"Sacrifice is Always Sacrifice"
A Ghost Story and Ruminations on Statues, Confederate and Otherwise
(As always, the old stuff can be found here.)
One of the joys of purchasing an old book is to open it and find clippings and notations that offer clues to its past life. I acquired three such volumes, all formerly owned by a Miss Elma James, who, with a little research, I learned to be a maiden Chicago art teacher. Born in 1888 to a shoe store retailer who emigrated from Surrey, she lived in the Oak Park neighborhood with her only brother, a doctor, until her death in 1955. She apparently liked ghost stories. From there they found their way to the eclectic collection of the late Professor James Newberry of Columbia College in Chicago, from which they were recently auctioned. So my shelves are their third home.
I was initially attracted to the lot because one of the books was an Arthur Machen title, of whom I’ve written about earlier. Another, also stuffed with clippings and pictures of the author, was a 1921 book simply entitled Ghost Stories, by Sabine Baring-Gould (1834-1924). Baring Gould is largely unknown today, and if he is known at all by Americans, it is for composing the familiar hymn, “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”
It is unfortunate that this may be all that he is remembered for, as he was hardly just a hymnographer. I doubt the song is sung much anymore. We use to sing it from time to time back in my Protestant days, and I know the Baptists did, though I am not sure that Methodists, for example, ever did. And now, in the watered-down world of broad American Evangelicalism, the hymn’s martial tone probably strikes a discordant note.
Ironically, from what I’ve read so far, Baring-Gould skewers fundamentalism—his characterization of the puritanical “Aunt Joanna” is as memorable in my mind as is Dickens’ evangelical Mrs. Jellyby. Baring Gould did for Cornish Wesleyanism what Machen did for Welsh chapel Wesleyanism. So he seems an odd standard bearer for old-time fundamentalism.
And Baring-Gould was so much more: a prolific novelist and short story writer, an antiquarian, a hagiographer, an Anglican priest, as well as a country squire. My first exposure to him—and appreciation for his work—came from his multi-volume Lives of the British Saints. In 2017, I located an affordable paperback set in Hay-on-Wye. The next year, I visited his grave in the mossy churchyard surrounded by the Lewtrenchard Forgotten Garden in far western Devon, near the Cornish border. His old family manse, now an upscale hotel, lies immediately adjacent.
I have read several ghost stories from the book, the first being “Jean Bouchon.” Baring-Gould weaves the story of an English writer who made several journeys to Orleans, France, searching for material for a book on Joan of Arc. What he found was something much more interesting. He frequented a small café located in a passage behind his hotel, up a flight of stone steps opening onto a place. From the first visit, soon after receiving his food, a pale, bewhiskered waiter would appear at his table, as if waiting for payment. This was disconcerting, but the Englishman would hand him the coins, plus a few centimes for his tip, as was the custom. The odd waiter would take the tip, but leave the other coins on the table. On his way out, the Englishman made mention of this behavior to the head waiter. He simply replied, “Oh, Jean Bouchon has been at his tricks again.”
The same scenario repeated itself for several days in a row, and the Englishman continued to press Alphonse, the head waiter, for an explanation. It was slow in coming, but finally he received the story. It seems Jean Bouchon was a former waiter at the establishment. The staff put all their tips into a common box, to be divided equally at week’s end. Suspicion arose that Bouchon was faking the dropping of his tips into the box. Once proof was obtained, he was confronted and fired from his position. As he was ignominiously expelled out of the café, another waiter tripped him. Bouchon lost his balance and fell headfirst down the stone steps, dying from a concussion a few hours later. That had been in 1869, five years earlier. Since that time, the ghost of Jean Bouchon had been haunting his old workplace, pocketing tips from strangers.
A number of years passed before the Englishman again returned to Orleans. He returned to his old haunt, only to find that Adolphe, the former head waiter had left the city. Apparently, Jean Bouchon had as well. The Englishmen persisted in asking the new waiter what had happened to Jean Bouchon and finally he was told of subsequent developments.
The other waiters had paid for Jean Bouchon’s funeral in 1869. But his burial spot was not in perpétuité. After a number of years, his coffin was dug up to make room for someone else. Instead of a corpse inside, they found the coffin stuffed with the copper centimes Jean Bouchon’s ghost had pocket off out of town customers in his old restaurant.
At that point, city officials became involved, and they and the waiters debated what they were to do with the money that could possibly placate the persistent ghost. Paying for masses to be said at the church was rejected as being not particularly appealing to the likes of Jean Bouchon. Finally, they decided to melt the centimes down and use them to erect a statue in his honor. The scheme worked, as it was reported that the ghost viewed the stature, smiled wryly in satisfaction, then faded from sight, never to be seen again.
One of the new waiters offered to take the Englishman to see the statue, located just outside the café. He was surprise to see, not an image of Jean Bouchon, but that of an athletic, classical-looking youth, falling backwards, arms outstretched, with one of them grasping a sword. He was told that since there were no pictures of Jean Bouchon, the sculptor was allowed a little poetic license. And so, the despised waiter who died headfirst down a flight of steps in 1869 was transformed into a hero, dying gallantly in defense of his city against the hated Prussian invaders of 1870.
This troubled the Englishman, so he persisted in questioning the propriety of such a depiction. His rational assessment was no match for Gallic sensibilities:
“Ah! monsieur, who looks on a monument and expects to find thereon the literal truth relative to the deceased?”
“This is something of a sacrifice to truth” I demurred.
“Sacrifice is superb!” said the waiter. “There is nothing more noble, more heroic than sacrifice.”
“But not the sacrifice of truth.”
“Sacrifice is always sacrifice.”
“Well, said I, unwilling further to dispute, “this is certainly a great creation out of nothing.”
“Not out of nothing: out of the coppers that Jean Bouchon had filched from us, and which choked up his coffin.”
It would seem that a sacrifice of Truth was a small price to pay to feed the patriotic vainglory of a people.
Of course, the thing about statues these days is the taking of them down. My initial reaction is to oppose such efforts; that is, of course, if the statues have any artistic merit whatsoever. I find this practice to be nihilistic at its root, and I oppose nihilism, no matter how righteously it is cloaked. I do not feel so strongly about modern statuary, however, which can be dismantled day in, day out, with no complaint from me. And I do remember enjoying the toppling of Lenin and Stalin in the heady early 1990s. (I remember seeing a bust of Stalin sitting on the back porch of a shed behind a little Georgian cafe beside the road out of Zugdidi into Svaneti.) So I guess it is just a matter of
whose head is being toppled.
Another thing that gives me pause about this trend—as does most anything labeled as progressive, is that there is never an end to it. There is always another perceived outrage to vanquish, some remaining belief to deconstruct. Utopia lies just beyond the next pile of rubble. And so, whether right or wrong, the South is now peppered with plinths that once supported the mythic heroes of a country that never was. And perhaps that is a good thing.
This is fresh on my mind, having recently read a review of Allen Guelzo’s new biography, Robert E. Lee: A Life. I will admit to being completely ambivalent about Lee; I have never found him a compelling figure, have never idolized him, or in fact given him much thought one way or the other. It is bad form, I think, to idolize generals; any of them. But back in the day, he was THE symbol for the Old South. This was a calculated bit of propagandizing and myth-making orchestrated by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, but enthusiastically accepted by the Southern populace in general, and the Southern re-interpreters of history in particular. Confederate monuments abound in the South. The one in the county in which I work in is located in the old city cemetery, out of view, and atop a mass grave of Confederate soldiers, so is somewhat appropriate there. The county in which I live still has one on the Courthouse square, but nobody seems to mind. It’s not an unattractive statute and that particular downtown needs all the help it can get. One of the most jarring statues I have seen is a huge one in a North Texas county bordering the Red River. I say this, because this area was solidly Unionist in the run-up to the Civil War, and voted accordingly. But the slave-owning squireocracy ran the county before, during and after the war. Forty-two Unionists were executed there without due process in 1862, civil liberties not being a particular concern of the CSA, or Robert E. Lee, for that matter.
To his credit, Lee never sought this adulation himself, and in some ways was an ill fit to fill such a symbolic role. But I guess the question is, “a symbol of what, exactly?” The way I see it, the creators of The Myth cast him as the very representation of Southern recalcitrance and resentment: pique over losing a war, opposition to the new order of things, and determination to prevent, in whatever way necessary, the enfranchisement of those who had once been the South’s human chattel. All of that is a bit ugly and unpleasant, unless hidden behind the noble image of a Robert E. Lee.
And so, his statues popped up everywhere in the South—not following the Civil War itself, but 40 years later, 60 years later, 90 years later, in the recurring spasms against the spectre of encroaching full equality. I actually attended a Robert E. Lee High School. We were the Rebels, sang “Dixie” and our elite boys got to dress up as Confederate soldiers and fire a cannon. Midway through my junior year, the federal judge who had to take charge of our school district changed all this, and we became the “Red Raiders,” whatever that was. Our high school was not, however, an old Southern institution, steeped in tradition. Rather, it was founded in 1958, in the fever heat of Southern antagonism to the Civil Rights struggle. And that is pretty typical of all the Robert E. Lee naming in the South: an in-your-face response to a nation headed in a direction it opposed. (Last year, upon the demolition of the butt-ugly 1958 structure and the construction of a classically-styled school, the name Robert E. Lee was finally dropped. The world did not end.)
The granddaddy of all Lee statues-the one in Richmond, and perhaps the place where a historical tie to the general actually justified a statue—has finally been carted away. My understanding is that it will be displayed in the new Black History Museum and Cultural Center in Richmond. No doubt it will be re-interpreted there.
But with the on-going deterioration of our aging and shambling liberal democracy, coupled with a new interest in localism, and indeed, secessionism, who knows, perhaps Lee will have his day in the sun again. He won’t do it on the basis of Guezlo’s new book, however. The author, a college professor, is interestingly enough, a staunch conservative who even spoke at a 2020 American History Conference convened by the former President whose name will not grace these pages.
Lee was reputed to be a brilliant strategist, figuring out how to do more with less, time and time again. But even his peers questioned the reckless abandon in which he would seemingly casually commit his troops to almost certain death. Of course, those men agreed to their commitment, and the same charge could be lodged against most generals, including Ulysses S. Grant (but then, nobody ever tried to make him into a saint.) While Lee was revered, he remained distant and aloof, with no close friends. He was not a little vain, and had a peculiar relationship with women; not allowing any of his daughters to marry. Nor was Lee a kindly slaveowner, coming into possession of a large number only at his father-in-law’s death in 1857. He famously tried to circumvent old Mr. Custis’ instructions that his slaves be freed.
This concern over his slaves, and his family’s material well-being, may have been what tipped him over to the Confederacy. Lee had never displayed any particular political sensibilities regarding states’ rights. In fact, he had spent most of his career outside the South. And yet, he was swayed by the Southern propaganda that Republicans, if allowed to gain power, would free the slaves. He blamed the Republicans for starting the war, instead of Southern secession and their firing on Fort Sumter. While Lee came from an old Virginia lineage, it was one clouded by scandal and reduced circumstances. His father bankrupted the family and fled to the West Indies. An older brother disgraced the family and fled to Europe. Stratford Hall, in my mind the most “English” colonial home in America, had been long lost to the Lees. His marriage to a Custis heir was a path back to respectability and prosperity. And the value of the Custis slaves were at its core.
In short, Lee was a complicated person, a man of certain strengths, but also of many fallibilities. I wonder if the statues erected to him sacrificed as much Truth as the one erected to Jean Bouchon? One thing is clear, the erection of civic statues is a political act, fraught with just as much room for mischief as their demolition.
A masterful connection of dots. As usual.
Excellent entertwining of two tales. I loved it. And you published it on my birthday too.
Robert E. Lee was long a figure of fascination and admiration to my younger self, though what I knew has proven to be the successfully mythologized version of his life. I didn't even know he owned slaves until recent years.
A complicated man and topic undoubtedly, as most Civil War issues are. My stance on the statues, Lee, and most else of that era is to decline to have a stance before ascertaining the level of nuance I'm dealing with. Perhaps a good rule for life.
P. S. My better half would critique me if I didn't throw in something along the lines of "Regardless of intellect or character or values, Lincoln was kind of a dictator".
Just calling balls and strikes.