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More Volck

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I’m so excited to see this Adalbert Volck exhibition, which I mentioned in a previous update.  The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, of all papers, has this excellent biography of the man. (But, surprisingly, none of his cartoons.)

Volck lived nearly 50 years after the war’s end, dying in Baltimore in 1912. In a letter to the Library of Congress, which had acquired some of his etchings, Volck said a few years before his death that his “greatest regret ever was to have aimed ridicule at the great and good Lincoln.”

His remorse isn’t surprising. By the turn of the 20th century, the passions of the war years had cooled. Lincoln had become a symbol of national unity — the man who saved the Union. And many preferred to forget the unsettling role of race and slavery in bringing on the conflict and in the Reconstruction years that followed.

via Cartoonist for Confederacy made mockery of the Union – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Disarmed

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This one’s rather macabre, so if you have a sensitive constitution, don’t click through to the picture that accompanies the article.

Shortly after the battle of Antietam, a farmer plowing his field dug up a dismembered arm.  For some reason, he and the doctor he consulted about it decided to pickle it rather than bury it, and it wound up in the collection of a private museum.

Wunderlich said he hopes to have a Smithsonian Institution forensic anthropologist examine the arm for clues about the owner’s diet and origin.

Battlefield Superintendent Susan Trail said the arm can’t be displayed at the Antietam visitor center because the National Park Service generally forbids displaying human remains. But she said the medical museum could display it at the Pry House, a field hospital site that the museum runs on the battlefield.

This imagery reminded me of a passage from Sam Watkins’ Co. Aytch, where he describes a very human reaction that led to many mangled and dead boys:

I saw another man try to stop one of those balls that was just rolling along on the ground. He put his foot out to stop the ball but the ball did not stop, but, instead, carried the man’s leg off with it. He no doubt today walks on a cork-leg, and is tax collector of the county in which he lives. I saw a thoughtless boy trying to catch one in his hands as it bounced along. He caught it, but the next moment his spirit had gone to meet its God.

via Md. Civil War medical museum aims to exhibit severed arm thought to be from Antietam battle – The Washington Post.

Sara Lucy Bagby

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I’m currently reading a John Brown biography, and am deep in the heart of the Bleeding Kansas chapters.  It’s interesting to note that, for all the violence and emotion of the pro- and anti-slavery factions, there were many moderate Kansas who tried desperately to keep these radicals in check.

This story, of an escaped slave torn from her life as a free woman, illustrates the delicacy with which the moderates of Ohio treated the situation of enforcing the hated Fugitive Slave Act.  They did their best to repress the irrepressible conflict that was erupting all around them.

The news of Bagby’s arrest raced across the country. It was as if the South had stabbed the North in the heart; Bagby was snatched from a bastion of freedom by the evil slave oligarchy. Northerners now knew that slaveowners would indeed reach into any town in any state and grab any African-American they chose. No one was safe from slavery’s odious grasp.

In the days before Bagby’s trial, the street outside her jail nearly erupted into violence several times as free blacks gathered. Others pleaded for calm. The United States in early 1861 was in a tenuous position, with some states having seceded and others mulling the possibility. Many hoped that there was still a way to reunite the country. But a violent rescue of Bagby would further inflame the South and make disunion inevitable.

Sara Lucy Bagby: Last African-American Forced Back Into Slavery Under The Fugitive Slave Act & A Harbinger Of The Civil War | usariseup.

Lincoln Giveth, and Lincoln Taketh Away

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If you’re an American reading this, your income taxes are due today.  Lincoln, of course, famously instituted the income tax into law, but did you know that your two day “tax holiday” this year is due to Abe as well?  Turns out DC shuts down for Emancipation Day, which commemorates an event most of us have long forgotten: The purchased emancipation of DC’s slaves, in 1862.  Harold Holzer wrote this nifty little summary, and it’s worth a read. (Assuming, of course, you haven’t got taxes to finish… or start?)

So the future “Great Emancipator” kept the D.C. freedom bill on his desk, unsigned, for two long days – delaying, he confided, until one Kentucky congressman could spirit his own aged servants back to his home state, where slavery remained lawful. This very newspaper reported “turbulence and disorder” throughout Washington, with “slave-hunters chasing up their dark-skinned chattels, to remove them, into Maryland and Virginia” before emancipation could be approved…

Yet the mere fact that a Congress and a president had worked together to end generations of pro-slavery tradition somewhere resonated with breathtaking power in April 1862. No doubt the excitement owed much to the venue: the national capital. It did not seem to matter that only 3,000 were liberated in Washington while millions remained in chains nationwide. As Frederick Douglass predicted: “Kill slavery at the heart of the nation, and it will certainly die at the extremities. This looks small, but it is not so. It is a giant stride toward the grand result.”

Tax holiday inspired by freedom – Philly.com.

Southern Suicides

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The New York Times’ Disunion (which I’ll be referencing a lot less thanks to the stingier paywall limits) examines suicides in the Confederate army, which it seems was more prevalent than in the Union army. Some excellent points are put forth.  (One not suggested was “the cause”; if Emancipation could breathe new life into the Northern ranks, is it not fair to suggest an equal and opposite reaction on the other side?)

Each suicide is a thing unto itself, but we can offer a few conjectures. Importantly, men, especially white men in the South, well understood the expectations Victorian society demanded of them in wartime. Honor and duty required their martial participation. So in the wake of the firing on Fort Sumter and Lincoln’s call for troops, Southern white men heeded their new nation’s call to arms and flocked to recruiting stations.

The “Boys of ’61” were pulled into military service by rage militaire a sense of adventure, but they were also pushed into service by patriotic womenfolk who, despite reservations, implored their husbands and sons to enlist. To resist would raise questions about one’s manhood as well as commitment to nation. Consequently, thousands reflexively rushed off to war without much deliberation or contemplation.

As Southern recruits mustered in camps, the reality of what they faced set in. While many a green soldier longed to “see the elephant” – a colloquial term referring to engaging in battle – eagerness often gave way to anxiety and a plethora of fears: of dying, of killing, of failure, of the unknown. If any of those fears were made manifest, a soldier’s courage would be called into question…

via A Burden Too Heavy to Bear – NYTimes.com.

Angel Glow

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Here’s an anecdote of the battle of Shiloh I’d never heard before, with a really neat modern conclusion.

Some of the Shiloh soldiers sat in the mud for two rainy days and nights waiting for the medics to get around to them. As dusk fell the first night, some of them noticed something very strange: their wounds were glowing, casting a faint light into the darkness of the battlefield. Even stranger, when the troops were eventually moved to field hospitals, those whose wounds glowed had a better survival rate and had their wounds heal more quickly and cleanly than their unilluminated brothers-in-arms. The seemingly protective effect of the mysterious light earned it the nickname “Angel’s Glow.”

In 2001, almost one hundred and forty years after the battle, seventeen-year-old Bill Martin was visiting the Shiloh battlefield with his family. When he heard about the glowing wounds, he asked his mom – a microbiologist at the USDA Agricultural Research Service who had studied luminescent bacteria that lived in soil – about it.

via Why Some Civil War Soldiers Glowed in the Dark – Mental Floss.

St Louis in Wartime

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I’d procrastinated on reading this article, mainly due to its length, but it’s a fascinating read and entertainingly written – well worth the investment in time. While it eventually settles down into an examination of the German immigrant population and its effect on the border state, it’s introduced by a look at the city that Sherman and Grant called home, and by this rather fabulous summary:

The leading city in one of the nation’s most populous slaveholding states, St. Louis was a strategic prize like no other. Not only the largest settlement beyond the Appalachians, it was also the country’s second-largest port, commanding the Mississippi River as well as the Missouri, which was then navigable as far upstream as what is now the state of Montana. It was the eastern gateway to the overland trails to California. Last but far from least, the city was home to the St. Louis Arsenal, the biggest cache of federal arms in the slave states, a central munitions depot for Army posts between New Orleans and the Rockies. Whoever held St. Louis held the key to the Mississippi Valley and perhaps even to the whole American West.

The city and its surrounding state stood at a crossroads between the cultures of the North and the South, between slavery and freedom, between an older America and a new one. The old Missouri flourished in the region known as Little Dixie, the rich alluvial lands where black field hands toiled in the hemp and cotton fields. The new one could be found in St. Louis, where block after block of red-brick monotony— warehouses, manufacturing plants, and office buildings—stretched for miles along the bluffs above the river. Each year, more than 4,000 steamboats shouldered up to the wharves, vessels with names like War Eagle, Champion, Belle of Memphis, and Big St. Louis. The smoke from their coal-fired furnaces mingled with the thick black clouds belching from factory smokestacks, so that on windless days the sun shone feebly through a dark canopy overhead.

(Hands up if you knew that “second largest port” fact. My hand is decidedly lowered!)

Counter-feat

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The New York Times’ “Disunion” feature keeps presenting essays on topics I considered for my podcast!  Luckily (unluckily?) I couldn’t find a gap for the story of this master counterfeiter, whose story is notable. (Ahem, little money-printing joke, there…)

Upham didn’t look like a counterfeiter. He didn’t hide out in the woods or perform daring jailbreaks. He didn’t run from the police. He was a respectable small-business owner and devoted Northern patriot. He ran a store that sold stationery, newspapers and cosmetics. But he was also an entrepreneur with an eye for easy profit, and the Civil War offered the business opportunity of a lifetime: the ability to forge money without breaking the law. Confederate currency, issued by a government that was emphatically not recognized by the Union, had no legal status in the North, which meant Upham could sell his “fac-similes” with impunity.

Over the next 18 months he built the most notorious counterfeiting enterprise of the Civil War — one that also happened to be perfectly legal. His forgeries flooded the South, undermining the value of the Confederate dollar and provoking enraged responses from Southern leaders. He waged war on the enemy’s currency, serving his pocketbook and his country at the same time.

via A Counterfeiting Conspiracy? – NYTimes.com.

Old World Religion, New World Conflict

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While Catholic soldiers always prove an interesting focus for research, the Catholic Church as an entity was uncharacteristically silent from 1861-5. As this article investigates, this may have been due to the Church having a dog(ma) in each side of the fight.

On the eve of the Civil War, as citizens were taking sides, and taking up arms, leading Unionists questioned where the Church stood on the issues of slavery and secession. In May 1861, the Third Provincial Council of Cincinnati attempted to clarify the Catholic position on the crisis. The Council stated that the “spirit of the Catholic Church is eminently conservative and while her ministers rightfully feel a deep and abiding interest in all that concerns the welfare of the country, they do not think it their province to enter the political arena.” It further elaborated on the Catholic “unity of spirit” that recognized “no North, no South, no East, no West.” Yet historian Mark Noll states that the American Catholic position, while not as “fully developed domestically as they were abroad” created a theological challenge to prevailing American beliefs. Catholics challenged the Protestant notions that linked democracy and Christianity, capitalism and Christianity, and the individualism Protestants interpreted from scripture. Noll stated in his book The Civil War as a Theological Crisis that the Catholic position “amounted to a fundamental assessment of prevailing beliefs and practices that American protestants, whose main principles were so closely intertwined with the nation’s dominant ideologies, could not deliver.” Northern theologians could not understand Catholic misgivings about the abolitionist movement, with its willingness to break the law for its goals, and Know Nothing roots, while Southern radicals could not abide the Church’s sympathy for and identification with the plight and suffering of slaves. Furthermore, while Protestant denominations split along sectional lines and theological interpretations of slavery, even to the point of advocating war, the Catholic Church seemed maddeningly united and suspiciously neutral during the secession crisis.

http://www.acton.org/pub/religion-liberty/volume-21-number-4/onward-catholic-soldiers-catholic-church-during-am

Escape Artist

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Last month I watched the Bresson classic, A Man Escaped for the umpteenth time. The true story of a French Resistance member who pulled a MacGyver-like escape from a heavily-guarded Gestapo prison. Everytime I watch it, I’m struck anew at my total lack of resourcefulness or tenacity; Should I ever be imprisoned by Nazis, I’m done for. The escapes (note plural – they’re always plural for fellows like these) that John Pierson undertook weren’t quite as gobsmacking (few were), but show such determination as to be noteworthy.

Several days later, on March 18, they were recaptured by Confederates that had “orders to arrest any one, white or black, that was going north or south, east or west, that did not have papers to show who they were or where they were going,” Pierson noted. The Confederates transported Pierson and his comrades to a prison in nearby Jackson. “The jail was made of wood and lined with heavy timbers set endways and driven full of nails, so that a mouse could not have escaped. We fared well and had many visitors. All seemed sociable enough except one schoolma’am from the northern states. She thought we ought to be hung, possibly to keep herself from hanging.”

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/04/the-great-escape/?ref=opinion%2F%3Fsmid%3Dfb-disunion