“Oh Burr, oh Burr, what has thou done,/ Thou has shooted dead great Hamilton!/ You hid behind a bunch of thistle,/ And shooted him dead with a great hoss pistol!” – Anonymous, 1804

Actually the loathsome Aaron Burr didn’t hide behind a bunch of thistle on July 11 of 1804. He shot Washington’s chief revolutionary war military aide, and later Secretary of the Treasury, in a formally staged duel. But most “duels” were settled without lethal violence; Hamilton himself had been in 10 previous ones without a shot being fired. And Burr’s reputation, such as it was never recovered.

The amazing thing is that Burr was, at the time, vice-president of the United States and could very easily have been president. He was Jefferson’s running mate in 1796 and again in 1800 (here as elsewhere Jefferson showed an appalling lack of judgement). And here you must forgive a digression in to electoral mechanics to understand what happened.

Because the U.S. Constitution did not foresee, and its Founding Fathers did not want, political parties, the original electoral system gave each member of the Electoral College two votes for president, with the top two vote-getters becoming president and vice-president respectively.

It worked fine when George Washington was the universally acknowledged best choice; his unofficial running mate John Adams came comfortably second twice. But in the genuinely contested 1796 election, supporters of both Adams and his rival Thomas Jefferson realized that at least one of their Electors must not vote for their guy and his running mate or they’d end up tied.

This got people thinking of the mischief that could be achieved through strategic use of the second ballots. First the Jeffersonians, realizing they were going to lose either way, started hatching convoluted schemes to have some of their Electors cast one vote for Jefferson and the other for Adams’ running mate Thomas Pinckney so Pinckney not Adams would finish first and end up president.

Adams’ Federalists began counter-plotting, thinking of ways to cast sufficiently fewer votes for Pinckney than Adams that cunning Jeffersonians couldn’t put him over the top. It got out of hand, as these things will, and the unfortunate result when the dust had settled was that so many Federalists voted for Jefferson to undermine Pinckney that Jefferson came second and became Adams’ vice-president, an arrangement distressing to both.

In 1800 something even worse happened. The Federalists kept it simple, having all their Electors vote for Adams and all but one for his running mate Charles Pinckney, with a single vote going to another distinguished federalist. But the Jeffersonian Republicans somehow fumbled their attempt to carry out the same elementary plan, and Burr and Jefferson wound up tied.

Enter Hamilton. The result of the tie, constitutionally, was to send the election to the House of Representatives then sitting, the one elected in 1798, controlled by the now-defeated Federalists. Voting by state not by individual representative, it deadlocked for a week, voting 35 times and each time giving Jefferson a majority (8 states) but not the 2/3 needed to settle it. Finally Hamilton, convinced that Burr was more dangerous than Jefferson because the latter had wrong principles while the former had none, persuaded his colleagues to make Jefferson president. (The voting system was fixed by the 12^th Amendment in time for the 1804 contest, creating separate presidential and vice-presidential votes for each member of the Electoral College.)

Clearly giving the presidency to Jefferson in 1800 was the right decision. It reflected the popular will (except that in 1800, had slave states not been overrepresented electorally, Adams would have won). And Burr really was worse than Jefferson.

So bad that, as Burr’s relations with Hamilton deteriorated after this incident, partly due to the admittedly prickly Hamilton’s outspoken criticisms, Burr challenged him to a duel, refused to have the matter settled honorably without bloodshed, and killed Hamilton.

Burr was charged with murder but never tried. He then went west to try to repair his shattered fortunes in land schemes so shady that Jefferson ended up having him arrested and tried for treason. He was acquitted, but left the United States in 1807, returning quietly and penniless in 1811, changed his name, practised law, and died in 1836, the same day his second wife divorced him for squandering her money in a final round of land speculations. About the only good thing you can say about the latter part of Burr’s life is that it was quietly rather than spectacularly disgraceful. And thank goodness he was never president.

I say it though I’m no fan of Thomas Jefferson. He was a man of utopian abstractions, unreasonably sympathetic to the French Revolution, reckless geopolitically and an absolute and hypocritical wretch on race. But there was a certain noble grandeur even about his errors. And it is striking in this context to reflect that, in its formative decades, the fledgling American Republic did not have a single truly bad president.

Some were undeservedly unpopular, like John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams. Others were undeservedly popular, especially Jefferson. But not one of the first eight were squalid, vicious or pitiful. Burr was all three, irremediably.

Were it not for Hamilton’s great achievement in putting aside his partisan and personal antipathy for Jefferson and securing him the presidency, the U.S. might have suffered untold harm from having the genuinely dreadful Aaron Burr in the White House. It’s bad that he killed Hamilton. But he might have done far worse.

Seventy-five years ago, on July 10 1940, the German Luftwaffe began one of the pivotal battles in world history, the Battle of Britain. Hundreds of planes attacked shipping in the English channel as the preliminary effort to draw out the Royal Air Force, destroy it, and thus keep the Royal Navy away from the planned “Operation Sealion” invasion of the United Kingdom.

It didn’t work. By the narrowest of margins, through desperate efforts by airmen from many nations including Canada, using the latest technology, with some luck and enormous grit, the British cause triumphed. What if it had not?

What if, to take just one example, the British had not developed a new alloy in the winter of 1938-39 that gave the Spitfire a harder propeller casing, more RPMs and a critical speed advantage over the rival Messerschmitt 109? Or suppose a limited British raid on Berlin in late August had not sent Hitler into one of his patented rages in which he ordered the Luftwaffe to destroy London, turning its main attention away from Britain’s radar and airfields and giving them a desperately needed break?

Possibly not all that much. Maybe the Germans would have been logistically incapable of getting across the channel in decisive force anyway. But I hate to think of it. After all, the Blitzkrieg had crushed Denmark, Norway and then France with stunning speed. I harbor a bleak image of Britain’s famed battleships desperately entering the fray without air cover and sinking blazing into an oil-covered sea as Swastika-ed landing craft rush the beaches at Hastings.

The odd thing about pivotal battles is that there are so many of them. There are other what-ifs from this period including what if the Bismarck, in its mad dash to evade the Royal Navy in May 1941, had run into either of the American battleships USS New York or USS Texas as, I believe, FDR rather hoped it would, and opened fire? We might then see this clash, precipitating early American entry into the European war, as pivotal.

I sometimes think liberty has hung by a highly improbable thread all along. Other times I think the underlying resilience of free people is so great that if one had been lost another would have been won soon afterward. The British government was, after all, still willing to trust its citizens with weapons in 1940 and it is not impossible that a German occupying force would have been destroyed by civilian resistance. But I am glad we did not find out.

In the middle of the Battle of Britain, Churchill told the House of Commons “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few”. Looking back, despite all the vagaries of history, I believe he was right. It is one of many pivotal battles in which a fairly small but very determined band of free men and women snatched victory from the looming jaws of defeat.

On this day in history, back in 1850, President Zachary Taylor died of cholera. Sic transit lack of gloria mundi, you may say. Or just “Who?!?” But think for a moment what might have happened otherwise.

Taylor himself was, well, an undistinguished politician. But he was a distinguished military man, both in the War of 1812 and, admittedly against less than overwhelmingly odds, in the lopsided Mexican-American war. And he was a reasonable if cynical choice for the Whig Party in their second real shot at the White House.

Two elections prior, in 1840, they had successfully elected William Henry Harrison, an even more elderly distinguished military man of equally vague political beliefs, only to have him die of pneumonia a month after delivering an endless windy inaugural address on a cold windy day, bringing his ticket-balancing-Democrat vice-president John Tyler into the White House. And when Taylor died, it brought undistinguished vice-president Millard Fillmore into the White House where he served out his term without distinction or effect.

The poor Whigs. They never had another chance. The Democrats, who had pounced in 1844 and elected the mediocre James Polk, pounced in 1852 and elected the mediocre Franklin Pierce, then in 1856 the superficially distinguished but ineffective James Buchanan. Then came the Republicans, Lincoln and Civil War.

Now the sad thing here is that the Whigs were meant to be the moderate alternative on the issue everyone knew mattered most, and threatened to tear the Republic asunder, slavery. Taylor himself was a Southerner and a slave-owner. But he was no fire-eater. Rather than pushing for the unlimited expansion of slavery he sought a reasonable compromise to contain it. And he vocally deplored secession.

Was any such compromise possible? Probably not. Was Taylor the man to make it happen? Again, probably not. The Compromise of 1850, well-meaning and ultimately disastrous, had the support of genuine statesmen like Henry Clay of Kentucky and Daniel Webster of Massachusetts. And when I say “compromise” I do not mean some arrangement that could have kept slavery in existence indefinitely. I mean some quiet way of winding it down.

The reason it matters is that, while we cannot know what might have happened under a strong Whig administration in the late antebellum period, we can and do know that the actual course of events was a disaster. It not only subjected the United States to a bloody civil war but, in the aftermath of that conflict, imposed a punitive Reconstruction on the South that was more about punishing Rebels than protecting blacks and sewed bitterness and resentment that helped keep bigotry and segregation strong for another century.

I am sympathetic to the gathering radical forces within the Republican Party who feared that any compromise on slavery meant accepting it in perpetuity and hope if I had been alive then I would have joined them. I am glad they prevailed. But I do wish they could have prevailed without war, for the sake of all concerned but most particularly of American blacks.

To say all that is not to say that cholera, any more than assassination, could alter the course of history. There were “forces” at work here, from economics to culture to a hardening of political hearts, that would probably have overcome even a much more forceful politician than Taylor. But presidential leadership on slavery was shockingly lacking in the 1840s and especially the 1850s. And it is a shame that the two presidents the Whigs did manage to elect both died early, leaving the Democrats essentially in control of the White House without interruption for the pivotal three decades leading up to the firing on Fort Sumter.

Just maybe, it might have been different had Taylor survived his sudden attack of cholera in the summer of 1850.

On July 8 back in 1994 Kim Il-sung died. Sort of. I mean, his body perished. His ideas had long predeceased him. But the Constitution of North Korean declared him “Eternal President” on September 5, 1998. So that’s one less thing.

Or one more, depending how you look at it. It’s one more lunatic touch from a regime that seemed to take positive delight in lunatic things (like Kim Jong-il’s reported 34 in his first-ever round of golf in October 1994 on a 7,700 yard course, including 11 aces, following his February perfect 300 in bowling) that they don’t have to worry about who to appoint president because a dead guy is hogging the job. Or a deity. Kim Il-sung’s birthday is a holiday in North Korea and is known as the “Day of the Sun”. Curious that atheistic materialists would regard their first ruler as a celestial and eternal being.

Like Lenin he was embalmed in that curious, grotesque and pathetic materialist form of immortality where the spirit vanishes and the incorruptible flesh remains. And citizens were apparently persuaded, or at least told, that neither Kim Il-sung nor Kim Jong-il defecated.

It is revealing in a base way that the current head of North Korea is head of the armed forces and First Secretary of the Worker’s Party of Korea. It’s a rather unsubtle reminder that in the absence of any genuine legitimacy, political power sprouts directly from the barrel of a gun. In some sense it’s always true; the political power of the free must come from weapons because only weapons can keep the evil at bay; thus Magna Carta was after all the product of armed citizens not merely elevated sentiments. But where freedom reigns the citizens were armed. North Korean does it differently.

It is even more revealing that the succession in North Korea has been dynastic. Kim Il-Sung himself was put in power by Stalin. But he was succeeded by his sun, I mean son, Kim Jong-il who in turn was succeeded by his son Kim Jong-un. When legitimacy is lacking, the primal reasserts itself because at least you know who his son is and there’s quite literally no other basis on which even to begin discussing the question of who should lead us. (Raul Castro is a less hallucinogenic version of the same rule.)

Now to be fair it’s not straight dynastic, at least in the sense that Kim Jong-il was not succeeded by his eldest son, who preposterously fell from favour after being caught trying to sneak into Japan to visit Tokyo Disneyland. But what an embarrassing method of succession, especially for the ultimate progressive regime, to revert to the most primitive system imaginable. I exempt rule by whoever hits everyone else on the head, which might be more primitive (or not; like the sharks who have two fetuses who fight to the death in the womb at least it tests your basic fitness) but is not really a system.

One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Both seem appropriate. But one must also scratch one’s head. For North Korea is not just instructive for the way its berserk tyranny reverted to dynastic biology. It is also instructive for the way that, once a regime becomes officially insane (and I have not begun to list all the absurd claims made about Kim Il-sung including the miraculous signs at his birth), there seems to be a perverse positive dynamic to get ever crazier rather than a prudent belief that we should keep it from being laugh-out-loud silly. It’s not just that forcing people to swallow patent untruths humiliates and weakens them; it seems that as J. Budziszewski has argued, once your conscience is set to negative polarity it pushes you away from good as firmly as a normal one pushes you away from evil.

Finally, the obvious religious overtones of the whole cult of personality around the “Heavenly Leader” show how dismally official atheism fails to satisfy basic human desires. Even a regime that could portray the portly clumsy Kim Jong-il as a superhuman athlete without normal bodily functions could not just say the boss died, get over it, we have power and you don’t.

In that sense, if no other, Kim Il-sung was the great teacher his state propaganda machine declared him to be.

On this day a decade ago, suicide bombers set off three bombs on the London subway and one on a bus during rush hour. The bombers killed 52 people, plus their own wretched selves, and injured over 700 in Britain’s worst terrorist incident since the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, its first ever suicide attack, and the most serious attack on British soil since World War II. And yet it accomplished nothing.

I do not of course minimize the pain of those who lost friends and relatives, or those who suffered injuries in the blasts. My point, though, is that the attack did not change British government policy nor did it achieve the main goal of terrorism, to terrify.

Again, to say so is not uncritically to endorse British government policy on any issue from immigration to defence spending. London is behaving in a singularly fatuous and feckless way, barely affected by the change from Labour to coalition to Tory ministries in the intervening years. But it is doing so for reasons common to all the advanced democracies, not because of any reaction public or political to “7/7”.

To some extent the British establishment seems to me to underestimate the threat of terror rather than to overestimate it. As has been habitual, it fails to grasp the nature or scale of the threat to the West from the rising tide of Islamism, Vladimir Putin’s feeble rampage, the increasingly desperate geopolitical lunge by the proud, brittle tyranny in Beijing, and from its own loss of economic dynamism and social cohesion, its demographic decline, the growth of narcissistic hedonism and its fading faith in itself and loss of common sense.

If it were up to me, I would worry that three of the four bombers were British-born and the fourth was a convert from Jamaica. And that a poll two years later found that a quarter of British Muslims surveyed said the alleged bombers did not actually carry out the attacks. The West has a habit of fatuity in the face of foreign aggression that is now overlaid with an increasing dependence on an increasingly unlimited and incompetent state. But none of this resulted from the terror attacks of July 7, 2005, or the utterly botched follow-up two weeks later.

Even the shockingly intrusive nature of surveillance in modern Britain came from Tony Blair, a man of whom on another occasion I should have much to say, none of it good. But this is not that occasion. Instead, I want to praise the British people for keeping calm and carrying on.

We used to hear, in the aftermath of 9/11 in particular, that if we did X, Y or Z the terrorists would have won. But the key thing was always that if we became terrified they would have won and that has not happened including in Britain after 7/7.

If you look at the list of incidents at the outset you see that 7/7 was the work of Islamist fanatics, the Lockerbie bombing of the previous Marxist-tinged wave of secular radicalism that also spawned the Red Brigades and Saddam Hussein, and the one before that of the Nazis and assorted 1930s menaces. The specific threats to our way of life change, but their abiding hatred of the West does not. And one reason it does not is that for all our follies, there is a core of quiet competence and steady self-reliance that drives the fragile and frantic into a frenzy.

If we do fall, it will be largely because of what we do to ourselves, not what our enemies try to do to us. And at least in this respect, the British have behaved splendidly from July 7 2005 on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICkWjdQuK7Q On July 5, back in 1946, the bikini was introduced. And about time, you may say. What the world needs is more scantily clad young women.

Oddly, today that sentiment would be as politically incorrect as the suggestion that in that case maybe more modest swimwear would be in order. It is a sign of how far we have come since such a revealing garment could be banned in many places, condemned by the Vatican, and generally shunned in the United States until the 1960s, Brian Hyland’s 1960 “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini”, daring “beach blanket” movies with Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon, and so on into the psychedelic explosion.

Speaking of explosions, the bikini was named for Bikini Atoll in the Pacific, where the U.S. was conducting atomic bomb tests. French designer Louis Reard hoped it would cause an “explosive commercial and cultural reaction”. And in time it did; it’s remarkable that Reard originally had to hire an exotic dancer to model it, but back then those two-pieces that did exist from the 1930s in Europe, a halter top and shorts, definitely covered the navel. (It’s also remarkable that Reard’s competitor Jacques Heim had come up with a similar but less risqué suit he called the “atome” – nuclear was rather more chic back then than since.)

Now the bikini is revealing in many ways. Including, said the deathly dull economist nerd, in illustrating a classic problem in game theory. In order to attract male attention at the beach, a girl gains a lot including a reputation for unconventionality by showing just a bit more skin than her rivals. They must keep up and a kind of arms race develops in which bathing suits get smaller and smaller.

Now at first glance, or stare, you’d think only men win this competition. Women are basically forced to undress in public. Now I know, I know, you think I’m being a prude. There’s nothing wrong with a G-string and pasties and only in unenlightened days of yore were they regarded as strip club attire. (Or should I say “Gentleman’s club”, in deference to a convention of so describing places no gentleman would go?) But the truth is that typical bathing suits now are tiny, uncomfortable and require aggressive waxing. And not that great for men.

As suits shrink, tastes become jaded. Jane Wyman was thought to look hot in halter top and shorts in 1935 (see the Wikipedia picture) and it’s hard to believe so many men could have been wrong including, in fact, Ronald Reagan, who once married her. If we now think such an outfit drab, it means we are world-weary and numb. And that’s not good.

Even if you think I’m being stuffy, concede for purposes of argument that the Incredible Shrinking Bikini is bad for both genders. (At the very least, it has helped inspire men to wear thongs, many of whom ought to be hauled off by the fashion police without delay.) What then can be done?

The girl who wears a slightly more modest suit simply loses male attention (or female in these enlightened times) and acquires a reputation for stuffiness. A bikini can shrink gradually but it can’t expand gradually. There’s a one-way ratchet effect there.

If the same is true in all kinds of areas of social life, if a slight relaxation of conventional rules on anything from swimwear to hairstyle to tattoos and piercings is easy to achieve, year on year, but impossible to stop or reverse, we’ll wind up with it all hanging out, glittering, blue-green or pink, deafening and coarse, impossibly wild by the standards of a few decades back and yet to our jaded eyes tired and unimpressive. And yet there will be no easy way back. Women could firmly insist on wearing considerably more modest suits and turn the tide. But it cannot happen millimetre by millimetre.

Finally, if this sort of process happens in ways that are harmful to social stability and possibly to government budgets as well, there’s clearly a dangerous trap here. If the old idea of welfare as bad for character can be whittled away by slowly expanding entitlements, but cannot be restored by slowly shrinking them, why, we might end up with massive government deficits and debts and a populace lacking the self-control to support politicians willing to make dramatic changes.

Again, you may say I’m imagining things. But if you compare the excitement the bikini first generated, the scandal and controversy even, with the apathy it now inspires, how thrilling men once found the garment and how ho-hum they now find it, it’s hard not to believe that there is a one-way ratchet both in swimwear and our capacity to find it exciting. And the Incredible Shrinking Bikini might be a metaphor for much that is happening inexorably around us to no one’s advantage.

On this date in 1776 the American colonies did not declare their independence. It actually happened on July 2. But it came to be celebrated on the 4^th and rightly so.

On July 3rd, John Adams, later Washington’s Vice President then President in his own right, wrote to his beloved wife Abigail that “The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America.” But never mind. The 4th it is, as it was in their minds.

It was on the 2^nd that Congress approved Independence. But it was on the 4^th that Congress approved the Declaration of Independence and it quickly became the de facto date of Independence and, of course, the official holiday. And I think it underlines the nature of cultural memory that quibbling is not merely pointless in practice but in theory in the face of such commemorations.

Why was the key date the 4^th even in the minds of the Founders, those who were there at the time, when Independence was actually declared on the 2^nd? Because it was on the 4^th that the explanation for Independence was declared. And while the American Revolution was, clearly and explicitly, a vindication of ancient British liberties, it was also a singularly articulate expression of how those ancient rights were universal and timeless truths, a City on a Hill whose light was offered to the entire world.

In fact there’s a preposterous story about the Founders and July 4 that shows how deeply it penetrated the national consciousness within living memory of the original event. And when I say preposterous I mean not in the sense of being silly or untrue but in the sense of being too remarkable to have been invented. Following independence, the turmoil of the 1780s and the successful writing and ratification of the Constitution, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson became not merely political rivals but bitter enemies.

Adams and his followers suspected Jefferson and his supporters of being Jacobins, partisans of the French Revolution, dangerous intolerant shallow fanatics. For their part, the Jeffersonian party thought Adams and his high federalists were crypto-monarchists, enemies of the American Revolution, dangerous intolerant plutocratic elitists.

When Jefferson won the 1800 election, which would not have happened had the slave states not been overrepresented in the Electoral College, and swept Adams’ Federalists from power forever, Adams himself sourly left Washington before his hated rival was even inaugurated.

After Jefferson too had left the White House, the two men were persuaded to correspond and try to bridge the gulf that had opened between them. And successfully; a letter from Adams on Jan. 1 1812 led to a fond 14-year correspondence that only ended when both men died just hours apart on, of all dates, the 4^th of July, 1826, by common consent the 50^th anniversary of “Independence”.

The two men never really changed. In 1816 Jefferson would admit that Adams had been right about the French Revolution. But asked for a public statement as the 50^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence approached, Jefferson provided a characteristically windy and utopianism declaration about Independence being “the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves” and so on.

The austere Adams simply said “‘I will give you ‘Independence forever!’” Asked if he had anything to add, he replied “Not a word.” Actually he did have something more to say. His final words from his deathbed on July 4, 1826 were “Jefferson still survives.” In fact he did not; he had died five hours earlier. Clearly both had been hanging on by force of will to see the anniversary and clearly both considered it the anniversary.

If the author of the Declaration and one of the greatest figures in the struggle for independence and the nation’s second president could settle on the 4^th, it’s the real date no matter what quibblers may say.

On July 3, 1863, the Union won the Civil War. Or perhaps one should say the Confederacy lost it. Or perhaps neither.

July 3 was the final day of the pivotal battle of Gettysburg, including the lunatic venture known as Pickett’s Charge. Whatever qualities Robert E. Lee possessed as a commander, and they were rightly legendary, they seem to have deserted him on that occasion. I’ve just rewatched the brilliant movie Gettysburg, partly because we were just at the battlefield last month as part of our Magna Carta documentary (if you’re wondering what the connection is, watch the documentary when it appears.) And I fantasize about being among the generals trying to talk Lee out of ordering the attack, including his right-hand man James Longstreet, and saying “Sir, if you held that high ground and the Union commander ordered his men to advance across all that open ground exposed to superior artillery fire, you would consider him unfit to command, would you not?”

Except as with all such scenarios, if I could have given Lee advice that would help the Confederacy win I would not give it. Even though it meant the death of many brave men who deserved a better cause than slavery which was at the core of the Confederacy no matter what excuse anyone makes. If I could have been anywhere at Gettysburg, in my fantasies, I would have wanted to be with Joshua Chamberlain’s 20^th Maine at Little Round Top. And if you don’t know that story, watch the movie… although I warn you that if you read a biographical sketch of Chamberlain you are likely to feel that you have wasted your life. But I digress.

The most amazing thing about Gettysburg is that Lee ordered the fatal advance on July 3 despite all the advice he did get and the judgement he unquestionably did possess. The only explanation I can find is that he knew the war was lost and couldn’t face the fact and reached for a miracle because nothing else would do.

Which is why I say Gettysburg may not have been as important as it looked. The Union had, it is true, managed to lose almost every battle that attracted major attention despite having superior forces. They had lost repeatedly on Southern soil and now the war was coming North. And a major loss at Gettysburg would have been harmful for morale and put Washington DC itself in peril. And yet there is another way of looking at the matter.

Despite what was happening in the East, the heroics of the Army of Northern Virginia, and the peculiar paralysis that seemed to afflict many Union commanders, there was another war being fought in the West, down the Mississippi, splitting the Confederacy and exposing Lee’s strategic rear. The day after Gettysburg, July 4, Grant captured Vicksburg, Mississippi, the last Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi, as part of the aptly named Anaconda Plan that would indeed asphyxiate and crush the South inexorably.

Still, there is something fitting that on July 4^th, with Lee in retreat, the Union had driven the South’s greatest commander permanently from its soil along with the Confederacy’s most storied army. It was a remarkable victory and deserves its place in the national mythology. And if you’ve never been to the battlefield and get a chance, you should definitely go.