for a relief force to arrive from the Christian powers to the west. The powerful city-states of Venice or Genoa, many of whose citizens were in the ranks of the men lining the walls, could each have dispatched a fleet laden with reinforcements and supplies, almost certainly securing the city from Turkish capture. Neither bothered. Pope Nicholas V pleaded with Christian rulers to send assistance to Constantinople, despite the theological quarrels between Catholics and Orthodox Christians. Nobody bothered. The defenders of Constantinople were on their own.

As their artillery continued to steadily erode the strength of the walls, the Turks also sought to undermine them. Soldiers brought from the silver mines of Serbia were put to work digging tunnels underneath the walls in order to collapse them. It was at this point that the mysterious man Grant made his mark for the defense. He dug countermines and broke into the Turkish tunnels. Some were destroyed by flooding them with water. In others, there was nightmarish underground combat in the dark as Grant's men attacked and killed Mehmed's diggers. The thought of dying in such conditions raises a chill in me even as I type these words. But the undermining effort was defeated.

Mehmed, far from a patient man, had become increasingly angered and frustrated by the stubbornness of the defenders. Moreover, he was worried that a Christian relief force might arrive before he could take the city. He sent an offer to Emperor Constantine, telling him that the people of the city would be spared and could leave without hindrance if they gave up Constantinople. The Emperor sternly refused, having long since decided to fight to the end. On May 27, the cannonading stopped and Mehmed let his men rest for a day, telling them that they would soon unleash a final, overwhelming attack. The Christians huddled in their churches, including the majestic Hagia Sophia, built by the Emperor Justinian in the 6th Century, praying earnestly for deliverance. Constantine, the last in the long line of Roman Emperors, met with his key commanders and swore to defend the city to the last.

The night of May 28 passed quietly. Shortly after midnight, however, there came a terrifying cacophony of sounds from the Turkish camp as trumpets blared, drums pounded, and cymbals clanged. Wave after wave of Turkish infantry stormed forward and hurled themselves on the weakened defensive walls. The Christian warriors met them in furious combat and the sounds of battle filled the air. Mehmed had planned his attack carefully, with the first wave being made up of irregular and loosely disciplined troops known as bashi-bazouks. The Christians repelled them in bitter fighting, but suffered casualties in doing so and became tired and worn out. A second wave, made up of tougher Anatolian infantry, was likewise repulsed, but it was a near run thing and the Christian defenders were weakened further.

Finally, Mehmed sent his third wave forward. It was made up of his Janissaries, his elite shock troops. Nothing was held back; Mehmed was committing all his resources to this final assault. The Christians fought on, however, and for a time it appeared that this wave, too, would be turned back. It was at this moment that two terrible pieces of ill fortune befell the Christians. First, some Turkish troops discovered that a small sally port in the wall was still open and scurried through it to the other side, raising their banner on the small portion of the wall they had captured. At almost the same moment, Giustiniani was badly wounded (the accounts differ on whether it was a crossbow bolt or a fragment of a cannonball) and carried from the wall in agonizing pain. The Christian defenders lost heart. Exhausted, massively outnumbered, and finally giving in to terror, the soldiers abandoned the wall and fled back into the city.

The Turkish soldiers swarmed over the wall, now emptying of defenders. Some were already pushing their way into the streets of the city, beginning the traditional three days of looting and rape that befell a captured city during this period of history. Constantine XI saw that all was lost. He drew his sword and charged into the Turkish horde, slashing away at them until he was inevitably cut down and killed. With him died the last remnant of the Roman Empire. As some of the Christians fled to their boats, the city was given over to sack. The victorious Turks ran wild through the city, looting churches and homes, raping women, rounding up men, women, and children to be sold into slavery, and wrecking havoc. Terrified Christians crowded into Hagia Sophia, praying for a miracle, but the doors were hacked open by Turkish axes and the people within suffered the same fate as their fellows. The priests refused to stop conducting their holy liturgy and were killed.

The siege was over and the Turks were victorious. Mehmed soon rode his white horse through the gates and into the city, restoring order. It was the first step in the process by which Constantinople would be reborn at the capital city of the Ottoman Empire, which would last into the 20th Century. It would regain its former glory and become again one of the chief cities of the world, filled with people from all over the world, a center of trade and diplomacy. But it would forever after be a self-consciously Islamic city, having been made so by the man who would forever after be known as Mehmed the Conqueror.

The body of Constantine XI was never found, but there was no suggestion that he survived the battle. At least, not in any normal state. There was, however, an oft-repeated legend that is still remembered in Greece today. According to some, Constantine XI was rescued by an angel and turned into a marble statue. He was then taken to a secret cave somewhere near Constantinople, where he remains to this day. He will remain in his frozen state, so it is said, until the time comes for him to come back to life, reclaim Constantinople for Christianity, and restore the Byzantine Empire.

Did Thomas Jefferson Father The Children Of Sally Hemings? Probably Not.

If I asked the average educated American to list three things about Thomas Jefferson, they would probably tell me that he was President of the United States, that he was the author of the Declaration of Independence, and that he fathered children with a slave woman named Sally Hemings. It's disappointing to me that so few would recognize his role in establishing freedom of religion and public education in America, as well as helping to enact judicial and currency reforms that impact us to this day. It bothers me that so many would overlook the fact that he was a brilliant architect, gardener, scientist, inventor, musician, wine connoisseur, pioneer archaeologist, and linguist as well as a statesman, More than anything else, though, it bothers me that the third "fact" most Americans would "know" about Thomas Jefferson is probably not true at all.

Here is the torrid Jefferson-Hemings story. It starts in 1802, with disreputable muckraker named James Callendar, who had previously been a Jefferson ally but had become deeply embittered when Jefferson had turned him down for a postmaster job in Richmond. He published a diatribe against Jefferson in which accused the President of having fathered a child with his slave Sally. This was the first public mention of the controversy. Although the Federalist press repeated the claims (journalism was no more polite then than it is today), no one seems to have taken it very seriously. Callendar was known to be an unstable alcoholic and it was clearly a case of personal retaliation by Callendar against Jefferson. Even fierce political enemies like Alexander Hamilton and Henry Lee, who were always willing to believe the worst about Jefferson, dismissed the charges as baseless. So did John Adams. Discussion of the Callendar accusations basically ceased after Jefferson retired from the Presidency.

Decades later, in 1873, a man named Madison Hemings gave an interview to an anti-slavery newspaperman named S. F. Wetmore in which he claimed to be the son of Jefferson and Sally Hemings. He told quite a story, alleging that when Sally was in France during Jefferson's tenure there as a diplomat in the 1780s (she had been brought as a companion for Jefferson's daughter Maria), Jefferson had initiated a sexual relationship with her and she had become pregnant. Madison Hemings claimed that, though she could have remained in France as a free woman, Sally choose to return to Virginia with the promise from Jefferson that her children would be freed at a later date. During this time, Sally would have been a teenager and Jefferson would have been in his forties. The story is frankly preposterous and is dismissed even by many who believe Jefferson to be the father of the Hemings children. Interestingly, much of the text in Wetmore story is lifted directly from Callendar's 1802 story, with many names incorrectly spelled in the same manner in both pieces, and much if not most of the Hemings testimony seems to have been written by Wetmore than quoted from Hemings. The story contains many obvious falsehoods, such as claiming that Dolly Madison was present at Madison Hemings's birth (the historical evidence conclusively shows that she was in Washington D.C. on the day in question). It's worth pointing out that Wetmore was abolitionist and Unionist who despised Jefferson for his connection to slavery and for advocating the states' rights positions that inspired the Confederacy. He had strong personal motives for wanting to chip away at Jefferson's reputation, rather in the same way that modern liberals like to chip away at Ronald Reagan and modern conservatives like to chip away at Franklin Roosevelt.

Throughout the 20th Century, few historians paid much attention to the Jefferson-Hemings story, deeming the evidence so slender as to not be worth bothering with. Dumas Malone and Merrill Peterson, perhaps the two greatest Jeffersonian scholars who ever lived, both dismissed the story as a myth akin to George Washington chopping down the cherry tree. It was only with the publication of Fawn Brodie's confusing and muddled "psychological biography" of Jefferson in the 1970s, in which she asserted that a Jefferson-Hemings sexual relationship did exist, that interest in the story revived. She provided no new evidence or, for that matter, any real evidence at all. Brodie, among other things, believed that Jefferson's comments of the color of dirt in the Rhine Valley, made while studying agricultural practices, revealed hidden details of his secret affair with Hemings. This is, to put it bluntly, so nonsensical that it's astonishing anyone might take it seriously. It should also be pointed out that Brodie wrote her book shortly after discovering that her husband was having an extramarital affair.

The biggest change in popular and academic perception of the Jefferson-Hemings story came in November of 1998, with the publication of a DNA study in the scientific journal Nature. It demonstrated a link through Y-chromosomal samples between a descendant of Field Jefferson (Thomas Jefferson's uncle) and a descendant of Eston Hemings, one of Sally's children. This proved conclusively that Eston's father was a member of the Jefferson family. The media had a field day, partially because of the then-ongoing sensational story of President Bill Clinton's infidelity, but also because the press loves any hint of a sex scandal and it has become fashionable to diminish the stature of America's Founding Fathers. Newspapers and television news programs ran stories asserting that the DNA study settled the question for all time. The public, and much of academia, swallowed of all of this hook, line, and sinker. Today, it seems to be a commonly accepted truth that Thomas Jefferson was, indeed, the father of all the Hemings children.

I disagree. The "evidence" for Jefferson's paternity is persuasive only to those who, for whatever reason, are already inclined to believe the story. If one adopts a rigorously rational attitude in approaching this question, it quickly becomes clear that the issue is, at the very least, far from settled. Personally, I would argue that the weight of the evidence is actually against the idea of Thomas Jefferson being the father of any of the Hemings children.

All of the solid information historians can amass about Sally Hemings can be written down on a postcard. We know how old she was, we know that she went to France with Jefferson's daughter, and we know that she had six children and when they were born. Abigail Adams met her in England while she and Jefferson's daughter were on their way to Paris and thought she was good-natured but childish and irresponsible. Many books have been written about Sally, fiction and nonfiction alike, but next to nothing is actually known about her. We don't know if she was literate, we don't know where she was on any given date, or anything else. We have no idea whether all of her children had the same father. All this is very important to keep in mind as we go forward in examining the question of Jefferson's paternity of the Hemings children.

Thomas Jefferson himself never publicly responded to James Callendar's claim that he had fathered a child with Hemings. Some people assert that the absence of a public denial was a tacit admission of guilt. But it was always Jefferson's policy to meet gossipy slanders from his political opponents with silence, believing that any response would be beneath his dignity. Moreover, in private correspondence, as in a July 1, 1805, letter to his friend and colleague Robert Smith, he did deny the story. He spoke of the various gossip being spread about him over the past few years and admitted that one story (that he had attempted to seduce his friend's wife when he was a young man) was true but that all the other stories were lies. He didn't mention Sally Hemings specifically, perhaps because he felt that the story was so absurd as to not be worth mentioning. It is quite clear that Jefferson himself considered the story preposterous.

Jefferson's family members and friends strongly rejected the claims. Edmund Bacon, Jefferson's overseer at Monticello and probably the person best positioned to know the truth, strongly refuted the idea of Jefferson's paternity of the Hemings children; he said he knew who the father was and refused to divulge his identity, except to stress that it was not Thomas Jefferson. Several of Jefferson's grandchildren denied the charges and pointed out that it would have been impossible for such an affair to remain concealed in Monticello, which was usually crowded with people. With the single exception of Madison Hemings, none of the Hemings children themselves said a word about their father being Thomas Jefferson. The slave Isaac Jefferson, who is an invaluable source of information about slave life at Monticello, mentions the Hemings family in his memoirs but makes no suggestion at all that the father of the children was Thomas Jefferson.

Now, a person might immediately object to the credibility of the denials by Jefferson family members, as they would have had a vested interest in protecting the reputation of their distinguished patriarch. But an equally valid objection can be raised to the oral history testimony of Madison Hemings (even if we accept that Wetmore's account of the interview was an honest one). I myself have met several people over the course of my life who assert dubious claims to be descended from prominent historical figures. Even assuming that Madison Hemings was who he claimed to be, which is far from certain, how do we know that Madison Hemings didn't simply want to make people think he was the son of Thomas Jefferson, rather than an undistinguished former slave like any other?

Because of the white complexion of the Hemings children, most people close to Jefferson assumed that their father or fathers were white men. Sally herself seems to have been at least partly white (it is often asserted that she was the daughter of Jefferson's father-in-law, and therefore the half-sister of Jefferson's wife, but there is no conclusive evidence of this). We know that some of the Hemings children lived without difficulty as members of the white community in Virginia after Jefferson's death, so it certainly seems likely that their father (or fathers) was (or were) white. Most members of Jefferson's family suspected that one of Jefferson's nephews, Samuel and Peter Carr, was the culprit. Both had a reputation for inappropriate intimacy with slave women and both were frequently at Monticello throughout Jefferson's life. Written evidence solidly places them at Monticello approximately nine months before the birth of three of the six Hemings children. Most importantly, some of Jefferson's grandchildren related that the Carr brothers admitted sleeping with Sally Hemings.

This is where the 1998 DNA test comes in. The Carr nephews were the children of one of Jefferson's sisters, not a brother. They would not have the same y-chromosonal DNA a Jefferson, so there is no way that either of them could have been the father of Eston Hemings. There is no evidence which rules out either of the Carr nephews as being the father of the other five Hemings children, but the identify of the father of Eston Hemings has to be a Jefferson.

Not necessarily Thomas Jefferson, though. There were a great many men within close proximity to Monticello who were directly related to Thomas Jefferson and carried the same Y-chromosonal DNA. They include Thomas Jefferson's brother Randolph and his five sons, Thomas Jefferson's first cousin John and his six sons, the seven sons of Thomas Jefferson's first cousin Peter, and the five sons of Thomas Jefferson's first cousin George. That's twenty-two people other than Thomas Jefferson whose paternity of Eston Hemings would have been consistent with the 1998 DNA test. There may be others who are unknown to historians. But of them all, the most important is Randolph Jefferson.

Randolph lived within an easy day's ride of Monticello and visited his brother often. According to a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote on August 12, 1807, Randolph was expected to arrive for a visit to Monticello at any moment. This was approximately nine months before the birth of Eston Hemings, the only Hemings child with a known DNA link to the Jefferson family. In other words, the available evidence places Randolph Jefferson at Monticello at precisely the time when the only Hemings child known to have been fathered by a Jefferson was conceived.

Why should we believe that Randolph Jefferson was more likely to be the father of Eston than Thomas Jefferson? Take a look at the two different personalities, as revealed by the comments of those who knew them. Randolph Jefferson had a reputation for excessive drinking and, according to the slave Isaac, liked to dance and play the fiddle in the slave quarters during his visits to Monticello. He was known to have fathered children with his own slaves on his own plantation. All this is in stark contrast to his brother Thomas, who rarely ventured into the slave quarters, never socialized with slaves with such familiarity, and whose writings express distaste at the blending of white and black races. Which of the two seems more likely to sleep with a slave?

Interestingly, the oral history of the descendants of Eston Hemings long asserted that Eston was not fathered by Thomas Jefferson but rather by one of Jefferson's relatives. In this, they were most likely correct. It was only with the publication of Fawn Brodie's book in the 1970s, and direct efforts at persuasion by Ms. Brodie herself, that the descendants of Eston Hemings began claiming that Eston's father was Thomas Jefferson.

There is something to be said about the dates of the births of all the Hemings children. All of Sally Hemings children were born between 1795 and 1808. This was between the death of Randolph's first wife Anne and his marriage to his second wife Mitchie, meaning that he was single when all of the Hemings children were conceived and born. This was also true of Thomas Jefferson, who lost his wife in 1782 and never remarried, but there is another element to that story. Two of the Hemings children, Madison and Eston, were conceived and born after Callendar had published the story and while Jefferson was serving as President. It is inconceivable to imagine that a man as emotionally controlled and careful of his reputation as Thomas Jefferson would have continued sleeping with Sally Hemings under such circumstances.

To me, it seems far more likely that Randolph Jefferson, and not Thomas Jefferson, was the father of Eston Hemings. As for the other children, who knows? Maybe Randolph was the father of them all. Perhaps the others were fathered by either of the Carr nephews. Perhaps they were fathered by a man historians have never heard of. Since we're talking about several different children, it could be some combination of all of the above. But the assertion that all of the Hemings children were fathered by Thomas Jefferson is not only dubious, but so unlikely as to be unthinkable.

In the popular media and in various reference sources, when the subject of Thomas Jefferson comes up, his paternity of the Hemings children is often stated as a confirmed fact, which it obviously is not. Alternatively, it is said that the Jefferson paternity of the Hemings children is the opinion of the majority of historians. I know of no poll of American historians undertaken to determine whether or not this is true. To date, there has only been one panel of genuine academic historians, the so-called Scholars Commission convened by the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Foundation, who have systematically investigated the claims. It included such luminaries as Dr. Lance Banning of the University of Kentucky, Dr. Alf Mapp of Old Dominion University, and Dr. Forrest McDonald of the University of Alabama, among many other distinguished historians. Its conclusion is that Randolph Jefferson is more likely to be the father of Eston Hemings than Thomas Jefferson, that there is no reason to believe Thomas Jefferson was the father of any of the Hemings children, and that "Sally Hemings appears to have been a very minor figure in Thomas Jefferson's life."

For further information, I would encourage all readers of this blog to study the Scholars Commission's report (the executive summary of the report can be found here). Other books I would recommend would be In Defense of Thomas Jefferson: The Sally Hemings Sex Scandal by William Hyland, Framing a Legend: Exposing the Distorted History of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings by M. Andrew Holowchak, and Jefferson Vindicated: Fallacies, Omissions, and Contradictions in the Hemings Geneological Search by Cynthia Burton. (Whatever you do, though, don't read the book on Jefferson by David Barton. Although he agrees that Jefferson was not the father of the Hemings children, the rest of the book is pseudohistorical nonsense. In fact, don't read any books by Barton at all, period.)

The idea that Thomas Jefferson was the father of the children of Sally Hemings is the product of two things, a media which loves a scandalous story and a cohort of misguided academics who are more interested in grinding their own cultural and political axes than they are in pursuing the truth. Such a conclusion cannot be reached through a dispassionate examination of the available evidence. Is it possible that Thomas Jefferson was the father of the Hemings children? From a purely logical point of view, obviously it is technically possible. But is it likely?

No, it's not.

Could Jubal Early Have Captured Washington D.C. in 1864?

One of the most fascinating episodes of the American Civil War was Jubal Early's Raid on Washington. It really should be made into a movie, as it has an amazing cast of characters and a plot of epic drama. It also has led generations of Civil War buffs to ask the question: could Jubal Early have captured Washington D.C. and won the war for the Confederacy?

A quick recounting the events is in order. In the summer of 1864, the Confederacy was desperately trying to hold back the massive Union offensives in both Virginia and Georgia. Its only hope was to hold out until the presidential elections in the North, which might see Abraham Lincoln removed from office and replaced with an administration willing to negotiate a peace. To achieve this, the South had to hold its major cities, inflict heavy Union casualties, and take any opportunities to embarrass or humiliate the Union armies, so as to persuade the Northern public that the continuation of the war would be a futile waste of life and treasure.

By early June, the Army of Northern Virginia under General Robert E. Lee and the Army of the Potomac under General Ulysses S. Grant had almost wrecked one another in the series of bloody engagements collectively known as the Overland Campaign. In the Battle of the Wilderness, the Battle of Spotsylvania, the Battle of North Anna, and the Battle of Cold Harbor, the two armies had bled each other white. Lee had suffered around 30,000 casualties, while Grant had suffered somewhere around 55,000. It was slaughter on a scale never before seen on American soil. Grant, through attrition and sheer force of numbers, was slowly eroding the Confederacy's ability to continue military resistance. At the same time, Lee, with every Northern soldier who died at the hands of his men, was whittling away at the Union's willingness to continue the war.

With the battlelines momentarily stalemated outside of Cold Harbor, Lee faced a new threat when he learned that a small Union army under General David Hunter had defeated Confederate forces in the strategically important Shenandoah Valley. Though he needed every man to face Grant, Lee make the risky decision to detach his vaunted Second Corps, commanded by General Jubal Early, and dispatch it to the Shenandoah Valley. Early, a pugnacious and brilliant fighter (and, by all accounts, an accomplished master of profanity) was the perfect man for the assignment. Setting out on the morning of June 13, within a week Early had chased a frightened Hunter out of the Valley and recovered it for the Confederacy.

Early now put into operation the second phase of Lee's plan, which was daring in the extreme. In addition to clearing the Shenandoah Valley, Lee wanted Early to move rapidly north, cross the Potomac River into Maryland, and present a threat to Washington D.C. Lee well understood the nervousness of the Lincoln administration when it came to the security of the capital and he hoped that such a move would force Grant to detach significant forces from the Army of the Potomac in order to protect Washington.

Early had less than 15,000 men, who were tired, hungry and lacking shoes and proper clothing. Nevertheless, they were quite possibly the finest infantry in the world. They were mostly Virginians and North Carolinians, but also included Georgians, Alabamians, and Louisianans. Some Maryland cavalry came along for the expedition, too, and their knowledge of the land would prove useful. These were the survivors of those who had marched and fought with Stonewall Jackson in the 1862-63 campaigns. Moreover, they were led by some of the best division commanders of the Confederate Army: John C, Breckinridge, John B. Gordon, Robert Rodes, and Stephen Ramseur. As Robert Kean, an official in the Confederate War Department, observed, these were "men to dare and do almost anything."

By contrast, the Union forces tasked with defending Washington were weak, scattered, and disorganized. With David Hunter having retreated into the wilds of West Virginia, there was no major Union field force between Early and Washington. General Franz Sigel had about 5,000 men defending the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and some scattered units in Maryland were under the command of General Lew Wallace, but no one seemed to be in charge and no one seemed to have any clear idea of what was happening. Even worse, the Union high command took a mystifyingly long time to realize that anything was wrong. In Washington, President Lincoln, Secretary of War Stanton, and Chief-of-Staff Halleck had no clear idea as to the location, intention, or size of Early's force. On July 3, just before the Confederates began crossing the Potomac, General Grant stated to Halleck his belief that Early's corps had returned to the Richmond area. It wasn't until July 5, the very day that Early began to cross into Maryland, that Grant decided to send reinforcements north towards Washington, and then only a single division under James Ricketts, which had a reputation for unreliability and had fought poorly at the Battle of the Wilderness.

As Early's men crossed the Potomac, scooping up Union supply depots at Martinsburg and Harper's Ferry as they did so, Sigel withdrew his smaller force onto the well-fortified high ground of Maryland Heights, just north of the river from Harper's Ferry, and awaited attack. Early spent two priceless days trying to pry Sigel out of these fortifications, but did not risk a direct assault, which he knew might fail and which would bring heavy casualties even if it succeeded. On July 7, Early decided to cut his losses, ignore Sigel and move on towards Washington. The lost time would soon be sorely regretted.

While this had been going on, Lew Wallace had suddenly emerged as the only Union man doing anything decisive or constructive. Without waiting for orders from his superiors, he began to assemble every soldier he could find at Monocacy Junction, on the direct route between Harper's Ferry and Washington. But his force was pathetically weak, made up of only of a few regiments of cavalry and a hobbled-together infantry brigade made up largely of inexperienced Ohio militiamen. In the pre-dawn darkness of July 8, salvation arrived in the form of Ricketts's infantry division.

Wallace technically had no authority to issue orders to Ricketts, who was not under his command. In a sign of the confusion that still infected the Union high command, Ricketts was under orders to proceed to Maryland Heights to reinforce Sigel. Had they marched on, the 3,000 Union troops of the division would have run directly into Early's 15,000 oncoming Confederates and been wiped out. Despite the uncertain command situation, Ricketts decided to disobey his orders and remain at Monocacy under Wallace's direction. This courageous decision very likely saved Washington City from Confederate capture.

On July 9, the Battle of Monocacy was fought. Early's 15,000 Confederates attacked Wallace's ad hoc force of less than 6,000. Early not only outnumbered Wallace nearly three-to-one, but his troops were of a much higher quality. But Wallace had selected an excellent defensive position behind Monocacy Creek and his troops fought with a surprising stubbornness. Early feinted on the left and launched his main attack on the right, spearheaded by Gordon's division. Ricketts's men dispelled rumors of their lack of fighting spirit and resisted stoutly, before superior numbers finally compelled them to give way. By the afternoon, Wallace's men had been soundly beaten and were retreating in disorder towards Baltimore. Yet, though undoubtedly a defeat, the Battle of Monocacy delayed Early's advance on Washington for a crucial day.

While fighting raged at Monocacy, confused Union authorities were making frantic efforts to prepare to the defend the capital. At first glance, it would seem to be an easy task. Three years of strenuous and expensive construction work had ringed Washington City with a vast chain of forts, trenches, and heavy artillery batteries. By the summer of 1864, it was the most heavily fortified city on the planet. Yet General Grant, in a display of overconfidence for which he has strangely escaped censure by historians, had ordered most of the garrison to join the Army of the Potomac for the spring campaign, leaving the immense defenses without the soldiers to make them worth anything. As Early approached the city, it was weakly defended.

No one appeared to be in charge in the city. Chief-of-Staff Halleck and Secretary of War Stanton seemed to be issuing orders almost at random to any officer they encountered. Stanton ordered General Alexander McCook to take command, while Halleck ordered General Quincy Gilmore to do the same and, for good measure, Grant at Petersburg sent word that he wanted General Edward Ord to be in charge. The whole thing was an enormous, confused mess.

The very muddle that was the Union command structure at Washington has made it difficult for historians to piece together exactly how many Union soldiers there were in Washington as Early approached. It might have been around eight or nine thousand men, but they were of distinctly low quality. Many were nothing more than government clerks hastily mustered into military service, who had received no training and who had never fired their weapons. The rest were members of the so-called Veteran Reserve Corps, known up until March as the Invalid Corps, men so disabled by sickness or wounds as to be unfit for active service and given jobs such as guarding prisoners and working as provost marshals. Against the men who had fought under Stonewall Jackson, these men could not be expected to put up much of a fight.

The strength of the Washington defenses lay primarily in its heavy artillery. But Grant had ordered all of the skilled artillerymen out of the capital's forts and into the ranks of the Army of the Potomac when he had embarked upon the spring campaign. Inspections rapidly undertaken during Early's approach at the orders of Halleck and Stanton revealed that many batteries were manned only by men who had no idea how to fire the cannon.

Washington City was there for the taking, if only Early could get to it in time.

But help was on the way to the beleaguered city. Down at Petersburg, Grant had finally woken up to the truth that Jubal Early and a significant chunk of the Army of Northern Virginia were in Maryland and posed a terrifying threat to Washington City, a threat that Grant himself had made possible by stripping the capital of its garrison. On the night of July 9, as Wallace's defeated troops streamed away from the battlefield at Monocacy, Grant gave orders for the VI Corps to depart by ship for Washington City without delay, as well as a division of the XIX Corps. These were seasoned veterans, led by an experienced officer in the form of General Horatio Wright. Behind the formidable Washington City defenses, these troops would easily hold even against Early's men. The question was whether or not they would arrive in time.

When the Battle of Monocacy ended on the night of July 9, Early and his small army were exhausted. They had marched hundreds of miles through the summer heat, fought innumerable skirmishes with the enemy, and capped it all off with a sharp and brutal battle along Monocacy Creek. Yet the prospect of capturing Washington City and perhaps carting Lincoln and his cabinet off to Libby Prison was so alluring that they were more than willing to continue. Early's men were on the road again on July 10, bearing down on the nearly defenseless city of Washington, while cavalry ranged across Maryland to burn bridges, tear down telegraph wires, and generally raise mayhem. Baltimore was in a panic and Washington City seemed almost cut off from the rest of the Union.

The road to Washington was hot in the extreme. There was much straggling along the way as exhausted men fell by the wayside, unable to keep up with their comrades. There had been no rain for some time and the dust was suffocating. Even for Stonewall Jackson's old "foot cavalry", there were limits to human endurance. July 10 would be remembered as one of the most difficult marches that these men had ever undertaken. When it was over, Early's troops were just north of Rockville, Maryland, within twenty miles of the Capitol Building and White House. But they were weak, thirsty, and exhausted, with many soldiers having become separated from their units along the way.

The march on July 11 started well before dawn. As exhausted as his men were, Early knew he had to push them. Though he could not have known that the ships carrying the men of the VI and XIX Corps were already on their way, he had to assume that Union reinforcements were rushing to protect Washington. He knew it was a race against time. But, as with the day before, it also turned into a contest with nature, as it was again unspeakably hot and dry on the road. Confederate cavalry under General John McCausland were the first to arrive in front of the Washington defenses. Though impressed by the formidable fortifications, he sent back word to Early that the works appeared only lightly manned. One can imagine how Early's pulse quickened when he heard the news and how his legendary cursing was put to use hurrying his men along, no matter how hot and tired they were.

As the day wore on, more and more Confederate troops marched up to the ramparts of Fort Stevens, one of the chief defensive points on the northern side of the city's defenses. It took time to get the men in position and they would need rest before being able to launch an attack. Brisk skirmishing took place out in front of the fortified line, while Confederate sharpshooters took positions from which they could snipe at Yankees within the fort. Artillery banged out. Unfortunately for Early, simply getting his main force to close up on Fort Stevens took most of the day. His men were in no shape for fighting. By the time enough men had assembled for a serious attack, darkness was already beginning to fall. A night's rest would be enough for his men to recover their strength and they would attack in the morning. Early could only hope that Union reinforcements were still more than a day away.

Yet even as Early and his commanders met at the mansion at Silver Spring, raided its wine cellar, and made jokes about returning Breckinridge to his old chair in the Senate chamber, the ships carrying the VI and XIX Corps were arriving on the Potomac River wharves. One can imagine the relief felt by Lincoln, Halleck and Stanton, to say nothing of the citizenry of Washington (aside from the pro-Southern element) as thousands of tough veteran infantrymen marched north from the boats to take up positions in the forts and trenches.

When the sun rose on July 12, Early saw a sight that must have made his heart sink. Fort Stevens and the adjacent trenches were filled with blue-coated soldiers. The heavy guns were manned by experienced artillery crews. Even with his whole force, notwithstanding the unmatched quality of his infantry, any attack on the Washington defenses would accomplish nothing but the slaughter of his own men. Moreover, he knew that his small army was now in great danger itself. The Union forces previously hemmed in at Harper's Ferry were possibly approaching from that direction and Hunter's force was finally emerging from the mountains of West Virginia. Combined with the two corps of the Army of the Potomac now in Washington, there was a risk of being caught between two fires. It was time to get away while the getting was good.

After a day of fruitless skirmishing in front of Fort Stevens, during which President Lincoln famously if foolishly came up to watch the fighting, Early and his men quietly stole away during the night. Laden with supplies they had gathered during their liberal foraging in Maryland, as well as a large amount of livestock and horses they had collected, they withdrew across the Potomac River and, a few days later, were safe in their lair of the northern Shenandoah Valley. The Union had not seen the last of Jubal Early.

Early's Washington Raid was over. It's one of the great dramas of the American Civil War and, ever since, historians have asked themselves whether he might have actually captured Washington D.C. The answer seems to be an emphatic yes. Had Jubal Early's force arrived at Washington D.C. a mere twenty-four hours before it actually did, it could have punched its way past the untried clerks and invalids without much trouble. The most obvious point of divergence that would have allowed this to happen would have been for Early not to have wasted the crucial two days trying to pry Sigel off of Maryland Heights by Harper's Ferry. Had he immediately decided to do what he eventually did - ignore Sigel and march on towards Washington - he would have had plenty of time to get there before reinforcements arrived.

Moreover, on two occasions, Grant ordered reinforcements to the north that made the difference at a critical moment, on July 5 when he ordered Ricketts's division to Baltimore and on July 9 when he ordered the VI and XIX Corps men to Washington. Had he delayed in either instance, the consequences for the Union would have been disastrous. Had Grant waited even one more day before sending Ricketts, Wallace would not have been able to delay Early at the Battle of Monocacy, Early would have arrived in front of Washington on July 10 rather than July 11 and would have been able to capture it. Had Grant waited even one more day before sending the VI and XIX Corps, Early would have been able to take the city on July 12, for the defenses would have still been feebly manned.

The consequences of a capture of Washington City by the Confederates in July of 1864 can scarcely be overstated. There would have been no way for Early to have held the city for very long after capturing it, but Grant would have had little choice but to send additional heavy reinforcements away from Petersburg to deal assist with the recapture and this might have forced the termination of the Siege of Petersburg altogether. It might even have allowed Lee to go onto the offensive. What seems almost certain is that Grant's campaign to capture Richmond would have been completely derailed.

Almost as important would have been the impact of Union war logistics. Washington City was not just the political capital, but the greatest military supply depot in the world. Warehouses were jam-packed with rifles, artillery, ammunition, blankets, uniforms, saddlery for cavalry and artillery horses, camp equipment and every other conceivable kind of military supply. Whatever Early's men would not have been able to carry off with them would have been put to the torch. The Washington Arsenal on the peninsula between the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers was the largest such facility in the United States and Early's men would have surely destroyed it, just as they would surely have burned down the Navy Yard. The War Department, the Navy Department and the Treasury Department (after being looted of its greenbacks) would have just as surely been burned. Conceivably, Early's men might have left the Capitol Building and the White House nothing but charred bits of rubble. The Southerners, having marched through the towns and farms of the Shenandoah Valley that had been left in ruins by the Yankees, were not going to be in any mood for leniency against their Northern enemies, as was historically shown by their destruction of the town of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. The destruction of military facilities in Washington City would have inflicted a mortal blow on the Union efforts to win the war in Virginia before the end of 1864.

Yet catastrophic as they would have been, the military consequences would have paled against the political ones. Historically, the summer of 1864 was a disastrous time for the Union war effort, with fiascoes at Cold Harbor, Kennesaw Mountain, and Brice's Cross Roads. Historically, the near-capture of Washington by Early was humiliating for the Lincoln administration. Imagine how more humiliating its actual capture would have been. The Democratic Party would have had a field day with political cartoons featuring Lincoln as he escaped down the Potomac River on a boar while Early's men ransacked the capital. All possibility of Lincoln winning that year's presidential election would have been finished. Even worse for the Union cause, the pro-peace wing of the Democratic Party would have seen its hand immensely strengthened. Combined with the fact that the Confederates would certainly have been in a stronger military position when the new president would have taken office in March of 1865, it seems virtually certain that a negotiated peace with the Confederacy would have followed, perhaps along the same lines as those which I outlined in my novel Shattered Nation.

The outcome of momentous historical events is often balanced on the edge of a knife. There is no better example of this in American history than the story of Jubal Early's Raid on Washington.