Civil War Librarian

News--- Freedman's Letter To His Former Owner [Part Three: Historical Detection]

2012-02-07T12:45:00.006-05:00

Text From HNet--Slavery Discussion Group:

This letter -- which is 100% legitimate -- "makes the rounds" every once in a while over the 147 years since it was first published in an Ohio paper, then copied in the NY Tribune, then in Lydia Maria Child's Freedmen's Book. In fact, it was oft-reprinted in a variety of publications between 1865-67, including in French. Then again during the 1960s/1970s. And again in the internet age.

Jordan (how his name was really spelled) and P.H. Anderson were real people. I've traced them and their story and am writing a book on both men and the letter. It's a fascinating story.

P.H. Anderson was "hip deep" in debt in August 1865 and had written Jordan, who had played a slave "managerial" role at Big Springs, to return I'm sure to help get in the harvest, help recruit back some of the slave laborers who had fled the plantation for nearby towns, and save the old plantation. Jordan didn't return, the plantation was lost, and P.H was dead by 1867.

Jordan and his family lived in Dayton, Ohio, from 1864 until his death in the early 20th century. He worked for the V. Winters mentioned in the letter.

Roy E. Finkenbine
Interim Dean and Professor of History
College of Liberal Arts and Education
University of Detroit Mercy
finkenre@udmercy.edu

Also, David Blight adds:

From: David Blight [mailto:David.Blight@yale.edu]

Dear all:

This is just an addendum to Roy Finkenbine's important interjection here
on the Jordan Anderson letter. It is indeed the real thing, and many
of us have been teaching with it for many many years. The internet
makes it new to new people, which is of course what the internet does.
Leon Litwack reprinted it in full in his book Been in the Storm So Long, which is I believe the first place I saw it. For those who may not have taught the letter, read it out loud to your students. It has a special poignancy when taught that way. And good luck Roy; what a great idea for a book about emancipation and its aftermath in microcosm.

David Blight
Professor of History and Director, the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, Yale University

Text Source: H-NET List for the History of Slavery

February 6, 2012

Image Source: The Brightest Man, WikiSource

News---Will Gettysburg's Famed Electric Map Become Hazardous Waste?

2012-02-03T14:10:00.004-05:00

The final fate of Gettysburg's Electric Map as yet to be decided, according to battlefield Superintendent Bob Kirby. But the map is "infused with asbestos," Kirby said in an email, and he must "determine the most environmentally appropriate and legal way" to dispose of it. Kirby sent the email in response to earlier reports the map was to be destroyed.

Created in 1963 for the 100th anniversary of the great battle, the map depicts troop movements with colored lights flashing across its topographically accurate surface. Other battlefields - nearby Monocacy outside Frederick, Md., for example - still use such maps to depict fighting and troop movements.

But when the new visitors center opened in 2009, the map was replaced with a 20-minute movie, "New Birth of Freedom," narrated by Morgan Freeman. The map, in pieces, now sits in storage; the Park Service has offered to give it away, but has said in the past it can't find a taker with the space to display it. Years after its closure, the map remains dear to many longtime battlefield visitors, and people reportedly still ask to see it.

Text Source: Gettysburg Times

News--- Freedman's Letter To His Former Owner [Part Two: Historical Detection]

2012-02-03T09:46:00.005-05:00

The letter, printed (as others have noted) in The New York Daily Tribune on 22 August 1865 ("Letter from a Freedman to his Old Master," p. 7), is prefaced with, "The following is a genuine document. It was dictated by the old servant, and contains his ideas and forms of expression. -- Cincinnati Commercial."

I've no particular reason to doubt that this letter is what it's claimed to be -- a letter written by a former slave to his former owner -- but it bears noting that a third party had a hand in its creation, at least to the extent that he or she took down Anderson's words. So, perhaps the writing also reflects corrections and revisions made by the person to whom Anderson dictated the text, though Childs prefaces her reproduction with "[w]ritten just as he dictated it." (How she knows this is unclear.)

Also unclear is how this letter arrived at the Cincinnati Commercial; given the time between the penning of the letter (August 7) and its appearance in the Cincinnati paper (sometime before August 22), a copy of the original (if the original had been sent) must've been handed over by Anderson, the person to whom he dictated the letter, or some advocate on either's behalf, and not forwarded by someone in Big Spring, Tennessee. (I should note that it would be interesting to see the letter that elicited Anderson's response.)

Text Source: snopes.com

Image Source: Mississippi Beautiful

News--- Freedman's Letter To His Former Owner. [Part One]

2012-02-03T09:38:00.006-05:00

In Rediscovered Letter From 1865, Former Slave Tells Old Master To Shove It

In the summer of 1865, a former slave by the name of Jourdan Anderson sent a letter to his former master. And 147 years later, the document reads as richly as it must have back then.

The roughly 800-word letter, which has resurfaced via various blogs, websites, Twitter and Facebook, is a response to a missive from Colonel P.H. Anderson, Jourdan's former master back in Big Spring, Tennessee. Apparently, Col. Anderson had written Jourdan asking him to come on back to the big house to work.

In a tone that could be described either as "impressively measured" or "the deadest of deadpan comedy," the former slave, in the most genteel manner, basically tells the old slave master to kiss his rear end. He laments his being shot at by Col. Anderson when he fled slavery, the mistreatment of his children and that there "was never pay-day for the Negroes any more than for the horses and cows."

Below is Jourdan’s letter in full, as it appears on lettersofnote.com. To take a look at what appears to be a scan of the original letter, which appeared in an August 22, 1865 edition of the New York Daily Tribune, click here. As Letters Of Note points out, the newspaper account makes clear that the letter was dictated.

Dayton, Ohio,August 7, 1865
To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee

Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin's to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again, and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me that Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.

I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here. I get twenty-five dollars a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy,—the folks call her Mrs. Anderson,—and the children—Milly, Jane, and Grundy—go to school and are learning well. The teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher. They go to Sunday school, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. We are kindly treated. Sometimes we overhear others saying, "Them colored people were slaves" down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks; but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Colonel Anderson. Many darkeys would have been proud, as I used to be, to call you master. Now if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.

As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars.

Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor's visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams's Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Here I draw my wages every Saturday night; but in Tennessee there was never any pay-day for the negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.

In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve—and die, if it come to that—than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.

Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

From your old servant,
Jourdon Anderson.

Text Source: Trymaine Lee [Columnist], Huffington Post

Image Source: Legends of Kansas

News---Gettysburg's Seminary Ridge Has Changes Coming : Museum and Leadership

2012-02-02T17:12:00.006-05:00

Gettysburg’s new Seminary Ridge Museum, slated to open in time for the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, announced today that Ms. Barbara Franco will serve as its first Executive Director of the Museum.

Barbara Franco is nationally recognized as a leader in the history museum field and has served as a past Chairman of the American Association for State and Local History. She brings a wealth of experience in historical interpretation and the opening and operation of new museums. She has been actively involved in planning for the Civil War 150th Anniversary at both the national and state level. A graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the Cooperstown Graduate Program, Franco has led museum programs in Massachusetts, Minnesota and Washington, D.C. Most recently, she served for nearly 8 years as the executive director of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.

Franco expressed her “delight to be working on this project, helping to preserve and bring to life one of the most important surviving buildings of the Civil War era in Gettysburg and be a part of one of the lasting legacies of the 150th anniversary of the great battle.”

Gettysburg’s Seminary Ridge Museum is currently under construction in preparation for opening in the spring of 2013. The exhibits will interpret the dramatic developments of the first day of battle, including the pivotal role of the building and its cupola used as lookout by General Buford and others, its conversion to field hospital for more than 600 wounded, and the moral and religious tensions around slavery, African-American history and the local work the Underground Railroad. The interpretations will include video productions, ambient and visitor selected audio programs, artifacts, original murals by Dale Gallon and multi-generational experiences in more than 16 thousand square feet, plus a special ticketed tour of its famous cupola.

Bradley R. Hoch MD, representing the management committee of the museum project, said: “Barbara Franco's skill, experience and proven success in museum creation are nationally recognized. She is the right executive director to open Gettysburg’s Seminary Ridge Museum, and we indeed are very fortunate."

Michael Cooper-White, President of the Lutheran Theological Seminary and partner in the joint venture, captured the importance of the project and choosing leadership carefully: “Converting Schmucker Hall into a state of the art museum is a cherished heirloom that we bequeath to present and future generations who search for the significance of the American Civil War. This museum will be a unique study in human conflict, compassion and commitment and will benefit from the leadership and guidance of Barbara Franco, who has the special skills and knowledge to help us steward this great treasure.”

Franco summed up her eagerness to join in the project, commenting “this museum will offer a new level of interpretation to the first day of the Battle, the building’s contributions to the social and religious context of the Civil War and its devastating aftermath. I am pleased to be able to combine my research and interest in 19th century history with my experience in museum interpretation, education and marketing.”

She is recognized as a national leader in history museums and is a past chairman of the American Association for State and Local History. Since 1997, she has been a faculty member of the Seminar for Historical Administration, teaching a course on “Managing Change” in historical museums and institutions. Ms. Franco has had extensive experience in exhibition development, published catalogues, articles, and given presentations on a number of topics that include historical interpretation, museum practice and historical research. She has been actively involved in heritage tourism development and in state and national planning for the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War.

Text Source: Historic Seminary Ridge Foundation

Image Source: Gettysburg Times

News---Virginia Civil War Hospital Partially Collapses, Now To Be Demolished

2012-02-02T09:38:00.003-05:00

Former Civil War Hospital Partially Collapses In Lynchburg,Chris Dumond, Alicia Petska and Dave Thompson, New Era Progress, February 01, 2012

A building that local historians said was once used as a Civil War hospital is set to be demolished after a partial collapse earlier this week. A wall of the 612 Dunbar Drive structure collapsed Monday night according to neighbors, although no one reported it to the city, Lynchburg Fire Battalion Chief Paul Ginther said. No one was injured. “We discovered it ourselves earlier today,” Ginther said Wednesday afternoon. “One of the guys on a medic unit was coming back from a call. He noticed the whole four stories of the back of the building had collapsed.”

He said neighbors reported it to a nearby business, which in turn contacted the owner, who lives in South Carolina. The owner contacted a construction company, which agreed to take down the entire structure. Ginther did not know when that could happen. This Civil War-era tobacco warehouse was one of many in Lynchburg that found itself pressed into service as a hospital during the war, according to local historians. Only two survived, this building and the current Morris Construction building on 12th Street, which has been refurbished and played host to some historical re-enactments. "You hate to lose something like this,” said Doug Harvey, director of the Lynchburg Museum System. “It’s a definite loss.”

During the war, dozens of local buildings were converted into hospitals, including 19 tobacco warehouses. In Virginia, Lynchburg was second to only Richmond in its number of Confederate hospitals. Peter Houck, author of “A Prototype of a Confederate Hospital Center in Lynchburg, Virginia,” said the city made for an ideal medical hub because its sloping terrain kept much of the fighting at bay. “For the most part, fighting was done on level ground, not hilly country like Lynchburg,” Houck said, adding the practice of taking soldiers to hospitals was an innovation of the Civil War. “Wounded soldiers used to be treated on battlefields in tents,” he said. “So it was a major change to start getting wounded soldiers off the battlefield and into hospital cities like Lynchburg.”

Most of Lynchburg’s warehouses-turned-hospitals were demolished in later decades. Houck said the Dunbar Drive warehouse, known as the Miller Building, had a particularly unusual background because it also served as a morgue during the war. “It’s too bad we’re losing our history this way,” he said, adding the cost of restoring buildings like these is often prohibitive.

“We have a hard enough time keeping up major historic sites like Poplar Forest and Point of Honor and Sandusky. It takes a lot of work on a lot of people’s part. So, unfortunately, places like the Miller Building can just end up being neglected.” The Morris family has been conscientious about maintaining the other building, Houck added, and hopefully will preserve it. The owner of the Dunbar Drive building, Harold Gibson, of Seneca, S.C., said his family had been looking to gauge interest in the building for its historical value, but the economic climate had made selling it impossible.

Gibson said he bought the building from his son, Leland Gibson, who had purchased the building as a warehouse for his heating and air conditioning business in Lynchburg before he moved back to South Carolina. “I wanted to get him some capital to be able to operate with,” Harold Gibson said, “so I bought it from him until he was able to re-purchase it back.” The transfer never happened.

City records indicate Harold Gibson bought the building in 2002, for $128,775. Leland Gibson bought the property in 1999 for $35,000. Harold Gibson said his son was traveling to Lynchburg on Wednesday to handle things for the family. “I’m sure it’s going to have to be demolished,” he said. The family didn’t have a timetable for tearing it down, he said, and would be working with the city to determine that. “Our major concern right now is safety ... and then make arrangements probably to demolish it.” He said the loss would be a substantial financial hit for his family, since the building can’t be sold. “I have a mortgage on it, and the cost of demolition,” he said.

“It will hit us pretty hard ... I don't know what the demolition costs might be.” Ginther said the building is unstable and could possibly collapse into Dunbar Drive, a bus route used by Paul Laurence Dunbar Middle School for Innovation. The road will remain closed until the building is demolished. Though the structure bore a Civil War Trails marker, it was not listed on the National Register of Historic Places, city officials said. Ginther said the building was braced years ago, but has been deteriorating from leaks in the roof and general lack of upkeep.

Text Source: The Daily Progress, February 1, 2012

Image Source: The Daily Progress, February 1, 2012

Off Topic---The Last Stands of Custer and Sitting Bull

2012-01-27T10:45:00.004-05:00

The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Nathaniel Philbrick, Viking Press, 466 pages, 18 maps, 64 b/w images, 11 color images, notes, bibliography, two appendices, 2010, $30.00 hardcover, $18.00 paperback.

Nathaniel Philbrick handled the histories Mayflower and the whaleship Essex exceptionally well. His consideration of Custer, Sitting Bull and their greatest battle is a fine example of good storytelling with primary sources, archaeology and artifacts. His presentation of the Custer legend and the development of the Little Big Horn story in popular culture is clear and concise. The films They Died With Their Boots On and Little Big Man are set within the Custer and Native American historiographies. Philbrick states that Custer is “more a cultural lightning rod than a historical figure, an icon instead of a man.”

The United State centennial celebration, the Democratic national presidential convention, and army politics are several of the many issues for George Armstrong Custer. The facets of Custer the man include glory seeking, charisma, the ability to deny obvious realities, personal arrogance, and a cheating heart. Sitting Bull is shown to be a prophet, warrior and chief. Philbrick states that Sitting Bull was "convinced that he alone had his people’s welfare in view, a conviction that inevitably exasperated those Lakota attempting to meet the challenges of reservation life in their own way."

Regarding his description of the Battle of The Little Big Horn and Indians' two day siege of Reno's troops, Philbrick is cautious in his claims. He relies on the army's inquiry testimony, survivors accounts, Native American accounts, Libby Custer's promotional efforts and modern archaeology to reveal the discrepancies of past narratives. Multiple points of view are presented in his narrative of specific events such as Custer's wounding and later death, Benteen's and Reno's character and the Native Americans attitudes toward their own chances of self defense. Overall, Philbrick's account is judicious in the weight he gives terrain and weather, weapons and logistics, and behaviors during crises. Compellingly written, informative and fair, Philbrick's The Last Stand is an engaging history book.

News---Call For Research On Confederate Soldiers' Wartime and Postwar Writings

2012-01-18T10:11:00.003-05:00

Robert Gudmestad, Associate Professor at Colorado State University has an invitation for those doing research on Confederate wartime writings and Confederate postwar writings. Here is his offer that was sent to H-War@h-net.msu.edu, a listserv.

Hello,

I am interested in putting together a session for the 2013 OAH Annual Meeting in San Francisco. My paper would compare the material in wartime letters/diaries of Confederate soldiers with the material in post-war memoirs/reminiscences. A panel could go any number of directions, but might focus on wartime military experience, Civil War memory, or even compare various wars. The deadline for proposals to the OAH is February 15, 2012 and you may find specific information at http://annualmeeting.oah.org/call_for_proposals/2013_sanfrancisco.html

If you are interested in participating, please send a 250 word prospectus by January 31, 2012 to me at robert.gudmestad@colostate.edu

Thanks,
Robert Gudmestad
Associate Professor
Colorado State University
970.491.6050

Image Source: Civil War Librarian

New and Noteworthy---Bloody Sabbath Before Antietam: How Did The Confederates Remember The Battle of South Mountain?

2012-01-09T22:39:00.003-05:00

An Interview with Brian Matthew Jordan, author of Unholy Sabbath: The History of South Mountain in Memory and History, September 14, 1862

Unholy Sabbath is the first, complete, full-length published study on the South Mountain battle (September 14, 1862). Brian Jordan recently discussed his book with Lindy Gervin of Savas Beatie LLC.

LG: The Confederates remembered the battle differently, didn’t they?

BMJ: Yes they did. The real meaning and import of the fighting suffered from the active postwar revisionism of its Rebel participants. Confederates had little desire to remember a battle in which the Federals wrestled away the higher, better ground from an army that had never been driven from the field, and in doing so, score an unprecedented victory that changed the course of the entire campaign by disrupting General Lee’s plans completely. There was much more romance in the story of an exhausted, barefoot army boldly striking north across the Potomac River, fighting it out against a larger and better equipped Army of the Potomac at Sharpsburg, standing on the field all the following day, and then making an organized (but not demoralized) retreat back to Virginia. South Mountain was a problem for the Confederates to overcome historically speaking, but the remedy was ready-made in the Lost Cause mythology, which I explain in the last chapter of Unholy Sabbath.

CWL: The entire interview is found at Libri Novus, the newsletter of Savas Beattie Publishing.

News---Gettysburg's Herr's Woods, Rebel Refuge, Receives a Preservation Cut

2012-01-08T20:22:00.009-05:00

Battlefield Woodlot To Undergo 'Health Cuts': Effort Is Intended To Promote Tree Growth In The Historic Woods, Tim Prudente, The Evening Sun, January 5, 2012.

This is the view of Herr's woodlot as photographed by William Tipton in 1880 from the cupola of the Lutheran Theological Seminary. The Katalysine Springs Hotel is the large building in the distance and the woods are just to the left, beyond the hotel grounds. A woodlot that sheltered Confederate soldiers on the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg will undergo "health cuts" by the National Park Service.

Some of the trees will be strategically cut down to promote a balance of younger, middle aged and older trees, according to the Park Service. Known as Herr's woodlot, this 42-acre site is in the northwest section of Gettysburg National Military Park, just west of Country Club Lane. "We wanted to establish an even mix so the trees will mature and it will remain a woodlot 50 or 100 years from now," park spokeswoman Katie Lawhon said. "It's sort of banking for the woodlot's future."

The clearing effort will cost the park $600 per acre, for a total of $25,158, and Pennington Tree Expert Service of Orrtanna was contracted to perform the work. Felled trees will be left on the forest floor to allow them to decompose, so that nutrients are returned to the soils and to provide habitat.

The park's tree-clearing efforts -- though at times controversial -- seek to restore the landscape to the way it looked in 1863. A six-acre parcel of densely wooded land near Culp's Hill, west of Spangler's Spring, was cleared in 2009 to allow an open view to Baltimore Pike and beyond. The park has also planted apple trees and natural hardwoods to restore acres of orchards and woodlands present during the battle. Still, clearing practices have drawn criticism from some neighbors and visitors who feel a national park should be interested most in preserving nature.

Herr's woodlot saw fighting during the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg. The woods sheltered refugees of Brig. Gen. James Archer's brigade after they had been repulsed and thrown back in disorder by Gen. Solomon Meredith's Union troops, known as the "Iron Brigade. Within an hour, North Carolinians under Brig. James J. Pettigrew deployed in battle line in these woods and sent forward a skirmish line to contest ownership of the Harman Farm with skirmishers from Meredith's brigade.

The southerners were subjected to small arms fire and the occasional artillery shelling before moving from the woods to attack the Union troops arrayed along McPherson's Ridge east of Willoughby Run. "Most likely the saddest use of the woods came soon after when wounded Confederates stumbled their way into the shade of the trees where they waited for ambulances to remove them from the battlefield," said John Heiser, historian for Gettysburg National Military Park.

Text and Image Source: The Evening Sun

Caption: This is the view of Herr's woodlot as photographed by William Tipton in 1880 from the cupola of the Lutheran Theological Seminary. The Katalysine Springs Hotel is the large building in the distance and the woods are just to the left, beyond the hotel grounds.

News---Will The USCT Be Honored With A Monument at Petersburg NMP's Crater? Isn't There Already One There?

2012-01-04T20:43:00.017-05:00

Gingrich Seeks Monument For Black Union soldiers At Battlefield, Brian J. Couturier, Progress-Index, December 29, 2011.

Leading Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich is behind an effort to have African-American Union soldiers recognized for their role in the Civil War Battle of the Crater. Gingrich, along with co-author William R. Forstchen, wrote The Battle of the Crater: A Novel that was released in November and recounts the role that United States Colored Troops played during the Siege of Petersburg in 1864. In the acknowledgments and afterward of the book, the authors call for a monument to be placed in Petersburg National Battlefield at the site of the Battle of the Crater in recognition of "forgotten" African-American soldiers "who, on a terrible day in July 1864, did indeed offer up the 'last full measure of devotion.'"

The idea of a monument for United States Colored Troops has the initial support of National Park Service officials who oversee the battlefield. "We are definitely open to putting something near the Crater to let people know about the role of United States Colored Troops," said Petersburg National Battlefield Superintendent Lewis Rogers. "Today as we approach the 150th anniversary of the battle, there is still no formal recognition of the role played by these soldiers in that fight," Gingrich and Forstchen wrote.

About a year ago, battlefield officials were in discussions with representatives of Gingrich to discuss how to place a monument at the Battle of the Crater site, Rogers said. One of the main contacts on the effort was Kathy Lubbers, who is Gingrich's literary agent and his daughter. "They were pushing us hard for five to six months," Rogers said.

However, the effort has stalled since Gingrich, who could not be reached for comment, announced his presidential bid. Gingrich and Forstchen wrote that Petersburg National Battlefield officials "are delighted to work with us to fulfill a long-held dream of ours to see a monument placed on the site of the Crater in memory of the thousands of USCTs who fought on that field. As far as we can have been able to find out, not a single battlefield monument to any USCT regiment exists on ground they fought for. We hope to rectify this long-overdue honor and acknowledgment." While there is no monument for a specific USCT regiment, there is a monument at Petersburg National Battlefield that recognizes United States Colored Troops on ground they fought on. The monument was placed on the Petersburg battlefield in the summer of 1993 and is inscribed: "In memory of the valorous service of regiments and companies of the U.S. Colored Troops, Army of the James and Army of the Potomac, Siege of Petersburg 1864-65."

Nearby there are informational signs that describe fighting by African-American troops on June 15, 1864, where they "recorded their first major success of the war in Virginia." During two hours of fighting, African-American troops routed Confederate defenders and captured dozens of Confederates and six cannons on the Dimmock Line. The current proposal is to move the existing USCT monument to the Battle of the Crater site and reface it to refer to specific units that fought in that battle. The monument could then be rededicated. The battlefield's current management plan recommends no further monuments at the park. "We don't want a forest of monuments," Rogers said.

Also, the National Park Service is also considering a trail near the Battle of the Crater site that would have waysides or informational placards that would teach visitors about the battle and the role of African-Americans in that particular fight and in the overall war. Park officials say they have also been approached by the African-American Civil War Memorial and Museum in Washington, D.C., about the effort for a monument.

However, the National Park Service would have to find money for such an effort and that could be a challenge in the current political climate with Congress cutting the federal budget. The effort has particular meaning for Rogers. "The USCTs are one of the lesser know things known in the Civil War," he said. "I'm an African-American and I didn't have much of an interest in the Civil War because I didn't know of the contributions of African-Americans."

Rogers said many African-Americans are not aware of the major contributions of African-American soldiers during the Civil War and typically think of the period as it relates to slavery. During the war, a total of nearly 187,000 African-Americans served in the Union army. Of those, the greatest concentration of U.S. Colored Troops was at Petersburg. During the Petersburg Campaign, USCTs would participate in six major engagements and earn 15 of the 16 total Medals of Honor awarded to African-American http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifsoldiers in the Civil War. More than 4,000 United States Colored Troops fought in the Battle of the Crater on July 30, 1864, and represents one of the largest concentrations of African-American soldiers on any battlefield during the war. As a result of the battle, 1,327 soldiers were killed, wounded, missing or captured in the fighting.

The Battle of the Crater stemmed from a Union effort to dig a tunnel packed with gunpowder under Confederate fortifications and blow a hole in the defensive lines around Petersburg. United States Colored Troops were trained to be the first units to charge the Confederate works after the blast, but a last-minute order placed untrained white Union soldiers in the front of the attack. As a result, the attack bogged down and many Union soldiers charged into the crater rather than going around it. The ensuing battle was a bloody defeat for the
Union.

http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
Text and Top Image Source: Progress-Index, December 29, 2011.

CWL: There is a USCT monument at Petersburg. Here is the Petersburg NMP virtual cache site of the memorial.

News---Army Of Northern Virginia Graves Found At Bristoe Station

2012-01-04T11:05:00.008-05:00

Tenth Alabama Regiment Cemetery In Virginia Uncovered 150 Years Later, Mary Orndorff, The Birmingham News, December 29, 2011.

About an hour west of Washington, D.C., on a scrubby plot of land overrun by pricker bushes and in the shadow of dense modern townhouse developments, an Alabama cemetery was born. Civil War preservationists with no personal links to Alabama admit to muttering a "Roll Tide" or two as they walked across the newly cleared land, the final resting place of between 75 and 90 soldiers with the Tenth Alabama Infantry Regiment. Historicl documents and archeological study pinpointed the burial grounds, a desperate place in the late summer of 1861, when rampant disease claimed up to five or six Confederate soldiers a day at what was known as Camp Jones.

There are other signs. The area is devoid of stones, except for five large rocks dug deeply into the dirt, each cut on at least one side by a man-made tool. And the area is pockmarked by man-sized depressions, not in rows, but haphazardly, as if soldiers were buried right where they died. That level of detail, however, was unknown until Dec. 3, when a crew of about 40 volunteers, led by a 16-year-old Eagle Scout candidate, descended with chain saws and strong arms and gave sunlight and a defined boundary to the cemetery. "It's one of the better Eagle Scout projects I've seen," said Rob Orrison, site manager with the Prince William County Department of Public Works Historic Preservation Division. "I was blown away by the number of people that came out."

The Bristoe Station Battlefield Heritage Park is a new, lesser-known addition to an area rich with Civil War historical sites; Manassas National Battlefield Park is about three miles away as the crow flies.

The Bristoe Station park opened in 2007 after a developer, Prince William County officials and the Civil War Preservation Trust reached a compromise. The massive farm property is to be developed for residential and office space, save for a 133-acre passive park marking the Battle of Kettle Run in 1862 and the Battle of Bristoe Station in 1863. The private owner who sold the land to the developer had farmed for decades around the unmarked cemetery, indicating he knew its historic value. But it was overgrown and inaccessible. So when Dane Smith of nearby Nokesville called up looking for an Eagle Scout project, park officials recommended clearing the cemetery.

Smith's father, Brian, recalls hearing the details about the project. "When I heard it was an Alabama regiment, I was like, 'Great, I work for an Alabama bank,'" Brian Smith said on his second straight chilly December Saturday at the site. He is the lead Washington lobbyist for Regions Financial Corp.

The volunteers, under Dane Smith's direction, cleared the underbrush, cut down trees, put up a split-rail fence and built a bridge over a creek. Their work was approved by Orrison, who told them which trees to remove and how not to disturb the ground. Tree stumps were left intact. The stone grave markers -- three of which Orrison knew were there plus two others uncovered during the work -- were marked with bright pink tape. The park had earlier used radar to detect the disturbed dirt of the grave sites so they could estimate a cemetery boundary. Soldiers marching by a nearby road in 1862 wrote of the row of cedar trees leading toward a clearing with wooden grave markers engraved with the names of the dead. Several years later, someone else wrote that the markers were in stone. "Who knows when they were changed?" Orrison said.

Old pictures indicate that some of the stones were engraved, but they are missing. Eventually, mulch will be placed on the path to the cemetery, and Orrison wants to raise the money to pay for a memorial plaque at the entrance, listing names of the 40 or so soldiers known to be buried there. He's hoping to have that work done in time for a September dedication ceremony. The grave sites will be mapped and the site open to tourists. Park officials hope that by registering the cemetery, genealogists and historians will help them fill in the blanks of who else might be buried there, and descendants will visit their ancestors. "It is a little sad that we won't be able to tell them exactly where they are," Orrison said.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

The Tenth Alabama Infantry Regiment included companies from Jefferson, Shelby, Calhoun, Talladega, St. Clair, Calhoun, DeKalb and Talladega counties, according to the Alabama Department of Archives and History. A second overgrown plot across the pasture is believed to be where Mississippi soldiers are buried.

Text And Image Source: Birmingham [Alabama} News, December 29, 2011.

News---St. Nick Visits Military Camps In The Republic of Suffering

2011-12-26T18:35:00.009-05:00

Cartoonist Nast Drew One Of First Santa Claus Images In A Time Of Political Turmoil, A Holiday Hero, Frank Reeves, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, December 26, 2011.

By Christmas 1862, more than 200,000 Union soldiers and sailors had been killed, wounded, died of disease or gone missing since the Civil War began 20 months earlier. So staggering were the casualties on both sides that the United States had become, in the words of one modern historian, a "republic of suffering." It was against this background of death and despair that Harper's Weekly -- then one of the country's leading illustrated newspapers -- published its annual Christmas issue, dated Jan. 3, 1863. The magazine had well more than 150,000 subscribers who paid $2.50 a year for its fare of news articles, short stories by authors such as Dickens, and its wood engravings of the war.

To illustrate the cover of its holiday issue, Harper's selected Thomas Nast, a 22-year-old artist who had been on the magazine's payroll for only a few months. He was one of a cadre of artists, including Winslow Homer, hired by Harper's to cover the war. For Nast, it was the beginning of a 25-year career with Harper's that would see him rise to a level of fame and fortune such as no other American cartoonist before him had ever achieved, said V.C. Rogers, a North Carolina-based freelance illustrator and unofficial historian of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists.

Harper's would be the forum through which Nast would excoriate Southern sympathizers, the Ku Klux Klan, corrupt politicians and, perhaps most regrettably to many today, Irish immigrants and their Catholic faith. Even though he opposed slavery and would support the cause of black rights during Reconstruction, his depictions of African-Americans have often been criticized as racist.

During his political crusades, he created some of the nation's most enduring caricatures and symbols, such as the elephant as a symbol of the Republican Party. Nast's drawing of a fat man, with an ample paunch and a money bag for a head, would become synonymous with the corrupt politician and, later, the greedy plutocrat. He would popularize the use of the donkey as the symbol of the Democratic Party, although he wasn't the first cartoonists to do so, Mr. Rogers said.

And, yes, Virginia, it is to Nast that we owe our modern conception of Santa Claus -- a composite drawn from German folklore and "St. Nick" in Clement Moore's " 'Twas the Night Before Christmas." The jolly old elf, sitting in his reindeer-drawn sleigh, would make one of his first public debuts on the Harper's cover for Jan. 3, 1863. "Nast was with only slight exaggeration the father of us all," Mr. Rogers said, referring to the generations of American political and editorial cartoonists who have followed in his wake.

In the 1860s, Nast was a staunch Union man. Family lore has it that he considered joining the Union army after President Abraham Lincoln called for volunteers following the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter in April 1861. But family and friends convinced the young man that he could do more to support the Union cause by using his paint brushes, pens and sketch books than by carrying a rifle. Their confidence in him was amply rewarded by the numerous sketches he drew from life about the war and the Union army. So effective were Nast's illustrations, which became the basis of some of Harper's most popular wood engravings, that Lincoln reportedly said Nast "is our best recruiting poster."

One of Nast's early masterpieces was "Christmas in Camp," the wood engraving for the cover of Harper's Jan. 3, 1863, issue. In the voice of a Victorian father, the editors provided an explanation of the drawing for their young readers: "Children, you mustn't think that Santa Claus comes to you alone." Soldiers bundled against the cold stand in the snow as they welcome Santa. "See how the soldiers have decorated their encampment in honor of the day. They have erected a triumphal arch to show how welcome [Santa] is," the editorial note continues.

Some of the men eagerly open the gifts Santa has brought them. One soldier pulls out a sock -- a Christmas stocking containing holiday goodies. In the foreground, a youngster, described as a drummer-boy, plays with a jack-in-a-box while his comrade looks on. Drummer-boys were popular subjects with Civil-War era artists. The boys in Nast's drawing look to be eight or nine years old. In reality, drummer boys were usually older. Children under 16 would probably not have lasted very long in an Army camp. The threat of disease and the rigors of infantry life would have killed them off quickly, said Michael Kraus, historian and curator at the Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall and Museum in Oakland. (The museum recently acquired original editions of Harper's, many of which contain Nast's illustrations.)

In the background (get your magnifying glasses at this point), soldiers "are playing football, getting a fine appetite for their Christmas dinner which is cooking on the fire." Despite the attempt by Nast and his editors to invoke holiday cheer, the grim business of war is an ever-present reality even in this fanciful scene. Nast's Santa was hardly a neutral figure in the conflict that was tearing the country apart. This Santa, wearing a star-spangled jacket and striped pants, is a staunch Union man like Nast himself. He wouldn't have been welcome around a Confederate campfire.

On first glance, Santa appears to be playing with a puppet for the innocent amusement of the men. Instead, as the edtiors tell us, Santa "is entertaining the soldiers by showing them Jeff Davis's future. He is tying a cord pretty tightly around his neck and Jeff seems to be kicking very much at such a fate." Jefferson Davis was, of course, the hated president of the Confederacy, often depicted in Harper's and other Northern newspapers as a rat.

The impact of the war did not fall on soldiers and sailors alone but also on their families at home. At war's end, many women and children would be widows and orphans. Then, as now, military families felt the grief of separation most acutely at Christmas. Nast tapped into this feeling in a double-page wood engraving entitled "Christmas Eve." It, too, appeared in Harper's Jan. 3, 1863, edition.

On the left panel, children are shown asleep in their bed while their mother kneels in prayer. We can imagine she is thinking about her soldier-husband at an Army camp far away. On the right panel, a soldier sits, bayonet in hand, while reading a letter from home. A small fire burns beside him to keep him warm. Nast surrounded these larger panels with contrasting scenes of holiday joy and the business of war. In the foreground, he drew a picture of four soldiers' graves. Even amid holiday joy, the war dead were not to be forgotten. "Letters from every corner of the Union poured into Harper's weekly with messages of thanks for that inspired picture," Thomas Nast St. Hill, the illustrator's grandson, wrote in an account that was published in 1971 of the elder Nast's Christmas illustrations.

"A colonel wrote the weekly to say that he had received his copy of the magazine and had unfolded it by the light of his campfire," St. Hill continued. " He was so touched by Nast's drawing that tears had fallen on the page. 'It was only a picture,' he wrote, 'but I couldn't help it.' " For the rest of his career, Nast would continue making pictures that touched the emotions of his audience. In the years immediately after the Civil War, he would play a pivotal role in bringing down New York City's corrupt Democratic political machine headed by William M. Tweed, the infamous "Boss Tweed." "I don't care a straw for your newspaper articles, my constituents don't know how to read," the boss reportedly said. "But they can't help seeing those damned pictures."

Nast died in 1902 of yellow fever while serving as a U.S. consul in Ecuador. But his place was already secure in the pantheon of political cartoonists. "We constantly refer back to Thomas Nast. We all take a piece of his legacy," said Rob Rogers, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's editorial cartoonist. "His main influence on us has been the idea that a cartoonist could use his art to combat evil."

Text and Image Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

News---States' Sesquicentennial Efforts Uncover Civil War Antiques

2011-12-26T18:07:00.021-05:00

Civil War's 150th Stirs A Trove Of Memories, Steve Szkotak, Associated Press, December 26, 2011.

A diary with a lifesaving bullet hole from Gettysburg. An intricate valentine crafted by a Confederate soldier for the wife he would never see again. A slave's desperate escape to freedom. From New England to the South, state archivists are using the sesquicentennial of the Civil War to collect a trove of wartime letters, diaries, documents and mementos that have gathered dust in attics and basements.

This still-unfolding call will help states expand existing collections on the Civil War and provide new insights into an era that violently wrenched a nation apart, leaving 600,000 dead. Much of the Civil War has been told primarily through the eyes of battlefield and political leaders. These documents are adding a new narrative to the Civil War's story, offering insights into the home front and of soldiers, their spouses and African-Americans, often in their own words.

Historians, who will have access to the centralized digital collections, are excited by the prospect of what the states are finding and will ultimately share. "I think now we're broadening the story to include everybody—not just a soldier, not a general or a president—just somebody who found themselves swept up in the biggest drama in American life," says University of Richmond President Edward Ayers, a Civil War expert. "That's what's so cool."

In Virginia, archivists have borrowed from the popular PBS series "Antiques Roadshow," traveling weekends throughout the state and asking residents to share family collections, which are scanned and added to the already vast collection at the Library of Virginia. Started in September 2010, the Civil War 150 Legacy Project has collected 25,000 images. Virginians have been generous, knowing they can share their long-held mementos without surrendering them, said Laura Drake Davis and Renee Savits, the Library of Virginia archivists who have divided the state for their on-the-road collection campaign. "They think someone can learn from them rather than just sitting in their cupboards," Savits said of the family possessions. "And they're proud to share their family's experience."

Patricia Bangs heeded the call when a friend told her about the project. She had inherited 400 letters passed down through the years between Cecil A. Burleigh to his wife, Caroline, in Mount Carmel, Conn. "I felt this would be useful to researchers, a treasure to somebody," said Bangs, who works for the library system in Fairfax, Va. In one letter, she said, Cecil writes of Union troops traveling from Connecticut to Washington, crowds cheering them along the way.

The letters, like many collected by archivists, are difficult to read. Many are spelled phonetically, and the penmanship can be hard to decipher. Typically, they tell of the story of the home front and its daily deprivations. Researchers in Tennessee, a battleground state in the war, teamed up with Virginia archivists earlier this year in the border town of Bristol. Both states have seen their share of bullets, swords and other military hardware. "We have grandmothers dragging in swords and muskets," said Chuck Sherrill, Tennessee state librarian and archivist.

Documents are fished from attics, pressed between the pages of family bibles and stored in trunks. Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan and many other states have similar programs, or at least are trying to gather materials for use by scholars and regular folks. Pennsylvania has been especially ambitious in adding new layers to the state's deep links to the Civil War, including a traveling exhibit called the "PA Civil War Road Show." The 53-foot-long museum on wheels also invites visitors to share their ancestors' stories and artifacts in a recording booth. The remembrances will be uploaded on the website PACivilWar150.com. One visitor brought in a bugle that an ancestor was blowing when he was fatally shot at the Battle of Gettysburg. "He wouldn't let anyone touch it," said John Seitter, project manager of the Pennsylvania Civil War project. "It shows you how deeply these artifacts connect people with the Civil War. There's some serious memorialization going on here."

The George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center at Penn State University is also amid a survey of all the public archives in the state to produce a searchable database. The ambitious project aims to shed light on small, underfunded public historical societies where records are often "hidden from historians and scholars" and not used, Matt Isham of the "The People's Contest: A Civil War Era Digital Archiving Project" wrote in an email.

Some people are even donating items unsolicited. In Maine, for instance, some residents have submitted letters from ancestors who served in the war, but the sesquicentennial also saw an unusual submission from James R. Hosmer. Hosmer's mother, Mary Ruth Hosmer, died in 2005. He was going through her possessions in Kittery, Maine, when he made a discovery: dozens of carte de viste, small photographs carried by some Union troops, an early version of dog tags. They were stored in a suitcase in an attic. "The state archives was quite thrilled with it," Hosmer said.

The Virginia archivists said they were especially pleased by a submission from the family of an escaped slave who wrote of his love for a woman named Julia at the same time he fled his master for an outpost on the Chesapeake Bay, where Union ships were known to pick up men seeking their freedom. David Harris found his freedom in 1861, serving as a cook for Union troops. "I love to read the sweet letters that come from you, dear love," David Harris wrote to Julia. "I cannot eat for thought of you."

A valentine made of pink paper and shaped into a heart using an intricate basket weave was addressed to Confederate soldier Robert H. King to his wife Louiza. He was killed in 1862. As for the diary tucked in a soldier's breast pocket that shielded him from death at Gettysburg, "He kept using the diary," Savits said. "He just wrote around it."

Text and Image Source: Civil War's 150th Stirs

Newsstand---- The Atlantic Commemorates Civil War With Greatest Hits Issue

2011-12-07T16:52:00.006-05:00

The Atlantic Monthly, founded in 1857, was created as a literary and cultural commentary magazine. Quickly achieving a national reputation, it became important by recognizing and publishing new writers and poets, and encouraging major careers by publishing leading writers' commentary on abolition, education, the War Between The States and other issues in political affairs.

Marking the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, The Atlantic’s special commemorative edition, featuring an introduction by President Barack Obama, showcases some of the most compelling stories from the magazine’s archives. Contributors include such celebrated American writers as Mark Twain, Henry James, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Louisa May Alcott.

Through reporting, essays, fiction, and poetry, The Atlantic chronicled the conflict firsthand—from the country’s deepening divisions in the years leading up to the conflict, to the horrors of the battlefield, to the reshaping of society after the war’s conclusion. This 148-page edition captures the voices of the witnesses to the war and its aftermath. With memorable images from the National Portrait Gallery, this rich collection of contemporary reflections on the dramatic story of America’s most transformative moment. Print copies are available at bookstores, newsstands and ordered online in digital format for iPad and Kindle.

Following is the table of contents for the issue Atlantic's contents:

PART ONE: PRE-WAR

Where Will It End?
In its second issue, The Atlantic urged readers to take a stand against slavery.
BY EDMUND QUINCY

Nat Turner's Insurrection
An account of America's bloodiest slave revolt and its repercussions
BY THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON

A True Story, Word for Word As I Heard It
In his ﬁrst Atlantic contribution, the author tells the story of a mother's surprise reunion with her son, a former slave.
BY MARK TWAIN

The Freedman's Story
An escaped slave recalls his violent showdown with slave-catchers.
BY WILLIAM PARKER

Paul Revere's Ride
The famous Revolutionary War poem that's really about slavery
BY HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

John Brown and His Friends
How a coterie of New Englanders-- including the author--secretly funded the raid on Harpers Ferry
BY FRANKLIN SANBORN

Bardic Symbols
The author's ﬁrst Atlantic poem
BY WALT WHITMAN

The Reign of King Cotton
In 1861, the grandson of John Quincy Adams argued that slavery could still end without war. BY CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS JR.

Recollections of Lincoln
A journalist who covered the Lincoln-Douglas debates recalls the future president's bawdy appeal.
BY HENRY VILLARD

The Election in November
In 1860, The Atlantic endorsed Abraham Lincoln for president.
BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

Charleston Under Arms
A Northern journalist records his visit to Charleston during the Fort Sumter standoff.
BY JOHN WILLIAM DE FOREST

PART TWO: THE WAR

Our March to Washington
A dispatch from a Union soldier who was later killed in action
BY THEODORE WINTHROP

Voluntaries
A poem in praise of soldiers who gave their lives for the Union
BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Bread and the Newspaper
In 1861, an Atlantic editor captured the anxious mood on the home front.
BY OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES SR.

The Advantages of Defeat
A scholar argues that the Union debacle at Bull Run was not such a disaster.
BY CHARLES ELIOT NORTON

Chieﬂy About War Matters, by a Peaceable Man
The novelist visits Washington in wartime--and is then censored by The Atlantic.
BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

The Cumberland
A poem commemorating a mighty Union ship done in by the Virginia, a rebel "ironclad"
BY HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

My Hunt After the Captain
An account of the author's frantic search for his wounded son, who lived to become a Supreme Court justice
BY OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES SR.

Barbara Frietchie
The classic poem mythologizing an old woman who ﬂew her Union ﬂag as the rebels marched past
BY JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER

The Man Without a Country
The famous short story about an Army officer who learns, too late, to love his country
BY EDWARD EVERETT HALE

American Civilization
An Atlantic founder argues vehemently for emancipation of the slaves.
BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON

The President's Proclamation
Seven months after his call to free the slaves, Emerson hails the Emancipation Proclamation.
BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Women, Unite Against Slavery
The author of Uncle Tom's Cabin urges other women to action.
BY HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

The Story of a Year
One of the earliest pieces published by the author, who was 21 years old at the time
BY HENRY JAMES

The Ladies of New Orleans
A Union general is stymied by the ornery women of the South.
BY ALBERT F. PUFFER

Leaves From an Oﬃcer's Journal
The white colonel of the ﬁrst official black regiment recounts his experience.
BY THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON

Life on the Sea Islands
A young black woman describes her experience teaching freed slaves.
BY CHARLOTTE FORTEN

The Brothers
Set in a wartime hospital, a short story about a family with a poisonous secret
BY LOUISA MAY ALCOTT

The Words That Remade America
The signiﬁcance of the Gettysburg Address
BY GARRY WILLS

A Rebel's Recollections
A Confederate soldier from a plantation family provides a Southern perspective.
BY GEORGE CARY EGGLESTON

Lee in Battle
A Northerner pays tribute to the general's humility and heroism.
BY GAMALIEL BRADFORD JR.

Toward Appomattox
Reliving the war's ﬁnal battles
BY JACK BEATTY

Late Scenes in Richmond
A reporter describes the rebels' ﬂight from Richmond, and Lincoln's surprise visit two days later.
BY CHARLES CARLETON COFFIN

PART THREE: POST-WAR

The End, and After
A Confederate soldier recalls the chaotic days following surrender.
BY GEORGE CARY EGGLESTON

Assassination
Three months after Lincoln's murder, The Atlantic seeks to make sense of it.
BY CHARLES CREIGHTON HAZEWELL

Ode to Lincoln
The magazine's ﬁrst editor gives poetic voice to the nation's grief.
BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

Three Months Among the Reconstructionists
In 1866, a journalist offered a scathing report on post-war life in the South.
BY SIDNEY ANDREWS

The Mistress of Sydenham Plantation
The famous novelist's tale of an elderly Southerner, oblivious to what the war has cost her
BY SARAH ORNE JEWETT

The Case of George Dedlow
An absurdist short story about a Union doctor--which many Atlantic readers erroneously believed at the time to be nonﬁction
BY SILAS WEIR MITCHELL

For the Union Dead
The classic 1960 poem pays tribute to the glory of the Civil War era.
BY ROBERT LOWELL

The Freedmen's Bureau
A leading black intellectual surveys the government's efforts to aid the freed slaves.
BY W. E. B. DU BOIS

Reconstruction, and an Appeal to Congress for Impartial Suﬀrage
A former slave urges Congress to grant black Americans the vote.
BY FREDERICK DOUGLASS

The Death of Slavery
A poem hailing the demise of slavery's "cruel reign"
BY WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT

The Result in South Carolina
A Southerner describes mounting racial tensions in the aftermath of Reconstruction.
BY "A SOUTH CAROLINIAN"

The Awakening of the Negro
An educator's controversial argument contends that blacks should advance by making themselves useful to whites.
BY BOOKER T. WASHINGTON

Of the Training of Black Men
Taking issue with Booker T. Washington, the author argues that blacks should attend college. BY W. E. B. DU BOIS

Strivings of the Negro People
Du Bois gives voice to the aspirations of black Americans in the post-Civil War world.
BY W. E. B. DU BOIS

Battle Hymn of the Republic
BY JULIA WARD HOWE

Text Source With Edits: The Atlantic

Off Topic---Richard Matheson, Master of the Uncanny

2011-12-07T11:30:00.007-05:00

Shadow On The Sun, Richard Matheson, TOR Books, 192 pages,$13.99 and Other Kingdoms, Richard Matheson, TOR Books, 320 pages, $24.99.

Richard Matheson is the author of the classics I Am Legend, Hell House, Somewhere in Time, The Incredible Shrinking Man, A Stir of Echoes, The Beardless Warriors, What Dreams May Come and others. Now forget the movies made from his books. Remember The Twilight Zone episodes.

Named a Grand Master of Horror by the World Horror Convention, and a recipient of the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement, Matheson has won the Edgar Award for Mystery and Detective writing, the Spur for Western novels and stories, and several of the Writer's Guild awards. In 2010, he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Yes, this is the author that the best storytellers, such as Stephen King, Elmore Leonard, Peter Straub and others, read.

Matheson has authored screenplays for film and television. His most recognizable work is for The Twilight Zone including “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” based on his short story and featuring a very young William Shatner. Born in New Jersey and raised in Brooklyn, and a World War 2 combat infantryman, Matheson earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri.

Shadow On The Sun, originally published as a mass-market Western in 1994, has been out of print for years. This tale of supernatural terror is best described by a comment of a friend who had just finished the book. "Wow! Couldn't put it down. I wonder if the makers of Cowboys and Aliens [the film] read this before they made their movie." Set in Arizona, a century ago during a truce between the remote frontier community and the Apaches. A delicate peace is literally shredded when the mutilated bodies of two white men are found. Billjohn Finley, the local Indian agent, fears that darker, more unholy forces may be at work: a tall, dark stranger who rides into town and is wearing the dead men’s clothes.

In Other Kingdoms the setting spans decades in France, England and Brooklyn. In 1917 a young American soldier is recently wounded in the Great War. The young veteran, Alex White, travels to Gatford, England because of a promise made to a dying comrade. This pastoral English village, seems to be the perfect spot to heal his wounded body and soul. In truth for the reader, Gatford and its forests are not as distant as Narnia but closer that Brigadoon. The neighboring woods are said to be haunted by capricious, even malevolent spirits, but surely those are just old folk tales.

In the forest dwells Magda Variel known as a witch but confesses to Alex that she is merely a practitioner of Wicca and has healing powers. She warns him of a more real danger, one that is located deeper into the forest. It is another kingdom. A World War One veteran, Alex is bold and undaunted. He becomes a resident in three kingdoms: rural England, the Wicca religion, and live among shape-sifting spirits. He willing enters bondage to love, sex and magic and has dual citizenship in two of kingdoms. Each has a dominant woman who wants him.

To read these two shorter works by Matheson is to engage a master storyteller who will very subtly cause you to suspend your disbelief. The literary genre of The Uncanny deals with the notion that a person or a thing has or seems to have a supernatural basis. The Uncanny genre deals this events that are beyond the ordinary, that are mysterious, superstitious, fearful or dreadful. Like Stephen King's work, Richard Matheson work is both an uncomfortably strange but a comfortably thoughtful experience.

Film News---Spielberg Films Team of Rivals in Virginia; Release Date 2013

2011-12-02T19:28:00.009-05:00

Daniel Day-Lewis Has a Great Honest Abe Beard Going for ‘Lincoln’, Tim Grierson, The Projector, December 2, 2011.

It was just over a year ago that it was announced that Daniel Day-Lewis would be the star of Steven Spielberg's Abraham Lincoln film. There's no question that the two-time Oscar-winner is an astonishingly gifted actor, but when you're playing a revered American president there will always be questions about whether you can do justice to a mythic figure in U.S. history -- especially when some people refuse to accept Day-Lewis in the role since he's English. But we think most folks will be willing to look past such minor issues after checking out this first photo of Day-Lewis sporting his beard for "Lincoln." You have to admit, the resemblance is pretty striking -- and rather presidential.

The photo (the first we've seen of the actor as Lincoln) was snapped by Michael Phillips (via Badass Digest), who took the picture presumably while Day-Lewis was enjoying a lunch break during the filming of "Lincoln" in Virginia. While a lot of unofficial on-set photos capture stars at their most unflattering, this casual shot actually gives Day-Lewis a regal, dignified air that's synonymous with most people's impressions of our 16th president. Even in repose, the guy just exudes rugged authenticity.

"Lincoln," which is based on Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Team of Rivals," is said to follow Lincoln during the final months of his life when the Civil War was coming to a close. The film won't open until December 2012, but it already has to be considered an Oscar front-runner simply because of the pedigree of the material, the director and the star -- and that it's not even mentioning the rest of the cast, which includes Sally Field, Tommy Lee Jones, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jackie Earle Haley, Michael Stuhlbarg, David Strathairn and Hal Holbrook. Spielberg has two movies coming next month -- "The Adventures of Tintin" and "War Horse" -- but after seeing this Day-Lewis photo it's hard not to focus on what the director has coming our way next year. We always knew Day-Lewis could play the part. Today, we learned he definitely looks the part, too.

Text Source: The Projector

Image Source: IFC.com

Actor/Character
Joseph Gordon-Levitt/Robert Todd Lincoln
Daniel Day-Lewis/Abraham Lincoln
Tommy Lee Jones/Thaddeus Stevens [Pennsylvania, US Congressman]
Lee Pace/Fernando Wood [Mayor NYC]
Sally Field/Mary Todd Lincoln
Jackie Earle Haley, Alexander Stephens [CSA, Vice President]
Jared Harris, Ulysses S. Grant
Joseph Cross, John Hay [Secretary to Lincoln
David Strathairn, Secretary of State William Seward
Bruce McGill, Edwin Stanton [Secretary of War]
Jeremy Strong, John Nicolay [Secretary to Lincoln]
Grainger Hines, Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles
Reed Birney, James Speed [Kentucky friend of Lincoln]
Mike Shiflett, CSA Senator RMT Hunter
John Hutto, Senator Charles Sumner [Massachusetts, US Senator]
Lincoln (original screenplay) (filming)

John Logan is the development screenwriter; his works include: 2004 The Aviator, 2003 The Last Samurai, 2000 Gladiator, 1999 Any Given Sunday. Tony Kushner is the onset screenwriter; he also wrote the screenplay of Munich

Information Source: IMBD.com

On The News Stand---Robert E. Lee and John Brown Share Lead Stories In Military History Quarterly

2011-12-02T10:48:00.006-05:00

'John Brown’s Blood Oath' by Tony Horwitz shows that before The Harpers Ferry Raid, the abolitionist promised a campaign of violence. It began with a gruesome midnight massacre in Kansas in 1856. ‘A Moment Full of Peril’ by Noah Andre Trudeau discusses the fear in the Buchanan administration that John Brown might touch off a national insurrection at Harper's Ferry and the decision by Washington officials to turn to Robert E. Lee to assess the situation and capture the rebels.

Readers may be familiar with Horwitz's and Trudeau's previous works. Horwitz wrote the informative and entertaining Confederates In the Attic and Trudeau wrote Gettysburg: A Testing of Courage.

New and Noteworthy: The Iron Ties That Bind or One Ring To Rule Them All?

2011-11-29T19:21:00.010-05:00

The Iron Way: Railroads, the Civil War, and the Making of Modern America William G. Thomas III, Yale University Press, 296 pages, 54 illustrations and maps, notes, index, bibliography, $30.00

Beginning with Frederick Douglass's escape from slavery in 1838 on the railroad, and ending with the driving of the golden spike to link the transcontinental railroad in 1869, this book charts a critical period of American expansion and national formation, one largely dominated by the dynamic growth of railroads and telegraphs. William G. Thomas brings new evidence to bear on railroads, the Confederate South, slavery, and the Civil War era, based on groundbreaking research in digitized sources never available before. The Iron Way revises our ideas about the emergence of modern America and the role of the railroads in shaping the sectional conflict.

Both the North and the South invested in railroads to serve their larger purposes, Thomas contends. Though railroads are often cited as a major factor in the Union's victory, he shows that they were also essential to the formation of "the South" as a unified region. He discusses the many—and sometimes unexpected—effects of railroad expansion and proposes that America's great railroads became an important symbolic touchstone for the nation's vision of itself.

William G. Thomas is professor of history and the John and Catherine Angle Chair in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He taught history at the University of Virginia, and, as director of the Virginia Center for Digital History, created digital projects on slavery, the Civil War, segregation, and civil rights. He lives in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Railroads and the Making of Modern America website.

New Fiction---Culp Brothers, Jack Skelley, Virginia Wade: Main Characters In A House Divided

2011-11-28T10:30:00.006-05:00

West Virginia Author Says New Civil War Fiction 'Mostly True', Associated Press, Lebanan Daily News, November 28, 2011.

Charles Town historian Bob O'Connor says his newest Civil War book, "A House Divided Against Itself," is a historical novel that's based on a true story. While it's technically fiction, O'Connor said the four main characters were real people, and the story about them is "mostly true." O'Connor told The Herald Mail of Hagerstown, Maryland, that he studied 90 letters, plus records from the National Archives and Army War College, to create the story of brothers John Wesley and William Culp.

The brothers grew up in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, but John Wesley moved to Shepherdstown, then to Virginia. He fought for the Confederacy. William, meanwhile, joined a Gettysburg militia that eventually became part of the Union's 87th Pennsylvania regiment. Their units battled in the Shenandoah Valley between 1861 and 1863, but O'Connor said the brothers never met during the conflict. His other key characters are John Wesley's best friend, Johnston "Jack" Skelly Jr., who joined the Union army, and Mary Virginia Wade, Jack's girlfriend. The story ends with the Battle of Gettysburg.

O'Connor said the 230-page book was inspired by a lecture that historian James C. Price gave on the Culp brothers in Martinsburg. It's available online at O'Connor's website, at Four Seasons Books in Shepherdstown, and at the Antietam National Battlefield gift shop in Maryland. He is the author of The Perfect Steel Trap: Harpers Ferry 1859 a novel, The U.S. Colored Troops at Andersonville Prison a history, and editor of The Life of Abraham Lincoln as President: A Personal Account by Lincoln's Body Gaurd, War Hill Lamon. His website is Bob Oconnor Books.

Off-Topic---Dealy Plaza, Dallas Texas Noverber 22, 1963: The Umbrella Man

2011-11-27T19:08:00.007-05:00

November 22, 1963, Dealy Plaza, Dallas Texas. It is a sunny day. During the Kennedy motorcade, a man opens and raises a black umbrella. Kennedy is shot in front of him. What part in the assassination did he play? A last minute signal that the plan to assassinate the President would go forward. A signal that could be seen from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository and the fence near the overpass behind the Umbrella Man. The truth is revealed is recalled by Josiah Thompson, author of Six Seconds in Dallas.

Go to The New York Times video album.

New and Noteworthy---A Scribbling Englishman On Both Sides of the Potomac

2011-11-23T13:32:00.009-05:00

The Confederacy's Secret Weapon: The Civil War Illustrations of Frank Vizetelly, Douglas W. Bostick, History Press, 158 pp., 98 b/w illustrations, bibliography, $19.99.

Frank Vizetelly's illustrations have for decades been viewed in coffee table books on the Civil War. Yet the name of this graphic artist usually does not ring a bell with probably most readers. Bostick's book remedies the situation. Placing Vizetelly in the context of mid-19th century print journalism is helpful but Bostick offers only a page and a half on how the work of a sketch artist moves from the sketch pad to news print. Strengths of Bostick's work is the close attention paid to Vizetelly's travels inside the Confederacy and his success in getting the illustrations exported to London.

As a correspondent for the London Illustrated News, Vizetelly is challenged by the U.S. War department July 1861 after the Federal defeat at Bull Run. He then enters the Confederacy and views the battle of Fredericksburg and the 1863 Mississippi Campaign. The artist is quite comfortable among the plantation aristocracy, the cavalier and chivalrous officers of the Confederate forces. With a clear and concise narrative, Bostick provides many of Vizetelly's dispatches and finished sketches. Vizetelly reports as if he is at Chickamauga, but Sorrel, Longstreet's aide, reports in his Recollections of a Confederate Staff Officer,that appears that Vizetelly arrived "long after the battle."

Vizetelly's anecdotes at times ring true and at other times there is a false ring to them. Did Vizetelly loan Jefferson Davis funds for his escape from Virginia? Bostick's account takes Vizetelly's memoirs at face value. This may leave some readers recalling the saying that the first casualty of war is truth. Was Vizetelly's illustrations a secret weapon of the Confederacy? Upon finishing Bostick's the book, CWL's reply is The Scots' Verdict: unproven.

Having no index and no bibliographic notes, The Confederacy's Secret Weapon: The Civil War Illustrations of Frank Vizetelly is not conducive to much further research. The brief bibliography does not list a book or article by Henry Vizetelly though on page 79 Bostick quotes from one. Yet, in providing a fine account of the life and times of Frank Vizetelly, sketch artist and correspondent of the London Illustrated News, Bostick offers a fine album of illustrations, a brief life on an English sketch artist and an introduction to the world of Civil War journalism.

New and Noteworthy---The Battle of the Crater: A Novel Entertains and Informs

2011-11-22T15:19:00.012-05:00

The Battle of the Crater: A Novel, Newt Gingrich and William R. Forstchen, Thomas Dunne Books Inc., 384 pages, $27.99, audiobook, 10 compact disks, unabridged, $44.95.

Among the baggage that Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich brings to the campaign, his successful career as a fiction writer is not being debated. During 2011 and 2012 much will be made of the alternative path that is being offered by this candidate. There is no discernible agenda in Gingrich's fiction other than to entertain and educate readers. With The Battle of the Crater, Newt Gingrich and William R. Forstchen tackle historical fiction without making alternative history.

Of the ten or so novels that the team of Gingrich and Forstchen have written CWL admits to having read none of them. Richard Slotkin's The Crater is on the short list of best Civil War fiction. Also, Richard Slotkin's No Quarter: The Battle of the Crater, 1864 will stand the test of time for being the best treatment of the battle. So, CWL came to Gingrich's and Forstchen's novel with limited expectations and was surprised by having them exceeded. The authors do not simply supply characters, attitudes, and story for the sake of the marketplace. The aspirations of African American troops, the terrain and importance of the Elliot's Salient entrenchments, the failures of generals are presented accurately and in a compelling fashion.

The Battle of the Crater was just one day of the nearly nine month siege of Petersburg, Virginia. On July 30, 1864, the Federal army exploded an underground gallery under the Confederate earthworks. Federal and Confederate generals and soldiers, in a general sense, are accurately portrayed. The story unfolds with the help of a fictitious character. James Reilly, newspaper sketch artist and friend of Lincoln, for the most part narrates the novel. The historic character Sergeant Major Garland White of the 28th USCT regiment, an escaped slave, recruiter, non-commissioned officer and informal chaplain, shares narrative duties with Reilly. Both are compelling figures and the novel rests easily on their shoulders.

The author's novel doesn't lag, in part because like most historic fiction, time and characters are compressed, but events and plot points are not hastily inserted. The major and minor characters are well drawn and the resolution will be heart felt by readers. Written for the mass market, The Battle of the Crater: A Novel succeeds in both entertaining and informing.

News---Battle of Gettysburg Witness' Death Remembered

2011-11-21T14:03:00.005-05:00

Sadie Shriver, An Eyewitness To The Battle of Gettysburg, Died at age 18, Jacqueline Palochko, The Evening Sun, November 20, 2011.

It's a solemn procession. Women are walking, holding flowers, with their hoop skirts hitting the fallen brown leaves on the ground. Men in top hats, staring straight ahead under the gray November clouds. Slowly, the crowd moves to Evergreen Cemetery in Gettysburg on Sunday morning. And around the gray, faded tombstones, they gather. More than 130 years ago, this is how the loved ones of Sadie Shriver might have said goodbye to her. But when her family buried her, one thing was missing -- a headstone.

This was a young woman who came from one of the oldest families in Adams County, Nancie Gudmestad, director of the Shriver House in Gettysburg said. A little girl who kissed her father, George Shriver, goodbye as he rode off to war. An eyewitness to the Battle of Gettysburg when she was just 7 years old. And when she was 18 years old -- two weeks before her 19th birthday -- she died from tuberculosis and was laid to rest in Evergreen Cemetery. Yet -- for some unknown reason -- her grave has been unmarked since she died in 1874. Until Sunday.

On what would have been her 156th birthday, a ceremony was held to unveil a headstone at Sadie's grave. A funeral procession with a couple dozen people, including re-enactors, traveled from the historical Shriver House on Baltimore Street to the cemetery.

So, they gathered around Sadie's grave. And spoke of how she must have seen the bloody, wounded soldiers during the battle. How she heard their last cries for help before they died. How she smelled gun smoke in the air. And among the crowd were some distant relatives of Sadie. A few years ago, Diane Weikert Dolan, of New Jersey, visited Gettysburg and toured the Shriver House. And when she started to hear the stories of the Shriver family and Sadie's mother -- Hettie Shriver, whose maiden name was Weikert -- it all sounded familiar. "They started telling me my family history," she said.

For Becki Powell, who now lives in Hershey, her family history was right under her nose. When she was living in Littlestown, she was a tour guide for the Shriver House. Around the same time, she started looking through books her family had been using to record their history. And there it was -- notes on Hettie and George Shriver in her family history book. Since then, Powell has visited Evergreen Cemetery to pay respects at the graves of her distant, long-lost relatives. She found the grave of Sadie's younger sister, Mollie; and their grandparents, Sarah and Jacob Weikert. But she always had trouble finding Sadie's. "I find this all very moving," Powell said of the ceremony for Sadie.

And before they left -- before they went back to their Sundays -- each visitor left a pebble on Sadie's grave. It's a Jewish tradition, Gudmestad said, to let the dead know they haven't been forgotten. "Sadie will know that someone came to visit her today," Gudmestad said.

Text and Image Source: Evening Sun November 20, 2011

News---Manassas Virginia Reports Reenactment Related Income A Healthy Sucess

2011-11-21T12:03:00.016-05:00

Manassas Profits From Mass Casualties (reenactment), Tom Jackman, Washington Post, November 20, 2011.

Thousands of Civil War reenactors and spectators converged on Manassas in July. “Our hotel is air-conditioned, right?” Most Civil War reenactments are done for the pure pleasure of recapturing historical moments, educating others about our past, and sweating off large amounts of weight in authentically heavy uniforms. But for the 150th anniversary of the First Battle of Bull Run, Manassas City and its businesses in Old Town were actually able to make some money, according to a new report issued by the city’s community development department.

. . . the report states, “The Sesquicentennial of the First Battle of Manassas was a singular event that is not expected to be repeated.” And what happened was that the city as a whole collected 14.4 percent more in meals taxes than in July 2010, which translates into an additional $811,500 in revenue for Manassas restaurants, the report figures.

In Old Town Manassas, shops saw increases of 55 percent for sales taxes and 21 percent for meals taxes, for more revenue. And sales at the Manassas Museum jumped 700 percent over the same time last year. ne party who didn’t cooperate: God. It was over 100 degrees most days of that July weekend, felt way hotter, and some events were canceled. But even this was turned into a positive because it allowed emergency management agencies to try out their response capabilities, and as a result there were no significant injuries, the report found.

So what does this mean for the sesquicentennial of the Second Battle of Bull Run, August 2012, a larger and even bloodier battle? Get those cash registers ready. And cool it with the heat waves, Big Man.

CWL: Here is the 27 page report of An Analysis of the City of Manassas Participation in the Sesquicentennial of the Battle of First Manassas, July 21 – 24, 2011

Text Source with some edits: Washington Post November 20 2011

Top Image Source: Kris's Photo a Day

Bottom Image Source: Manassas Civil War.org

New and Noteworthy---John Brown Is In Everybody's Attic

2011-11-17T13:22:00.013-05:00

Midnight Rising: John Brown And The Raid That Sparked The Civil War, Tony Horwitz, Henry Holt/MacMillian Publishing, 383 pages, 55 illustration, 4 maps, appendix, notes, bibliography, $29.00. Unabridged Audiobook with Author Interview, $39.95.

In the 1998, the very funny and popular Confederates In The Attic, Tony Horwitz gained a degree of notoriety for pursuing Civil War reenactors. What does the the American Civil War mean to men who dress in blue or gray wool, to children in classrooms and to pickup drivers who fly Confederate flags from their truck beds? In Midnight Rising Horwitz pursues the historic Civil War character of John Brown, an individual who used terror to confront terrorism.

W.E.B. DuBois, a noted African-American historian, looked back on the historiography concerning John Brown's life, his murders, his kidnappings, his armed insurrection and his execution for treason against the state of Virginia. He noted that many historians concluded that Brown was insane and an impractical, if not a stupid, terrorist. What makes Brown impossible to understand, the historian noted, is also what makes Brown understandable to blacks. Brown was willing to risk his life and was willing to die to set African-Americans free from slavery. For John Brown, slavery was a war against blacks and it was a war that started along time before Brown himself was born.

Since the 1980s John Brown has become understandable. Stephen Oates' To Purge This Land With Blood and David S. Reynolds' John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights have reignited interest in Brown's life of violence. Tony Horwitz's Midnight Rising: John Brown And The Raid That Sparked The Civil War describes John Brown as expanding his sense of self from childhood through his execution and his death. Indeed, Horwitz finds suspense in Brown's wrestling, and at times failing, to become a successful family man, a prosperous businessman, an industrious community member and an accepted authority in a faith community.

John Brown cannot be understood without the context of America from 1800 to 1860, an era when multiple American revolutions were happening: political, industrial, transportation, religious, agricultural and economic. Brown was caught up in them all. Horwitz concisely acknowledges the state of the Union during these decades and recognizes the national trends that are causing havoc in Brown's life. He moved through New England and made friends with Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Frederick Douglass, a man who stole himself from slavery, counted John Brown as a friend. Several abolitionists throughout the North contributed to Brown chosen cause and efforts. His friends included several of the wealthiest men of the era. But, there were also bankers who dealt with his business failures.

In the early 1850s with nothing to inherit due to Brown's financial failings in the domestic international wool markets, his children moved to Kansas for a fresh start. In June 1855 John Brown, at the urging of his sons, travelled to Kansas in order to participate in Kansas' civil war. By early 1856 the city of Lawrence had been burned and its abolitionist citizens were left dead in its streets. On May 24 Brown and his sons travelled to nearby Pottawatomie Creek and late at night he directed the murder of five pro slavery settlers.

During January 1857, In an effort to aid the antislavery fight in Kansas, Franklin Sanborn, secretary of the Massachusetts State Kansas Committee, introduced Brown to influential abolitionists in the Boston area. These acquaintances constituted themselves as the "Secret Six" who would fund Brown's lawlessness. By January 1858 Brown, with his sons and others rode into Missouri and attacked two homesteads, confiscated horses and wagons and stole eleven of the farmers' slaves. Brown and the raiders traveled eighty-two days, covered over a thousand miles, and to delivered the slaves to freedom in Canada. Within the next year, Brown would conceive a plan to steal and move Virginia's slaves into the Appalachian Mountains and then northward.

On July 3 1859 John Brown rented a farmhouse a few miles outside of Harpers Ferry, Virginia. A member of his party began to reconnoiter the U.S. arsenal at the convergence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers. During August, Brown and Frederick Douglass gathered together for a clandestine meeting at a rock quarry near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. Brown tried to convince Douglass to join him in a raid to Harpers Ferry and its environs. Douglass told Brown that the place was 'a perfect steel trap' and refused to become an accomplice.

On October 16 Brown with his raiders seized the armory at Harpers Ferry, removed slaves from nearby plantations and remained long enough to be trapped in the fire engine house. By October 18 he fell into the hands of the U.S. Army. The politicos in Washington D.C. also sensed a trap for themselves and turned Brown and the surviving raiders over to Virginia authorities. On November 2 a Virginia jury after a week of trial and forty-five minutes of deliberation declared John Brown guilty of murder, treason, and inciting a slave insurrection.

During the morning of December 2 John Brown wrote the following message: 'I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had as I now think, vainly flattered myself, that without very much bloodshed, it might be done.' Brown was hanged that day and a year later, South Carolina was in the midst of seceding from the Union.

Much like the December 2 note, Horwitz shows Brown evolving into the role of a public martyr. Smoothly written, well paced and at times dramatic, Horwitz takes Brown seriously as a man who wrestles with his own failures and the failures of his nation. The author does not over dramatize the story. The characters around Brown are unique and engaging without a writer's help. Thankfully Horowitz avoids bringing forth into his John Brown story such currents events as the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. Such remarks have marred the Emory Thomas’ Dogs of War and have already dated Louis P. Masur's A Concise History of the Civil War.

Readers of David Reynolds’ John Brown and Stephen Oates' To Purge This Land With Blood are encouraged to return to Horwitz’s John Brown. Like Reynolds and Oates, Horwitz offers an engaging, multi-dimensional and compelling biography of a puzzling character who makes trouble for nearly all readers. Those familiar with Horwitz's Confederates in the Attic will find a character who would not have believed that the Civil War started on April 12 1861, but had started many decades before.

Bottom Image Source: Harpers Ferry Historical Association

New and Noteworthy---Forrest's Fighting Preacher

2011-11-16T11:24:00.006-05:00

Forrest's Fighting Preacher: David Campbell Kelly of Tennessee, Michael R. Bradley, Hisory Press, 145 pp., illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, notes, 2011, $19.99.

Before the war he was a pastor, at the beginning of the war he was a recruiter, during the war he as an aide to N.B. Forrest and by the end of the war he had commanded a regiment, a battalion and a brigade. David Campbell Kelly's adventures are described in Forrest's Fighting Preacher: David Campbell Kelly of Tennessee. It serves as a fine 'slice of life' biography, a window into the Forrest's command, and a picture of Tennessee pastor.

Bradley reveals Kelly to be Forrest's trusted confidant. For Kelley, a clergyman who had served for two years as a missionary in China, his return to Tennessee conincided with the election of Lincoln and Tennessee's secession. He raised a cavalry company from his large congregation. The unit began its service in N. B. Forrest's original regiment. Kelley became Forrest's second in command, served in combat, offered on Forrest's staff and as ade-de-camp and chaplain. After the war, Kelley returned to the ministry and took part in the establishment of Vanderbilt University. Later he stood for the office of the governor of Tennessee.

Michael R. Bradley earned his PhD from Vanderbilt University and taught U.S. history for thirty-six years at Motlow College in Tullahoma, Tennessee. Now professor emeritus, he remains an active author and speaker. He is recognized for his several works, including Nathan Bedford Forrest's Escort And Staff , Tullahoma: The 1863 Campaign for the Control of Middle Tennessee and With Blood and Fire: Life Behind Union Lines in Middle Tennessee, 1863-65 .

New And Noteworthy---What Did Blockade Runners Bring Into The Confederacy?

2011-11-15T22:20:00.009-05:00

The Denbigh's Civilian Imports: Customs Records of a Civil War Blockade Runner between Mobile and Havana, J. Barto Arnold III, Institute of Nautical Archaeology, 512 pages, paperback, 2011, $40.00

The Denbigh Shipwreck Project Publication Number 5 offers customs forms and invoices revealed details of everyday life during the Civil War, January and June 1864. Hundreds of small orders for individually identified families as well as orders for merchants. The invoices presented might just as well be answers for survey questions to the lady of the house such as, “What six items would you like us to bring you from the general store in Havana ?”

A typical invoice might contain 20 yds. of fabric for new clothes, 6 pairs of children’s shoes, 10 lbs. of fancy tea, and 200 cigars. The book offers an amazing look into the import business during wartime and fascinating details on those Southerners who could afford them.
Bottom Image Source: Robert Oreg

New and Noteworthy---The Real War Has Gotten Into A Book: The Civil War Medical Photography Archive of Harewood Hospital

2011-11-14T17:40:00.007-05:00

Shooting Soldiers: Civil War Medical Photography, Book One: Wounded Soldiers Identified, 101 Regiments From the Harewood Hospital Album, Reed B. Bontecou, M.D., The Burns Archive Press, 165 pp., 100 b/w photographs, indices, primary references, $50.00.

Clinical photographs taken of the wounded soldiers taken by Dr. Reed Bontecou, were at one time among the collections of the Army Medical Museum. Later scattered, many are now in Shooting Soldiers: Civil War Medical Photography, Book One: Wounded Soldiers Identified, 101 Regiments From the Harewood Hospital Album. Dr. Stanley Burns' 35 year pursuit benefits readers with this publication, the size of which is 5 3/4" by 6 3/4".

The first of several projected this volume, this volume of portraits present wounded soldiers' partially clothed with their wounds exposed and each patient holds a chalkboard with their names on it. The image of. J. E. Jolliff, Company K, 116 Pennsylvania Volunteers graces the book's cover. An extensive introduction offers a history of the photographs, a biographical sketch Dr. Reed B. Bontecou, an explanation of new weapons and the war's tactics, and a brief history Harewood Hospital.

The photographs are presented as 3.5 x 5.5 images with one photograph per page. Page 37 is typical of the format. "David R. Tempelton, Co. A., 46 NY, Petersburg, April 2, 1865, gun shot wound, left eye, [photograph taken] at time of admission. At 16, was admitted to HHH, Arpil 5 with gunshot wound of the head. Ball hit left temple, just back of outer angle of eye, grazing malar bone and eyeball, destroying sight; passed off producing fles would of the tip of the nose. Was wounded at Petersburgh April 2nd 1865. He is now well."

There are indices of the regiments, and the battles at which his subjects received their wounds. The bibliography of includes both print and online primary sources. This book aids general readers of the war ,and those readers specializing in medical history and Civil War photography. In summary, CWL recalls the words of the radio correspondent who May 6, 1937 watched the explosion and destruction of the zeppelin Hindenburg at Lakehurst, New Jersey. "The humanity! Oh! The humanity!

Film Coming in 2012, 2013---12 Years a Slave: Kidnapped And Sold Into Slavery, An Autobiography

2011-11-11T09:09:00.006-05:00

Director Steve McQueen is already getting plenty of attention for his sexually controversial film Shame starring Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan, and while his next film, Twelve Years a Slave already sounds promising featuring a reunion with the X-Men: First Class star and Chiwetel Ejiofor, the new is sure to get a considerable amount of exposure with a huge name now joining the cast. Screen Daily reports (and The Playlist confirms) that Brad Pitt, who is already producing the film through his Plan B production banner, will also have a role in the film written by McQueen along with Three Kings scribe John Ridley.

Based on Solomon Northup's 1853 autobiography, the film will tell the story of a free black man (Ejiofor) who found himself kidnapped and turned into a slave for twelve, long, grueling years under numerous owners. Northup was a happy, married, educated and free black man living in New York who was approached by two men with a job offer in Washington D.C. But upon his arrival in the capitol, he was kidnapped, put in a slave pen and passed around through various slave owners for twelve years. As an autobiography, the book is a detailed firsthand account of the slave markets in D.C. right down to the food served to the slaves. Spoiler alert for those who don't want to know too much, the real-life story has a happy ending with the man able to secure his freedom when a white carpenter from Canada, who didn't believe in slavery, smuggled out letters to Northup's wife, thus initiating a court case that set him free.

It's not clear what role Pitt will take in the film, but it's my bet that he'll play one of the various slave owners. Fassbender's role has yet to be confirmed either, but it's been speculated that he'll play the carpenter from Canada, though that role could just as easily end up going to Pitt. Either way, with a film like Shame putting McQueen in the spotlight for its NC-17 sexual drama, and a stellar cast, that includes a long deserved lead role for Ejiofor, this is already one of my more anticipated films in the coming years.

Text Source: First Showing
Top Image: Black Film
Bottom Image: Brad Pitt in film The Assassination of Jessee James

Journal of the Civil War Era: Volume 1 Number 3: Messmates, Illinois Politics, Women's Civil War History

2011-11-11T08:57:00.004-05:00

The Journal of the Civil War Era announces the publication of its December 2011 issue, Voume 1 number 4. The journal is a collaborative effort between the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center at Penn State and the University of North Carolina Press. It canvasses the history-cultural, social, and economic as well as political and military-of the United States from roughly 1830 to 1890.

The contents of the December 2011 edition are as follows:

Articles:

Rachel A. Shelden, "Messmates' Union: Friendship, Politics, and Living Arrangements in the Capital City, 1845-1861"

Bruce Levine, "'The Vital Element of the Republican Party': Antislavery, Nativism, and Abraham Lincoln"

James L. Huston, "The Illinois Political Realignment of 1844-1860: Revisiting the Analysis"

Review Essay:

Lyde Cullen Sizer, "Mapping the Spaces of Women's Civil War History"

Professional Notes:

Brian Kelly and John W. White, "The After Slavery Website: A New Online Resource for Teaching U.S. Slave Emancipation"

Further information about the journal, including subscription rates, may be found at: http://www.journalofthecivilwarera.com/

News---Gettysburg's Lutheran Seminary Building Becomes Battle Museum

2011-11-10T14:57:00.007-05:00

Seminary Building Will Be Refurbished Into A Museum To Show Its Role In The Battle Of Gettysburg, Steve Marroni, The Evening Sun, November 2, 2011.

One of the most historically significant Civil War buildings in private hands soon will be refurbished into a state-of-the-art museum and will be open to the public just in time for the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. Schmucker Hall at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg was a lookout point and the center of the Union’s defenses the first day of the three-day battle. And in the following days, it served as a field hospital for hundreds of wounded soldiers.

Seminary Ridge Historic Preservation Foundation President John Spangler said the museum will teach people about the building’s role in the battle, as well as the significance religion played in the lives of Americans during the time of the Civil War.
“What’s amazing to me is that on both sides, Union and Confederate troops sat by the fire at night, and read from the same Bible", Spangler said.

The seminary, along with the Adams County Historical Society and the preservation foundation, received a $4 million state grant last week for The Voices of History campaign, which will transform the 1832 building into a fourstory, state-of-the-art museum. The building, once called the Old Dorm, has not been in use for students since the 1950s. Currently, the top two floors are not being used at all because of unsatisfactory heating and cooling and lack of humidity control, but the bottom two are a part of the historical society, where much of its collection is on display.

Spangler said Schmucker Hall played a significant role in the first day of the battle. The cupola at the top of the building has been a prominent feature for many historians, and was where Union cavalry Gen. John Buford observed the approaching Confederate army and met with Gen. John Reynolds to develop a plan.

Bradley Hoch, chairman of the Adams County Historical Society board of directors, said the Union's First Corps suffered 5,700 casualties killed, wounded and missing out of 8,000 soldiers as they defended the position at Schmucker Hall, giving the Union time to fortify other key points along the battlefield. He said the Union essentially traded lives for time. Each floor of the museum will have interpretive displays, bringing to life the history of Schmucker Hall, Spangler said. The fourth floor will be dedicated to the events of the first day of the battle that occurred around Schmucker Hall. The third floor will follow Schmucker Halls use as a field hospital during the remainder of the battle, and through September of that year. The second floor will focus on the moral and social history of the period, and will feature displays on faith, issues of slavery and freedom and the Underground Railroad, Spangler said. The first floor will be a reception area.

The museum will include murals, artifacts, and audio and video displays. It also will feature interactive maps, recreations of hospital scenes with die-cast statues and much more. The historical society is now packing up artifacts and moving them out of Schmucker Hall in preparation for construction, which is excepted to begin in December. The museum is expected to be ready by spring 2013.

Text and Image Source: The Evening Sun, 11.01.11

Sesquicentennial News----Port Royal Sound, November 1861

2011-11-10T09:28:00.009-05:00

The Battle of Port Royal is among the earliest amphibious operations of the American Civil War. The United States' navy and army captured Port Royal Sound, South Carolina,on November 7, 1861. The sound lies between Savannah, Georgia and Charleston, South Carolina and was guarded by two forts on opposite sides of the entrance: on the south was Fort Walker located on Hilton Head Island and to the north Fort Beauregard located on Phillip's Island.

Beginning on November 3 the amphious force assembled in the Atlantic close to its force's objective. Because of losses occurred during an Atlantic storm, the army was not able to land. The Federal attack was solely between ship-based guns and land based guns.

The fleet attacked on November 7 by bombarding Fort Walker and Fort Beauregard. After passing both forts several times, the fleet assumed enfilading positions that took advantage of both forts. Four Confederate gunboats appeared then fled into a creek. By the afternoon, a majority of the forts' artillery pieces could not be service by the Confederate gunners and the Confederate infantrymen had fled the forts. Fort Walker fell to landing parties from the Federal flagship.

Those Confederates gaurding Fort Beauregard assumed that they would soon have no way to escape and they abandoned the fort. Another landing party took possession of the Fort Beauregard later in the day. Though facing a heavy volume of fire, neither the Federal nor the Confederates suffered heavily and casualties were light. In both forts 11 men were killed, 47 were wounded, and 4 were missing. In the fleet, 8 were killed and 23 wounded. Immediately following the capture of the forts, the Union forces occupied Beaufort, Georgia, and moving north occupied St. Helena Sound. The northward expansion continued up to the rivers south of Charleston,
South Carolina.

The Civil War Navy blogsite offers a list of bloggers, news, resources and commemoration activities. Civil War Navy Sesquicentennial Bloggers. Matthew Eng, Coordinator, Deputy Educator, Hampton Roads Naval Museum, and Civil War Navy's blogsite coordinator, his other Blog Contributions: Hampton Roads Naval Museum, Naval History

Civil War Navy Sesquicentennial Website

News---President Signs Proclamation, Establishes Fort Monroe National Monument

2011-11-09T14:33:00.010-05:00

President Barack Obama Tuesday signed an executive order making Fort Monroe in Hampton, Va., which closed as a military base in September, a National Monument. Fort Monroe "was the site of the first slave ships to land in the New World," Obama said during the Oval Office signing. "But then in the Civil War, almost 250 years later, Fort Monroe also became a refuge for slaves that were escaping from the South, and helped to create the environment in which Abraham Lincoln was able to sign that document up there -- the Emancipation Proclamation."

Obama said the National Monument designation would bring millions of dollars to the region and create 3,000 jobs. "There's a strong economic component to this. We think we're going to see additional jobs in Virginia as a consequence of this. But for those members of Congress who are here, I still need some action from Congress on the American Jobs Act and other steps," the president said.

Remarks by the President at Signing of a Presidential Proclamation Establishing the Fort Monroe National Monument, President Barack Hussein Obama, Oval Office, White House, Washington, DC, November 2, 2011.

"Well, one of the great pleasures of this job, but also one of my responsibilities, is making sure that we are preserving our nation’s treasures so that they can be enjoyed by our children, our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren. And over the years, over 100 sites have been set aside as national monuments -- everything from the Statue of Liberty to the Grand Canyon.

"So today, I am continuing that proud tradition by adding another monument to the list: Fort Monroe in Hampton, Virginia, has played a remarkable role in the history of our nation. It was the site of the first slave ships to land in the New World. But then in the Civil War, almost 250 years later, Fort Monroe also became a refuge for slaves that were escaping from the South, and helped to create the environment in which Abraham Lincoln was able to sign that document up there -- the Emancipation Proclamation.

"In September, Fort Monroe closed its doors as a military base. But thanks to advocacy of some outstanding citizens and historians and elected officials who are represented here, as well as the great work of our Department of the Interior and Ken Salazar and the -- all the people who have been involved in making this day possible, we are going to continue this legacy, making Fort Monroe a national monument.

"This is going to give an opportunity for people from all across the country to travel to Fort Monroe and trace the history that has been so important to making America what it is. It’s also going to be an incredibly important economic boost to the region. Local officials estimate that this may end up creating as many as 3,000 jobs in the region. It will add millions of dollars to the local economy in and around Hampton. And so this is a win-win. Not only is it good for the people of that region now, but it also allows us to set aside this incredibly important site for the enjoyment and appreciation of generations to come.

"So I want to thank everybody who’s here for the great work that they’ve done. I am looking forward to not only visiting myself but also taking Malia and Sasha down there so they can get a little bit of sense of their history. And I thank the Commonwealth of Virginia for giving us this opportunity to appreciate the remarkable history of their state but also of this country.

So with that, I’m going to sign this bill -- or executive order.(The executive order is signed.) There you go. (Applause.) Just one last point I want to make. As I said, there’s a strong economic component to this. We think we’re going to see additional jobs in Virginia as a consequence of this. But for those members of Congress who are here, I still need some action from Congress -- (laughter) -- on the American Jobs Act and othttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifher steps. But in the meantime, this is going to make a big difference. And again, I want to thank everybody here, particularly the private citizens who put their time and money and effort into making this day possible.

Top Text Source: United Press International

Bottom Text Source: White House

Top Image Source: Hampton Roads
Middle Image Source: Missouri Law
Bottom Image Source: White House

Off Topic---Stephen King 'Creeps Me Out'

2011-11-09T09:38:00.012-05:00

Full Dark, No Stars, Stephen King, Scribner's Publishing, Pocket Books paperback edition, 576 pp., $9.95.

Once a decade CWL reads a book by Stephen King. During the previous decade it was On Writing which is in part a memoir and in part a writer's workshop lecture. It reveals a practical view of his craft and the contents of his toolkit. While looking for something that would 'creep him out' during autumn's dying of the light, CWL turned to King's 2010 Full Dark, No Stars.

The work Richard Matheson, H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe is echoed and enhanced by King. In Full Dark, No Stars's first story '1922' is reminiscent of Poe's A Tell-Tale Heart. A farmer, making his son an accomplice, kills his wife; the motivation is that the wife has inherited land that she wants to sell to a pork rendering plant. The story meets King's checklist of being propelling and assaulting. But the characters' marionette strings are pulled conspicuously by King. The wife could have sold the land in a heart beat, taken the money and moved to Omaha; the author stops her. Even before the murder the farmer, who is not worth a pinch of owl's dung, lets rats overrun his barn. That is especially bad when the wife's ghoul sends them to do her bidding. CWL lived 20 years on a dairy and beef farm. No rats, just cats. Though the story meets King's criteria, set forth in an essay at the end of the book, of running at full speed on an open highway, 1922 has a few large and obvious potholes.

On the other hand, the next three stories, Big Driver, Fair Extension and A Good Marriage are are nearly irristable. Well plotted, with characters that are obnoxiously attractive and climaxes these stories are subtle, and satifying. The stories have a quick pace. Mundane details and slight metaphors fix images in the mind of the careful reader. The romance author in Big Driver can be a bit cloying; but her cat and her GPS hold to the Socratic Method and ask questions that keep the author and the reader on task. In Fair Extension, a devil appears with an offer that should have been refused by a loan officer with terminal cancer. This story is a long list of painful circumstances imposed on the banker's best friend and his family. The ending is both striking and disappointing. The protagonist is left staring at the planet Venus, thinking that life is good. The scene is reminescent of work by playwright Henrik Ibsen and the novelist Norman Mailer.

A Good Marriage offers a question and an answer. How would a wife who has a good marriage respond when she learns that her husband is a serial killer? This is King's most successful short story among the four in Full Dark, No Stars. The main character's narrative voice is clear and relates her utterly boring, normal life in a marriage with two children. Like the other main characters in these stories, the wife discovers a double life witin her marriage partner, and then she discovers her own double life. In each of these stories these characters talk to themselves in slang and baby talk. It is annoying. Yet for CWL the overall effect of these four stories is that they do indeed 'creep him out.'

After the four short stories, King offers a further look at his motivation. He has been writing for the market place since he was 18 and has been in the trade for over 40 years. It's not about the money reports the fiction writer who is a multi-millionaire. King can not stop writing fiction; he has his own criteria and standards. You might like some of his stories; you might not like some of his stories. He might judge himself as more successful in some stories and less so in others. There will be more to come. CWL expects to continue to read King's work, sometime in the next decade, just like the past four decades.

Forthcoming---Demon of the Lost Cause: Sherman, His Autobiography, And His Spin

2011-11-04T17:03:00.007-04:00

Demon of the Lost Cause: Sherman and Civil War History, Wesley Moody, University of Missouri, 200 pages, $30.00. Release Date: November 20, 2011

Review by William C. Davis for History Book Club:

"Not too many years ago a speaker at a Civil War symposium in St. Louis announced that when the program was over, he was going to visit the local cemetery where General William T. Sherman is buried to “piss on his grave.” Not the most temperate of notions, perhaps, but one that certainly reflects the attitude of millions of Southerners past and present toward one of history’s most controversial commanders. No general on either side generated more visceral animosity, nor has any other leader in the Civil War been so damned on the basis of myth, prejudice and general ignorance.

"Sherman was living in Louisiana when the crisis erupted, and in fact few other future leaders of the Union’s armies had as close an experience and understanding of the South as he did. And oddly enough, in light of his later reputation, Sherman rather liked the South, and felt some sympathy for its plight in 1861 when it found itself backed into a corner over issues surrounding slavery. One of the answers to critics who condemn him for the damage done during his march across Georgia in 1864 is that he saw it as a way of shortening the war, and thereby lessening the overall injury to the South of more years of protracted war.

"As for the widespread destruction that he perpetrated in Georgia in his March to the Sea, a great deal of it is simple myth. Scores of the houses and barns that he supposedly burned are still standing. His army, in fact, cut only a narrow swath either side of its route of march to Savannah, and even his goal was primarily seizure of foodstuffs needed by his army, and destruction of anything that could aid the Confederate war effort. There was virtually no sanctioned wanton destruction. Even the burning of much of Columbia, South Carolina, was against his orders, though he did not try over hard to prevent it once commenced.

"In his new book Demon of the Lost Cause: Sherman and Civil War History, Wesley Moody takes on this myth and many others, including those that Sherman himself helped to create or promote. No man who has been at the center of epochal events is immune to the temptation to take the high ground in crafting his own place in history, and Sherman was no exception. His two-volume memoir, published in 1890, became almost as controversial as the general himself, and Moody does an admirable job of sifting the fact from the “spin.”

"What emerges is a Sherman who was neither beast nor saint, neither a cruel destroyer of civilians and their world, nor a far-seeing prophet of 20th-century warfare. Historians and readers of today may find as much stuff of controversy in Moody’s depiction of Sherman as our ancestors did in the man himself, but no student or study of the man who made war a sort of hell can afford to ignore Demon of the Lost Cause in the future.

"By the way. The historian in St. Louis changed his mind, and Sherman’s grave remains to date, so far as is known, unsoiled."

New and Noteworthy---Lincoln, Two Constitutions And The War

2011-11-03T13:23:00.009-04:00

Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation: Constitutional Conflict in the American Civil War, Mark E. Neely, University of North Carolina Press, 410 pages, notes, bibliography, index,$35.00. [November 2011]

From the publisher: The Civil War placed the U.S. Constitution under unprecedented--and, to this day, still unmatched--strain. In Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Mark Neely examines for the first time in one book the U.S. Constitution and its often overlooked cousin, the Confederate Constitution, and the ways the documents shaped the struggle for national survival.

Previous scholars have examined wartime challenges to civil liberties and questions of presidential power, but Neely argues that the constitutional conflict extended to the largest questions of national existence. Drawing on judicial opinions, presidential state papers, and political pamphlets spiced with the everyday immediacy of the partisan press, Neely reveals how judges, lawyers, editors, politicians, and government officials, both North and South, used their constitutions to fight the war and save, or create, their nation.

Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation illuminates how the U.S. Constitution not only survived its greatest test but emerged stronger after the war. That this happened at a time when the nation's very existence was threatened, Neely argues, speaks ultimately to the wisdom of the Union leadership, notably President Lincoln and his vision of the American nation.

CWL: The author of The Civil War and the Limits of Destruction , The Last Best Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America , The Confederate Image: Prints of the Lost Cause and many others, Mark Neely offers a thorough discussion secession, habeas corpus, the presidency, soldiers in courtrooms, the police state of Richmond Virginia, and states' rights in the Confederacy. Readers will be informed and possibly provoked. In a lifetime of studying Lincoln, the Constitution of 1787, the Confederate Constitution, civil liberties on both side of the Mason-Dixon Line, Mark Neely offers both a distillation of his previous works and new information and interpretation of how the Constitution of 1787, as a legal foundation, was stressed and saved in the courtrooms of The North, The South and The West during the war.

Civil War Fiction: CWL's List Of The Top Five

2011-11-01T12:03:00.011-04:00

In response to an online query, CWL offers a list of five novels that will satisfy the Civil War reader and probably anyone with an undergraduate degree in history or English.The Crater, Richard Slotkin; Shiloh, Shelby Foote; The Falling Hills, Perry Lentz; Bright, Starry Banner, Alden Carter; and of course, Killer Angels, Michael Shaara. These titles are not in any particular order.

Also, on a separate list are the novels by Howard Bahr: The Black Flower, The Year of Jubilo, The Judas Field, Home of Christmas. I could begin reading again any one of them at any time of the day.

Here's two of the top five with the others coming soon.

The Falling Hills, by Perry Lentz was published in 1994 by the University of South Carolina Press. The novel's 470 pages offers a driving narrative of black Federal soldiers, white Federal officers, Confederate cavalrymen, Southern civilians who loyal Unionists and loyal Confederates. The very structures and cultures of Fort Pillow and west Tennessee come alive with colorful and menacing details. Combat scenes are exceptionally well done.

Bright, Starry Banner, by Alden Carter was published by Soho Press in 2004. I was skeptical because of the cover: Modern Neo-Confederate art work and the title: Bright Starry Banner. But I was wrong. I have visited Stones River National Battlefield Park and had a fair understanding of the battle. Alden recreates it accurately. The other strengths of this novel is the characterizations of the privates to the generals.

The bright starry banner of the title describes both flags, not just the one on the cover. From CWL's reading of diaries and experience as a reenactor, the grit of the battle lines and reactions of soldiers on the front rings true. The generals are not gods; they are very human in Alden's novel. What makes this book better than most CW fiction are the ideas in it. It's not all fighting; God, faith, slavery, honor, and sex are on the minds of these characters and these ideas are not the modern notions of them but are placed in the context of mid-19th century America but not constrained by it.

Anniversary Reenactment---Ball's Bluff, Leesburg, Virginia: Re-enactors Stage Booming Battle At Ball's Bluff

2011-10-24T19:58:00.011-04:00

Re-enactors Stage Booming Battle At Ball's Bluff, Leesburg Today, Saturday, October 22, 2011

Nearly 1,000 Civil War re-enactors and some 2,000 spectators converged on the Ball's Bluff battlefield near Leesburg Saturday to stage the largest ever re-enactment of the 1861 engagement. Warned to put their ear-plugs in and turn their hearing aids off, the crowd was treated to a thundering hour-long program that began with a skirmish between Confederate and Union units in the woods and ended with a surge of southern re-enforcements capturing many of the northern soldiers and driving the rest into the Potomac River.

The spectator area at times was surrounded by the sounds a gunfire as units advanced, retreated and flanked their foes. The frequent booms of Union howitzers, whose construction was commissioned to help mark the 150th anniversary of the battle, could be heard well beyond the confines of the regional park. Activities continued Sunday at Morven Park, where visitors toured encampments from 9-10:30 a.m. and viewed a re-enactment of the Battle of Dranesville at 11 a.m. At 12:30 p.m. a wreath-laying ceremony was held at the Baker Monument at Ball's Bluff Regional Park.

Text and Image Source: Leesburg Today
Text is slightly edited by CWL.

Anniversary Reenactment---Ball's Bluff, Leesburg, Virginia: Appreciations and Suggestions

2011-10-24T09:38:00.005-04:00

CWL sent these remarks to the cwdg.yahoogroups.org on the Monday after the Ball's Bluff commemoration reenactment on October 21, 22, 23.

As an infantry re-enactor who has been on campaign since 1993, me and my pards would list the 2011 Ball’s Bluff as among the best in in our experience.
Reasons: 1. Good accurate scenario on original ground. 2. Schedule of events
3. size of reenactment group, not to large not to small [with the exception of the Rebels, whose enlistments fell noticeably short] 4. And of course, great weather.

As we were leaving the question arose, when are we coming back? Is there an interest by the organizers that having Civil War re-enactors do a NPS style living history on the Ball’s Bluff location annually?

Slight disappointments: A. Friday’s fire wood supply contained a lot of dead wood that wouldn’t make heat; B. and in the ‘it never gets done’ educating the re-enactors on the battle that is being commemorated. Many re-enactors come on the field knowing lots about Gettysburg but not much about Ball’s Bluff and other smaller engagements. A one sheet, both sides with maps handout would go far with re-enactors and, come to think about it, spectators too.

I am one of those re-enactors that walk up to spectators and start conversations and it would be nice to have a common piece of information about the battle to talk about with spectators.

Image Source: markhunter

News---Army Museum's Morbid Oddities Resettled In Maryland

2011-10-20T14:23:00.005-04:00

Army Museum's Morbid Oddities Resettled In Maryland, Associated Press, October 17, 2011.

The bullet that killed Abraham Lincoln is mounted under glass, like a diamond in a snow globe, in its new home at the National Museum of Health and Medicine. The lead ball and several skull fragments from the 16th president are in a tall, antique case overlooking a Civil War exhibit in a museum gallery in Silver Spring, just off the Capital Beltway. The military museum, known for its collection of morbid oddities, moved in September from the former Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington.

At Walter Reed, visitors had to pass through a security gate and find the museum on the campus, where parking could be a problem. The new building stands outside the gates of Fort Detrick's Forest Glen Annex. Visitors can just drive up, walk in and come face-to-face with a perpetually grinning skeleton directing them to an exhibit on the human body. There, one can see a hairball from the stomach of a 12-year-old girl and the amputated leg of a man with elephantiasis — a disease that causes limbs to become bloated. The leg floats upright in a glass jar like an enormous, pickled sausage.

The museum's collection of 25 million objects includes plenty to inspire fascination or disgust — or both. But it's also a treasure trove for researchers like Candice Millard, author of the new book "Destiny of the Republic," about the assassination of President James Garfield. She wrote in her acknowledgements that she held in her gloved hands at the museum the section of Garfield's spine pierced by a .44-caliber bullet from Charles Guiteau's gun. Guiteau's brain and partial skeleton are also in the museum's collection. Deputy Director Tim Clarke Jr. said the museum will close in January and reopen by May 21 with its largest-ever display of objects to mark its 150th anniversary. The scope of the exhibits is still being decided, he said. "We are sure, though, that we are programming and planning an exhibit that will astound our visitors," Clarke said.

The $12 million relocation established a permanent home for an institution that has had 10 addresses since 1862. That's when Surgeon General William Hammond directed medical officers in the field to collect "specimens of morbid anatomy" for study at the newly founded museum along with projectiles and foreign bodies. A photograph nearly covering one wall of the museum's new Civil War exhibit shows amputated legs stacked like firewood. The exhibit also includes the shattered bones of U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Daniel Sickles' lower right leg, mounted for display beside a 12-pound cannonball like the one that hit him during the 1863 Battle of Gettysburg. Most of the museum's objects, including 2,000 microscopes and hundreds of thousands of human brain specimens, are in an off-site warehouse.

They will be moved by next spring to a renovated warehouse across the street from the new museum. Clarke said the requirement to safely pack, move and unpack each artifact will enable the museum to get a better handle on the number of artifacts in any given collection and the grand scope of the entire collection. One thing the museum won't do is destructive testing of artifacts. That's what the Grand Army of the Republic Museum and Library in Philadelphia learned when it explored the possibility in 2009 of comparing DNA from a Lincoln bloodstain in its own collection to the Lincoln anatomical specimens at the National Museum of Health and Medicine. Eric J. Schmincke, president of the Philadelphia museum, said he appreciates the desire to keep an artifact intact. "You don't want to take any chances like that," he said. "It's because you want them to see what you have. It's history."

Text and Image Source: Associated Press/Fox News

Award Winning---The Seasoned Soldier: Coping with the Environment in Civil War Virginia

2011-10-17T10:32:00.009-04:00

By awarding the 2011 Coffman Prize , The Society of Military Historians has recognized The Seasoned Soldier: Coping with the Environment in Civil War Virginia. Kathryn S. Meier.

The Seasoned Soldier: Coping with the Environment in Civil War Virginia by drawing on a wide array of official and personal accounts examines the ways in which Union and Confederate soldiers understood and practiced self-care during the Peninsular and Shenandoah campaigns of 1862. Notwithstanding seminal efforts by the U.S. Sanitary Commission to improve soldiers’ living conditions, military medicine on both sides remained rudimentary and principally concerned with rooting out malingerers. Consequently, principal responsibility for maintaining physical and mental health—as well as combat effectiveness—devolved to the soldiers themselves. Over time, they acquired the skills required to look after their bodies and stave off melancholy, rendering themselves “seasoned soldiers.” Their respective armies depended on such men, even if they did not always understand or approve of their methods. What officers interpreted as desertion or straggling, the men often considered essential sojourns—necessary to mend bodies, augment diets, or restore nerves. Innovatively combining military, medical, and environmental history, A Seasoned Soldier sheds new light on two of the most storied campaigns of the Civil War and points the way for future scholarship in the field.

A Note From Dr. Meier to CWL: The manuscript is under review at UNC Press. I have my fingers crossed that if the process goes well it will be out in about a year. Until then a dissertation version of the manuscript can be read online via Alderman Library at University of Virginia, under the title “'No Place for the Sick': Nature’s War on Civil War Soldier Health in 1862 Virginia" or an article summarizing the argument appeared in the June 2011 issue of The Journal of the Civil War Era under the title “‘This is No Place for the Sick’: Nature’s War on Civil War Soldier Mental and Physical Health in the 1862 Peninsula and Shenandoah Valley Campaigns."

Text Source: Society of Military Historians
Image Source: University of Scranton

Preservation News---Mary Boykin Chestnut's Photo Album Donated To Library And Soon To Be Published With Diary

2011-10-11T16:17:00.012-04:00

Faces of the Civil War: Mary Chesnut's Photographs Back In Family Hands, Robert Behre, Post Courier, October 10, 2011.

Mary Chesnut, wife of U.S. Sen. James Chesnut Jr. of South Carolina on the eve of the Civil War — a man who played a pivotal role in the war's first shot at Fort Sumter and later served as an aide to Confederate President Jefferson Davis, wrote an extensive diary widely praised as one of that era's greatest works of literature. But she also collected a few hundred photographs, primarily of the people who were her subjects. These photos likely jogged her memory as she continued to rework her diary up throughout Reconstruction and until her death in 1886. Since then, the photographs and her written words were split up.

Molly [pictured] went from being Mary Boykin Chesnut's maid to becoming her business partner in a dairy after the Civil War. Her diary, first published in 1905, would become famous. Her photographs, however, disappeared — at least from the scholars and family members most involved in keeping Chesnut's legacy alive.

Today, her words and pictures soon will be back together at the University of South Carolina. A new two-volume set published this month, which includes 'Mary Chesnut's Diary from Dixie,' and 'Mary Chesnut's Civil War Photograph Album,' gives the broader understanding of Chesnut's work and of what's been missing all these years. The story of their reunification is an epic one in itself, with drama, angst and ultimately a happy ending.

Chesnut had no children, but her sister's descendants, now scattered across the country, have continued to find out all they can about her life and work. Along with Chesnut scholars, such as C. Vann Woodward, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1981 expanded edition of her diary, the family tried to find out what happened to the photo albums. All they knew was the albums vanished from an ancestor's home in Baltimore in 1931. Since then, the family and Woodward would get occasional tips about their whereabouts, but the trail always went cold.

Until November 2007. That's when their owner, John O'Brien of West Virginia, put them up for auction in Nashville. Historians in Charleston spotted the auction and contacted The Post and Courier, which did a short story about their concerns that this important historical record would end up in private hands or, even worse, bought by someone who would sell the photos off individually.

The story was seen by Margot Rose of Charleston, a cousin of the Daniels family in Camden, which lived in Mulberry Plantation, one of Chesnut's homes, said Marty Daniels. Daniels' mother, Martha Williams Daniels, had spent much of her life doing historical research on her famous ancestor.
The family, about 50 members of which had gathered for Thanksgiving at Mulberry, had about three days to figure out how to find the money, knowing the winning bid could surpass $200,000. The extended family prepared for the auction by sending emails to clarify how much each family member could pledge toward their purchase. Martha Daniels, 84 at the time, took the lead. Some elementary school-age children in the family pledged $100 from their savings accounts.

The family also called other South Carolina libraries and historical groups whose interest might be keen to ask them not to compete and bid up the price beyond the family's means. They also contacted Austin Sheheen, a family friend, a collector of early South Carolina currency and uncle of recent gubernatorial candidate Vincent Sheheen, to phone in to the auction and represent the family. 'We figured we had to take a chance and try,' Marty Daniels said.

The auction featured all sorts of Civil War memorabilia, and while the family felt comfortable that it could compete, there was a price beyond which it couldn't go. Moments before the album was auctioned off, autographed photos from the war were going for bids of $10,000. Chesnut's album contained about 200. 'We watched in horror as we watched the computer,' Marty Daniels said. 'We were really anxious.'

The anxiety peaked when just about three minutes before the lot of Chesnut's photos came up for auction, Sheheen's phone line went dead. He called back. The bidding began at $60,000, as the extended family monitored the auction online. Sheheen eventually placed the winning bid for $77,675. 'We knew we got it because it was within our budget,' Marty Daniels said. 'We got it on a very good day, and we did get a great kindness from other institutions in South Carolina.'

The family wanted to own the photos because it had so much documentation from Chesnut's life that it felt well-positioned to research them. Also, publishing them would give the family a chance to raise money for its ongoing work with the Mulberry Plantation archives. The collection arrived at Mulberry before Christmas 2007. It included Confederate generals, European heads of state, abolitionists, slaves, women and children, a full range of all those who played a part in and were affected by the war. Some of the photographs are referred to in Chesnut's diary, such as the image of General Robert E. Lee. 'That day Mrs. Lee gave me a likeness of the General, a photograph taken soon after the Mexican War,' Chesnut wrote. 'She likes it so much better than the later ones. He was certainly a handsome man then — handsomer than even now. I shall prize it for Mrs. Lee's sake, too.'

Photography was emerging in the 1860s, and people of means often posed at studios for cartes de visite, French for visiting cards. Many were taken by the nation's most famous wartime photographers, including Matthew Brady and Charleston's Quinby and Co. They're among the earliest photographs even taken in the state, since studio portraits were just becoming popular as the new technology emerged. During the past four years, Daniels and archivist Barbara E. McCarthy researched the photos and were able to identify all but six. 'Our take on it is she was consciously creating the two to go together,' Daniels said of the diary and photos.

While the auction house said there were 211 pictures, it turned out about 25 were missing. The seller, John O'Brien bought them just in time to keep the albums from being dismantled by a collector. O'Brien later helped the family track down more than a dozen missing photos apparently removed by the previous owner. With their book project done, the family is poised to hand them over to the South Caroliniana Library, which also holds Chesnut's diaries. There, others can continue to research them. Henry Fulmer, the library's curator of manuscripts, said the two belong together.

'They definitely are of national significance,' he said. 'We see this as probably the last known, until recently unknown, part of her personal archives. We're thrilled that now, for the first time since Mrs. Chesnut's death, they are literally side by side in the same building and available for scholars and for those who want a glimpse of history.'

Text and Image Source: Post Courier, October 10, 2011

New and Noteworthy---The Dead Line At Andersonville Prison: In Fact, Memory and 20th Century Wars

2011-10-06T10:18:00.012-04:00

Haunted by Atrocity: Civil War Prisons in American Memory, Benjamin G. Cloyd. Baton Rouge Louisiana State University Press, Illustrations, 251 pp., notes, index, bibliography, 2010, $37.50

Review by Adam M. Zimmerli. Published on H-CivWar (September, 2011)

As the Civil War drew to a close in 1865, thousands of prisoners streamed home from prisons North and South, victims of often haphazard systems that fostered both intentional cruelty and unintentional suffering. More than four hundred thousand soldiers endured captivity during the war, and nearly one-tenth of the soldiers who died during the war years breathed their last within the confines of a prison. Though most of the returning soldiers would mend physically, the question of what happened to them and their comrades, and how their experiences fit within the emerging interpretation of the colossal struggle, would weigh on their minds and those of generations after them.

Benjamin G. Cloyd's recent Haunted by Atrocity is a welcome and timely voice in the ongoing struggle to understand the memory of the Civil War. In a discussion that is dominated by models of either combat veteran memories transitioning into the postwar commemoration or ladies' societies navigating complex political waters through monuments to the fallen, Cloyd's book weaves a complex story that not only incorporates the difficulties of competing postwar narratives, but also adds the depth of a group of veterans that are frequently overlooked but whose often vitriolic responses had a lasting effect when other interpretations faded.

Focusing largely on Andersonville, Haunted by Atrocity examines the influence that the prison and its inmates' memories had on six distinct time periods. The overarching story of the prisoner experience, ranging from the earliest weeks of the Civil War to the impending sesquicentennial, is one that remains controversial even as reconciliation movements dull the edge of postwar rhetoric. In addition to discussing an important yet often overlooked facet of the struggle to privilege certain memories, Cloyd's book also provides tangible evidence that some of the emotions generated by the Civil War remained extremely potent despite the passage of time.

Beginning with the genesis of the prisoner-exchange cartels, the author charts the prisoners' experiences in the first chapter. Cloyd shows that the burgeoning systems regarding prisoners of war quickly broke down under unanticipated pressures caused by the vast numbers of captured soldiers following the war's early battles. He also draws the reader's attention to the early charges of barbarism and atrocity, their uses in propaganda on both sides, and their effects on the psyches of the incarcerated soldiers.

Following this chapter on the war itself, Cloyd delves deeply into the growth of the memoir industry and its impact on the evolving interpretations of the conflict. During much of Reconstruction, virulent attacks on the South dominated the memory of the prisons, in particular with regard to Andersonville. The narrative was not completely one-sided, however, and Cloyd contrasts the overt vehemence of the Union veterans with their more quiet Confederate counterparts. The latter's recollections ultimately set the stage for the drastic changes to the war's interpretation in the form of the Lost Cause narrative.

Haunted by Atrocity's next two chapters on the period between 1877 and 1914 differ significantly from the way many other treatises on Civil War memory interpret the rise of the Lost Cause. Whereas most works on this period emphasize a relative relaxation of the animosity that drove postwar politics, Cloyd shows that prisoner memoirs clung even more fervently to descriptions of barbaric captors and systems designed to torture or kill inmates. It was during this period, as well, that former Confederates began publishing prisoner-of-war memoirs. Equally as vehement as the accounts from Union veterans, the stories told by Southerners were also part of an effort to reclaim a status as equals within society and to lay claim to the memory of the war. As major commemorations occurred on former battlefields throughout the South that often featured former enemies coming together and posing for photographs, former captives from both sides joined in the telling of the Civil War by employing highly charged language and divisive rhetoric.

These chapters do conform, however, to the standard interpretation of the evolution of the war's memory in terms of the Emancipation narrative. Former prisoners often reacted violently to African American celebrations at sites like Andersonville. As Cloyd points out, these riots and physical altercations that broke out at numerous Memorial Day celebrations in the South as African Americans gathered to remember the sacrifices of Union soldiers who had languished and died in prisons eventually all but silenced the Emancipation narrative.

A final point discussed by Cloyd in these two chapters examines the question of commemoration at the prison sites. Veterans' groups placed thousands of monuments on fields stretching from the wilds of Texas to Gettysburg, yet few were met with such hostility as those of contested figures at former prison sites. Cloyd uses major points of controversy, such as the proposed monument to Henry Wirz, and the monument to the Confederate dead at Camp Chase, as bellwethers throughout the second chapter. He employs those monuments to show that the viewpoints of former prisoners had become increasingly disparate as the limits of reconciliation were stretched in that era, and living veterans of the war became even more firmly entrenched in maintaining the memories of their departed comrades. Since the general feeling of reconciliation and "shared recognition of what it meant to be a soldier" did not encompass the experiences of the prisoner of war, "the same factors that encouraged national reconciliation continued to promote discord in the specific instance of Civil War Prisons" (p. 109).

The last three chapters of Haunted by Atrocity explore the legacy of the prisons as their roles shifted in the twentieth century. One of the greatest changes that Cloyd explores is the decline of subjective, first-person accounts of the prisons in favor of more objective, historical analyses of the prison experience, as well as the rise of Civil War prisons in fiction. Historians came to use the prison experience, from both the small, firsthand accounts to commandants' and politicians' reflections, to exonerate numerous individuals and to portray many captors as average human beings, rather than as barbarians. Fiction could blur that line to an extent, as Cloyd illustrates through post-World War II stories that drew light parallels between such Civil War prisons as Andersonville and concentration camps. Largely, however, the discussion of captivity during the war, as well as the political machinations that influenced policies, entered a new phase in the twentieth century, which opened the door to new interpretations that precluded simplistic notions of cruelty for cruelty's sake as had been a hallmark of the discussion for decades.

As early as the late nineteenth century, prisons evolved into tourist sites as opposed to purely commemorative sites . . . .

For Cloyd, the creation of the National POW Museum at Andersonville is the natural and logical "consequence of our accepting the objective memory of Civil War prisons," and has transformed a site with a divisive past into a place and memory that is malleable enough to be used for true reconciliation and healing (p. 177) . . . .

The only problem that arises from Cloyd's treatment of prisons in the Civil War and their memory worth mentioning is his seeming bias regarding some of the more modern descriptions of the various sites. While the author very clearly points out the traumas and political agendas motivating the writings of veterans, he has less patience for treatments of the subject that have come in the past approximately fifty years, particularly those that seek to exonerate or glorify the South . . . .

Despite focusing largely on Andersonville, a fact acknowledged by the author in the introduction, Haunted by Atrocity succeeds in weaving context and complexity into a topic that needs more voices. Cloyd's use of Andersonville as a case study provides an intriguing backdrop for the study of Civil War prisoners and their relationship to the contested memories of that conflict. This setting, both in terms of physical location and current monographs, makes this work an excellent tool for effectively comparing and contrasting the evolution of memories as they pertained to various aspects of the war. Haunted by Atrocity offers much food for thought regarding the way historians interpret the war's effect on prisoners, soldiers, civilians, and society, and will surely cast a long shadow on the field of Civil War and memory.

Ellipses made by CWL.
Full Text Source At: H-Net
Second Image Source: Georgia Encyclopedia Online
Third Image Source: spotsylvaniablogspot.com

New and Noteworthy---A Civil War Veteran Artillerist Evaluates The Use and Misuse of Saint Barbara's Thunder

2011-10-05T16:37:00.009-04:00

The Artillery Service in the War of the Rebellion, 1861-65, John C. Tidball, Lawrence M. Kaplan, editor, Westholme Publishing, 400 pages, 30 b/w illustrations, maps, notes, index, bibliography, $30.00. Release Date:October 28, 2011.

The Artillery Service in the War of the Rebellion, 1861–65, is a comprehensive overview and analysis of the U.S. Army’s field artillery service in the Civil War’s principal battles, written by John C. Tidball, a distinguished artilleryman of the era. The overview, which appeared in the Journal of the Military Service Institution from 1891 to 1893, and nearly impossible to find today, examines the Army of the Potomac, including the battles of Fair Oaks, Gaines’s Mill, Mechanicsville, Malvern Hill, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg; the Army of the Tennessee, including the battles of Stones River and Chickamauga, and the Army of the Ohio’s battle of Shiloh.

Tidball, a decorated Civil War veteran and superintendent of artillery instruction for the army, expertly presents the war through an artilleryman’s eyes in explaining the organization, equipping, and manning of the artillery service. His analysis highlights how the improper use of artillery, tying batteries down to relatively small infantry commands that diluted their firepower, seriously undermined the army’s effectiveness until reforms produced independent artillery commands that could properly mass artillery fire in battle.

The Artillery Service in the War of the Rebellion, edited by historian Lawrence M. Kaplan and presented here in one volume for the first time, includes additional material from an unpublished paper Tidball wrote in 1905 which contains further insights into the artillery service, as well as a general overview of the Petersburg campaign. A major new discovery in Civil War scholarship, The Artillery Service in the War of the Rebellion contains essential information that will change earlier historical interpretations of key battles and will be essential reading for all those interested in the war or contemplating writing about it.

John C. Tidball, 1825–1906, was a career army officer and Superintendent of Artillery Instruction at the Artillery School from 1874 to 1881. He served through the Civil War in most of the major campaigns in the Eastern Theater, from the first battle of Bull Run through the siege of Petersburg. He was brevetted five times for gallant and meritorious conduct on the field and ended the war as a brevet major general.

Lawrence M. Kaplan is chief historian of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency. He has served as a staff historian at the U.S. Army Center of Military History, Washington, D.C., and as a staff historian at the U.S. Army Field Artillery Center, Fort Sill, Oklahoma. He is the author of Homer Lea: An American Soldier of Fortune.

Text Source: Westholme Publishing

News---Lt. Alonzo Cushing's Medal of Honor: Ain't Got No Home, Yet.

2011-10-04T14:17:00.007-04:00

Delafield Battling For Cushing Medal, Kelly Smith, Lake Country Reporter, Feb. 23, 2011.

The Common Council will send a letter to the White House as part of the city's effort to accelerate its campaign to become the home of the Medal of Honor that will likely be awarded to Civil War hero Lt. Alonzo Cushing. Cushing is a Delafield native who was one of four brothers for whom Cushing Elementary School and Cushing Park were named. Cushing, a West Point graduate with a brilliant career as a 21-year-old Union officer, is slated to receive the country's highest military award posthumously for his gallant, but fatal, stand against Maj. Gen. George Pickett's charge on Union forces at Cemetery Hill during the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg on July 3, 1863.

The letter urges President Barack Obama to approve the secretary of the Army's recommendation that Cushing receive the medal. "Even though he was horribly wounded several times during the largest bombardment in the history of this continent, he refused to leave his command. When his commanding officer told him to move to the rear and get medical attention, he requested permission to move his cannons forward, instead," according to the letter.

Cushing was fatally wounded as he fired his remaining canister charges at the attacking rebel forces, the letter added. "We speak for our community in letting you know how much it would mean to the Cushing descendants, our residents and to Americans who still remember the gallantry of those who fought and died in the name of freedom, for you to sign the approval for the Medal of Honor for Lt. Cushing," the letter states.

The letter was drafted by David Krueger, who was appointed by Mayor Ed McAleer last year to serve as the city's representative in efforts to have the medal donated to the city. Krueger said there are conflicting reports over whether the president's approval is the final step in the process of awarding the medal to Cushing or whether final action is also required by the U.S. Senate.

Cushing apparently has no surviving direct descendents, according to Krueger and city historian Margaret Zerwekh. The 91-year-old Zerwekh launched the campaign 30 years ago to have the Medal of Honor awarded to Cushing for his gallantry in the battle that was a turning point in the Civil War. "She started it by writing Sen. William Proxmire,(who served in the Senate from 1857 to 1989) and then she wrote Sen. Russ Feingold and Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and President George W. Bush," Krueger explained in a recent interview.

Feingold announced on March 9, 2010, that the secretary of the Army had approved the medal for Cushing. Since then, Zerwekh and city officials have been urging military and congressional officials to hold the awards ceremony and display the medal in the City of Delafield, where Cushing was born. However, in a recent interview Krueger said that representatives of three other locations might also be vying to host the ceremonies and display the medal. He said there may be distant relatives of Cushing who are campaigning online to have the medal awarded in Fredonia, N.Y., where he spent much of his life. Another potential site is the Military Academy at West Point, where other posthumously awarded Medals of Honor are displayed. Krueger added there is also an online campaign by some Civil War buffs to have the medal awarded to the Gettysburg National Military Park where a $100 million visitors center was built four years ago.

Text Source: Lake Country Reporter
Top Image Source: Cushings Battery
Bottom Image Source: Richmond Howitzers

New and Noteworthy----Lincoln's Kentucky Ally And Prosecutor of The Conspirators

2011-10-04T13:15:00.007-04:00

Lincoln's Forgotten Ally: Judge Advocate General Jospeh Holt of Kentucky, Elizabeth Leonard, Univ. Of North Carolina Press, 448 pages, notes, bibliography, index, $40.00, Release Date: October 10, 2011.

Lincoln's Forgotten Ally, Review by William C. Davis, History Book Club.

First impressions are important, and for most people who first see his hard stare and cold features, impressions of Joseph Holt seldom improve upon familiarity. When he is recalled at all, it is as the implacable and merciless prosecutor of the conspirators involved in the kidnapping and assassination plots against Abraham Lincoln. Almost a century and a half after the trial of the criminals, Holt is still largely remembered for allegedly suborning perjury and paying for damning testimony to take the trial beyond just those immediately involved, seeking to implicate Confederate President Jefferson Davis and others in high position in the Lost Cause.

Elizabeth D. Leonard's new Lincoln's Forgotten Ally: Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt of Kentucky is a welcome tonic to long-held prejudices. If Holt was indeed relentless in his pursuit of Lincoln's killers, still he was also firmly opposed to slavery and a staunch supporter of the Union from the outset despite being a Democrat from slave-holding Kentucky.

He served in the lackluster cabinet of the equally lackluster President James Buchanan, first as postmaster general, and then as secretary of war after scandal rocked the administration. When war broke out Holt at first took a commission as colonel of a Union infantry regiment, but in 1862 Lincoln appointed him judge advocate general of the Union army. No one likes a prosecutor as a rule, and as judge advocate, prosecution was Holt's mandate. He pursued the case against General Fitz-John Porter, a popular and capable officer who ran afoul of internal army politics, and then became the guiding force behind the trials of the Lincoln conspirators. The convictions were perhaps his greatest success, though the manner in which they were obtained tarnished his image ever after, and effectively ended any hopes he may have had for a postwar political career.

Lincoln's Forgotten Ally is the first full biography we have had of Holt, and the author is more than equal to the task of taking a two-dimensional figure and putting flesh on his bones. Throughout Holt's life his devotion to the Union comes through, from his efforts to keep Kentucky from seceding, to his work in making the Emancipation Proclamation effective, and his postwar efforts to use his office to make sure that military forces occupying the South during Reconstruction effectively implemented the reforms implicit in the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution, while combating the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and other extremists. When he died in 1894, his body was wrapped in a battle flag that he had kept for that purpose for almost 30 years.

Combining in-depth research and able narrative with measured judgment, Elizabeth D. Leonard has given Holt that necessary third dimension at last, and in the process filled an important void in our understanding of the men and measures that turned Lincoln's vision into a reality.

Text and Image Source: History Book Club

Opinion---Civil War Politics, The Tea Party, And The Decisions That Await Us

2011-10-03T17:54:00.014-04:00

The Civil War at 150: The Past In The Present?, David W. Blight, Kansas City Star, October 3, 2011.

Why can’t we just get over the Civil War in America? Why does it still have such a hold on our imagination, on our political habits and rhetoric, on the stories through which we define ourselves as a people and a nation? Why is the Confederacy, a mere four-year experiment in revolution to preserve a slave holding society, still so interesting to so many people? Haven’t we had at least two “Reconstructions” — the first of the 1860s and ’70s, the second the civil rights movement a century later — to solve those issues at the war’s roots?

As we commemorate this most pivotal and transforming event — at the same time the country descends into some of the worst political polarization in modern times — it is important to visit these questions. The stakes are very high. And, ideologically, many of the issues of 2011 are much the same as in 1861. Given the hold the tea party seems to have on the base of the Republican Party, we should take notice when some in the group invoke the Confederate constitution as a model for anti-tax, anti-centralization libertarianism.

First, it was modeled closely after the U.S. Constitution. Second, its advocates may need a reminder of just how desperately the Jefferson Davis administration struggled to forge a centralized government out of the chaos of war, jealous localism, states’ rights and homegrown greed and individualism. Indeed, yesterday’s secessionists and today’s nullifiers have much in common. Both are distinct minorities who have suddenly seized an inordinate degree of power.

One acted in revolution to save a slaveholders’ republic; the other seems determined to render modern federal government all but obsolete for any purpose but national defense. Both claim their mantle of righteousness in the name of “liberty,” privatization and racial exclusion (one openly, the other using code that keeps it largely a white people’s party). Both vehemently claim the authority of the “Founders.” Compromise? Both professed disinterest, indeed seemed to welcome rupture. All this we might have thought all but buried in the mass slaughter of the Civil War. But, alas, history keeps happening.

This month, Texas Gov. Rick Perry chose to announce his presidential candidacy in Charleston, S.C., where secession and the Civil War began. Merely coincidental? This is the man who in 2009 suggested his state might consider “secession” as resistance to federal authority. Perry crafted this line for his now larger national audience: “I’ll work every day to try to make Washington, D.C., as inconsequential in your life as I can.” What would the United States be if Abraham Lincoln’s administration and the federal government had decided to be “inconsequential” in 1861?

Texas secessionists would have realized their dream back then. But how would have West Texas farmers in Depression-era Haskell County — where Perry grew up — have gotten electrification but from a consequential federal government? Just how would racial segregation have been dismantled there or the rest of the country?

And would we prefer to have federal standards less consequential for food and drugs? Or how many national parks would there be if the feds had simply never bothered to be consequential in land use and natural resources. What kind of air might we be breathing if there were no Clean Air Act? Interstate highways? Social Security? Workplace safety? College loans and the GI Bill, which helped forge an American middle class? An endless list.

We all make the past useful to our personal present, some more than others who might negate a social contract with their fellow humans in the service of private “freedom.” Is it possible that at the heart of this dispute is that the federal government — however cumbersome amid the arcs of history bending forward and backward — has actually been a vehicle for the increase of democracy and equality, and that some Americans resent this?

We live in a society in 2011 not only divided over race and the advent of a black president, over the rights of immigrants, over religious tolerance, over a seemingly permanent state of war, over who and what are legitimate Americans and whether they shall be accorded birthright citizenship. And we have ceaseless debate about the proper relation of federal to state power. That “Union” preserved by the Civil War generation, turning 150 years old, is not a healthy organism.

Yes, the Civil War is rooted in states’ rights. But the significance of any exercise of states’ rights, like any other constitutional doctrine, is always in the issue to which it is employed. Today, states’ rights claims are advanced by many governors and Republican-majority legislatures in the very language of “secession” and “nullification” made so infamous in antebellum America. They are aided and abetted by a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, although the justices have not justified “nullification” by name. What indeed has brought those words back into our political parlance?

A short list of examples among many tells us just how alive some Civil War legacies are in our time. Kentucky has a bill pending to make that state a “sanctuary” from the Environmental Protection Agency. Arizona Republicans want to exempt products made in their state from federal interstate commerce laws. Montana has one bill that would “nullify” the federal Endangered Species Act and another to require the FBI to get a local sheriff’s permission to make any arrests.

Contexts change, of course, but we have a history with these ideas, and it had a terrible result in 1861. Put most directly, either the United States reborn in slave emancipation is based on a social contract, forged and reforged by the new historical imperatives of industrialization and urbanization in the Progressive era and by a horrible economic Depression in the 1930s and a civil rights revolution of the 1960s, all of which for real reasons necessitated the increased exercise of federal power to protect human liberty, welfare and survival, or it is not.

The conservative movement in America, or at least its most radical wing, seems determined to repeal much of the 20th century and even its constitutional and social roots from the transformative 1860s.

The Civil War is not only not over, it can still be lost. As the sesquicentennial ensues in publishing and conferences and on television and countless websites, one can hope that we will pursue matters of legacy and memory with one eye on the past and the other acutely on the present.

The stakes are high.

David W. Blight teaches American history at Yale University and is the author of the just released “American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era,” as well as the multiple-award-winning Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory.

Text Source: Kansas City Star, October 3, 2011

Top Image Source: Bedford St. Martins Press

CWL: CWL respects and has thoroughly enjoyed Blight's work. Having read his very new American Oracle, CWL's respect has grown even more. American Oracle reviews the Civil War Centennial as perceived by William Penn Warren, Bruce Catton, James Baldwin and others. It is part American literary history, part historiography and part biography. Read in the course of a week, it became a 'couldn't put it down' book. But the U.S. government of 1861, 1931 and 1981 is not the government of 2011. Those governments were all much smaller than the government today which seems not to be able to do levee maintenance well, clean up oil spills well, monitor investment firms well, management a budget well, nor guide the American economy well. Instead of being too big to fail, the national government may be too big to succeed. E.F. Schumacher wrote a book during the 1970s entitled Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered. That small truth may be applicable today. By the way, CWL is a 'Wide Awake for Lincoln' man and scoffs at the Lost Cause but has come to understand that the current national government may itself need a 'Reconstruction'.

Preservation News----Lacy House of Chatham Manor on Stafford Heights At Fredericksburg Needs Friends

2011-09-30T11:00:00.010-04:00

Chatham May Get 'Friends' Group, Clint Schemmer, Fredericksburg.Com, September 26, 2011.

Lynda Baer admits she fell in love with Chatham at first sight. The beauty of the estate's physical setting, the elegance of its great house and the fascinating tales from the 18th-century home's long history worked their magic on her, starting years ago.

Now, the Fredericksburg woman wants to help ensure others who visit Chatham Manor for the first time can have that sort of magical moment, and feel a connection with the place. Tomorrow evening, Baer and other longtime area residents are inviting people to the Stafford County historic site to toss around ideas and organize a group to help the National Park Service care for the old plantation--the only home in America to have hosted George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. "It's a 'witness building' built before the American Revolution. That's amazing to me; just think about all of the people who have walked across its floors," Baer said.

"The Park Service and volunteers do a great job in interpreting it and keeping it open to the public. But these days, Chatham needs a little more TLC. It needs more money." That's where a Friends of Chatham group could be vital, she believes. A private, tax-deductible entity could fund costly and out-of-the-ordinary repairs, upgrade exhibits and finance special programs, Baer said. "I got to thinking, 'Wouldn't it be fun to start a nonprofit friends group to raise money and give the buildings and grounds a real shot in the arm?'"

That was more than a year ago. The thought took Baer to Mount Rushmore and a national conference where she met people from across the country who are doing all sorts of things to support national parks in their communities. Back home, she roamed all of the Fredericksburg-area Civil War battlefields, talked to friends and neighbors, and consulted local history-minded groups about the work they do. A few weeks ago, Baer and five others--Jane Conner of Stafford, Charlie McDaniel of Fredericksburg, Jim Padgett of Stafford, Sara Poore of Stafford and Scott Walker of Fredericksburg--wrote history-minded people proposing such a group. Tomorrow's meeting starts at 7 p.m.; everyone is welcome. Baer made clear that a new group, should it be established, would have a mission quite different from other local organizations such as the Chatham volunteers, Friends of Wilderness Battlefield or Friends of Fredericksburg Area Battlefields. Pure and simple, it would be focused on fundraising.

Chatham's volunteers put in thousands of hours each year keeping the house--the largest and stateliest in the area--open to the public. FOWB does the same at Ellwood Manor on the Wilderness battlefield, and has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to restore the circa-1790 house. FOFAB supports the park's education programs and has recently partnered with it in publishing a series of snappy, richly illustrated histories of Chancellorsville, Ellwood and the Stonewall Jackson Shrine. "Friends of Chatham would be super-inclusive," said Baer, who has volunteered her time at Chatham since 2005. "But all of its dollars would go to fix up Chatham and support programs there. It wouldn't duplicate what people are already doing."

The need for such a group became clear to Baer, she said, as she guided visitors through its ground-floor rooms and their historical displays. Those exhibits are the same "temporary" ones that the Park Service put in when it acquired the property as a gift from the estate of its last private owners, industrialist John Lee Pratt and his wife, Lillian.

Park Superintendent Russ Smith welcomes the idea, noting the strides that friends groups have made at places such as Ellwood, Gettysburg, Golden Gate National Recreation Area and Philadelphia's revolutionary-era sites. "Ellwood is open only because the Friends of Wilderness Battlefield staffs it for visitors, takes care of its grounds, and provides other programs and services," Smith said. "Because of them, Ellwood went from being a shell of a building to being a very nice introduction to the whole Wilderness battlefield for park visitors. We're very grateful for that."

Similarly, Chatham is kept open because of its dedicated volunteers, he said. Overall, volunteers do 25 percent of the work that gets done in the park, Smith said. "People have the idea that a lot of federal agencies have unlimited resources," he said. "The National Park Service has a $10 billion backlog in unmet maintenance needs. So we really count on friends groups to help the national parks achieve their mission. Chatham has a lot of physical needs, big and small, that we would like to tackle with help from the community."

"Parks' needs outweigh their resources," Smith added. "And there is every indication the federal budget will shrink. The National Park Service, as part of the government, isn't held harmless from budget cuts." With four major battlefields, the park includes 7,342 acres spread over 145 square miles in four counties. Of its $4.5 million annual budget, 98 percent goes to keeping buildings open, maintenance, interpretations and other things, Smith said. That leaves 2 percent for everything else. "For new programs or services, we have to rely on our friends for a lot of help," he said.

Text Source: Fredericksburg.ComTop

Image Source: NewShots.com

Middle Image Source: Trip Advisor.com
Bottom Image Source: Flickr

Forthcoming----Midnight Rising: John Brown And The Raid That Sparked The Civil War

2011-09-29T14:56:00.005-04:00

Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War, Tony Horwitz, Henry Holt and Company, 384 pp, notes, illustrations, appendices, bibliography, index, $29.00. Release date: October 25, 2011.

Others have noted that John Brown and his raiders are the stone in the shoe of historians. On October 18, 1859,thirty-six hours after launching 'the great work of of my life' he sat with two dead sons and a saber slash on his skull. Captured in the fire engine house of the U.S. Arsenal at Harpers Ferry Virginia, Brown was interogated by future CSA general Governor Henry Wise. "He is a fanatic, but firm, and truthful, and intelligent," Wise told a newspaper correspondent. Virginian and ardent secessionist Edmund Ruffin described Brown as he stood for 15 minutes on his gallows' trapdoor, hooded and a noose around his neck. "He seems to me to have had few equals." Thomas Jackson saw Brown behave "with unflinching firmness." In the past 150 years, in the eyes of others Brown has been viewed as inept, unrealistic, insane, saintly and a willing martyr.

Regarding Tony Horwitz's Midnight Rising: John Brown Ant the Raid That Sparked The Civil War, Erik Larson, author of The Devil in the White City and In the Garden of Beasts states "There’s a brilliance to this book that put me in mind of Truman Capote'sIn Cold Blood, only Horwitz’s Midnight Rising is set deeper in America’s dark past. With stunning, vivid detail, he has captured the sheer drama and tragedy of John Brown and that bloody raid at Harpers Ferry that helped propel America toward civil war."

Other notable historians are enthusiastic about Midnight Rising. "Tony Horwitz's gifts as a vivid narrator of dramatic events are on full display in this story of John Brown's wars in Kansas and his climactic Harpers Ferry raid in 1859. Brown's family and the men who joined him in these fights against slavery receive a more fully rounded treatment than in any other account. Of special note is the discussion of Brown's self-conscious emulation of Samson by pulling down the temple of bondage and dying a martyr in its ruins" states James M. McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom.

"With his customary blend of rich archival research, on-location color, and lyrical prose, Tony Horwitz has delivered a John Brown book for our time. Part biography, part historical narrative, Midnight Rising is a riveting re-creation of the Harpers Ferry raid, told with an unblinking sense of Brown's tragic place in American history. Writing with enveloping detail and a storyteller's verve, Horwitz shows why Brown was—and still is—so troubling and important to our culture" recommends David W. Blight, author of American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era.

"Beautifully written and sparkling with fresh insights, Midnight Rising resurrects the multiple faces of John Brown: avenging angel or murderous terrorist; slavery's nemesis or deluded fanatic; abolitionist hero or subversive insurrectionist. In this thrilling, magnificent and essential book, Tony Horwitz shows how one man and a single event set the nation on a doomed course where the crimes of a guilty land could only be purged by blood" reports James L. Swanson, author of Manhunt and Bloody Crimes

News---Museum of the Confederacy Celebrates First Anniversary of Ground Breaking At Appomattox With Programming

2011-09-29T13:40:00.006-04:00

The Museum of the Confederacy and Appomattox Court House National Historic Park present the Sesquicentennial Civil War Conversation Series of monthly lunchtime talks upstairs at Baine's Books and Coffee in Appomattox, VA. The topics and speakers are October 12, 2011 Jim Godburn, Hospital Systems, November 9, 2011 Linda Lipscomb, Letters and Diaries, December 14, 2011 Candace Hart, Christmas Traditions.

On November 5, 2011 from 8:00 AM to 2:00 PM at the Central Virginia Community College's Appomattox Center will host three sessions on music, medicine and emancipation. On music David Wooldridge and Corbin Hayslett from the Appomattox Court House National Historical Park will cover Appomattox’s own Sweeney brothers and Teresa Roane of the Museum of the Confederacy will show copies of sheet music and other materials from the Museum’s archives. On medicine Dr. Peter Houck will lecture on the military hospital system and Jim Godburn of the Appomattox Court House National Historical Park will focus on the civilian side of medicine. On emancipation: Reverend Thomas Tillerson will lecture on the different forms of emancipation throughout the war, from Ft. Monroe early on to Appomattox at the end. Pre-registration is required; tickets are $25 per person and $40 per couple. Admission ticket includes a continental breakfast and a boxed lunch.

The $7.5 milliom Museum of the Confederacy project in Appomattox broke ground a year ago on September 23. Upon raising $6 million toward the $7.5 million project, construction began in that autumn and is expected to end by spring 2012. The 11,700-square-foot museum is near the intersection of Virginia 24 and U.S. 460 and will house Civil War artifacts and exhibits. “There’s nowhere better to do it than Appomattox,” said S. Waite Rawls III, CEO and president of the Museum of the Confederacy. “The very word ‘Appomattox’ carries so much meaning in history.”

In 2010, Rawls said the museum’s exhibits would encompass three major areas: the events before the Civil War ended, the surrender at the McLean House and the reunification of the country. Williamsburg-based architect Carlton Abbott has designed the building Rawls has said it will evoke reverence so that visitors “are fully aware they’re on an important spot.”

Members of local governing bodies hope the new museum serves as an economic boost both to the Town of Appomattox and Appomattox County. “What I’m hoping will happen is more hotels and restaurants,” said Gary Tanner, chairman of the Appomattox County Board of Supervisors. “It’s not a big city, it’s relaxed — but it’s definitely where the Civil War ended and people should visit here.” Appomattox Mayor Paul Harvey said the museum would complement the Appomattox Court House National Historic Park, located about a mile from the museum site. “It’s a great connection with the (national) park and we see it as an increase in tourism and the number of people that visit Appomattox each year.”

Members of the museum’s board of trustees personally donated about $2.5 million to the project. “We have put our money where out mouth is,” Rawls said. Another $2.8 million came from the Virginia Tobacco Commission. The Appomattox museum is part of planned multi-site museum system, with three more museums proposed for Fredericksburg, Fort Monroe and Spotsylvania. Though the museum in Appomattox won’t be completed until 2012, Rawls said, museum officials plan to schedule Civil War lectures at libraries and schools in the area as a way to reach out to the community.
“The door may not be open, but we’re here,” he said. “This is all systems go.”

For more information: Museum of the Confederacy or contact Linda Lipscomb at 855-649-1861 x23 or llipscomb@moc.org.

News---The Civil War's Body Count: Was It Three Quarters Of A Million?

2011-09-26T18:52:00.012-04:00

Recounting the Dead, J. David Hacker, New York Times, September 20, 2011.

Even as Civil War history has gone through several cycles of revision, one thing has remained fixed: the number of dead. Since about 1900, historians and the general public have assumed that 618,222 men died on both sides. That number is probably a significant undercount, however. New estimates, based on Census data, indicate that the death toll was approximately 750,000, and may have been as high as 850,000.

The notion that we’ve drastically undercounted the Civil War dead is not a new idea: in fact, Francis Amasa Walker, superintendent of the 1870 Census, estimated that the number of male deaths was “not less than 850,000.” So how did the lower number come to be the accepted count — and why does it matter that it was wrong?

Efforts to identify, rebury and count the dead began as soon as the war ended. A precise count proved impossible, however: both armies lacked systematic procedures to identify the dead, wounded and missing in action, as well as an official means to notify relatives of a soldier’s death. Men went missing; battle, hospital and prison reports were incomplete and inaccurate; dead men were buried unidentified; and family members were forced to infer the fate of a loved one from his failure to return home after the war.

United States Census Bureau History StaffFrancis Amasa WalkerInstead, postwar counts of the Union dead drew from regimental muster-out rolls and battle reports. An 1866 report compiled under the direction of Provost Marshal General James B. Fry estimated that 279,689 men in the Union forces died in the war. The estimated death toll increased to 360,222 by the late 19th century, partly as a result of widows and orphans bringing forward information when applying for pensions and survivors’ benefits.

But a direct count of the Confederate dead proved impossible. The destruction of the Confederate army and many of its records limited investigators to partial counts. The Fry report documented just 133,821 Confederate deaths from incomplete returns. That number didn’t change much: since Confederate widows and orphans were ineligible for federal benefits, the estimate was never supplemented with information from survivors.

Francis Amasa Walker’s interest in estimating the number of war-related deaths was a result of the 1870 Census returns. The final Census count put the population at 38,558,371, up just 22.6 percent from the count in 1860. All previous 19th-century censuses had documented decennial growth rates between 32.7 percent and 36.4 percent, a near-constant rate of increase that 19th-century Americans had come to expect and celebrate as a measure of the nation’s strength, progress and future prosperity.

The 31-year-old superintendent was understandably defensive. City boosters in Philadelphia and New York had charged the 1870 enumeration with excessive coverage errors, and President Grant had taken the unusual step of ordering a recount of those cities. Although the second counts failed to turn up many additional residents, the Census remained suspect. After all, if past growth patterns had continued, the population should have been 41.5 million. Had the Census somehow missed 3 million people?

Walker acknowledged that the 1870 census was far from perfect, but he refused to concede that it was more deficient in its coverage of the population than preceding censuses. Instead, he reasoned, the war was to blame. The disappointing growth rate, he countered, was the result of the “notorious and palpable effects of the war, which hampered the growth of the black population, checked immigration, limited marriages and births and led to the direct loss of close to a million men.”

Although the Surgeon General’s Office had at that point documented 304,000 Union deaths, Walker noted that the number was based only on those men who died during their terms of service. About a third of the 285,000 men discharged for disabilities and many of the remaining 2 million men who survived the war, he argued, subsequently died as a result of diseases and wounds contracted while in the Army. “Tens of thousands were discharged to die; tens of thousands died within the first few months after discharge,” he wrote. “Tens of thousands more lingered through the first or second year.” Together with the losses calculated by the Surgeon General’s Office, Walker concluded that “500,000 will surely be a moderate estimate for the direct losses among the Union armies.”

Walker’s estimate of Confederate losses was necessarily rougher. He started with a guess at the number of men participating — about half of the aggregate number participating on the Union side — and his assumption that Confederate soldiers’ longer average terms of service and relative lack of nourishing food, medicine and skilled physicians resulted in a greater risk of death. “Without attempting to deal at all nicely with this subject,” he argued, “it is difficult to see how anyone could, upon reflection, place the losses of the confederate armies at less than 350,000 men.”

Unfortunately, Walker did not pursue the line of inquiry further. After his reappointment as superintendent for the 1880 Census, he had to explain the overly rapid growth of the South’s population between 1870 and 1880 and defend the Census from charges of fraud in the form of over-counting. After a field investigation by the Census geographer Henry Gannett failed to turn up any evidence of fraud, suspicion returned to the 1870 census. Gannett charged that many of the 1870 enumerators were appointed for their Republican political connections, not for their local knowledge or ability to conduct a census. The inevitable result, he concluded, was a large undercount.

This time Walker agreed. Having been successful in pushing through many costly reforms for the 1880 census, one of which was to shift enumeration responsibilities from federal marshals answerable to the Justice Department to a much larger field force selected for their qualifications and answerable to the Census Office, Walker must have felt some measure of justification from Gannett’s report.

But with the census discredited — a crude calculation by the 1890 census office subsequently indicated that the 1870 Census had undercounted the South’s population by 1,260,078 (10 percent of the region’s and 3 percent of the nation’s population) — the opportunity for a more comprehensive examination of the war’s human cost was lost to the political winds. The estimate of 360,222 Union deaths stood.

The count of Confederate dead was, however, heavily debated. William F. Fox, a private citizen and Union army veteran whose 1889 book on regimental losses remains a classic reference work for Civil War historians, relied on battle reports and unofficial estimates to obtain a total of 94,000 Confederate battle deaths. He complained, however, that records were incomplete, especially during the last year of the war, and that battlefield reports likely under-counted deaths (many men counted as wounded in battlefield reports subsequently died of their wounds). In 1900 Thomas L. Livermore, who, like Fox, was a private citizen and Union army veteran, put the number of Confederate non-combat deaths at 164,000, using the official estimate of Union deaths from disease and accidents and a comparison of Union and Confederate enlistment records.

Livermore’s estimate assumed Union and Confederate troops suffered an equal risk of death from disease, a conservative assumption that Walker had explicitly rejected. Despite acknowledging that his estimate of disease mortality likely undercounted Confederate deaths and his concern that Fox’s estimate of battle deaths could “be accepted only as a minimum,” Livermore combined the two estimates to arrive at a total of 258,000 Confederate deaths, a total that remains unrevised more than a century later.

So why should we now doubt that number? For one thing, Fry, Walker, Fox, Livermore and other early investigators were limited by the quality of the data available. Using new quantitative sources, we can now make a more comprehensive and accurate estimate of war-related deaths. With one exception, microfilm copies of the original manuscript returns have been preserved for all censuses since 1850 (the 1890 Census manuscripts were lost in a fire). Census microdata samples created from these returns at the Minnesota Population Center make it possible to estimate undercounts by age and sex in censuses back to 1850 and to construct a Census-based estimate of male deaths caused by the war.

Census undercounts are estimated using multiple censuses and a demographic method known as back projection. The results confirm that, indeed, the 1870 Census was the most poorly enumerated. It was not nearly as bad as Walker feared and as 1890 census officials charged, however: the net undercount was 6.5 percent in 1870, compared to 6.0 percent in 1850, 5.5 percent in 1860, and 3.6 percent in 1880.

War-related losses are estimated by comparing sex differences in mortality during the 1860s with sex differences in mortality in the 1850s and 1870s. The results indicate that the war was responsible for the deaths of about 750,000 men (using less conservative assumptions, the total may have been as high as 850,000). Although that estimate is 100,000 fewer than the 850,000 deaths suggested by Walker, it is closer to his guess than it is to traditional estimate of 618,222 deaths, which has been cited uncritically for too long. If the Census-based estimate is correct, the traditional estimate is about 20 percent too low.

Although there are limitations to using Census data to estimate of Civil War mortality — civilian deaths are too few to be measured accurately, and deaths cannot be reliably divided into Union or Confederate subtotals — the method provides a more complete assessment of the war’s human cost. In addition to the men who died during their terms of service, the Census-based estimate of male mortality includes men who died between the date of their discharge and the 1870 Census from diseases and wounds contracted during the war, as well as non-enlisted men who died in guerilla warfare and other war-related violence. It excludes, however, men dying from war-related causes who would have died under the normal mortality conditions of the late 19th century. This final group, included in all direct counts of the Civil War dead, represents about 80,000 men.

So what? Above a certain count, do the numbers even matter? Well, yes. The difference between the two estimates is large enough to change the way we look at the war. The new estimate suggests that more men died as a result of the Civil War than from all other American wars combined. Approximately 1 in 10 white men of military age in 1860 died from the conflict, a substantial increase from the 1 in 13 implied by the traditional estimate. The death toll is also one of our most important measures of the war’s social and economic costs. A higher death toll, for example, implies that more women were widowed and more children were orphaned as a result of the war than has long been suspected.

In other words, the war touched more lives and communities more deeply than we thought, and thus shaped the course of the ensuing decades of American history in ways we have not yet fully grasped. True, the war was terrible in either case. But just how terrible, and just how extensive its consequences, can only be known when we have a better count of the Civil War dead.

Sources: Drew Gilpin Faust, “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War”; Joshua B. Howard, North Carolina Civil War Death Study; Francis Amasa Walker, Report of the Superintendent of Census to the Secretary of the Interior, Dec. 26, 1871; Henry Gannett, “The Alleged Census Frauds in the South”; Francis Amasa Walker, Documents Relating to the Taking of the Census of South Carolina, Oct. 5, 1880; Robert P. Porter, Henry Gannett and William C. Hunt, “Progress of the Nation, 1790 to 1890″; William F. Fox, “Regimental Losses in the American Civil War, 1861-1865″; Thomas L. Livermore, “Number and Losses in the Civil War in America, 1861-65″; Steven Ruggles et al., “Integrated Public Use Microdata Series.”

J. David Hacker is an associate professor of history at Binghamton University, SUNY.

Text Source New York Times September 20, 2011

Image Source: Civil War Librarian

New: A Pocket History of the Civil War

2011-09-26T13:16:00.007-04:00

A Pocket History of the Civil War: Citizen Soldiers, Bloody Battles and the Fight for America's Future, Martin F. Graham, Osprey Publishing, 248 pp., bibliographpic notes, 54 charts, 19 b/w illustrations, appendices, index, $15.95.

With 98 quotations from participants, 54 charts, 80 quiz questions, and 56 entries in a glossary A Pocket History of the Civil War is practical and reaches a wide variety of readers.

The charts include the organization, uniforms, ranks, equipment, muskets/rifles/ carbines and pistols loading procedures of both the infantry and cavalry. Artillerymen are likewise covered. And that's just the first chapter. Twenty-two battles and campaigns are covered in the next four chapters with charts of commanders, engagements in the campaign, and casualties. The chapters' text is clear and concise.

Additional chapters offer the 1860 census, total casualty figures, number of major battles and engagements in each state, greatest percentage of regimental losses by state, nunbers of soldiers engaged by theatre, roles of commanders in battle, and higher ranking generals killed in battle. A chapter on prisons considers paroles and exchange issues, a listing of 12 Federal and 11 Confederate with population and death figures. The chapters' text is direct and extends the figures used by the charts.

Ten brief discussions of interesting characters and events include Sam Davis of Tennessee, Henry and Clara Rathbone [Lincoln's guests at Ford's Theatre], Sergeant Richard Kirkland of the 2nd South Carolina, Ambrose Bierce of the 9th Indiana, The Great Locomotive Chase of Georgia, Federal drummer John Clem, and the reunion at the 75th Anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg among others.

Of course, something is always left out of a pocket history. In this case, Forts Henry and Donelson, a consideration of the Federal blockade, the fall of New Orleans, emancipation issues, the Lincoln assasination, and any mention of Reconstruction. On the other hand, there are 183 notes for particular sources used in the text. Each of the charts relating to prisons receive a bibliographic citation. Overall new and general readers of Civil War history are well served by Osprey's Publishing's A Pocket History of the Civil War: Citizen Soldiers, Bloody Battles and the Fight for America's Future.

HNet Review: Were Southern Military Academies Making Southerners Into Yankees?

2011-09-23T09:23:00.006-04:00

Military Education and the Emerging Middle Class in the Old South, Jennifer R. Green, Cambridge University Press, 2008. Illustrations. xiii + 300 pp. $80.00.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Thomas Perry (Purdue University), Published on H-Education (July, 2011)

In her 2008 book, Military Education and the Emerging Middle Class in the Old South, Jennifer R. Green seeks to fill a gap in the historiography of middle-class formation in the antebellum United States, as well as in the history of education. Compiling demographic data on over one thousand cadets who attended state or private institutions in the Old South during the 1840s and 1850s, Green contends that military education is one location to view the development of the middle class in regional and national terms. Families from the middle ranks of southern society--largely nonmanual, nonagricultural professionals--“mirrored their northern counterparts in leveraging education to develop professional occupations” (p. 2).

Taking advantage of funding opportunities and a nonclassical curriculum, southern, middle-class families sent their sons to such academies as the Virginia Military Institute, the South Carolina Military Academy, and the Kentucky Military Institute, among others, to attain an education with the hope that it could promote both social stability and social mobility. Many cadets, she claims, adopted northern, middle-class values stressing industry, morality, and self-regulation, yet at the same time their vision of manhood retained some southern variations. The emerging middle class in the South never threatened the southern elite’s dominance of the region, she insists, which was based on slave ownership and landholdings. Instead, members of the middling rank hoped to separate themselves “from the yeomanry, plain folk, and any developing urban working class” (p. 181). The benefits of a military education, however, coupled with alumni networks and the increased professionalization of certain occupations, does suggest that the standards for mobility and social status were changing during these years.

Green argues that the middle class in the antebellum United States did not possess a class consciousness. Rather, they were a class “in itself,” whose members realized they held similar economic, occupational, and behavioral characteristics with a larger group of people but lacked a shared sense of identity. She agrees with much of Jonathan Daniel Wells’s book, The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800-1861 (2004) but she furthers his analysis by “defining the group more specifically” to investigate what social mobility, status, education, and professionalism meant to the middling ranks of southern society (p. 20).

Although one-third of military cadets’ fathers labored in agriculture, most worked in professional occupations--“they were attorneys, physicians, and ministers, in order of frequency”--and looked to military education to instill discipline and useful knowledge in their sons to solidify or enhance their social status (p. 25). They were successful, Green asserts, as matriculates from the academies were more prevalent in professional occupations than their fathers.

The book review is continued at the following link. Text Source: HNet/HCivilWar

CWL: With an $80 price tag, readers may wish to go to their local library and request it through inter-library loan.

News---Gettysburg NMP Adds The Josiah Benner Farm To the Battlefield Park

2011-09-22T13:30:00.007-04:00

NPS Acquires Benner House, Mark Walters, Gettysburg Times, September 22, 2011.

The Gettysburg National Military Park announced its most recent property acquisition Wednesday afternoon, the Josiah Benner House in Straban Township. Purchased in May, GNMP took possession of the nine-acre, 980 Old Harrisburg Road property Monday. In 2001, the park purchased the three-acre parcel next door, which includes the Josiah Benner barn, but this $405,000 purchase of the farmhouse and springhouse completed the package.

The farmhouse, springhouse and barn are all contributing features to the park's listing on the National Register of Historic Places according to GNMP spokesperson Katie Lawhon. Lawhon said that the property was previously a private residence and that billboards removed from the site in June. "Even though there is a Congressionally authorized boundary of the park, inside that boundary there is still more than 900 acres of non-protected lands," said Katie Lawhon of the 5,989 acre park.

Lawhon said that GNMP received help from the Civil War Trust, America's largest non-profit organization devoted to the preservation of America's Civil War battlefields. In a 24-year span, the Civil War Trust has worked to preserve more than 30,000 acres of battlefield land at 110 battlefields in 20 states.

"It's a really exciting property," said Civil War Trust spokesperson Mary Koik of the Josiah Benner property. "Not just the land itself but the historic structures that played a role in the battle and its aftermath." According to Lawhon, the Josiah Benner Farmhouse predates the 1863 Battle of Gettysburg. Lawhon said that the house's location on Old Harrisburg Road placed it in line of advance by Gen. Jubal Early's Confederate Division on the afternoon of July 1, 1863, the first of the three-day battle.

"In an effort to attack and outflank Union positions on and near Barlow's Knoll, Confederates had to pass around these solid obstacles," Lawhon said of the two-story brick houseset on a stone foundation and the two-and-a-half story stone, Pennsylvania Barn. "The walls of the buildings provided cover for skirmishers of both sides during various portions of the July 1 conflict. At the close of fighting on that day, the house and barn were pressed into use as temporary Confederate field hospitals. Several Union soldiers and officers were also carried there for treatment."

Lawhon added that the one-story springhouse just east of the farmhouse was likely used as a temporary cover for skirmishers of both armies and would have provided water and "refrigerated" food for wounded soldiers in the hospitals of the Benner house and barn. Lawhon said the National Park Service works closely with the Civil War Trust in acquiring historically significant properties, primarily from willing sellers. She said the poor economy and housing market contributed to the recent selling of many properties.

In March, GNMP purchased the 95 acre Gettysburg Country Club in Cumberland Township for $1.4 million, protecting what is now known as the Emanuel Harman Farm from future development. In June, the Adams County Commissioners sponsored the Civil War Trust for two grants totaling approximately $217,000 to partially fund the acquisition of two properties along the Baltimore Pike - 1200 and 1230 Baltimore Pike - which are part of what once was Henery Spangler's farm, where scores of Union and Confederate dead were buried.

Text Source: Gettysburg Times
Image Source: Gettysburg Daily

News--- From Wills and Court Records A Database Of Virginia Slave Names Emerges

2011-09-21T09:14:00.006-04:00

Database Of Virginia Slave Names Made Public, Linda Wheeler, Washington Post, September 15, 2011.

Names of people enslaved in Virginia, pulled from some of the Virginia Historical Society ’s 8 million documents, have been compiled into Unknown No Longer, a searchable database now available to the public.

The online tool includes more than 1,500 names found in letters, wills, court records and other sources. Each name is connected to a digital copy of the original document in which it was found. Society spokeswoman Jennifer Guild said the work of extracting the information began more than a year ago. “It is possible these names have never been seen before,” she said. “This is the first time we have published them.”

The database can be searched by keywords such as name, occupation and plantation. “For instance, if all you knew was your great-great-great-grandmother was named Ann and she had been a slave in Virginia, that is enough to begin a search with this database,” Guild said. “Or, if all you have is a plantation name, you go to that name and you will find what we have on the slaves who lived there.”

It is a continuing work: the society will add new information to the database as it continues to go through the 8 million documents in its collection. This is the society’s first database that specifically compiles names of enslaved people from Virginia and is taken from their own materials. In the past, all that was available to anyone searching the society’s holdings online was a list of the titles of books or other published material that contained slave-related information; anyone wanting to know more about what those papers contained would have to go to the society to do the research.

Text Caption: Ambrotype from Virginia Historical Society's collection shows an unidentified woman. The organization has launched Unknown No Longer, a database of slave names. (Courtesy Virginia Historical Society)

Text and Image Source: Washington Post September 15, 2011

News---John Brown's Gallows Site For Sale

2011-09-15T20:02:00.006-04:00

For Sale: Historic Mansion On Site Of John Brown's Hanging, Marylynne Pitz, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 11, 2011.

A few weeks before Christmas of 1859, John Brown, the fiery abolitionist convicted for treason, swung from a gallows in Charles Town, W.Va.

John Gibson, who commanded the first troops to battle Brown after his ill-fated raid on a federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, built a mansion on that historic ground more than 30 years later. Now, the five-bedroom, 6 1/2-bath home, which has undergone a restoration overseen by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, will be offered for sale today in an Internet auction that starts at 6 p.m. EST. The minimum bid is $950,000. The website is historichometeam.net.

Located on a one-acre corner lot, the home was built in 1891 and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Current owners Gene Perkins, a contractor and entrepreneur, and his wife, JoAnn, are moving to Florida. A previous owner, Mrs. Augustin Jacquelin Todd, donated it to the trust in 1982. In November of 1989, the Perkinses submitted a successful sealed bid to buy the property from the National Trust.

The Perkinses finished the third floor, installed a gourmet kitchen, a new heating system and upstairs plumbing. They also restored elegant woodwork and a widow's walk. They put in an outdoor pool. All of the mansion's eight fireplaces are wood-burning. There's one in each bedroom. "It's been on the market for probably a year," said Gary Gestson, who works for a marketing firm in Gaithersburg, Md. and believes the mansion would make a great bed and breakfast. The National Trust for Historic Preservation, he added, had to approve all restoration plans before the Perkinses began the work.

"They did a lot of restoration. There were rooms that had been bricked over. They opened up the house. They are responsible for bringing it back," said Mr. Gestson, who has toured the property. His favorite space is the large dining room. "There is china in the china cupboard that was designed for the house," he said, adding that the china will be sold with the property. The main floor has 11-foot-high ceilings. On the second floor, ceilings are nearly 10 feet high.

A two-story barn being used as a garage could be turned into guest accommodations, too. The front of the property has wrought-iron fencing while a 6-foot brick wall at the back affords privacy. In the closet of one bedroom, there are signatures and notes from past visitors, including Amy Vanderbilt, Mr. Gestson added.

The mansion is two blocks from Main Street in Charles Town, an hour-and-a-half drive from Washington, D.C. Laid out by and named for George Washington's brother, Charles Town has thoroughbred racing, casinos, outdoor activities and Lollapaloosa, a music festival. Col. Charles Washington's home, Happy Retreat, was built in 1790 and still stands.

If the Perkinses do not receive the price they want, they can cancel the auction. They may consider financing up to $1.5 million. There is a white plaque on the property marking the historic execution. Every five years, re-enactors recreate the drama of John Brown's execution, minus the hanging, of course. But there's a gallows in the background.

Image Caption: Abolitionist John Brown was hanged on the grounds of this home in Charles Town, W.Va., in 1859.

Text and Image Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 11, 2011.

New and Noteworthy---The Civil War, A Visual History: Rare Images and Tales of the War Between the States.

2011-09-15T10:03:00.010-04:00

The Civil War, A Visual History: Rare Images and Tales of the War Between the States, no author, Paragon Press, 225 pages, index, photocredits, 2011, $14.95.

Amazingly, The Civil War, A Visual History: Rare Images and Tales of the War Between the States has no author because it is an extensive collection of primary text sources with period illustrations. 100% of the text is authored by those who participated in the Civil War, as soldiers or civilians.

For example, there are three highly detailed images of the Great Seal of the Confederacy, the resolution to create the Great Seal, and the letter of authenticity Langham Chambers Company of London, England that designed and engraved it. Two paragaphs of South Carolina Governor Robert Haynes' inaugural speech are presented along side a Lincoln campaign button. Federal accounts of life in Andersonville Prison appear with period photographs of the camp. Sketches by soldiers and news journalists, engravings from newspapers, carte d'vistes, front pages of Harper's Weekly and other newspapers, and posters that include the regulations for training camps.

Nearly all the photographs, documents and letters are from the Library of Congress. Some are familar and have appeared in many books and magazines. Others have been less often seen. Many have been enlarged and cover two pages, which reveals greater details. Overall, as a coffee table book, The Civil War, A Visual History: Rare Images and Tales of the War Between the States, is satisfactory and will capture the attention of those between the ages of 8 and 80 whose attention is being drawn to the Civil War's sesquicentennial.

New----National Geographic Offers Exploring History With Lincoln and the CSS Hunley Featured

2011-09-13T12:50:00.007-04:00

What propelled Abe Lincoln from the obscurity of frontier life to leading the nation, and becoming the most written about president of the United States? Understanding the young Abraham Lincoln -- his early life, influences and motivations -- takes center stage in “Exploring History,” a new National Geographic magazine special issue. The history-themed magazine, priced at $6.99, will be available on newsstands beginning Sept. 13, or by ordering online at www.ngm.com/history.

Offering a feast for history lovers, the lavishly illustrated special issue also probes the inner workings of the Roman Legion, examines Aztec Emperor Moctezuma’s tragic fall, follows Joan of Arc’s incredible teenage journey and uncovers the little-known story of the medical heroes who stemmed the tide of bubonic plague in San Francisco a century ago. Additionally, there are articles on the earliest Egyptian pyramids, the Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley and the life of Viking raiders, as well as listings of the best new history books, TV specials and apps.

For the Lincoln cover image, illustrator Tim O’Brien peeled back layers of age to create a never-before-seen portrait of the young, future president as he may have appeared in his mid-30s, long before the war years and the presidency furrowed his brow.

In cover article “Born Radical,” writer K.M. Kostyal looks for clues to understanding Lincoln’s character in his early years. A poor, rawboned, self-educated frontier boy, Lincoln had a sharp intellect and a natural streak of independence. As a youth, he went against the grain when he saw fit: In a world of overt religiosity, he was a skeptic; in a family where his father abhorred bookishness, he was a “constant and stubborn reader”; in a society preoccupied with physical labor, he disdained it; and in a rough-cut male culture, he didn’t smoke, chew, curse, gamble or drink.

Inordinately ambitious, Lincoln had a clear sense that he was destined for high things. A legal colleague said three things propelled Lincoln toward greatness: a super-magnanimity that made him a very poor hater; deep intelligence; and a profound sense of justice. Illustrated with photographs, drawings and a map from 1857, the article includes a timeline of major moments in Lincoln’s life and a sidebar profiling him as a family man.

Text And Image Source: National Geographic

CWL: Last night, CWL bought it from a supermarket magazine rack and spent some time with it. Fine text, well illustrated, good maps. A social studies teacher's delight. Subscriptions are six issues for $18.00. Seems a good buy.

New---Handy and Dandy: The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Civil War

2011-09-13T10:56:00.004-04:00

The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Civil War, William L. Barney, Oxford University Press, 2001, revised and updateted 2011, 378 pp., b/w illustrations, maps, index, appendices, $18.95.

With about 250 entries, a general chronology, a list of museums and historic sites, a list of websites and a bibliography, The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Civil War is a fine resource at a reasonable price. The binding is well made and the book opens easily and the spine does not crease. The illustrations are on nearly every page and support the text. Cartoons, sheet music, portraits, sketches, posters, flags and black and white period photographs are among the illustrations, some of which are familar and others are those that are less frequently seen.

Among the entries are military commanders, political leaders, legislation, social groups, advocates, ideologies, and documents. The range of the entries run from antebellum to postbellum subjects. How about the Kenner Mission? Yes, Jefferson Davis sent Duncan Kenner to Europe in January 1865 with authority to state that the Confederacy would emancipate its laves in return for the immediate recognition of it exstence as a legal government. A surprise to Confederate ambassadors abroad, they gave the opportunity to England and France, which rejected it. Upon learning of the rejection, Davis lobbied for the for a Confederate programs of arming and then freeing slaves.

What was the role of gold during the war? What role did political dissent play in the Union and the Confederacy? What was the platform of the Constititional Union party during the 1860 election? What was the role of the U.S. Congress' Committee on the Conduct of the War? These questions, as well as others, are addressed in the The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Civil War. Each entry is concluded with 'Further Reading' that mentions of the standard books on the topic. Also, See Also guides users to related topics. The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Civil War well serves both casual and frequent readers of Civil War history.

1861 News---Letters To The Editor From Camp Curtin, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania

2011-09-05T23:47:00.008-04:00

Pittsburgh Regiments Aim For Quality Civil War Gear, Len Barcousky, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, August 2011.

Harrisburg's Camp Curtin, set up by and named for Pennsylvania Gov. Andrew Curtin, did not meet the standards of Col. Samuel Black, commander of the 62nd Pennsylvania Volunteers, when the regiment shipped out from Pittsburgh in the summer of 1861. So Black "scoured the country around" the state capital and found "the most beautiful camp ground in the country" for his men, according to a report in the August 14 edition of The Daily Pittsburgh Gazette and Commercial Journal.

The men set up their tents and dug their latrines on farmland just east of Harrisburg belonging to Simon Cameron. Cameron was a Pennsylvania politician recently named secretary of war by Abraham Lincoln, and the soldiers named the site Camp Cameron in his honor. As was common during the Civil War, the report to the newspaper on the activities of the 62nd was submitted by a soldier in the unit, identified only by his initials: J.T.C

"Our tents are of good material, afford ample protection against rain, and are situated just west of a fine woodland of stately forest trees," he reported. A nearby stream provided water for bathing and washing clothes. The camp was laid out with names familiar to soldiers from Pittsburgh and Allegheny City, now the North Side. They included East and West commons and Federal and Liberty streets.

Their commander, Pittsburgh-born Samuel Black, had fought in the Mexican War and later became territorial governor of Nebraska. He was a no-nonsense officer. "No obscene language or swearing whatever is tolerated," J.T.C. wrote. "Discipline of a very strict character is enforced, and six or seven men are detailed every morning to clear away all rubbish, 'level the ground,' pull up roots &c." Cameron himself made a brief visit to the camp, "promising to send our uniforms, and equipments, &c, from Washington city directly."

Conditions were much less promising during the early months of the war for another local regiment: the 9th Pennsylvania Reserve Corps. The unit, primarily Allegheny County volunteers, was assigned to Camp Tennally, northwest of Washington, D.C. The Pennsylvania Legislature had promised the men that they "were to be equipped in a superior manner," a soldier correspondent wrote in the August 17 edition of the Gazette. He identified himself with the single initial "K."

Instead "they were armed with old Harper's Ferry altered muskets, the general appearance of which would indicate that they were manufactured by some backwoods blacksmith and wagon maker," he wrote. "Not one bayonet out of every dozen can be fixed or unfixed in under fifteen minutes," he claimed. He wrote that the musket barrels were so thin that "after firing three or four rounds they become so hot, it is almost impossible to hold them ..."

In an effort to cover up the defects in the outmoded weapons, the muskets had been given a fresh coat of paint. The inadequacies of their guns placed the men in danger from nearby Confederate forces. "I really wished a few days since, when on picket duty, almost in sight of the enemy, that Curtin himself occupied the position of the men in the ranks," K wrote. The Allegheny County men risked being "picked off at the distance of a thousand feet, when our beautiful, well painted muskets would not reach half that distance. "K" closed with a challenge to Pennsylvania legislators and the governor. "If Govenor Curtin wishes to redeem his character ... let him at once procure with the millions at his disposal, ten thousand stand of improved arms.

Text and Image Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.com

Image Caption: Andre Curtin, Governor of Pennsylvania

New---Two From The History Press: Antietam and African American Federals at Petersburg

2011-09-05T20:58:00.013-04:00

Battle of Antietam: The Bloodiest Day, Ted Alexander, History Press, softcover, $19.95.

From The Publisher: The heavy fog that shrouded Antietam Creek on the morning of September 17, 1862, was disturbed by the boom of Federal artillery fire. The carnage and chaos began in the East Woods and Cornfield and continued inexorably on as McClellan's and Lee's troops collided at the West Woods, Bloody Lane and Burnside Bridge. Though outnumbered, the Rebels still managed to hold their ground until nightfall. Chief historian of the Antietam National Battlefield Ted Alexander renders a fresh and gripping portrayal of the battle, its aftermath, the effect on the civilians of Sharpsburg and the efforts to preserve the hallowed spot. Maps by master cartographer Steven Stanley add further depth to Alexander's account of the Battle of Antietam.

Ted Alexander is the chief historian at the Antietam National Battlefield, where he has worked for more than twenty-six years. He is the author, editor or contributor to ten books on the Civil War and other aspects of American history. Ted is also the author of more than two hundred articles and book reviews for publications such as the Civil War Times, Blue and Gray, North and South and the Washington Times.

The Battle of New Market Heights: Freedom Will Be Theirs by the Sword, James S. Price, History Press, 128 pages, softcover, $19.95.

From the publisher: In the predawn darkness of September 29, 1864, black Union soldiers attacked a heavily fortified position on the outskirts of the Confederate capital of Richmond. In a few hours of desperate fighting, these African American soldiers struck a blow against Robert E. Lee's vaunted Army of Northern Virginia and proved to detractors that they could fight for freedom and citizenship for themselves and their enslaved brethren. For fourteen of the black soldiers who stormed New Market Heights that day, their bravery would be awarded with the nation's highest honor--the Congressional Medal of Honor. With vivid firsthand accounts and meticulous tactical detail, James S. Price brings the Battle of New Market Heights into brilliant focus, with maps by cartographer Steven Stanley.

James S. Price is a Civil War historian, blogger and educator who specializes in the history of African American Union soldiers. He has worked for many Civil War sites and museums, including Petersburg National Battlefield, Pamplin Historical Park and the American Civil War Center at historic Tredegar. In 2009, he received his MA in military history from Norwich University. For the past three years, he has dedicated himself to the study of the Battle of New Market Heights and has sought to raise awareness of this important battle by leading specialized tours of the preserved portions of the battlefield, lecturing throughout the metro Richmond area on the topic and writing about different aspects of the battle on his weblog. It is his hope that by raising public awareness of the services rendered by United States Colored Troops that the fields on which they fought will be preserved for future generations.

Forthcoming---The Civil War In The Light of the Civil Rights Era

2011-09-05T20:31:00.009-04:00

American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era, David W. Blight, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 328 pages, Publication Date: September 26, 2011, $27.95.

Text From Publisher: Standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, a century after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, Martin Luther King, Jr., declared, “One hundred years later, the Negro still is not free.” He delivered this speech just three years after the Virginia Civil War Commission published a guide proclaiming that “the Centennial is no time for finding fault or placing blame or fighting the issues all over again.”

David Blight takes his readers back to the centennial celebration to determine how Americans then made sense of the suffering, loss, and liberation that had wracked the United States a century earlier. Amid cold war politics and civil rights protest, four of America’s most incisive writers explored the gulf between remembrance and reality. Robert Penn Warren, the southern-reared poet-novelist who recanted his support of segregation; Bruce Catton, the journalist and U.S. Navy officer who became a popular Civil War historian; Edmund Wilson, the century’s preeminent literary critic; and James Baldwin, the searing African-American essayist and activist—each exposed America’s triumphalist memory of the war. And each, in his own way, demanded a reckoning with the tragic consequences it spawned.

Blight illuminates not only mid-twentieth-century America’s sense of itself but also the dynamic, ever-changing nature of Civil War memory. On the eve of the 150th anniversary of the war, we have an invaluable perspective on how this conflict continues to shape the country’s political debates, national identity, and sense of purpose.

1861 News--- Cannons' Tests Became Public Spectacle In Pittsburgh

2011-09-05T19:22:00.010-04:00

Eyewitness 1861: Testing Of War Cannons Became Public Spectacle, Len Barcousky, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, August 7, 2011.

In the summer of 1861, cannons like this one, now installed at Fort McHenry in Baltimore, were tested at a "proving ground" near Tarentum. Testing, or "proving," Pittsburgh-made artillery was combined with "al fresco" dining by local businessmen and their wives during the summer of 1861.

On June 5 crews transported 10 cannons, called "columbiads," and four mortars by train from the city to a "proving ground" across the Allegheny River from Tarentum. There the guns were subjected to day-long tests. "Some experiments were also made to ascertain the effect of projectiles on heavy iron plates," according to a next-day story in the Pittsburgh Daily Dispatch.

"The experiments on the iron plate, together with the novelty of the Government proof, attracted quite a large party, chiefly gentlemen connected with the iron interest," the story said. "A number of ladies also accompanied the party, for whose special delectation the aid of a city confectioner had been called in to prepare a banquet 'al fresco.'" Several lawyers and "gentlemen of leisure were also added to the party, engrafting the lighter amusement of an impromptu picnic on the graver business of Uncle Sam," the report went on.

Such weapons tests were especially important in the opening months of the Civil War as Pittsburgh's workshops, foundries and "manufactories" geared up to supply the Union forces with weapons, ammunition and uniforms. The site of the former proving ground is now private property, according to local historian Arthur Fox, who has identified the spot. Although the location was more than 20 miles upriver from Pittsburgh's Golden Triangle, the area was by no means wilderness in the 19th century.

The site lacked "a large extent of waste country or a body of water ... on which the balls or shells may fall without risking life," the story said. Mortars were usually tested by angling their barrels at 45 degrees, but the Dispatch story said that the weapons for these tests were aimed almost parallel to the ground in an effort to keep spent rounds from landing close to nearby houses. Later tests included mortar firings at near point-blank range -- a mere 100 yards -- at iron plates of various thicknesses. "The plates were invariably hit, and generally at approximately the center, which would not have disgraced many riflemen," the reporter wrote.

Gun crews then carried out similar checks on the 8-inch columbiads, smooth-bore cannons that fired 64-pound balls. During the proving ground trials, one of the targets for two of the guns was a5-inch-thick iron sheet. When the smoke cleared away after one test firing, observers found two trees had been toppled and the plate had been hit twice and broken in half. "The result of all the firing proves that at short range no ordinary, or practicable iron sheeting would resist the power of a columbiad shot," the reporter concluded.

That conclusion, however, would be proved at least partially wrong nine months later. In March 1862 the Union's Monitor and the Confederate's Merrimac, both ironclads, battled each other to a draw, at the mouth of the James River in Virginia. The results of that otherwise minor engagement showed that iron plate could be very effective in protecting ships and their crews from cannon fire. In the years that followed, navies around the world rapidly converted their fleets from wood to iron.

Image Caption:In the summer of 1861, cannons like this one, now installed at Fort McHenry in Baltimore, were tested at a "proving ground" near Tarentum, Pennsylvania.

Text and Image Source: Pittsburgh Post Gazette, August 7, 2011

Off Topic: King Arthur's Round Table Discovered?

2011-08-31T17:38:00.004-04:00

King Arthur's Round Table Discovered?, The Telegraph, 26 Aug 2011.

King Arthur's round table may have been found by archaeologists in Scotland.
Archaeologists searching for King Arthur's round table have found a "circular feature" beneath the historic King's Knot in Stirling. The King's Knot, a geometrical earthwork in the former royal gardens below Stirling Castle, has been shrouded in mystery for hundreds of years. Though the Knot as it appears today dates from the 1620s, its flat-topped central mound is thought to be much older.

Writers going back more than six centuries have linked the landmark to the legend of King Arthur. Archaeologists from Glasgow University, working with the Stirling Local History Society and Stirling Field and Archaeological Society, conducted the first ever non-invasive survey of the site in May and June in a bid to uncover some of its secrets. Their findings were show there was indeed a round feature on the site that pre-dates the visible earthworks.

Historian John Harrison, chair of the SLHS, who initiated the project, said: "Archaeologists using remote-sensing geophysics, have located remains of a circular ditch and other earth works beneath the King's Knot. "The finds show that the present mound was created on an older site and throws new light on a tradition that King Arthur's Round Table was located in this vicinity."

Stories have been told about the curious geometrical mound for hundreds of years -- including that it was the Round Table where King Arthur gathered his knights. Around 1375 the Scots poet John Barbour said that "the round table" was south of Stirling Castle, and in 1478 William of Worcester told how "King Arthur kept the Round Table at Stirling Castle". Sir David Lindsay, the 16th century Scottish writer, added to the legend in 1529 when he said that Stirling Castle was home of the "Chapell-royall, park, and Tabyll Round".

It has also been suggested the site is partly Iron Age or medieval, or was used as a Roman fort. Extensive work on the royal gardens was carried out in the early 17th century for Charles I, when the mound is thought to have taken its current form. The first known record of the site being called the King's Knot is from 1767, by which time it was being leased for pasture. Locals refer to the grassy earthworks as the "cup and saucer", but aerial photographs taken in 1980 showed three concentric ditches beneath and around the King's Knot mound, suggesting an earthwork monument had preceded it.

The new survey -- funded by Historic Scotland and Stirling City Heritage Trust -- used the latest scientific techniques to showing lost structures and features up to a metre below the ground. It also revealed a series of ditches south of the main mound, as well as remains of buildings, and more recent structures, including modern drains which appear at the northern end of the gardens.

Mr Harrison, who has studied the King's Knot for 20 years, said: "It is a mystery which the documents cannot solve, but geophysics has given us new insights. "Of course, we cannot say that King Arthur was there, but the feature which surrounds the core of the Knot could explain the stories and beliefs that people held."

Archaeologist Stephen Digney, who coordinated the project, said: "The area around Stirling Castle holds some of the finest medieval landscapes in Europe. "This investigation is an exciting first step in a serious effort to explore, explain and interpret them. The results so far suggest that Scotland's monarchs integrated an ancient feature into their garden, something we know happened in other countries too. "We are looking forward to the next stage in September when we hope to refine some of the details."

Dr. Kirsty Owen, Cultural Heritage Adviser at Historic Scotland, added: "The project has the potential to add to our knowledge of the landscape context of the medieval and early modern occupation of Stirling Castle. "The ditches identified may intriguingly be part of historically documented earlier garden features, or if prehistoric in origin could add to our scant knowledge of prehistoric activity at Stirling Castle.

"We look forward to seeing the results of the next phase of investigations." Futher work including a ground-penetrating radar survey, is now planned to take place next month to find out more. A small display of the interim results can be seen close to the site at the Smith Museum.

Text and Image Source: The Telegraph, UK

CWL: Wha d'ya know? It's an Eastern Woodlands Indian Mound!

Off Topic: The Demon Under the Microscope---What Civil War Doctors Couldn't See

2011-08-31T10:43:00.008-04:00

The Demon Under The Microscope: From Battlefields Hospitals to Nazi Labs, Thomas Hager, Broadway Publishing, 352 pages, bibliography, index, source notes, paperback, $15.00.

Thomas Hager opens Demon Under The Microscope with compelling descriptions of December 7 1941's wounded and those who cared for them. The setting is Tripler General Hospital in Hawaii. Ambulances, trucks, and cars bring the torn, the lacerated, and the roasted to the hospital. When it is filled the lawns of the facility are covered with the injured. The hospital's three operating rooms are in service for nearly a full day. Surprisingly and quite unlike World War One, there is not a single death from infection.

In the first three chapters, Hager weaves stories of battlefield medicine from before the French Revolution through World War One. The science of bacteriology began immediately before and during the First World War in which soldiers living in earthworks and trenches could die and without being wounded. It was a world without antibiotics. In Germany, Gerhard Domagk and his colleagues at Bayer Corporation worked constantly to identify which microscopic bacteria that caused tuberculosis, malaria, and blood poisoning. Discovered in 1932, sulfa became the first of the modern.

Hager addresses the biology and chemistry of the discovery through the competitive personalities, the national environments, the aggressive international marketplace. Patent wars, lawsuits, dying children of U.S. Presidents, a nearly dead Winston Churchill after the Teheran Conference move the store forward. Research chemists, laboratory mice, and fortunate and unfortunate accidents may be mundane, but not when the Nazi's are looking over shoulders and monitoring research labs. Nazi chieftan Reinhard Heydrich is wounded by Czech assassins and, due to a possible misuse of sulfa, dies. To find out if sulfa was the cause, Ravenbruck concentration camp's laboratory conducts infection and sulfa studies on women prisoners.

For those who have seen Saving Private Ryan, recall the episode where the medic is wounded in the assault on the Nazi communication post. His wound was dusted with white powder, a sulfa drug. Demon Under the Microscope is a well paced, personality driven suspense story of scientific discovery. There are no photographs in the books; it would have been enhanced with portraits of the main characters. On the other hand, your mind supplies the visuals from Hager's descriptions.

Second Image Source: The Science Museum, United Kingdom

New: The Summer Thunder of Saint Barbara' s Artillerymen

2011-08-30T16:15:00.008-04:00

Summer Thunder: A Battlefield Guide To The Artillery At Gettysburg, Matt Spruill, University of Tennessee Press, 338 pp., 60 b/w photographs, 74 maps, 5 appendices, 2010, $29.95.

Matt Spruill, author of four Civil War battlefield guides, brings his teaching experience at the U.S. Army General Command and Staff College and the U.S. Army War College to bear upon the Gettysburg battlefield. His 2011 Decisions at Gettysburg: The Nineteen Critical Decisions That Defined the Campaign may be among this year's best books on the Battle of Gettysburg.

Summer Thunder is one of a kind. Students of the Battle of Gettysburg are well served by Bradley Gottfried's The Artillery of Gettysburg and Spruill's book is also valued resource for is visitors to the national military park. Summer Thunder uniqueness lies in a 'boots on the ground' approach. Many guide books take the user on a two hour tour with July 2 and July 3 cover in one stop. Spruill's tour is thorough with 35 stops many of which have three and even four segments once the user get out of the car. July 1, July 2, and July 3 engagements are distinct on the tour.

The armies’ deployment of artillery from one position to another, from one day to the next is carefully described. Matt Spruill, a retired U.S. Army colonel and former Gettysburg Battlefield Licensed Guide, offers readers succinct segments of the artillerists' and infantry commanders' reports found in the Offical Records and in their postwar writings. The tactical thinking of of the cannoneers is revealed and their voices are clear and precise in Summer Thunder.

Spruill has chosen 35 locations with complete with driving instructions, recent photographs, and uncluttered maps that depict the battlefield as it was in 1863. The artillery positions are marked and includes the number of guns in action with each battery. The passages from primary sources reveal the participants understandings of the event.

Gregory Coco's A Concise Guide to the Artillery at Gettysburg is among the best short consideration of the topic. Spruill's is quite similar regarding the various artillery pieces and ammunition used by both armies. What makes Summer Thunder distinctive is the constant attention Spruill to the distance in yards between the tour stop and the distant targets and the ability of some pieces to reach further than others.

For frequent visitors to the battlefield or those who attend the anniversary battle walks hosted by the National Park Service, Summer Thunder is so descriptive that the mind's eye can visual from the text the view Spruill describes. Well illustrated with portraits of the commanders and present day views of the terrain, the book's text is supported by appropriate visuals.

Several but not all the maps have topographic lines. Thankfully, the farm buildings, those still standing and those lost to time, are on the maps. Small disappointments in Summer Thunder include the omission of the Pennsylvania Reserves assault and capture of Houck's Ridge and the clearing of the Wheatfield after the Grand Assault. Also, the cavalry battles of July 3 are not covered. The July 2 artillery duel between the Federals East Cemetery Hill, McKnight's Knoll and Culp's Hill and the Confederates on Benner's Hill is addressed in an appendix.

Summer Thunder is of value for all who read at least one Gettysburg book in a year, who travel there anytime, who reenact Civil War artillery, who take the Licensed Battlefield Guide Examine or those who members of the Order of Saint Barbara, a military honor society of the field artillery and the air defense units of the United States Army and the United States Marine Corps. Saint Barbara's Day is December 4.

New and Noteworthy: Lincoln Around The World

2011-08-30T15:06:00.003-04:00

The Global Lincoln, Richard Carwardine and Jay Sexton, Oxford University Press, 344 pages, hardcover, $29.95.

From the Publisher: Perhaps more than any other American, Abraham Lincoln has become a global figure, one who spoke--and continues to speak--to people across the world. Karl Marx judged Lincoln "the single-minded son of the working class"; Tolstoy reported his fame in the Caucasus; Tomas Masaryk, the first president of Czechoslovakia, drew strength as "the Lincoln of Central Europe"; racially-mixed, republican "Lincoln brigades" fought in the Spanish Civil War; and, more recently, statesmen ranging from Gordon Brown to Pervez Musharraf to Barack Obama have invoked Lincoln in support of their respective agendas.

This fascinating volume brings together leading historians from around the world to explore Lincoln's international legacy. The authors examine the meaning and image of Lincoln in many places and across continents, ranging from Germany to Japan, India to Ireland, Africa and Asia to Argentina and the American South. The book reveals that at the heart of Lincoln's global celebrity were his political principles, his record of successful executive leadership in wartime, his role as the "Great Emancipator," and his resolute defense of popular government. Yet the "Global Lincoln" has been a malleable and protean figure, one who is forever being redefined to meet the needs of those who invoke him.

The first study of Lincoln's global legacy, this book tells the unknown and remarkable story of the world-wide impact of one of America's great presidents.

From an Amazon.com review: This book, like all such academic collections, varies in quality given the range of writers and specific topics discussed. It is a great help that one of its two British editors is the noted Lincoln biographer, Professor Richard Carwardine. A general reader, holding a decent prior level of knowledge about Abraham Lincoln, a keen interest in this great man and an interest in world affairs, will likely find this volume quite rewarding.

Text and review source: Amazon.com

New and Off Topic---At The Devil's Table During Columbia's Cocaine Wars, 1989-1995

2011-08-18T16:59:00.008-04:00

At The Devil's Table: The Untold Story of the Insider Who Brought Down the Cali Cartel, Willima C. Rempel, Random House, 368 pages, $27.00.

CWL: This book delivers everything the cover flaps states. There are times when the reader wonders how will the informant, his wife and children make it out alive. An honest man with a job that takes a crooked turn. Thug life in Columbia. A war between to narco-families, one family from Medellin and and the other from Cali. When one extended family is hunted down, put in prison or killed another war begins. The Cali Cartel vs. the Columbian government is a shudder-inducing story. With the U.S. help, both families are taken down. The British and Dutch narco-mercenaries get back to Europe and retire. Martin Scorcese should by the film rights to this book.

Cover Flaps: In this riveting and relentless nonfiction thriller, award-winning investigative reporter William C. Rempel tells the harrowing story of former Cali cartel insider Jorge Salcedo, an ordinary man facing an extraordinary dilemma—a man forced to risk everything to escape the powerful and treacherous Cali crime syndicate.

Colombia in the 1990s is a country in chaos, as a weak government battles guerrilla movements and narco-traffickers, including the notorious Pablo Escobar and his rivals in the Cali cartel. Enter Jorge Salcedo, a part-time soldier, a gifted engineer, a respected businessman and family man—and a man who despises Pablo Escobar for patriotic and deeply personal reasons. He is introduced to the godfathers of the Cali cartel, who are at war with Escobar and desperately want their foe dead. With mixed feelings, Jorge agrees to help them.

Once inside, Jorge rises to become head of security for Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela, principal godfather of the $7-billion-a-year Cali drug cartel. Jorge tries to turn a blind eye to the violence, corruption, and brutality that surround him, and he struggles privately to preserve his integrity even as he is drawn deeper into the web of cartel operations. Then comes an order from the godfathers that he can’t obey—but can’t refuse. Jorge realizes that his only way out is to bring down the biggest, richest crime syndicate of all time.

Thus begins a heart-pumping roller-coaster ride of intensifying peril. Secretly aided by a pair of young American DEA agents, Jorge races time and cartel assassins to extract damaging evidence, help capture the fugitive godfather, and save the life of a witness targeted for murder. Through it all, death lurks a single misstep away.

William C. Rempel is the only reporter with access to this story and to Jorge, who remains in hiding somewhere in the United States—even the author doesn’t know where—but has revealed his experience in gripping detail. Salcedo’s is the story of one extraordinary ordinary man forced to risk everything to end a nightmare of his own making.

News---Further Discoveries at Georgia POW Camp

2011-08-18T13:41:00.007-04:00

More Artifacts Discovered At Lost Civil War Site, Rob Pavey, Augusta Chronicle, August 18, 2011.

Camp Lawton near Millen, Ga., is yielding clues to soldiers' lives. Archaeologists now have more than buried artifacts to piece together the story of Camp Lawton, where Union prisoners were housed in the final weeks of the Civil War. “We have an actual letter, sent by a prisoner to his family back in the North,” said Georgia Southern University archeologist Kevin Chapman.

Today marks the one-year anniversary of the unveiling of a new exhibit devoted to the camp, which occupied 42 acres in Jenkins County within today’s Magnolia Springs State Park. Excavations have yielded dozens of tiny treasures—from buttons and buckles to knife blades and jewelry—that will help solve only a part of the puzzle. “The mind-set of the prisoners is hard to learn from archeology,” Chapman said. “And here is the mind-set of a man, sitting in the dirt right here at Camp Lawton, on Nov. 14, 1864.”

The writer was Charles Knox, a carpenter from Schroon Lake, N.Y., who enlisted in the Union Army, was captured in Virginia and sent to Georgia. He ended up at Camp Lawton, where 10,299 prisoners were held—and where at least 685 of them died. His letter, acquired recently by Georgia Southern’s museum, shows the concern he had for his family, and his longing for home. “Haveing a chance to send a line into God’s Land & hopeing you may hear from me by it I write a few lines hopeing they will reach you in safety,” Knox wrote to his wife, Frances. “I have written to you every month since I was captured the 5th of May, last, and have seen hard times since.”

He offers his wife hope that he may be soon exchanged for Confederate prisoners—and instructs her to “sell the cow” if money is sparse. “To hold this letter in your hand, that this man wrote, is a special feeling,” said Chapman. “And his greatest concern isn’t about himself or his situation, but that his wife could be suffering from his absence.”

Just eight days after the letter was written, Camp Lawton was hastily evacuated ahead of Gen. Sherman’s advancing Union army. Knox was returned to another prison camp in Andersonville, Ga., where he was held until Feb. 27, 1865. After a recuperative stay at Tilton General Hospital in Wilmington, Delaware, he was discharged from the army as a seregeant. He returned to his home in Schroon Lake, N.Y., and resumed his life as a carpenter. He died Feb. 27, 1895, at the age of 70. In addition to the letter, new artifacts pulled the Lawton site are also being studied. Among the more significant discoveries was a badge from the Union’s Third Army Corps, whose emblem was an elongated diamond-shape. Barely 10 feet away, a copper ring was found with a similar design, Chapman said, which could indicate prisoners from the same units were housed together. “As they were brought in, they were divided into 100-member groups, known as messes, and they were often soldiers from the same group,” he said, noting that the practice later spawned the term “mess hall.”

Other important new items include a Civil War-era token from a grocer in Niles, Michigan and a suspender buckle that was patented in 1988 in Boston. As studies at the site continue efforts will be made to identify the original stockade walls, and also to locate the Confederate quarters, where an estimated 1,200 men lived while guarding the prison population. “There was a significant Confederate encampment,” Chapman said. “Guards would have lived there, and there were two to three hospitals, a commissary, a commander’s headquarter building, things like that. It would be a large complex, perhaps a combination of existing home sites commandeered for use, along with tents and temporary buildings.”

Actual digging will proceed slowly, due to the need to carefully map and interpret the findings. “We have only begun to tell this story,” he said. “Even after an entire year, we have only cracked the door to peek in at the story of Camp Lawton.”

Image Caption: A copper ring with an elongated diamond emblem believed to represent the Union’s Army 3rd Corps. It was among new artifacts shown today from the site of Camp Lawton, a Confederate prison camp in Jenkins County where more than 10,000 captured Union soldiers were held in the closing weeks of the Civil War.

Text and Image Source: Augusta Chronicle

Off Topic---Classic World War 2 Memoir: With The Old Breed On The Pacific Islands

2011-08-18T12:22:00.008-04:00

With The Old Breed At Peleliu and Okinawa, E. B. Sledge, Presidio Press; 352 pages, paperback, $16.00.

With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa is a United States Marine's World War II Pacific Theater memoir. Eugene Sledge first published his memorior in 1981. With the Old Breed along with A Helmut For My Pillow by Robert Leckie, has been recognized as being among the best first-hand accounts of combat in the Pacific. Sledge, in a pocket-sized New Testament he carried with him during battles, kept a diary. In 1944 Sledge began making personal notes after Peleliu while in a rest camp on Pavuvu Island. As a 60 millimeter mortar man in K Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, 1st Marine Division Sledge experienced combat during the battles of Peleliu and Okinawa. After completing a re-working of his diary, With the Old Breed was published in 1981 and has gone through ten other printings in the U.S., U.K., Japan and Thailand.

Sledge presents details of the utterly exhausting struggle of fighting and living living in a tropical battlefield: perpetual fear, fatigue, and filth. Marines could not stay dry, could not dig latrines in Okinawa's mud or Peleliu's coral, could not sleep. While digging a fox hole, Sledge found graves; he protested to the sergeant who ordered him to continue. Sledge continued to complain until a captain ordered him to move the hole three feet to one side. Instances of mutilations on the battlefields are a part of Sledge's memories. With a buddy, he discovered the mutilated bodies of three Marines, one of which had been sexually mutilated. He does not neglect the behavior of some Marines towards dead Japanese, such as the removal of gold teeth from Japanese corpses.

The descriptions of receiving several night time "banzai" or frontal assaults are horrific. The brutality displayed by American and Japanese soldiers and the hatred that each for each other is described on the personal level. This is contrasted with Sledge's childhood and youth. Born in 1923 in Mobile, Alabama Eugene Sledge was the descendant of Confederate officers. A frail child and avid reader, his physician father brought him up in the out-of-doors. Fishing and hunting, he came to love adventures the woods. Rheumatic fever and then a rheumatic heart murmur kept him out of the Marines until he graduated from high school in May 1942 and entered Marion Military Institute in the fall. In December 1942, he left the academy for the Marine Corps. The Alabamian entered officer training program and was sent to Georgia Tech.

He intentionally failed his exams in order to become an enlisted Marine. Sledge survived the islands and was stationed in China until 1946. He returned to Alabama and attended Auburn University where he began his career in helminthology, which is the study parasitic worms. At the behest of his wife and children he dealt with his PSTD by reviewing his New Testament diary and producing With The Old Breed. Rich in the details of combat, weapons, buddies, the enemy and Marine life, Sledge's memoir leaves the reader with indelible images of the horrors of combat in the Pacific. It is ironic that Sledge's diary was kept along side the words of Jesus and Paul. CWL would love to study the original diary and see what Sledge wrote beside the Gospel of John, Chapters 15 through 17 in which Jesus teaches his disciples the night before his crucifixion.

News---Cleburne's Proposal To Arm Slaves Remembered

2011-08-17T13:29:00.005-04:00

General Cleburne’s Proposal to Arm Slaves, David Seibert, Historical Marker Database, July 14, 2011.

General Cleburne’s Proposal to Arm Slaves Marker

Inscription: Here on January 2, 1864, Gen. Patrick Cleburne proposed arming slaves in exchange for their freedom to alleviate the manpower shortage facing the Confederacy. Almost all the other generals present opposed the idea of black Confederate soldiers because it violated the principles upon which the Confederacy was founded. Gen. Patton Anderson said the proposal “would shake our governments, both state and Confederate, to their very foundations,” and Gen. A.P. Stewart said it was “at war with my social, moral and political principles.” Considering the proposal treasonous, Gen. W.H.T. Walker informed President Jefferson Davis, who ordered any mention of it to be suppressed. In March 1865, with defeat looming, the Confederate Congress approved enlisting slaves, but few did and none saw combat. Conversely, nearly 200,000 free African Americans served in the U.S. armed forces.

Erected 2011 by the Georgia Historical Society, the Georgia Battlefields Association and the Georgia Department of Economic Development for the Civil War 150 commemoration. The marker stands in front of the Cook-Huff House, used by General Joseph Johnston as his headquarters in January 1864 while he planned his defenses for the campaign for Atlanta. Johnston was appointed to command the Army of the Tennessee in late December 1863. Marker is at or near this postal address: 314 North Selvidge Street, Dalton GA 30720.

Image and Text Source: Historical Marker Database

News---Which Generals Are Overrated?

2011-08-17T11:02:00.005-04:00

The War List: Overrated Civil War Officers, Gary W. Gallagher, Military History Quarterly, Online Departments, August 03, 2011

1. Lieutenant General Nathan Bedford Forrest: Reached His Full Potential

Historian Shelby Foote's widely quoted view that Forrest stood alongside Abraham Lincoln as one of the war's "two authentic geniuses" defines hyperbole. Forrest was an excellent cavalry officer who vexed Union forces in the Western Theater. His many admirers claimed he should have been given far greater responsibility, perhaps even army command. But Forrest lacked the administrative skills, temperament, and intellect to lead an army. Nothing in his record suggests he could have succeeded in operational or strategic planning and execution.

2. Major General John Fulton Reynolds: The 'Best' Based On Little

Reynolds has often been described as the best corps chief in the Union's Army of the Potomac, a gifted officer who turned down command of the republic's largest force on the eve of Gettysburg. But he exemplifies the phenomenon of reputations inflated by death in dramatic circumstances. Prior to Gettysburg, he led the I Corps at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, in neither instance distinguishing himself. The shot that killed him on the morning of July 1, 1863, as he rode toward the fighting along McPherson's Ridge, elevated him to the status of martyred hero—and sparked untold speculation about what might have been.

3. General Joseph E. Johnston: Retreated All The Way To Glory

Johnston appeals to those who believe Robert E. Lee too often pursued bloody offensives. Frequently compared to the great Roman general Fabius Maximus, he has been lauded as one who understood that masterful retreats and defensive thinking best suited the Confederacy's needs. Yet his retreats in Virginia and Georgia demoralized the South, while his logistical blundering after First Bull Run, clumsy offensive on the Peninsula in May 1862, and pathological concern with rank and privilege all harmed the cause.

4. Colonel John Singleton Mosby: Achieved A Ghostly Impact

Few figures from the Civil War have inspired more romantic adulation than Mosby, whose battalion of partisan rangers operated in the Shenandoah Valley and elsewhere in northern Virginia. The Gray Ghost's own postwar writings helped burnish his reputation, leaving no deed unmentioned and undoubtedly persuading 20th-century television producers to create a series based on his exploits. Yet Mosby's attacks on supply trains and other activities, though annoying to Union commanders, did nothing to shape the larger outcome of the war in Virginia.

5. Brigadier General Joshua L. Chamberlain: Canonized By Book And Film

Chamberlain, commanding his 20th Maine Infantry, was one of many Union colonels who led their units with distinction at Gettysburg, and he compiled a splendid record in later campaigns. He remained largely forgotten until Michael Shaara's book The Killer Angels and Ken Burns's documentary The Civil War sent his stock soaring. By the mid-1990s, his reputation outshone that of all Union officers except Ulysses S. Grant and perhaps William Tecumseh Sherman. The "Hero of Little Round Top," as he came to be known, surely deserves to be remembered—but only as one among many.

Gary W. Gallagher, a professor of history at the University of Virginia, is the author of The Confederate War (1997), Lee and His Army in Confederate History (2001), and The Union War (2011).

Text Source: Military History Quarterly

CWL: The comments left in response to this list are interesting to read. Several defenses of Mosby and Forrest, none of Johnston. And no responses regarding Reynolds or Chamberlain. There is a good response regarding the work of an historian and the evaluations of an enthusiast.

One response was a declaration of from New Zealand: "What a load of rubbish. Even myself as an amateur historian can see through this attempt to have a go at the Confederate historians. I would prefer to read honest articles from good historians than to read something of an agenda that this article is. Note to self. Dont read any of Gary Callagher's books."

CWL's response to this comment was: "You should read Gallagher's 'The Confederate War'. I bet you'll find very little to disagree with between the covers. Also, check out The Teaching Company's lecture series on 'Robert E. Lee and His Lieutenants' taught by Gallagher. Gallagher is very complimentary to Lee and his staff.

Noteworthy---James Knight's Battle of Franklin Has Fifth Printing In Three Years

2011-08-16T10:47:00.003-04:00

The Battle of Franklin: When The Devil Had Full Possession of the Earth, James R. Knight, The History Press, 158 pp., 38 b/w illustrations, 6 maps, notes, appendix, Fifth Printing 2011, $19.99.

The History Press well serves the local, regional and state book markets. In the publisher's Civil War Sesquicentennial Series each book is a concise, illustrated history of an epic battle, a critical turning point, a pivotal campaign or an important city. The authors are respected Civil War scholars and regional historians who offer their research in crisply written, well illustrated and suitably mapped volumes. James R. Knight has offered two in this series; one on Fort Donelson and one on the Battle of Franklin. Both are fine examples of clear and complete within the series that has a 200 page, or there about, limit. A few weeks ago, CWL reviewed Fort Donelson: No Terms But Unconditional Surrender.

Franklin's battlefield is in the process of recovery from development. The Carter House is now a National Historic Landmark located on the field of the 1864 Battle of Franklin. The house serves as the interpretive center for the battle and features a museum and guided tours. Following the bloody battle on November 30, 1864, wounded soldiers were treated at the Carnton Plantation with its antebellum mansion. Probably four or more Confederate generals were laid out on its back porch. Nearby is the McGavock cemetery, one of the largest Confederate graveyards in the nation. Both of these sites were featured in Robert Hicks' bestselling novel The Widow of the South. The Lotz House Museum features artifacts and antiques from the Battle of Franklin, the Civil War, and frontier Tennessee. Organized in 2005, Franklin’s Charge is an organization dedicated to preserving Civil War battlefields in Williamson County, Tennessee, and to educating the public about Civil War events occurring in Middle Tennessee. One of its goals is to bring together all preservation groups operating in Williamson County. James Knight's The Battle of Franklin is in part evidence that the citizens of Franklin and their neighbors have been successful their preservation efforts.

In late November 1864, the last mobile Southern army east of the Mississippi started out from northern Alabama on the Confederacy’s last offensive. Army of Tennessee and John Bell Hood, its commander, set out to capture Nashville and then march on to the Ohio River. A small Union force, commanded by John Schofield, slipped by at Spring Hill and faced Hood's army at Franklin. In a desperate attempt to smash John Schofield’s line at Franklin, Hood threw most men against the Federals' field fortifications the center of which as on the Carter house and its cotton gin. With reports from the Official Records, letters and diary entries from the Carter House Archives, middle Tennessee historian James R. Knight paints a vivid portrait of leaders and enlisted men.

Knight addresses what can be known of the battle and the questions are left unanswered. The questions of Hood punishing the army for its failure at Spring Hill, the likelyhood of Hood of being over medicated for wounds, and just how many dead Rebel generals were on the Carnton house front porch are reasonably answered by the author. Knight recovers the story of the civilians during the battle and their attempt to live after a battle which heavily damaged their property and filled their yards and fields with the dead and dying. He handles Hood's campaign strategy well and the army's path to middle Tennessee, the event at Spring Hill and John Schofield's mistakes and achievements during the retreat to Nashville. Federal and Confederate rank and file troops' testimony of the campaign is present in every chapter. Knight nicely concludes the book with a brief description of the demise of the Confederate army during and after the Battle of Nashville. Also, in an epilogue, Knight offers brief summaries of the commanders careers and lives after the battle and war.

Knight's Fort Donelson and The Battle of Franklin are essential for visitors to the sites and for those are looking for accessible books on the turning points of the Civil War.

News--July 1863: Bullets Miss Soldier, Kills Tree 149 Years Later

2011-08-10T14:35:00.006-04:00

Workers Find Civil War bullets In Gettysburg Tree: Park Maintenance Crews Make Historic Discovery, Tim Prudente, Evening Sun, August 9, 2011.

A gnarled oak tree that had fallen on the Gettysburg battlefield was overlooked for years by visitors and park staff. Now, it's the center of attention after maintenance crews discovered two Civil War bullets lodged in the trunk. Last week, crews were cutting through the tree on Culp's Hill when a chain saw struck lead. "One hundred years ago it was commonplace to find bullets in Gettysburg trees but this is a rarity today," said Bob Kirby, superintendent of Gettysburg National Military Park.

It was the first time in more than a decade that bullets have been found in a tree on the battlefield, according to park staff. The discovery also proves the fallen oak tree witnessed the Battle of Gettysburg and an arborist has since identified the tree to be more than 200 years old. "Not only is the bullet an artifact but the tree is too," said Museum Specialist Paul Shevchuk.

The discovery was made Thursday and one of the bullets is believed to be a 54 caliber, the other a 58 caliber. Crews were working to remove a section of the trunk that threatened a nearby marker. The rest of the fallen tree will remain on the east slope of the Culp's Hill summit, near the marker for Union Maj. Joshua Palmer. Two sections of the trunk containing the bullets were taken to the Museum and Visitor Center, where they will be frozen for three days and vacuumed to remove any insects or mold. Then, the sections will be stored alongside hundreds of similar sections of trees that have been found to contain bullets or shrapnel.

Gettysburg National Military Park boasts a collection or more than 1.6 million relics, the world's largest, and likely most valuable, assortment of Civil War artifacts. Only about 2 percent of this collection is on display for the public, though. Staff only select artifacts for display that illustrate the story of the Civil War. t's not surprising the discovery was made on Culp's Hill, an area that saw some of the heaviest fighting during the Battle of Gettysburg.

On the morning of July 3, Confederate forces launched the second of two attacks on Union troops occupying Culp's Hill. The Rebels, though, were ultimately repelled - after seven hours of fighting - largely due to an artillery bombardment from Union forces perched on Powers Hill. Soon after the battle, Culp's Hill became a popular picnic area for tourists who were intrigued by the bullet-riddled trees. Few of these trees survive today, though. Historians say most literally died from lead poisoning.

Top Caption: A replica bullet is shown next to a Civil War slug found lodged in an oak tree on the Gettysburg battlefield. Crews discovered two historic bullets last week while working to clear trees from the summit of Culp s Hill.

Bottom Caption: Gettysburg Museum Specialist Paul Shevchuk shows sections of an oak tree from the Gettysburg battlefield that contain bullet fragments from the Civil War. The artifacts were found last week when crews worked to cut a fallen tree on Culp s Hill.

Text and Image Source: Evening Sun, August 9, 2011.

New and Noteworthy---Gettysburg Campaign Handbook Attracts All Ages

2011-08-10T11:12:00.005-04:00

The New Gettysburg Campaign Handbook: June 9-July 14, 1863---Facts, Photos and Artwork for Readers of All Ages, J.David Petruzzi and Steven Stanley, Savas Beatie Publishing, 184 pp., numerous color and b/w photographs, 28 color maps, $18.95.

Without a doubt, Savas Beatie LLC, kept to its high standard of quality with its offering The New Gettysburg Campaign Handbook: June 9-July 14, 1863---Facts, Photos and Artwork for Readers of All Ages. By condensing and reorganizing the prize winning The Complete Gettysburg Guide and adding some new information, J.David Petruzzi and Steven Stanley have created a book that is for readers of all ages. Even pre-readers will be entertained by using the book as a picture album. Having taught all grades from kindergarten through 12, with the exception of sixth grade, and by having raised five children, I could almost guarantee it. Any adult who is willing to have a small child sit on their lap and read to them and talk about the pictures, will be able to tell stories from this book.

Also, anyone who is looking for their first book on the Battle of Gettysburg, would do well to start with The New Gettysburg Handbook. Lists of facts, questions with answers, black and white and color photographs, sketches and classic watercolor paintings are on every page. For the the authors offer the distance away from the battlefield on the evening of June 30, the organization of the armies, and photographs of the noteworthy commanders and men in the ranks. The weather conditions are briefly discussed as are the role of the civilians in the battle. Controversies, myths, misconceptions about the campaign and battle are addressed. Forty-one notable qoutations are listed, the Confederates are list in red and the Federals are listed in blue. The battle covers 75 of the books 189 pages. Two pages offer and discuss the Gettysburg Address.

For visitors to the national battlefield park there is a list of webstites. Helpful for readers is a list of books organized in 19 categories. The organization of the armies [order of battle] is presented which makes the book handy for touring the battlefield and reading the monuments. More than likely, first time visitors leaving the national park's bookstore will have The New Gettysburg Campaign Handbook: June 9-July 14, 1863---Facts, Photos and Artwork for Readers of All Ages in hand.

There a few segments of the campaign that were missing from The Complete Gettysburg Guide that are also missing from The New Gettysburg Campaign Handbook. More attention than a single line should be used for the June 30 cavalry battle at Hanover. Imagine if Confederate horsemen were travelling west on the Hanover-Gettysburg Road on July 1. Also, the July 2 evening counter assault of Pennsylvania Reserve Division troops from the north slope of Little Round Top through Plum Run and to the east side of the Wheatfield should have been noted. After the July 3 Grand Assault, the Pennsylvania Reserve brigades again assaulted the Wheatfield and captured Georgia troops with their colors. The assault occurred along with Farnesworth's cavalry charge toward the Slyder Farm and Merrit's cavalry charge northward on the Emmittsburg Road. The cavalry charges are discussed and maps are presented; but the Pennsylvania Reserves assault is not mentioned and has no map. Though constrained by the 184 page limit adding a map and a caption would have been possible. Also, a brief history of the National Cemetery and the birth and growth of the Gettysburg National Military Park is not found between the covers.

These omissions do not detract from The New Gettysburg Campaign Handbook: June 9-July 14, 1863---Facts, Photos and Artwork for Readers of All Ages. It is an enjoyable and informative handbook for all readers and travelers to the battlefield. All the Civil War national parks would be well served by the attention of Petruzzi and Stanley.

News---Fallen Tree Reveals Bullets Fired in July 1863

2011-08-09T14:40:00.003-04:00

Bullets From Battle of Gettysburg Discovered In A Tree, Tim Lambert, WITF.org, August 9, 2011

Maintenance workers at the Gettysburg National Military Park cutting through a fallen oak tree have discovered bullets fired during the famed Civil War battle. The crews came across the bullets earlier this month, while working on Culp's Hill, which served as the right flank of the Union Army on July 1st, 2nd and 3rd in 1863. "Culp’s Hill is one of the areas on the Gettysburg battlefield that saw intense fighting in July 1863," says Park Superintendent Bob Kirby. "One hundred years ago it was commonplace to find bullets in Gettysburg trees but this is a rarity today."

Two sections of the tree trunk where the bullets were found have been moved to the park's museum collections storage area. They will be treated to remove insects and mold and then added to the park's artifacts collection. According to the National Park Service, a number of witness trees on the battlefield have been frequently pointed out during battlefield tours.

Other previously unknown Witness Trees are often identified during preparatory work for battlefield rehabilitation efforts, where the park re-opens historic meadows and farm fields to restore the historic integrity of the 1863 battlefield and to improve the visitors’ understanding of what happened during the clash between Union and Confederate forces.

Text and Image Source: WITF.org