December 7, 1860: A Nation on the Verge of Exploding

As Christmas approached in 1860, the United States was a very edgy nation. After decades of debate and compromise and political equivocation about the morality of legalized slavery, the issue of institutional bondage was pulling the country apart.

Many Southerners were incensed at the election of Abraham Lincoln a month earlier, and passions were so hot in South Carolina that the state legislature was seriously talking about leaving the Union. And they weren't angry because Lincoln had pledged to end slavery. Lincoln, a pragmatist to the core, hadn't said anything about ending the "unique institution" that underpinned the South's agrarian economy. South Carolinians were furious because he'd said he simply was opposed to the expansion of slavery into territories that weren't even states at the time.

So on Friday, December 7, 1860, the United States was a nation that was about to burst apart even though Lincoln would not take office until March 1861. The newspapers of the day were filled with stories about "the crisis of the Union" and the "disunion question" and worries about whether South Carolina's inflammed passions would spread and prompt other Southern states to withdraw from the Union.

In the South, slaveowners were terrified of an insurrection by their slaves. On December 7, 1860, the New York Times published a letter from an unnamed woman in South Carolina to her uncle in New York City.

"The country here is all aglow with the fires of revolution, and such is the intensity of excitement that we can scarcely find time or inclination to talk or think of anything else than the political topics of the day, and the moral and social consequences directly pertaining to secession," she wrote. "I fear that secession and revolution are, with our people, foregone conclusions; that we have gone too far, retraction and recession are impossible, and that civil war with all its consequent horrors is already upon us."

In that same issue, the Times also published a letter from a young man in Tennessee to his father in which the Tennessee resident worried about the fragmenting of the country and the possibility that slaves would take up arms against Southern slaveowners.

"(T)he passions of the people (are) being aroused, in both sections of the country, and ambitious demagogues (are) urging them on," he wrote.

The letter-writer told his father he had no particular desire to defend slavery but would take up arms to defend his family. "What do you think, father, of going to California?" he wrote. "Not to avoid danger, or to desert any to whom we owe help, but to go, all of us, where we shall be at peace from this question, which is so much to be lamented on all accounts."

The worst fears of these and other Americans came to pass. The Civil War would erupt in April 1861 when South Carolina troops fired on federal troops manning Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina.

The war is still the bloodiest in the nation's history. And it still stirs passions and causes consternation 150 years later. For most of my adult life, I've been pondering my family's involvement in that war, and I'm still trying to make sense of it. As we observe the Civil War Sesquicentennial, I'm going to post some thoughts, comments and documented family history about that war. Please watch for those posts and comment on them where you think it's appropriate.

NOTE: The illustration at the top of this post is a political cartoon from 1860 commenting on how the election of Abraham Lincoln as president tore at the nation's political bonds.

Study Shows Gulf Coast Hurricanes Weaken Before Landfall

The U.S. Gulf Coast has been pounded by some fierce hurricanes in the past decade, but a recent study shows that cooler waters near the shore kept the storms from being much worse.

The study was conducted by the National Hurricane Center in Miami and Colorado State University.

Hurricanes draw their power from warm ocean water that has been heated to at least 80 degrees Fahrenheit to a depth of around 160 feet. During the summer, the water in the central and southern Gulf of Mexico often is much warmer than 80 degrees, and this water has fueled some of the most intense hurricanes in history.

In 2005, these warm waters allowed Hurricane Dennis to become one of the most powerful July hurricanes on record. On July 7, Dennis's winds reached 150 mph as it roared across the Gulf about 500 miles southeast of Mobile, Alabama. It looked like the eye of the powerful storm was going to go straight up Mobile Bay and into downtown Mobile as a devastating Category 4 hurricane.

But when Dennis got within about 150 miles of the coast, it encountered the cooler inshore water and that helped reduce its fearsome power. Still, the storm made landfall between Mobile and Pensacola as a Category 3 storm with winds of about 120 mph.

The cooler waters near shore also probably helped diminish two other very intense hurricanes just before they made landfall on the Gulf Coast in the summer of 2005 -- Hurricane Katrina in August and Hurricane Rita in September.

"It's something special about the Gulf of Mexico," said Mark DeMaria, one of the co-authors of the study.

The study noted that when storms are over the central and southern Gulf of Mexico, they're over warm water from the tropics. On average, storms' winds intensify by about 8 mph for every 12 hours they're over this water, the study said.

But the water in the northern Gulf hasn't been influenced by this tropical warming, and so the warm water inshore isn't as deep.

"When hurricanes move over that water, (the storm's) high surface winds tend to mix cooler water up to the surface, which can lessen a storm's intensity," DeMaria said.

There are, of course, always exceptions. Sometimes, ocean currents bring warmer water closer to the coast, and that can cause devastating consequences if a hurricane reaches that water. In 1969, Hurricane Camille may have crossed one of those freak currents of very warm water as it approached the Gulf Coast. The storm lost little, if any, intensity as it neared landfall, and on August 17, Camille's eye came ashore at Pass Christian, Mississippi with winds of about 190 mph.

The study was published in a recent edition of the Journal of Weather and Forecasting. Viewing the full study requires a paid subscription, but an abstract can be viewed here.

NOTE: The NOAA photo above shows Hurricane Dennis just before it made landfall on July 11, 2005.

Spirit of '10?

We're in a war against some dangerous people who are willing to use any means they can come up with to kill as many people as possible. But it seems that we're thrusting our heads deeper and deeper into the sand to avoid confronting this reality.

The latest -- and maybe the most disturbing -- example of this refusal to acknowledge reality is being played out today in many airports where controversial new search techniques are being used by the Transportation Safety Administration to screen airline passengers before they board airplanes.

News reports say that the new security measures, which had been planned for some time, were implemented when an Al Qaida plot was uncovered last month to ship bombs aboard cargo airplanes and explode the bombs over the U.S. Airline passengers now have the option of either going through a new full-body scanner or being hand searched by a TSA officer.

MSNBC describes the search as an "open-palmed pat-down that many travelers, and even some security officers, feel is too personally invasive." Passengers can avoid the search by going through the full-body scanner. The scanner displays a nearly nude image of a passenger to a TSA officer who is out of the public view.

So, one way or the other, airline passengers are being required to submit to something that is seriously discomforting. Still, the Los Angeles Times reported recently that the TSA said that 28 million people boarded passenger planes during the first two weeks of the new security procedure, and only one percent of those passengers declined to go through the scanner and had to undergo the hands-on body search.

The Times reported that TSA said it received fewer than 700 complaints about the hands-on searches. That's a tiny proportion of the millions of people who had to undergo security checks before boarding airplanes.

It's easy to understand the annoyance of passengers who have to undergo these new search procedures. It is unsettling and humiliating to have your privates groped or displayed on a screen. But there is this war going on, and we are continually reminded of how fiercely our enemies hate us and how intensely they want to kill us, preferably in large, spectacular numbers. They would love nothing better than to explode a passenger airplane crammed with Americans over a large city so that chunks of flaming wreckage and body parts rained down on horrified witnesses who would then blame the government for not preventing this tragedy.

So it's hard for me to understand the mentality of those who are the loudest in protesting the increased scrutiny. And it's also baffling to me that the complaints of such a small group could explode into the broiling scandal that has erupted in the past few days.

In the December issue of Vanity Fair, editor Graydon Carter notes that Americans seem to be "full of inchoate rage, and . . . constantly throwing fits and tantrums". Carter published his comments weeks before the latest outrage. And our enemies are playing this anger like an instrument.

I've long been fascinated by the history of World War II. As I've gotten older, I've realized how propaganda was used to shape public opinion and persuade people to get with the program. And propaganda always makes me uneasy because it's used to emphasize one point of view and diminish or conceal other points of view. So when I see a poster like the one above that I've altered for this post, I also realize that the same techniques were being used by the Allies and their enemies.

I can't help but compare that era to today. However misleading the propaganda images from that time may have been, it's clear that people were willing to put up with much more danger and inconvenience than we are now. For example, beginning in September 1940 and continuing for months, Nazi Germany bombed London and other British cities every night. By May 1941, about 43,000 civillians had been killed in the attacks that came to be known as the Blitz. That means that far more people were killed every month during the Blitz than were killed in the attacks on New York on September 11, 2001.

But as Carter noted in his Vanity Fair column, a poll taken at the time showed that the British were more upset by food rationing than they were by the constant bombing. They simply were determined to carry on in the face of Hitler's savage onslaught.

What we're being asked to put up with isn't even on the same scale as what Londoners endured during the Blitz. But my god, how we're complaining. And how gratifying this must be to the thugs who are determined to kill us.

Recalling an Infamous Home Run

I've been down with the flu for several days and it's disrupted all the normal routines. It's a pretty nasty bug. I'm at the stage now where it's a low-grade fever and general aching malaise interrupted by occasional fits of violent and rather painful coughing. And there are powerful sneezes as well.

So I've spent most of the past few days in the guest bedroom. We have a stereo in that room that has a cassette tape deck, and I've dug out old tapes that I haven't played in years, tapes that in some cases I'd forgotten I have. And I've passed much of the time by drifting in and out of sleep as I listen to, among other things, Garrison Keillor monologues.

I've also spent the last several nights in that room so Jane can sleep without being awakened by my sudden noisy coughing and weary groans of exasperation. Around 3:30 this morning I woke up coughing and couldn't go back to sleep. So I sifted through the old tapes looking for something to put on the stereo.

One of the tapes I'd forgotten I have is a copy of the radio broadcast of the seventh game of the 1960 World Series between the New York Yankees and Pittsburgh Pirates. So I put that one into the player.

I was 10 years old when that game was played, and I remember it very well -- at least the final few innings. I didn't realize it at the time, of course, but that World Series game and the 1960 Major League baseball season was the end of an era. In 1960, there were still only 16 Major League teams -- eight in each league -- and the teams played a schedule of 154 games.

In 1961, Major League baseball would begin an expansion that would eventually swell the number of teams to 30, increase the regular season schedule to 162 games, and lead to a post-season playoff that stretches into November.

When New York met Pittsburgh in the 1960 World Series, I was at the peak of my passion for the Yankees. I'm not sure how a hick kid from a tiny rural town in the South became a Yankees fan, but I think it must have had something to do with Mickey Mantle. I'd learn later that Mantle was about as tragically flawed a man as has ever lived, but in 1960 he was a god walking among mortals.

I lay there in the dark listening to broadcaster Chuck Thompson's account of the game, which was played on October 13, 1960. At some point I realized that the 50th anniverary of that memorable game is only a few days away. The fact that I'm getting old enough to recall events 50 years ago is a little unsettling. I remember all of the fanfare surrounding the 50th anniverary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, which occurred years before I was born, and so that anniversary celebrated an event that, for me at least, was safely in the distant past and wasn't a reflection of my own aging.

But now, I'm old enough to remember things that happened half a century ago. Time passes.

The game itself was a wild, high-scoring, see-sawing affair. After two innings, Pittsburgh led 4-0. But the Yankees rallied, and by the sixth innning they held a 5-4 lead.

In 1960, World Series games were played during the day, and October 13, 1960 was a Thursday. So that meant that I wasn't able to turn on the game until after I'd gotten home from school. But I got home in time to see the end of the game.

In the top of the eighth inning, the Yankees extended their lead to 7-4, and it looked like it was all over. But in the bottom of the eighth, a fluke occurred that changed the course of the game. With Gino Cimoli on first, Bill Virdon hit a bouncing ground ball to Yankees shortstop Tony Kubek. It should have been an easy double-play, but the ball hit a pebble, took a wicked erratic hop, and hit Kubek in the Adam's apple. Everyone was safe, Kubek had to leave the game, and before the inning ended the Pirates had taken a 9-7 lead.

Still, the Yankees came back in the top of the ninth inning to tie the score at 9-9, and I was confident that the Yankees would hold the Pirates in the bottom of the ninth and win it in extra innings, especially since the bottom of the Pirates' lineup was coming to bat in their half of the inning.

Listening to the tape last night, of course, I knew what would happen. Bill Mazeroski would lead off for the Pirates against Ralph Terry. He'd take Terry's first pitch for a called ball. Then he'd hit Terry's second pitch over the left field wall, the Pirates would win, 10-9, Pittsburgh would go berserk, and I'd trudge quietly upstairs to my room with tears of disappointment running down my cheeks.

Listening to the game in the dark through a feverish haze 50 years later, I didn't start crying. But I still shook my head in disbelief that Terry gave Mazeroski a pitch that he could knock out of the damn ballpark.

NOTE: The photo at the top of this post was shot by George Silk for Life magazine. It shows University of Pittsburgh students watching from the tower of the Cathedral of Learning and cheering Bill Mazeroski's home run that won the 1960 World Series.