Somebody posted this image to Reddit last week, and as usual the userbase filled in some of the questions it inspired about Civil War deaths and mores. There are some well-read historians lurking on there amongst the jokers and the wags – this is a thread word reading.
durutticolumn comments on Godfor, a Gettysburg battlefield vulture. [1396×702].
This abortive little article doesn’t give us much food for thought on its stated question, but includes this intriguing tidbit:
Culberson was 10 years old when the great conflict ended, and he had always wondered who was the greatest. He sent a survey to 43 surviving Confederate generals asking for their input. Forty completed and returned the senator’s survey. Of the seven major generals five named Gen. Robert E. Lee, one chose Gen. Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson, and one was non-committal. Of the 30 brigadier generals, they all named Lee.
Anyone else curious to see all these responses, and especially to find out who remained “non-committal”?
I wrote earlier of the slaveocrats’ role in bringing about the war; it’s fascinating yet horrific to watch how they lured moderates into their scheme, but after this article it’s slightly easier to see how they did it. Newspapers at the time were not held to much in the way of journalistic standards, and the boom in printing meant any idiot who could afford a press could disseminate his views. Sadly, the general public then was probably as unquestioning as the average consumer today.
In pre-Civil War America, the dominant newspapers were based in New York: James Gordon Bennett’s Herald, Horace Greeley’s Tribune and Henry J. Raymond’s Times. However, as Brayton Harris points out in “Newspapers in the Civil War,” the invention and expanded use of the telegraph and a soaring literacy rate in the U.S. led to a quadrupling of active newspapers across the country between 1825 and 1860.
In Delaware, as the Civil War loomed, erupted and progressed, those seeking control of the political process allied with likeminded newspaper editors to expand and encourage their constituencies. These journals heralded partisan viewpoints on behalf of their political patrons.
via Civil War Profiles: Newspaper partisanship in Civil War Delaware | Coastal Point.
The more I read about the war’s origins, the more I dislike the slaveocrats. The Lost Cause tradition has swathed the discussion in the States’ Rights argument, but even a scratch on its surface reveals the ugly truth beneath. Eric Foner agrees in this article for Politico.
Whenever I lecture to non-academic audiences about the Civil War era, someone is bound to insist that the South fought for states’ rights rather than the long-term survival of slavery. In an extreme version of this view, Abraham Lincoln was not the Great Emancipator but a tyrant, the creator of the leviathan national state that essentially enslaved white Americans. This reading of the conflict is why a remarkable number of libertarians, self-proclaimed defenders of individual freedom, sympathize with the Old South, and why some even make excuses for slavery.
But this history omits one important part of antebellum history: When it came to enforcing and maintaining the peculiar institution against an increasingly anti-slavery North, the Old South was all too happy to forget its fear of federal power—a little-remembered fact in our modern retellings of the conflict.
When the South Wasn’t a Fan of States’ Rights – Eric Foner – POLITICO Magazine.
Like Wisconsin, Indiana was a Union-heavy state that contributed much in the way of men to the cause. They didn’t contribute many colored troops, though, because according to this article Indiana was quite hostile to blacks. There is even the rumor of native black troops being poisoned.
The young Townsend, from Putnam County, bought a pie from a peddler selling them in Camp Fremont in Indianapolis where the 28th USCT was mustered in.
“I don’t know for sure, but the abolitionist press reports lots of stories in the Civil War about people deliberately selling poisoned foods to black troops,” Etcheson said. “He gets really ill and has to go back to Putnamville, where he dies in the spring of 1865. I don’t know what the illness was, but pension records link it to the pie.”
via Ball State prof asks: Was black Civil War soldier from Indiana poisoned in 1865?.
This is an article publicizing a reenactor’s appearance, but unlike other notices of the sort, it is very fleshed-out (emphasis on flesh). The reenactment is of a Civil War doctor, and the writer makes a point of discussing the realities beyond the wound itself, such as how saving an arm could cost a relationship 20 years later.
Richard Covell Phillips of Prattsburgh (44th New York) fought on after being wounded on the second day at Gettysburg, then made his way to a field hospital. There a doctor saved his arm, but he lost the USE of that arm. Later he and other walking wounded were ordered to make their own way on foot several miles down to town, picking their way through the decaying corpses of thousands of men, mules, and horses. After a night on the floor of a church the wounded went by train to Baltimore, where the hospitals were full. Diverted to Philadelphia he finally had his blood-soaked uniform cut away, a week or so after being wounded.
Philips stayed in the army, even serving a year or so postwar. But his wound exacted a toll from his family for decades. His oldest son wanted badly to get an extensive education, but the father insisted that he leave school as a teenager and work on the farm, doing the jobs his father couldn’t… an insistence that engendered deep bitterness.
Dr. Babcock and Dr. Annabel — Civil War Medicine Then and Now – Blogs – The Leader.
We celebrated the arrival of 2015 a week ago today. Back in Lincoln’s time, January 1st was the day the White House doors were thrown open to the public and the masses thronged in to greet the inhabitants. These White House New Year’s levees were common knowledge to me, but their desegregation never struck me as a revolutionary event until reading this article.
Every year the Lincolns threw open the doors of the White House for a New Year’s reception to which the public was invited. When a few African Americans – including Abbott and fellow physician Alexander Augusta – asserted their citizenship by attending in 1864, people inside the White House were shocked, but decorum prevailed.
The next year, however, things unfolded quite differently. By New Year’s 1865, it appeared that the abolition of slavery and the defeat of the Confederacy were at hand. For African American activists and their white allies, however, it was not enough simply to outlaw slavery. They envisioned a nation in which racism, too, would be eradicated. They wanted an end to discrimination in voting rights and law enforcement. And African Americans wanted to be treated with the same respect and dignity accorded to whites.
Wisconsin is one of those forgotten states for me – I can only spot it on the map by counting away from Illinois, and it’s never made it onto my must-see list. During the Civil War, though, it was a keystone for the Union. This short article details Wisconsin’s contributions to the Federal cause.
By the time the Civil War broke out in 1861, the Wisconsin State Journal had been publishing for more than 20 years. But nothing could prepare Wisconsin and its nascent capital city for the horrors to follow. The country’s struggle with slavery, and the resulting war, would be the dominant issue of the time.
Families in Wisconsin and elsewhere were torn apart, as one soldier in three suffered some sort of casualty and one in every seven “gave the last full measure of devotion,” as Abraham Lincoln memorably said in his Getttysburg Address.
via The Wisconsin State Journal at 175: The Civil War years : Wsj.
The Mutter Museum’s website suggested this blog as the go-to source for all Civil War medicine facts. It does look full to the brim with interesting articles.
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Another medical article, this one a review of the Mutter Museum’s Civil War exhibit. For those with strong stomachs, it looks like a fascinating visit.
The new exhibition focuses in part on Philadelphia’s role in the Civil War. It was not a battleground, but about 157,000 injured soldiers were transported here by train or steamboat for treatment. Though civilian clinics admitted some, a number of military hospitals were also built, including two that were almost cities unto themselves, each with more than 3,000 beds.
On display are surgical instruments like a hammer and chisel, knives and saws used for amputations and an unnervingly long pair of “ball forceps” for extracting bullets. Most of these grisly operations were done with the soldiers knocked out by chloroform or ether, the curators note — contrary to the common belief that there was no anesthesia back then and only a bullet to bite on.
One display case holds the broken skull of a soldier who was shot through both eye sockets. Stark photographs reveal young men with limbs missing, faces mutilated, and piercing, haunted eyes. Others, still able-bodied, are shown burying the fallen.
via ‘Broken Bodies, Suffering Spirits’ at the Mütter Museum – NYTimes.com.