0:00 [SPEAKER_01]: On a cold morning, October 21, 1861, an officer in the Union Army named a major Henry Livermore Abbott led the 20th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment through another hopeless assault against a superior enemy force, up in isolated hill at the tip of northern Virginia, at what would become known as the Battle of Balls Bluff. 0:23 [SPEAKER_01]: Like so many battles at the beginning of the war, 0:28 [SPEAKER_01]: However, ignorant you might be of the art of warfare. 0:32 [SPEAKER_01]: You probably know it's a bad idea to fight uphill at the edge of a cliff against a well-intrenched enemy force. 0:40 [SPEAKER_01]: At the edge of a river, without access to either reinforcements or a route of escape. 0:46 [SPEAKER_01]: So, of course, this is exactly what the Union Army found a way to do, in the words of 0:54 [SPEAKER_00]: Union Colonel Edward Baker chose a steep and rocky cliff about a hundred feet high on the Virginia shore, Balls Bluff for his assault. 1:04 [SPEAKER_00]: In selecting a cliff for his route to Ventry, but their evidently had not stopped to figure out how, in the event of a retreat, everyone would get safely back down it. 1:16 [SPEAKER_00]: He also was unaware that a substantial Confederate force was waiting for him in the woods 1:24 [SPEAKER_01]: In Baker's defense, he had no business leading anyone into battle. 1:29 [SPEAKER_01]: He was a lawyer and politician, a friend of Abraham Lincoln, owing his post, more to chronism and qualification. 1:38 [SPEAKER_01]: He was also shot through the head shortly after the battle began, but this kind of amateurism was common in the union army in those days. 1:46 [SPEAKER_01]: and unfortunately, so was the carnage that resulted from it. 1:51 [SPEAKER_01]: One of the earliest historians, on the Civil War, bluntly recounted the inevitable end of the battle, a ball's bluff. 1:59 [SPEAKER_00]: Only a handful of men continued to offer any resistance at the top of the activity, which their comrades were descending in great haste. 2:09 [SPEAKER_00]: A final charge of the eighth Virginia under the command of Colonel Nathan Evans, one of the confederate heroes of Bull Run, drove them in turn into that abyss where further struggle was impossible. 2:26 [SPEAKER_00]: One of the cannons which was flung from the summit of the cliff rolled down to the water's edge and was broken in pieces. 2:34 [SPEAKER_00]: The confederate said nothing to do, but to complete their victory by firing upon opponents who were no longer able to retaliate. 2:44 [SPEAKER_00]: The crown of fugitives clung to the brushwood, which covered the activities of Balls Bluff and finding no shelter sought their last chance of safety in the only boat which remained more to the shore. 2:59 [SPEAKER_00]: The other two, which were filled with wounded men, were already far off and being overloaded as is always the case under such circumstances, soon sank with all those who were congratulating themselves upon having been able to get on board. 3:18 [SPEAKER_00]: A large number of officers and soldiers threw themselves into the river to cross by swimming. 3:25 [SPEAKER_00]: Most of these drowned had a few were killed by the balls of the enemy who pursued them without mercy. 3:33 [SPEAKER_00]: At last darkness came to put an end to the scene of horror. 3:39 [SPEAKER_01]: In that small, handful of men offering resistance. 3:43 [SPEAKER_01]: At the top of the cliff, Henry Abbott stood above his men in order to direct their fire from prone positions in the tall grass, somehow, as his men died one by one, or were being inedited, or shot back into the river, Abbott survived. 3:59 [SPEAKER_01]: Most of the men under his command were university students. 4:03 [SPEAKER_01]: or academics, who had joined the war for idealistic reasons to save the union and destroy the so-called peculiar institution of slavery, almost all of these men were better suited for the classroom, or the boardroom, or the courtroom, really anywhere, but battlefields of hand-to-hand combat, glorified streetfights, where men bayanetted, and shot each other to pieces at the distance 4:31 [SPEAKER_01]: So the 20th Massachusetts was known more commonly as the Harvard Regiment, and habit himself, enrolled at Harvard University at the age of 14 when he graduated at 18 and 1860. 4:43 [SPEAKER_01]: He entered his father's law firm, which is where the war found him when the Confederacy fired on Fort Sumter in April of the following year. 4:54 [SPEAKER_01]: While his brothers rushed off to enlist, Abbott was reluctant to go, writing to his father in May of 1861, he said simply, «My tastes are not warlike, like net and flutters, but literary and domestic. 5:08 [SPEAKER_01]: But he went anyway. 5:09 [SPEAKER_01]: Refusing to let his brothers fight with our hand, and on October 21st, he led his group of intrepid academics on the fool's errand of Bald's Bluff, where so many brilliant, young men would be shot to death while drowning at the edge of a cliff. 5:25 [SPEAKER_01]: Over the next three years of unthinkably vicious combat, Abbott risks his life at the front of his regimen, time and again, at the battles of fair oats, lendale, and malvern hill, and also a 5:44 [SPEAKER_01]: Confederate sharp shooters were already looking for officers and Abbott was always happy to give them one, walking out ahead of his men. 5:52 [SPEAKER_01]: We're standing to direct their fire while they knelt or lay prone in order to protect the killing power of the 20th Massachusetts. 6:01 [SPEAKER_01]: In the crowded battlefields of the late Civil War, this was a death wish. 6:05 [SPEAKER_01]: And when a Confederate bullet find a hit his chest at the Battle of the Wilderness, 6:10 [SPEAKER_01]: On May 6, 1864, the only surprise was that it hadn't happened sooner to truly appreciate the recklessness of Abbott's behavior, it helps to have a sense of the nature of civil work combat. 6:23 [SPEAKER_01]: It was horrible beyond comprehension. 6:25 [SPEAKER_01]: From the time of his appointment, as commanding General of the U.S. Army, General Ulysses Grant's Battle Plan. 6:32 [SPEAKER_01]: with simply to create carnage, wherever he could. 6:36 [SPEAKER_01]: To draw leaves elusive armies into head to head, toe to toe, hand to hand combat, until the body's piled up. 6:44 [SPEAKER_01]: It was a simple campaign of attrition. 6:47 [SPEAKER_01]: Lee would run out first. 6:48 [SPEAKER_01]: The historian Lewis Minand describes the result of this approach, and he's seen from the so-called bloody angle of Spazavania. 6:57 [SPEAKER_00]: In a small space along the breastworks of confederate trenches, in the pouring rain, the two sides had fought hand-to-hand continuously for 18 hours, in a kind of blood-frenzy. 7:11 [SPEAKER_00]: Man thrust bayonets through the logs or jumped onto the barricade and fired into the mass of soldiers below until they were themselves shot down. 7:22 [SPEAKER_00]: A tree-18 inches thick was completely severed by bullets. 7:26 [SPEAKER_01]: In that space, measuring only 12 by 15 feet, more than 150 bodies stacked up under grants 7:40 [SPEAKER_01]: a literal hill of casualties. 7:43 [SPEAKER_01]: For each successive wave of attackers to climb and die on, even in a campaign so full of heroism as this, Abbott distinguished himself and by the time he died in a field hospital in Virginia on the afternoon of May 6, 1864 at the ripe old age of 22. 8:01 [SPEAKER_01]: He was a legendary figure, adored by his peers, other soldiers wrote letters about him, poems about him, and marked his death as a turning point in their own lives. 8:12 [SPEAKER_01]: The future Supreme Court chastis Oliver Windell Holmes, a legend in his own right, had been a close friend of Abbott, and remembered him in this famous 1884 Memorial Day speech. 8:24 [SPEAKER_00]: out. 8:26 [SPEAKER_00]: You may be sure that we won't do anything of the kind, having decidedly too much reverence for the Constitution. 8:34 [SPEAKER_01]: Antihated the Union Generals, he was willing to die for, as Manant puts it. 8:40 [SPEAKER_00]: Abbott frequently denounced the superiors who orders he executed in such exemplary fashion, as butchers and dunces. 8:49 [SPEAKER_00]: I firmly believe that the men who ordered the crossing of the river are responsible to God for murder. 8:57 [SPEAKER_00]: He wrote to his sister after Fredericksburg. 9:00 [SPEAKER_00]: But the less he respected the cause for which he risked his life, the more valiantly he acted. 9:07 [SPEAKER_01]: Whatever Abbott thought or felt, he lived virtuously, and he sacrificed everything for a cause that was profoundly good, and alonger you live, the more you realize how singularly important that is. 9:19 [SPEAKER_01]: Our political views are worth so much less than our actions, and our feelings are worth so much less than our lives. 9:26 [SPEAKER_01]: Abbott had the wrong ideas, the wrong politics, and his heart was in the wrong place. 9:31 [SPEAKER_01]: He violated his unconscious, and his personal truth. 9:35 [SPEAKER_01]: To die for a cause, he didn't fully believe in. 9:38 [SPEAKER_01]: But, as just as homes, and the rest of the 20th Massachusetts volunteer saw it, this conflict and Abbott only exposed the profound selflessness of his sacrifice. 9:49 [SPEAKER_01]: He fought for his friends, and for a cause, infinitely, 9:54 [SPEAKER_01]: Modern society has convinced us the most important thing about us is the way we feel. 10:01 [SPEAKER_01]: Both about ourselves and the world outside. 10:03 [SPEAKER_01]: We really believe that our beliefs are more important than our actual impact on the world around us. 10:09 [SPEAKER_01]: We think our vocabulary, slogans, and sympathetic gestures, our Facebook posts matter more than the change we actually create in the world. 10:19 [SPEAKER_01]: were constantly defining ourselves and judging each other by the kind of people we say we are. 10:25 [SPEAKER_01]: Personally, I'm more inspired by Henry Abbott than a hundred Instagram activists from the present day, people who have the right vocabularies. 10:34 [SPEAKER_01]: the right ideas, but whose main contribution to society is often talking about what they talk about when they talk about change. 10:42 [SPEAKER_01]: By and large, these people produce nothing. 10:45 [SPEAKER_01]: They sacrifice nothing. 10:46 [SPEAKER_01]: They build nothing. 10:48 [SPEAKER_01]: Apart from audiences that produce revenue and make them rich, they hold the right signs, shout the right slogans, join the right mobs in the right marches, and then they go home to comfort. 11:00 [SPEAKER_01]: and do grumble, and write strongly worded social media posts, but to what end. 11:05 [SPEAKER_01]: As often as not, to the validation of their fragile, self-seeking inner words, people like Henry Abbott give everything, without a single tweet to show for it. 11:15 [SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes they do so much with the wrong ideas, the wrong politics, the wrong vocabularies. 11:21 [SPEAKER_01]: but they do it, and that's more than what can be said for most of us today. 11:24 [SPEAKER_01]: Whatever else Abbott was, he was a literal soldier, a righteousness, and decidedly not deep in his feelings. 11:32 [SPEAKER_01]: Abbott is the kind of hero we no longer know what to do with. 11:36 [SPEAKER_01]: He was a rampaging badass, on the most savage battlefields of the modern era. 11:40 [SPEAKER_01]: He was braver than you, better than you, and a bit of a racist. 11:44 [SPEAKER_01]: The case of Henry D. Abbott, haunts me lately. 11:47 [SPEAKER_01]: It should probably haunt you too, sitting with Henry Abbott this morning, feeling humbled. 11:52 [SPEAKER_01]: I'm reminded that life really is a bottom line business. 11:56 [SPEAKER_01]: My politics don't matter. 11:58 [SPEAKER_01]: My feelings don't matter. 11:59 [SPEAKER_01]: What I believe doesn't matter, none of it matters until I actually do something about it. 12:04 [SPEAKER_01]: All my ethical ideas and my passion for justice are just a self-satisfying headgame until I reach out into the world and make it better in some concrete way.
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