TO & E.

This is coolbert:

Here from the "History Detectives", an episode with a military dimension! [many of the History Detective episodes have a military dimension]

"Calhoun BOOKS - - THE DETECTIVE: Gwen Wright"

A set of books, is it six books or is it eight [??], purchased at a local library sale, and thought to have belonged to the famous U.S. Senator John C. Calhoun.

"how one man’s study of the Roman Empire may have helped spark the American Civil War."

"A man in South Carolina recently bought a six-volume set of books from a small-town library and made what may be an astonishing find.

"A South Carolina man has a beautiful eight-volume set of Edward Gibbon’s famous History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"

"Dated 1789, these early volumes of the History are inscribed with the signature of John C. Calhoun."

"Along with Daniel Webster of Massachusetts and Henry Clay of Kentucky, Calhoun was part of The Great Triumvirate of statesmen who set the terms of debate on the most challenging issues of their time" [first half of the nineteenth century.]

Books, the complete set by Gibbon - - owned [?] and read and re-read by Calhoun! Books that have note[s] in the hand-writing of Calhoun - - regarding the organization [TO & E] of a Roman Legion!

[TO & E: Table of Organization and Equipment.]

“Cohorts consisting of 500 to 600 men, ten cohorts constituting a legion.”

Calhoun and other southerners like him did see the Roman Empire as the archetype for emulation. Rule by a small group of highly educated, independently wealthy aristocratic persons! Persons devoid of petty concerns, sharing an interest in enlightened and beneficent government. Persons whose aristocratic mien and status was related to the ownership of land, the production of a cash crop from a plantation WORKED BY SLAVES!!

"The southern planters were attracted to all things Roman . . . They compared their civilization, which they considered to be the height of anything that was then existent in the world. They looked back to Greece and Rome and made those parallels"

Calhoun did envisage the day when the various southern states might have to fight for their independence. And did see the TO & E of the Roman Legion as a model for military organization and structure? It appears so!

That Calhoun - - a statesman, a Senator - - an intellectual - - a voracious reader - - paid particular interest to the TO & E of a Roman Legion - - surprises?

coolbert.