Natural History

Some natural history notes from George Templeton Strong’s extraordinary Civil War Diaries, out in a new edition from Library of America edited by friend-of-the-blog Geoff Wisner. 

I. In September, 1864, Strong retails an anecdote from Washington DC. It seems a fan of George McClellan, the failure of a Union General who became a failure of a Democratic Presidential candidate, was droning on about flying across the land to tout "Little Mac" when someone in the audience shouted “Oh shut up. You wouldn’t fly thirty rods before somebody shot for you a Shite-poke.”


Shite-poke is a pungent Americanism for the smaller herons: Green, Night, Yellow-crowned, Bittern, so labeled because, as the OED decorously puts it “the birds’ habit of defecating when disturbed.”


II. In October of 1864, Strong bought two North Carolina “Fox Squirrels” from a menagerie on West Broadway as pets for his oldest son (about to enter his “teens”—so that word was already in use.) Squirrels were very popular pets in the 19th century; I guess I assumed people caught their own, but city-dwellers obviously had the marketplace. Strong writes of the squirrels: “These exiled secessionists are fully goodnatured fat & intelligent unlike their fellow countrymen.” A couple of weeks later, the squirrels get loose and started chewing their way through the “Trunks, carpetbags & other valuables” in the attic.


III. Strong delights in using the word “Coprophagous” in reference to Copperheads and other agents of treason. The notes making reference to the dung beetle, which of course rolls up balls of dung for its larvae, but the literal meaning, shit-eating, says it more directly.


IV. Copperheads was a disparaging term for the Peace Democrats, that faction of the then Democratic Party that wanted peace with the Confederacy (and continued slavery). The term comes from the snake. These Southern sympathizers and anti-abolitionists tried to flip the insult into positive territory by adopting the image of Liberty’s head from copper pennies—but when you are a supporter of baby-selling, women-flogging, and slave-raping, your adherence to Liberty is pretty damn specious. (Strange how the nominal designations of the parties have transformed; once “Republican” was used by the adherents of Lincoln and Emancipation, today it used by a cult that empowers death squads and ethnic cleansers.)


V. August 21, 1865: “Throughout Virginia, the Canada Thistle is springing up abundantly in the track of every Northern column & Calvary ride, or in other words over all the State. It used to be nearly unknown there. But it’s seeds were mingled with Northern oats & passed undigested through the bowels of myriad Northern Horses. — The appearance of our Eastern Milkweed in abundance along the lines of wagon travel over the great Western Plains is not so easily accounted for. Horses and cattle eat no milkweed seeds, & the only animals that specially affect it, so far as I have noticed, are certain slim longicorn Coleoptera.”