Patrick K. ODonnell joins Steve and Alex to discuss the impact of the Christmas season on the fighting during the Civil War, including the Christmas Eve raid at Trenton and the Christmas Day assault in Trenton, New Jersey.
00:02:23.000Welcome. It's Monday, 25 December in the year of our Lord, 2023. It is Christmas Day and we are honored to do a tradition.
00:02:32.420We started back at Breitbart Radio, I don't know, a decade ago. We've had our colleague and friend, I believe the best combat historian of his generation, Patrick K. O'Donnell.
00:02:45.440Join us every year for the combat history of Christmas. What we try to do is make sure everybody's aware that in this holiest of seasons for the Christian faith,
00:02:56.620in one of the most joyous seasons, obviously for everyone in the Judeo-Christian West with Hanukkah and then the celebratory joys of Santa Claus and all of that for the little kids,
00:03:09.220is that there have been many times in American history, in fact, pivot points in American history have come during this Christmas season in brutal winter conditions oftentimes.
00:03:20.500Patrick K. O'Donnell joins us. Patrick, why is it? Is it because people have gone on the offensive?
00:03:27.260What is it about, you know, when we talk about, as we'll get to the Christmas night in Trenton to really turn the American Revolution or we talk about the Battle of the Bulge or the Chosin Reservoir or all other of these?
00:03:44.240And this new episode we're going to talk about coming from your book, The Unvanquished. The book will be out over Memorial Day this year.
00:03:51.540What is it about the Christmas season, I guess, and winter in many aspects that caused major combat to happen?
00:04:00.540The United States is nearing 250 years, Steve. And Christmas, in many cases, when America is at war, has been a great inflection point.
00:04:11.360Either America has gone on the attack, that being the Revolutionary War, or our enemies have attacked us.
00:04:18.480And as you mentioned, weather often plays a huge factor in this. Weather covers or screens offensive moves.
00:04:28.180And this is often when the enemy or the United States is struck during, you know, during our conflicts over the last 250 years.
00:04:37.420And these times have been, I mean, we're talking about some of the most brutal battles in American history.
00:04:47.800Battle of the Bulge, caught unawares, Chosin Reservoir, right?
00:04:51.480A lot of reasons for that. But we're talking about the level of intensity of combat has been pretty amazing, has it not?
00:04:59.660It's been incredible. In all the conflicts that America has been involved in, the level of intensity in combat has been exceptional.
00:05:12.300And that is certainly the case with the Civil War, which I think is some of the most brutal combat that we faced.
00:05:19.940And, you know, if we go back, for instance, to the winter slash autumn of 1863, it's here that the Confederates earlier win a great battle at Chickamauga down in Tennessee on the Georgia border.
00:05:35.880And they surround the vital town of Chattanooga with their forces.
00:05:41.300But Missionary Ridge takes place and they break that siege and a new siege takes place at Knoxville.
00:05:48.420And it's here that a raid has to be taken, has to take pressure off of that siege.
00:05:54.660And that is, it's part of the one episode, a Christmas kind of raid, if you will, that involves the recent, the forthcoming book that I've written, The Unvanquished.
00:06:05.880Which is on Lincoln Special Forces, otherwise known as Jesse Scouts.
00:06:12.440And these were just exceptional men that were, in many cases, only 18 or 19 years old.
00:06:17.700Young boys that had to volunteer for hazardous duty.
00:06:21.180And they had no idea, in many cases, what that was.
00:06:23.720But after they volunteered, they raised their hand, they volunteered, they were given a Confederate uniform as Union soldiers.
00:06:30.080And then had to do some of the most hazardous duty of the entire Civil War.
00:06:34.220And most of these men never came home.
00:06:38.060They would receive seven medals of honor.
00:07:36.700I've been working on this book for six years.
00:07:38.500And it is a true untold story that America in 1941 had no special operations forces, and it would be Wild Bill Donovan that would look back on these men, as well as the Confederate forces under John Singleton Mosby and the Confederate Secret Service, to forge our special forces, which would become the U.S. Army Green Berets and others.
00:08:05.540And it would change the course of history.
00:08:22.160You know, Bolton just used this the other day in this talk about insurrection.
00:08:27.400He made the case that, you know, a lot of this thing that's happening in Colorado and the discussion around insurrection, that the lawmakers – you know, the secession move in the insurrection, there were 620,000, what, casualties, and not even counting civilian casualties.
00:09:05.340Well, I'll be through your research because this is why people are so fascinated.
00:09:08.560When they read your books, they're so heavily researched, first-person accounts that come out of diaries and journals.
00:09:14.960Your books are popular because they read like novels, right, with these characters that, quite frankly, nobody's ever heard of until you write them up.
00:09:34.680It's been one of the wars that I've focused on.
00:09:38.480But I was driving around northern Virginia, and I ran across the roadside sign.
00:09:48.120And that road – there are two roadside signs.
00:09:50.080One was the final hanging place of one of these scouts.
00:09:55.840His name is Jack Sterry, and it's in the Plains, Virginia.
00:09:58.480And it's 1862, and Jack is in a Confederate uniform, and he is trying to guide General Hood's forces down the wrong road at the Second Battle of Manassas, which would have changed the course of history.
00:10:13.680And he is out guiding them and trying to convince them to go down this road.
00:10:19.140And they spent about an hour trying to interrogate this guy, trying to figure out who he was when he's, in fact, one of Lincoln's special forces.
00:10:27.040And he's trying to guide them down the wrong road.
00:10:29.180And they basically unmasked this individual, and they hang him near the spot of this sign.
00:10:38.000And in the 1960s, when they were widening the road, they found Jack's body as well as the Confederate that he had killed, who was a dispatch rider.
00:10:54.840And then it turns out that it had never been written up as a full book.
00:10:59.660And they had led the Union Army to victory in multiple battles.
00:11:05.500But within that story is the men that they had to fight against, which were some of the most incredible, dangerous men of the South that were just, in many cases, just formidable.
00:11:20.380Greatest partisan forces in the war were John Singleton Mosby, who begins with only a handful of men and then grows this partisan force to over a thousand.
00:11:37.360And they harass the Union relentlessly.
00:11:40.680And pretty much anything that goes into Mosby's Confederacy, which is this area in Northern Virginia, which is in and around Middleburg, Warrington, and Loudoun County, it remains untouched.
00:11:53.540And they tie down tens of thousands of forces.
00:11:55.460But within this story is also the story of influence operations that the Confederacy had launched to change the course of the election.
00:12:07.080And it's a lot of stuff that we see today.
00:12:09.400It's not just about supply and wagon trains, but it's also about influencing people and influence operations.
00:12:15.540And even the first ballots, for instance, mail-in ballots become part of the Civil War.
00:12:24.160And there's an entire fraud case, which involved tens of thousands of ballots for the Democratic candidate at that time, which I bring out in this book.
00:12:35.140So it's an epic story of seven medals of honor, men that basically do everything to win the war.
00:13:04.360They were called Jesse Scouts, and then they changed the name over time based on the commander.
00:13:10.640It would be Avril Scouts or it would be Sheridan Scouts.
00:13:13.020But they were – the heart of these men begin as Jesse Scouts, and they were named after John Fremont's wife, Jesse Fremont, in her honor.
00:13:26.380And as one quote said, he was a better man than even her husband.
00:16:57.040You even need to get jacked up even on a mellow Christmas day.
00:17:00.580You've got a big day ahead of you, right?
00:17:02.580So for those of you who didn't go to midnight mass or evening services yesterday, coming back from church services, we welcome you on Christmas Day.
00:17:09.620We do this as a traditional honor to honor patriots, to honor our country on Christmas Day.
00:17:16.140The combat history of Christmas, American patriots at war during the Christmas season and oftentimes on Christmas Day.
00:17:23.600You know, Jesse Fremont is one of my favorite – the Fremonts are one of my favorite couples in American history, and particularly that age of the Old West and really the rise of America as a world power.
00:17:39.840Her father was Thomas Hart Benton, who arguably, I think for Missouri, the most powerful – one of the most powerful senators in the United States Senate in the run-up to the Civil War.
00:17:49.600Her husband, the great pathfinder, John C. Fremont, was actually – Lincoln was not the first Republican nominee.
00:17:57.720Fremont ran in 1856, and Trump took the – Lincoln took the nomination away from Seward and Chase and Fremont in 1860, kind of out of nowhere, really a surprise candidate, although he was kind of the – I think the ones that abolitionists trusted the most, although he was not a fire-breathing abolitionist.
00:18:18.840There's a story, Patrick O'Donnell, that when Fremont actually as the military – he was the senior general in the West at the beginning of the Civil War.
00:18:29.560He actually put out a proclamation that freed the slaves in Missouri and in territories under his control, which is exactly what they didn't want to have happen.
00:18:40.100They're trying to keep the border states of Kentucky and Delaware, Maryland, and particularly Missouri, which had had a lot of partisan ranger fighting bloody Kansas and all that.
00:18:50.080So, you know, Lincoln sent him a direct telegram and kind of put him on notice, hey, you know, I'm the commander-in-chief.
00:19:18.200And she sent a message immediately from the Willard, which was obviously very dialed into the White House, to the White House, that she was there.
00:19:24.840And Lincoln, I think it was Hay, the young secretary, John Hay, sent a message to her, come immediately to the White House because Lincoln needed to hear this response from Fremont.
00:19:35.360And, you know, she gets there and it's got – I don't know, it's 1 o'clock in the morning.
00:19:39.300She gets there and she gives the letter, and I don't think the letter exactly was what President Lincoln was, you know, thinking – you know, wanted to see.
00:19:47.280And he's kind of reading it, and I think he asked her a question or he looked up.
00:19:50.820He did something, and she just – she just on a full board fuselage, boom, hit him, letting him know in her opinion, you know, he was not half the man her husband was.
00:20:02.080And quite frankly, he was kind of a clown, and he was the great – Fremont was the great pathfinder, really the leader.
00:20:07.200And she – and he needed to start – he needed to start – he needed to start listening to Fremont.
00:20:13.880Lincoln cut the conversation off pretty quickly and basically told, hey, get her out of town, get her back to the Willard, but get her on the next train back to Missouri.
00:20:24.720And then he relieved – he relieved Fremont for cause, I think, 48 hours later.
00:20:29.900So she was not shy about taking on the powers that be.
00:20:33.740She had been raised by one of the most powerful people in Washington and was not beyond telling somebody what they could do with it.
00:20:40.380So it's quite fascinating that the Rangers – that the Scouts were named in her honor.
00:20:47.340They are – the Scouts began in Missouri in that cauldron of brother against brother, this, you know, inner rivalry between, you know, people next door, neighbors, were fighting each other.
00:20:58.220And Fremont is put in there along with the men that he has, and he raises a series of Scouts, and they are named in Jesse's honor.
00:21:11.700The first commander of the Scouts is a guy by the name of Carpenter.
00:21:15.400And this is really made for a movie, Steve.
00:21:18.420The Carpenter is kind of – he's just full of it in many cases.
00:26:10.320Why would the urgency that you would send troops, particularly elite troops, into that type of a journey?
00:26:18.280The urgency is that Knoxville is about to fall and they need to cut the supply line,
00:26:23.760the Virginia-Tennessee Railroad, which runs through Salem along with other points all the way down to Tennessee.
00:26:30.060And the plan is to act as a diversion, to basically cut the supply line, maybe cut the ability for the Confederacy to remove Longstreet from down there or supply him,
00:26:41.920but also act as a distraction to draw troops away from that front to deal with this new threat.
00:26:49.960And this new threat creates a massive response from the Confederates.
00:26:54.440Six commands of Confederates on horseback, largely, then go after Avril and these scouts.
00:27:01.500And it is a brutal march through the mountains, as you mentioned.
00:27:06.040But they also have to evade constantly the Confederates, which are on their tail.
00:27:09.900After they destroy the railroad, they then have to escape.
00:27:13.000And it's the scouts that do some amazing things, Steve.
00:27:16.380They run into, for instance, an enemy scout.