WAR VIRGINS

 

I suggest, if you want a touch the reality of the American Civil War, you pick up a nine pound, 56 inch long, walnut stock .58 caliber model 1855 Springfield muzzle loading rifled musket, and think about what this weapon tells you about the world which built it. 

They made 47,000 such weapons in Massachusetts, and another 12,000 at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, before the war started.  Over the five years after Fort Sumter in 1861, they built about a million more in various versions. 

But to the volunteers who were handed one of those older, no longer state-of-the-art weapons (costing $20 each at the time, about $500 in today's money), they were revolutionary. This was likely the first mass produced piece of high tech these people came into intimate contact with. And once they did, they were no longer virgins.

Following the manual written by Brigadier General Silas Casey, (above) - West Point class of 1828), you began with your Springfield musket standing on its base. 

You removed a paper cartridge from the box on your hip. You bite or tear off the end of a paper cartridge (above), exposing 65 coarse grains of black powder, which you pour down the barrel. With your thumb you press the remains of the cartridge (with the bullet called a “minie ball” inside), into the top of the barrel. 

Using the rod stored beneath your musket's barrel, you ram the ball, cartridge and the powder down the barrel until it is firmly at the bottom. 

Replacing the ramrod, you lift the weapon to chest high. You half-cock the hammer, take a percussion cap from your cartridge box (on your other hip) and place it atop the nipple covering the opening in the breach. Then you lift the weapon to your shoulder, pull the hammer back to full cock, aim toward the enemy and upon command, you pull the trigger, releasing the hammer.

The hammer falls, setting off the black powder in the percussion cap. The resulting explosion forces hot gases through the breach, which sets off the black powder in the barrel. This flash of heat causes the the soft lead on the bottom of the' minie' ball to expand, trapping the gases behind it. Those gases then drive the bullet out of the barrel at about a thousand feet per second. With luck you might hit a target 100 yards away. 

With training, a man could get off two, and maybe three, rounds every minute. But most of the soldiers, particularly in the early stage in the war, spent very little time learning to fire their weapons. Burning black powder produced enormous dense clouds of smoke, and after a few minutes you couldn't see what you are aiming at. Firing ranges were thus considered largely a waste of time for the average soldier. So the men spent most of their time learning to march.

Battlefield tactics were over half a century old by 1861, developed by Napoleon Bonaparte in the 1790's, when muskets were still smooth bore, and so inaccurate that to effectively injure an opponent they had to be used in mass, hundreds or thousands of muskets firing in the same direction at the same moment. 

Everything that occurred on the battlefield was done to create that moment, when the maximum number of men would discharge their weapons at the target, together.  The concept is still used today, and it is called "lead on target". 

General Silas Casey (above), in his 2 volumes of Infantry Tactics published in  1862,  listed 84 separate and distinct steps required to move a company of 84 men from a marching column four men wide, to their firing formation, in a rank thirty-two inches between each man, three ranks deep. And that was on the flat and open parade ground. 

The men and the officers had to to learn to do this, across unfamiliar and broken terrain, without thinking, while people were trying to kill them. The endless drilling required to achieve proficiency at this was boring, physically exhausting, and boring. And there was no way to prepare the men for the terror of replicating it while being shot at, under the noise and horrors of combat, because each human experiences combat differently and each combat is different than any other. 

What was it like? Well, in 1863, after two years of hard won experience with the demands, drudgery and the horrors of combat, the two sides met for three days at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. After that battle 35,000 abandoned but usable muskets were collected on the battlefield, of which 11,000 were unloaded and 24,000 were loaded, in one form or another. 

Of the loaded muskets, 6,000 had one charge, 12,000 had two charges, and the remaining 6,000 held anything from three to ten charges - One musket had twenty-two charges stuffed down its barrel;  powder, cartridge and bullet, one atop the other. 

The noise of all those muskets firing next to unprotected ears, producing all that smoke, meant that a soldier could no longer hear his own rifle going off. And if you missed the first loaded round not being fired, likely you never got a second chance. Firing a musket with anything more than one charge in the barrel often resulted in the weapon exploding. And that raises the question of how many battlefield casualties were unconsciously self inflicted.

Officers had a few things to learn too, even the 5'2” tall Ulysses Grant (above) who had graduated West Point in 1843. Although he had been forced to resign in 1854, his training made him a much sought after commodity, and during the opening months of the war, in June of 1861,  the governor of Illinois made him a colonel and he was given command of the 21^st Illinois volunteer regiment. 

These 1,000 men were described by their new commander as “men...who could be led astray.” And they had been. Grant said he “found it very hard work for a few days to bring all the men into anything like subordination; but the great majority favored discipline, and by the application of a little regular army punishment all were reduced to as good discipline as one could ask.”

On 3 July, 1861 the 21^st Illinois was ordered to Quincy, Illinois, but en route the destination was changed.

The 19^th Illinois regiment had been building a bridge over the Salt River west of Palmyra, Missouri - about 25 miles north west of Hannibal, on the Mississippi River. Troops of the Missouri State Guard, sympathetic to the south, had cut off the union troops. Grant was now ordered to rescue the fellow prairie state units.

However, by the time his men had reached the Mississippi river, the threatened unit had retreated back to Hannibal, with not a shot being fired by either force. Grant wrote later, “I am inclined to think both sides got frightened and ran away.” Still, Grant got his men across the big river, and marched to the scene. The 21^st Illinois spent two weeks finishing the bridge, and was then ordered to advance on a new Missouri State Guard regiment gathering to the south, at the forks of the Salt River.

The Missouri troops were commanded by a politician, Colonel (later Brigadier General) Thomas Alexander Hariss. His position was in a valley, and was overlooked by the small community of Florida, with about 100 residents. 

And as Grant approached the town he started to get nervous. “In the twenty-five miles we had to march we did not see a person, old or young, male or female, except two horsemen who were on a road that crossed ours. As soon as they saw us they decamped as fast as their horses could carry them.” Grant now had to assume the rebels were alerted of his approach, and would be waiting for his men. The young commander camped his men that night beside the road, so they would be fully rested for the battle he knew was coming in the morning.

In the morning, Grant lead his little force up the hill. “As we approached the brow of the hill...my heart kept getting higher and higher until it felt to me as though it was in my throat. I would have given anything then to have been back in Illinois, but I had not the moral courage to halt and consider what to do; I kept right on. When we reached a point from which the valley below was in full view I halted. The place where Harris had been encamped a few days before was still there...but the troops were gone. My heart resumed its place.”

In fact, Harris and his still unprepared recruits had retreated on hearing that Grant was gathering horses and wagons just to prepare for his march south. With such a head start, his Missouri State Guards were now sixty miles away, heading to join larger rebel forces.  

Learning this, Grant noted it taught him something.  “It occurred to me at once that Harris had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him. This was a view of the question I had never taken before; but it was one I never forgot afterwards. From that event to the close of the war...I never forgot that he had as much reason to fear my forces as I had his”. On the march back to the bridge at Palmyra, Grant noted, “The citizens living on the line of our march....were at their front doors ready to greet us now.”

And that taught him even something more useful, something still true today - winners are always popular. Grant was no longer a virgin.

- 30 - 

VIRUS - The Tulip Inflation

 

I want to talk about the human propensity for greed, by first discussing a small family of viruses which ignore humans completely -  the Potyviridae. These five related parasites, each 100^th the size of a bacteria, do not infect humans, but they do infect and quickly kill lilies – after all,  the word virus is Latin for poison. 

In response, lilies evolved the tulip,  resistant enough to the Potyviridae that they could reproduce for perhaps a dozen generations before succumbing to these miniature succubus. And that's when humans come into the picture, because long before humans knew there was such thing as a virus, they found a way to ruin their lives, and the lives of thousands of their fellow humans, by investing in Potyviridae - which they did not know even existed.

See, tulips evolved from lilies where Europe blends into Asia, in the Ferghana Basin, north of Afghanistan, east of the Caspian Sea and west of Lake Balkhash - what is today Uzbekistan. The basin is surrounded by mountains, and in this isolated test tube 36 different varieties of wild tulips developed over a few thousand years. 

Some had multiple stalks and blooms, some only one. The blooms could be white, red, yellow or orange. 

But when infected with Potyviridae the blooms would be wildly stained as if a child had asymmetrically dripped paint over them. This was the normal interaction between a species and a virus which preyed on it. But then the unexpected happened. 

In the  8^th century, humans living in the Ferghana Basin converted to Islam, and tulip bulbs were transported westward to Islamic population centers, as a beautiful curiosity, the more so because of the fanciful patterns they displayed when infected by Potyviridea, which traveled with its host bulb. And because the bulbs could be transported thousands of miles, because they were purely ornamental, and because they had to be replaced every decade or so,  to own and grow the infected tulips became a display of extreme wealth, conspicuous consumption, restricted to the ruling caliphs in Baghdad and later Istanbul.

A century after Christopher Columbus – in 1593 - tulip bulbs were first planted in the Netherlands, by the botanist Carolus Clusius (above). He was one of the first true botanists, and "The father of all beautiful gardens in this country", that country being the Spanish Netherlands. But change was coming, and Clusius' wealthy patrons eventually were,  for the first time in history, not blue-blood royalty but the local capitalists burgomasters of the the town of Leiden.

The Dutch Revolt of 1581 freed the local merchants from paying protection money to Spanish Catholic royalty. Left to their own devices, the Protestant capitalists were interested in just two things, making money, and showing everybody how much money they were making. 

The “Nouveau riche” adopted all the accouterments of their noble predecessors, including fine clothes, large homes, fancy carriages, personal portraits, and within ten years, ownership of the exotic tulip, so named because its bloom resembled a Turkish turban (above). And it was now that human greed is unleashed in our story, when rare infected tulips pass from being a de rigueur symbol of wealth, to a means of  measuring and displaying that wealth.

The Lord, it seemed, had designed the tulip to make humans rich, and more than a few Calvinist ministers in Holland pointed this out. The plant blooms for only a week or two in the spring. And having proven its colors, after the leaves have died back, the bulb may be dug up and sold and traded, and stored almost indefinitely in a cool dry place before being returned to the soil where it would sprout and bloom again.  

So the tulip market was set by the plant itself, each fall. The rest of the year traders would buy and sell future contracts on the bulbs in storage or in the ground, gambling on their future vitality, which, considering their most desirable pattern variations were being determined by an invisible virus that was slowly killing the plant, was never a sure thing. 

The futures market in tulips began to drive the price of tulips upward, until, within twenty years of Clusius' first experiments with bulbs in 1610,  the burgomasters felt required to make it illegal to sell tulip futures “short”, meaning to gamble that the price for bulbs in the ground would drop before the next spring bloom.

A disaster in the tulip trade was predictable as far back as the summer of 1623, when a bulb of the rarest variety (only 10 existed), Semper Augusttus (above), was sold for a thousand guilders. The most skilled carpenters earned only 250 guilders a year, and Carolus Clusius, the man responsible for all of this, had earned a mere 750 guilders a year.  But when the bulb of the Semper Augusttus (above)  was pulled from the ground by it's wealthy owner, Adriaan Pauw,  he found it had produced two “daughter” bulbs, meaning the value of each of Adriaan's Semper Augusttus bulbs had just been reduced by 15%.  So he stopped digging them up.

The law against selling tulip futures short had been reaffirmed in 1621, and again in 1630, and yet again in 1636. So it seems the practice was continuing and getting more popular. And clearly many burgomasters saw the practice of betting on a catastrophe as dangerous. At the same time no penalties were ever attached to a violation of these laws, so traders kept making money with their bets. 

The general feeling in Holland seems to have been (as it is in America today about big banks and hedge funds, and corporate geniuses and bit coins ) that everybody could continue making money as long as everybody stayed greedy but smart. Except, that has never happened in all of human history. 

And it did not happen in 17th Century Holland - first because the traders were not trading in what they thought they were trading in, which was not tulips, but in a virus which infected tulips. And second, since they were assuming they could stay greedy and smart,  they were doomed to fail since in all cases and all the time,  greed makes you stupid. 

Adriaan Pauw (above) was smart. He kept the value of his Semper Augusttus high by the simple expedient of not digging up his bulbs to sell them, which prevented anybody from noticing that they got weaker with each generation. 

But he did go to considerable expense of constructing a gazebo in the garden of his estate at Heemstede (above) , "... a weird contrivance of wood and cunningly angled mirrors that stood in the middle of the tulip bed...From a distance...Pauw’s single tulip bed looked densely planted with hundreds of brilliant flowers. It was only ...an optical illusion. The mirrors of the wooden cabinet had turned the few dozen tulips in Pauw’s collection into a spectacular profusion." Thus more than doubling the impression of his wealth. Which made it easier for Pauw to borrow money. Which he did,  a lot.

In 1624 Pauw's 12 prized  Augusttus were valued at 1,200 guilders each. The next year that went up to 2,000 guilders each, and in 1626 up to 3,000 guilders for a single bulb. That was never sold. Inflation spread like a virus to all varieties of virus infected tulips. 

During one two year period the price for a “General of Generals” Tulip (above) bulb increased from 100 guilders to 750 guilders. On 5 February, 1637 at an auction held in the lake side fortress village of Alkmarr, where 70 rare bulbs sold for 53,000 guilders, an all time high - several hundred million American dollars today. Who could resist such temptation? 

Not  Pauw.  He finally sold a single bulb of Augusttus (above) for 5,500 guilders. But the bloom was about to fall off this rose.

Just two days earlier and 20 miles to the south, in the village of Harrlem, a tulip investor club – called a college – decided to see how deep the demand for tulips really was. They held an auction of a huge quantity of common tulip bulbs.

Only one buyer showed up. Realizing he was the market, he demanded a 35 % discount. And he got it. And when word of this investment disaster reached Alkmarr prices of tulips collapsed like the price of baseball trading cards in 2007 or crypto currencies in 2022.  That year of 1637 many varieties of tulips would quickly lose 95% of their value.

Families went bankrupt -  heads of households and sons committed suicide - how many has become a subject for much debate in modern economic circles. Many victims sought a new start in the New World. Said one Calvinist, it was “ God’s Just Plague-Punishment, for the attention of the well-to-do Netherlanders in this bold, rotten century.”  It was the usual, "Heads, God wins; tails human lose" philosophy. But why should God get involved when there are so many lawyers around? 

There were endless lawsuits. And because every buyer wanted out of their futures contracts and every seller wanted them enforced, the politicians did nothing.   Most futures contracts were quietly closed out for 10-15% of their paper value.

A lot of people have tried to claim the Tulip Mania  was not a “market bubble”, like all the other market bubbles since. But the best description of what went wrong that I have found was written by A Maurits van der Veen, from the Virginia college of William and Mary. (BUBBLE)   

He wrote in 2009, “...it became increasingly difficult to distinguish those with solid private knowledge from those who were simply following the crowd... these constituted a new kind of trade, no longer linked to individual bulbs.” In other words, greed driven investors were betting not on tulips, but on other tulip investors - call it the tulip derivatives market. That was where the tulip market had first blown up. Sounds like a market bubble to me. And when Tulip mania died, so did some of the most valuable tulips, because their viruses were not passed on. There has not been a real Semper Augusttus bloom since the middle of the 17^th century.

There are many who still insist the Semper Augusttus (above) was the most beautiful tulip that ever existed, as there are many who insist an unregulated “free market” is morally and functionally superior to regulated markets. And people are still buying Crypto coins because greed always makes people stupid. 

But Semper Augusttus was not a true species, but the by-product of a Potyviridae (above)  devouring the tulip from the inside, consuming its genetic code, and eventually killing and devouring the bulb. 

The infected bulbs (above) lived no longer than the rich man who had the fortunes to maintain their artificial existence.  Modern tulips are far stronger,  their colors stronger and their genes more resistant than the frail infected flowers that so entranced the “Nouveau riche” of 1637. 

And because of that, billions of people today enjoy tulips  Some day, perhaps, the nouveau riche of a new age will come to admit that like the Potyviridea infected tulip, an unregulated  “free market”, is merely a splash of color which distracts your attention from the parasite devouring capitalism from the inside - unrestricted uninhibited greed.

- 30 -