A First Draft of History: Week of April 9 – 16

1865 - At Appomattox, Virginia, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his 28,000 troops to Union General Ulysses S. Grant, effectively ending the American Civil War. Forced to abandon the Confederate capital of Richmond, blocked from joining the surviving Confederate force in North Carolina, and harassed constantly by Union cavalry, Lee had no other option.

In retreating from the Union army's Appomattox Campaign, the Army of Northern Virginia had stumbled through the Virginia countryside bereft of food and supplies. Union cavalry forces under General Philip Sheridan had outrun Lee's army, blocking their retreat. By April 8 the Confederates were surrounded with no possibility of escape.

On April 9, Lee sent a message to Grant announcing his willingness to surrender. The two generals met in the parlor of the Wilmer McLean home at one o'clock in the afternoon. Lee and Grant, both holding the highest rank in their respective armies, had known each other slightly during the Mexican War. In many respects, they were a study in contrasts: the gruff Grant arrived in his muddy field uniform while the refined and proper Lee had turned out in full dress attire, complete with sash and sword. Lee asked for the terms, and Grant hurriedly wrote them out. All officers and men were to be pardoned, and they would be sent home with their private property – most important, the horses, which could be used for a late spring planting. Officers would keep their side arms, and Lee's starving men would be given Union rations.

Grant was a rough-and-tumble sort of figure, but he displayed tremendous character on this occasion. He silenced a band that had begun to play in celebration and told his officers, "The war is over. The Rebels are our countrymen again." Later, he would insist that the US government respect the terms he had given the Confederates, even when many northern politicians, none of whom had actually done any fighting of course, wanted to punish the South more harshly.

After Appomattox, scattered resistance continued for several weeks, but for all practical purposes the Civil War had come to an end. It had been exactly four years and three days since the firing on Fort Sumter. From our vantage point today, we can see that the South was doomed to defeat from the outset. Once it became clear that Lincoln was willing to slaughter as many people as it took to keep the southern states in the Union, it was just a matter of time before the North’s advantages in manpower, industry, and resources won the day. In fact, the remarkable thing is that the South held out as long as it did.

1866 - The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) was founded in New York City by philanthropist and diplomat Henry Bergh. In 1863, Bergh had been appointed by President Abraham Lincoln to a diplomatic post at the Russian court of Czar Alexander II. It was there that he was horrified to witness work horses beaten by their peasant drivers. En route back to America, a June 1865 visit to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in London awakened his determination to secure a charter not only to incorporate the ASPCA but to exercise the power to arrest and prosecute violators of laws against animal cruelty.

Back in New York, Bergh argued that protecting animals was an issue that crossed party lines and class boundaries. "This is a matter purely of conscience; it has no perplexing side issues," he said. "It is a moral question in all its aspects."

The speech prompted a number of dignitaries to sign his "Declaration of the Rights of Animals." Bergh's impassioned accounts of the horrors inflicted on animals convinced the New York State legislature to pass the charter incorporating the ASPCA on April 10, 1866. Nine days later, the first effective anti-cruelty law in the United States was passed, allowing the ASPCA to investigate complaints of animal cruelty and to make arrests. Bergh was a hands-on reformer, becoming a familiar sight on the streets and in the courtrooms of New York. He regularly inspected slaughter houses, worked with police to close down dog- and rat-fighting pits and lectured in schools and to adult societies. As the pioneer and innovator of the humane movement, the ASPCA quickly became the model for more than 25 other humane organizations in the United States and Canada. And by the time Bergh died in 1888, 37 of the 38 states in the Union had passed anti-cruelty laws.

The sad irony is that the aggregate amount of suffering Americans inflict on animals is exponentially higher now than in the nineteenth century. Thanks to Bergh and other reformers, most Americans today, at least most Americans not named Michael Vick, would recoil at the thought of confining or beating their family pet. Yet those same Americans think nothing of eating the flesh of tens of millions of animals that are condemned to spend their entire miserable lives confined in cages scarcely larger than their bodies, deprived of sunlight and fresh air, pumped full of hormones, and brutally slaughtered.

When I teach history classes, my students often wonder how Americans could have practiced slavery, or displaced the Native Americans, or done other things that today we rightly denounce. I always ask them to imagine whether there’s anything we routinely do today that people a hundred, two hundred years from now will deplore. I think our treatment of animals is a good example. 

1961 - Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, traveling aboard the spacecraft Vostok 1, becomes the first human being to travel into space. During the flight, the 27-year-old test pilot and industrial technician also became the first man to orbit the planet. Vostok 1 orbited Earth at a maximum altitude of 187 miles and was guided entirely by an automatic control system. The only statement attributed to Gagarin during his one hour and 48 minutes in space was, "Flight is proceeding normally; I am well."

After his historic feat was announced, Gagarin became an instant worldwide celebrity. Monuments were raised to him across the Soviet Union and streets renamed in his honor. The triumph of the Soviet space program in putting the first man into space was a great blow to the United States, which had scheduled its first space flight for May 1961. Moreover, Gagarin had orbited Earth, a feat that eluded the U.S. space program until February 1962, when astronaut John Glenn made three orbits in Friendship 7. By that time, the Soviet Union had already made another leap ahead in the "space race" with the August 1961 flight of cosmonaut Gherman Titov in Vostok 2. Titov made 17 orbits and spent more than 25 hours in space.

o Soviet propagandists, the Soviet conquest of space was evidence of the supremacy of communism over capitalism. However, to those who worked on the Vostok program and earlier on Sputnik (which launched the first satellite into space in 1957), the successes were attributable chiefly to one brilliant but largely unknown man: Sergei Pavlovich Korolev. Born in the Ukraine in 1906, Korolev was part of a scientific team that launched the first Soviet liquid-fueled rocket in 1933. In 1938, his military sponsor fell prey to Stalin's purges, and Korolev and his colleagues were also put on trial. Convicted of treason and sabotage, Korolev was sentenced to 10 years in a labor camp. The Soviet authorities came to fear German rocket advances, however, and after only a year Korolev was put in charge of a prison design bureau and ordered to continue his rocketry work.

In 1945, Korolev was sent to Germany to learn about the V-2 rocket, which had been developed by the Nazis for use against Britain. The Americans had captured the rocket's designer, Wernher von Braun, who later became head of the U.S. space program, but the Soviets acquired a fair amount of V-2 resources, including rockets, launch facilities, blueprints, and a few German V-2 technicians. It’s a little-publicized fact that the space age really began because of the work of German, not American or Soviet, scientists. Korolev built on this German technology to develop rockets for the Soviet Union.

The Soviet space program under Korolev would go on to numerous space firsts in the late 1950s and early '60s: first animal in orbit, first large scientific satellite, first man, first woman, first three men, first space walk, first spacecraft to impact the moon, first to orbit the moon, first to impact Venus, and first craft to soft-land on the moon. Throughout this time, Korolev remained anonymous, known only as the "Chief Designer." Korolev died in 1966. Upon his death, his identity was finally revealed to the world, and he was awarded a burial in the Kremlin wall as a hero of the Soviet Union. Yuri Gagarin was killed in a routine jet-aircraft test flight in 1968. His ashes were also placed in the Kremlin wall.

1990 - The Soviet government officially admitted its responsibility for the Katyn Massacre of World War II, when nearly 5,000 Polish military officers were murdered and buried in mass graves in the Katyn Forest. The admission was part of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's promise to be more forthcoming and candid concerning Soviet history. In 1939, Poland had been invaded from the west by Nazi forces and from the east by Soviet troops. Sometime in the spring of 1940, thousands of Polish military officers were rounded up by Soviet secret police forces, taken to the Katyn Forest outside of Smolensk, massacred, and buried in a mass grave.

In 1941, Germany attacked the Soviet Union and pushed into the Polish territory once held by the Russians. In 1943, with the war against Russia going badly, the Germans announced that they had unearthed thousands of corpses in the Katyn Forest. Representatives from the Polish government-in-exile (situated in London) visited the site and decided that the Soviets, not the Nazis, were responsible for the killings. These representatives, however, were pressured by U.S. and British officials to keep their report secret, since those countries were allied with the Soviets. As World War II came to an end, German propaganda lashed out at the Soviets, using the Katyn Massacre as an example of Russian atrocities. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin flatly denied the charges and claimed that the Nazis were responsible for the slaughter. The matter was not revisited for 40 years.

By 1990, however, two factors pushed the Soviets to admit their culpability. First was Gorbachev's much publicized policy of "openness" in Soviet politics. Second was the state of Polish-Soviet relations in 1990. The Soviet Union was losing much of its power to hold onto its satellites in Eastern Europe, but the Russians hoped to retain as much influence as possible. In Poland, Lech Walesa's Solidarity movement was steadily eroding the power of the communist regime. The Katyn Massacre issue had been a sore spot in relations with Poland for over four decades, and it is possible that Soviet officials believed that a frank admission and apology would help ease the increasing diplomatic tensions. So the Russians finally owned up to Katyn Forest Massacre but it’s amazing how steadfastly they turn a blind eye to the countless other atrocities of the Soviet era. In fact, there are still numerous towns and cities across Russia where one can still find statues of Joseph Stalin! And we are culpable in this act of willing forgetfulness as well. Every American school child has learned about Auschwitz, and rightly so, but how many have studied Katyn, or the Ukrainian famine, or the gulags? A new movie about the Holocaust comes out seemingly every year, but can anyone name a Hollywood film produced about Stalin’s atrocities?

International News: The North Koreans launched a rocket on Friday that was supposed to carry a satellite into space. Instead though, it failed in the second stage of its flight, about 81 seconds after take-off. At that point the rocket blew up and fell into the ocean. So, according to the US media, the launch was a failure. However, according to North Korean media, and I quote, “Our glorious nation now has the power to cause the imperialists and their underlings to cower in fear. Our rockets rule the skies. All tremble in fear of our glorious leader.” So, I really don’t know who to believe.

Actually, the really interesting thing about this failed launch is that, unlike North Korea’s two previous failed attempts at putting a satellite into orbit, this time the state media owned up to it. That’s especially surprising, given that the failure is seen as a particular embarrassment to North Korea’s new leader, Kim Jong-Un. In fact, some US officials have expressed concern that Kim Jong-Un will try to compensate for this failure by doing something even more confrontational, like conducting another underground nuclear test. Even though this launch was a failure, it’s still seen by the US as a provocation, because rockets that carry satellites can also carry warheads. So, in response to the launch, Washington announced it was suspending plans to contribute food aid to the North. The only problem with that plan is that the New Korean leadership doesn’t really seem to care if its people starve. Punishing the North Korean leaders for rocket tests by withholding food from their people is like me threatening my kids by telling them that if they don’t behave I won’t let them eat their vegetables or take a bath.

Turning now from North Korea to its equally bellicose neighbor - a standoff in the South China Sea between the naval forces of the Philippines and China seems to be escalating this week. China has now sent a third ship to support its claim to the area known as Scarborough Shoal off the northwestern Philippines. Philippine warships attempted to arrest the crews of a Chinese fishing fleet that had entered the territory, sparking the latest dispute between the two Asian countries. The Filipinos were stopped from arresting the Chinese by the arrival of two Chinese surveillance ships, which then ordered the Philippine warships to leave the area. They refused arguing that it’s Philippine territory and have since sent a second warship to the area. China also claims the rich fishing ground as its own despite it being within 200 nautical miles of the Philippines.

On the surface this would seem to be a minor dispute between two countries but it is in fact part of a much wider problem that may lead to U.S. military involvement. On any map you buy in China of the country you will see a huge bulge down in the south showing the territory it claims in the South China Sea. It's an enormous area, which spreads near to the shores of the Philippines, Indonesia, Taiwan, Vietnam, Brunei and Malaysia. It even spreads nearly as far as Singapore. No other country in the region recognizes China's sovereignty, but that hasn't stopped Beijing from marking its claim by any means it can. This includes building concrete forts, occupied by troops on isolated coral reefs and placing concrete markers in other areas, even underwater, to support their claim.

So, no one accepts China’s claims, but no one is willing to stop them. As Thucydides recorded in the Melian dialogue: “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” The U.S. military continues to watch China's actions in the South China Sea closely.

The reasons behind all this interest by competing powers in the South China Sea are twofold. Outside powers like the U.S. view the area as a key international waterway in which a large part of world trade passes through. U.S. aircraft carriers regularly pass through the South China Sea on their way to and from the Middle East. And the second reason is it is widely believed that under the South China Sea there are huge quantities of oil and gas. China and other nations who claim all, or part of, the area are hoping it will give them energy security.

It’s also worth noting that a conflict over the South China Sea figures prominently in the James Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies, so this may be a case of life imitating art.

In other international news, former Colombian finance minister Jose Antonio Ocampo on Friday withdrew his candidacy for World Bank president, leaving two candidates in the highly politicized race. With the World Bank board meeting on Monday to pick a new president, Ocampo said he hoped emerging market nations would rally behind one candidate, Nigerian Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, who, for his part, pledged that if the world will elect him to head the World Bank he will be able to retrieve $100 gazillion dollars that his uncle, the former king of Bagungaland, has hidden in a Swiss bank account, and he’ll totally share it with everyone. Okonjo-Iweala is now the sole candidate from developing nations in a race against U.S. nominee Jim Yong Kim, a Korean-American health expert who appears almost certain to win the post. Ocampo said he did not believe the selection process had been fully open, transparent and merit-based. Imagine, something about the World Bank that isn’t fully open and transparent. With their candidates, emerging market nations are seeking to challenge U.S. leadership at the bank to increase their influence in global economic institutions long controlled by rich nations.

Under an informal agreement, the World Bank has always been headed by an American and the IMF by a European. While the American Kim is still the favorite to win the World Bank presidency because of his backing from the United States and European countries, a rigorous challenge from emerging market countries could put them in a stronger position to extract concessions favorable to their interests. It also increases their odds of winning senior jobs in the future. So we’ll see who comes out on top in that election, but it won’t be the Colombian.

And speaking of Colombia, President Obama was in Colombia this week for a Summit of the Americas. His trip has been overshadowed by a developing scandal involving Secret Service agents and prostitutes in the city of Cartagena, but nonetheless, many commentators believe it is very important that the president is paying attention to our Latin American neighbors.

To explain why, I’d like to read a brief excerpt from an article I found in The Economist: 
“All in all, this is a pretty good time to be an American. Think about it. The middle class is expanding and growing richer. Once-stark inequalities are shrinking. The quality of governance has improved by leaps and bounds. Politics is becoming less ideological and more centrist and pragmatic. And never before have Americans held such sway in the wider world. Oh, perhaps a clarification is in order. This is a pretty good time to be a Latin American. For the citizens of the United States, who tend somewhat presumptuously to think of themselves as the only Americans, this is not altogether such a good time. In the United States, in point of fact, all those trends are running in the opposite direction. The middle class is beleaguered; inequality is growing; government is gridlocked; politics is increasingly polarised and the superpower is in a funk about its global decline. Isn’t this high time for the United States to pay a little more attention to the big changes taking place in its own back yard?”

Now obviously no Latin American country is close to the US in terms of wealth or power, and most aren’t even close to close, but still, the trends this article highlights are worth noting. So, I hope the president’s trip to Colombia is a fruitful one. In fact, there’s already one positive sign: the Obama administration said yesterday that a key free trade deal with Colombia will be fully enforced next month.

National News: If you’ve listened to this show regularly, you’ve realized that I’m not one of these armchair pundits who issues his opinions from some comfortable office somewhere. I’m a journalist, and that means that sometimes I have to head out into the field, as I did this week when I went to Washington D.C.

I was going to try to interview Rick Santorum about his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination, but then he dropped out of the race this week, so I decided to just look around D.C. instead. Now by way of context, I should mention that on my drive up I heard from my accountant about how much I owe the IRS, so I was not favorably disposed towards the federal government when I arrived in the district.

Nonetheless, after I miraculously found a parking space right on 14th St as it crosses the Mall, and I stepped out onto the Mall and saw the capital building on one side and the Washington Monument on the other…well, I’m not ashamed to say that it was both moving and, in a way, awe-inspiring. More than any other city in the country, D.C. is about one thing – government. It is a government city even more than Houston is an oil city or LA is an entertainment city, and there’s something awesome about the massive facades of the neo-classical buildings arrayed along the Mall like a phalanx of soldiers, each housing an agency of the federal government. I went in one building, the Department of Agriculture building, and stood at the end of a corridor that stretches over two city blocks. It’s like something out of the Matrix – you can barely see the end of it. The whole thing is amazingly massive. And yet, one also feels a sense of dismay at this physical embodiment of government, because of course somebody has to pay for all of it. I was reminded of Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation during his tour of the US in 1831 that there is very little sign of government in the US. Well, those days are long gone. In fact, standing in the middle of DC, the whole debate over whether we should have a limited government or a robust, interventionist government seems a bit silly. For better or worse, the issue has been settled.

State News: Leaders of the North Carolina Democratic Party declined to answer questions Friday about reports that a junior staffer quit working for the party last fall after being sexually harassed by a senior party official. Apparently this was a case of a male staffer being harassed by a male superior. Several party officials said they were told the party settled with the young man and that he signed a non-disclosure agreement. No financial settlement appears on the party's finance reports. The senior official allegedly behind the harassment is still working at the party's Raleigh headquarters. One former administrator quit the state party six weeks ago, saying that she could no longer belong to an organization that “protected a predator." Democratic consultants said party leaders have to step up and address the issue directly, but so far they have not done so.

And in breaking news related to this case, Jay Parmley, the executive director of the North Carolina Democratic Party resigned yesterday. In his resignation letter, he denied harassing any party worker.

And speaking of North Carolina Democrats behaving badly… The witness list for John Edwards’ upcoming criminal trial was released this week. It includes dozens of names close to the former presidential candidate, including the woman with whom he had an affair while his wife was dying of cancer. The proposed lists of witnesses for the defense and prosecution were released late Thursday, following the start of jury selection for Edwards' federal trial in Greensboro.

The Democrat faces six counts related to nearly $1 million in secret payments from two campaign donors used to help hide Edwards’ pregnant mistress as he sought the White House. Edwards mistress, Rielle Hunter, is on both the government's and defense witness lists, while his eldest daughter, Cate Edwards, could testify for the defense.

As expected, former campaign aide Andrew Young is listed as a prosecution witness, as is his wife, Cheri Young. Young handled the money for Hunter's care and falsely claimed paternity of Edwards' child. After repeatedly denying the affair, the former U.S. senator admitted the baby was his in 2010. Key to the government's case is proving that Edwards, 58, knew about the payments, which prosecutors contend were illegal campaign donations under federal law. The money came from Edwards' national campaign finance chairman, the late Texas lawyer Fred Baron, and campaign donor Rachel "Bunny" Mellon, an heiress and socialite who is now 101 years old. Both had already given Edwards' campaign the maximum $2,300 individual contribution allowed by federal law.

Edwards' former campaign manager Nick Baldick, who ran a fundraising organization to which Mellon made donations, is on both witness lists, as is Edwards' former law partner David Kirby. State Sen. Josh Stein, D-Wake, who managed Edwards' 1998 run for U.S. Senate, is listed as a prosecution witness. Former Edwards press secretary Jennifer Palmieri is expected to testify she was present in an Iowa hotel room in October 2007 when Elizabeth Edwards confronted her husband, Baron and Baron's wife about the couple's support of Hunter.

If convicted, Edwards faces a maximum penalty of 30 years in prison and as much as $1.5 million in fines. Don’t worry, I will be sure to bring you all the salacious details as the trial unfolds. After all, as Samuel Johnson (or someone like that) remarked, “No sound is as pleasant as the crumbling of one’s fellow man,” especially when that man is someone like John Edwards.

One last piece of news this week, news that folks here on the Outer Banks may find especially interesting. This week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that there will never again be another Hurricane Irene. Apparently, Irene did enough damage last August that the name will be retired. NOAA and the World Meteorological Organization recycle a list of storm names, using them over every six years. A storm name is retired when a specific storm causes a memorable amount of destruction or death.

Over eight days in August 2011, Irene was directly responsible for 49 deaths: five in the Dominican Republic, three in Haiti and 41 in the United States. The storm made landfall on Aug. 27 along North Carolina's Outer Banks as a Category 1 hurricane, then veered out to sea and reached the United States again the next day near Atlantic City, N.J. Damage in the United States was estimated at $15.8 billion. There are about 76 retired hurricane names, including Hazel from 1954, Camille from1969, Hugo from 1989, Andrew from 1992, and of course Katrina from 2005.

Andrew Stern is, among other things, an historian, an Ocracoke resident, and a board member at Ocracoke’s community radio station, WOVV 90.1FM where you can hear his weekly broadcast of “A First Draft of History” every Monday morning at 9am.