Posted on 04/01/2017 4:22:05 AM PDT by Bull Snipe
Major General's George Pickett and Fitzhugh Lee attend a shad bake near Dinwiddie Courthouse
How baking a fish helped shorten a war...
I guess shad is better than no food at all.
Had they cooked it electrically, it could have been the Shad-Shock Redemption.
On this day in 2017, I had lox and cream cheese on a bagel for breakfast. Now I’m ready for war.
My greatgrandfather and his brothers served under Fitzhugh Lee.
I’m going to the Occoquan River (Potomac tributary) today to see if the shad are running. When it’s hot, there is no better fishing for me. Like mini tarpon. On a few occasions over the years, I’ve caught so many shad in one day that my arms wore out and I had to quit. I stopped counting, but I guess I caught close to 100 fish. So much fun.
When I was a boy, we ate shad roe and scrambled eggs quite often.
I live across the street from it in the town of the same name. I just saw somebody out in a boat below the dam a few minutes ago. I’m not a fisherman, but I can’t remember the last time I saw a boat on the river from my limited vantage.
What evil lurks in the hearts of men? Only the shad roe knows.
That’s quite witty for a Marine
http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/pickett_george_e_1825-1875
< snip>
Pickett rejoined the Army of Northern Virginia in May 1864, even regaining his old division, but nothing was the same. The last ignoble chapter of his military career came on April 1, 1865. At the Battle of Five Forks, Union troops successfully attacked Lee’s right flank, ending their ten-month siege and forcing the fall of Petersburg and the Confederate capital of Richmond. Pickett, however, left his troops poorly positioned for the fight when he left the lines for an infamously long lunch—a shad bake with Fitzhugh Lee, Robert E. Lee’s nephew. The “food was abundant,” the historian Douglas Southall Freeman has written, and “the affair was leisured and deliberate as every feast should be.” In the meantime, the battle was lost and Pickett was removed from command. The surrender at Appomattox Court House came just eight days later, on April 9.
“For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armstead and Wilcox look grave yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago....”
William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust
I’ve never had roe although I’ve been to the Delaware Shad festival in New Hope many times. I haven’t tried it because even the cooks tell me it’s awful, lol!
Lovely words. I also recommend Thomas Wolfe’s description of Gettysburg in “O, Lost” which is the full manuscript of “Look Homeward Angel” and is published. His father as a boy witnessed the battle and it makes for fine reading.
“In Dixie Land I’ll take my stand
to live and die in Dixie.”
Forlorn hope indeed ...
Awful is exactly how I remember it.
It was recently an ingredient in the cooking game show Chopped and it even looked awful.
Thanks for the post. Picked up quite a bit that I did not know about General Pickett.
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