Civil War Road Trips

Posted on June 17, 2012 by Eireann

Summer; when a young (or old) Civil War buff’s fancy turns to National Park visits. The Baltimore Sun provides a handy list of road trip planners, either of the read-a-book/DIY variety, or the more expensive guided tours. One day I hope to make enough money off this site (current annual income still stands at $0) to afford one of the big tours. The best I can do right now is standing reaaaally close to the park rangers as they speak.

Most of the major battles were fought on the same ground along the Mississippi River, along the coasts, near large Southern cities and in Virginia, between Washington and the Confederate capital in Richmond, said Michael Weeks, author of “The Complete Civil War Road Trip Guide.”

“If you’re standing on one battlefield, you’re usually very close to five, 10, even 20 others,” Weeks said.

via Civil War: A road trip of Civil War sites – baltimoresun.com.

Unraveling ‘The Soldier’s Faith’

Posted on June 13, 2012 by Eireann

An interesting article on Oliver Wendell Holmes’ “The Soldier’s Faith” speech – his thought process and the reactions it earned. Like all good speeches seems to have been reviewed far less reverently at the time it was given than now.

Holmes had a horrific war experience. He was wounded three times, one bullet lodging in his chest and another passing through his neck and out his throat. He had contracted dysentery, the consequences of which would affect him the rest of his life. He noted in “The Soldier’s Faith” that he had stumbled over dead bodies, encountered corpses piled up on themselves, and experienced the dreadful tedium of waiting, concealed, while enemy shots came closer and closer. “When you are in it,” he remembered, “war is horrible and dull.”

But by 1895 Holmes’ recollections of his wartime experience had been replaced by a different memory, and the collective memory of the Civil War had changed as well.

via Unraveling Oliver Wendell Holmes’ ‘The Soldier’s Faith’ – BostonHerald.com.

The Forgotten Navy

Posted on June 10, 2012 by Eireann

I don’t usually bother with articles about reenactors, but this guy’s got a terrific angle, and I love his enthusiasm for teaching. It’s a short article, and worth a read beyond just these interesting facts:

There were advantages to serving in the Navy during the Civil War.

Sailors had a higher survival rate than soldiers, in part because disease could be quarantined to one ship’s crew rather than allowed to spread throughout an Army camp, Dispenza said.

On the steam-powered Navy ships commonly used on rivers — uncertain winds made sails unreliable — sailors typically poured off drinking water from the steam condenser, he said. The boiler process killed bacteria in that water.

Sailors typically ate better than soldiers because they rarely outran their supply line, Dispenza said. If the crew needed food, they could go ashore and buy, steal or hunt what they needed.

The Civil War Navy also was racially integrated, Dispenza added. Slaves were considered illegally held by the South, so many surrendered to Union gunboats and served as enlisted sailors.

“As the war went on, there were black petty officers giving orders to white sailors,” Dispenza said, noting “that would not happen in the Army.”

via The Navy: Civil War's unseen force – News-Sentinel.com.

Clara Barton’s Inner War

Posted on June 8, 2012 by Eireann

Many of my favorite historical figures (Lincoln, Sherman, Meriwether Lewis among them) appear to have suffered from debilitating depression, which makes it all the more stunning that they went on to drag themselves up and change their worlds. Another of my favorite tough broads, Clara Barton, was listed amongst the black dog owners, too.

“I am depressed and feel dissatisfied with myself,” she wrote in fine, tiny script in diaries now stored on microfilm in the Library of Congress. With so little to do, she paradoxically couldn’t rest, and so “rose not refreshed, but cold and languid.” For neither the first nor last time, she considered suicide.

“All the world appears selfish and treacherous,” she wrote on April 14. “I can get no hold on a good noble sentiment any where. I have scanned over and over the whole moral horizon and it is all dark. The night clouds seem to have shut down — so stagnant, so dead, so selfish, so calculating. . . . Shall the world move on in all this weight of dead, morbid meanness?” A few days later, she fantasized again about killing herself.

But then, as Elizabeth Brown Pryor wrote in her 1987 biography, “Clara Barton: Professional Angel,” the self-made philanthropist’s “dejection was lifted finally by her only true remedy — a need for her services. The Union army’s spring campaign had started early.”

via Clara Barton’s inner war — Health — Bangor Daily News — BDN Maine.

The Galvanized Yankee

Posted on June 7, 2012 by Eireann

Henry Stanley’s fascinating biography and his astonishing Civil War connections. Totally worth the counts-against-article-quota NY Times click.

By switching sides Henry became one of the first of 6,000 so-called Galvanized Yankees to switch from wearing gray to blue. Galvanized, because the process of galvanization coats the gray surface of steel with a thin layer of bluish zinc — though the underlying metal is the same. To avoid fighting former comrades, the great majority of Galvanized Yankees were sent west to deal with unruly American Indians. But since Stanley was a recent immigrant, his Illinois unit was sent to Virginia. Along the route he suffered the effects of Camp Douglas germs and was hospitalized at Harper’s Ferry on June 22.

This was not the first time Stanley had demonstrated his adaptability. In 1859 he arrived in New Orleans as 18-year-old John Rowlands; he quickly abandoned his Liverpool-assigned cabin boy job and disappeared into the city. He didn’t have much to leave behind; John’s mother was a Welsh prostitute, his father’s identity is unknown. He was raised by his maternal grandfather, until the man died five years later. From then on, like someone straight from Dickens Productions central casting, he lived mostly in a “workhouse,” a home for able-bodied indigents who performed generally difficult contract work to earn their keep.Somehow young John managed to get some education along the way.

Thanks to his literacy and knowledge of arithmetic, once in New Orleans he was promptly hired by a local merchant. Gradually the elderly and childless shopkeeper took a special interest in John. He advised the boy of the favorable commercial prospects for opening a store on one of the up-river Mississippi tributaries. And so, about a year later, John moved to a site near present-day Pine Bluff, Ark. to work for a local shopkeeper. But first he changed his name to a variation of a much-admired New Orleans cotton-trader: John Rowlands became Henry Morton Stanley.

via The Galvanized Yankee – NYTimes.com.

Smalls’ Wonder

Posted on June 5, 2012 by Eireann

One of the anniversaries I missed due to my recent blog hacking was the swashbuckling escape of Robert Smalls. It’s a more exciting action-adventure than anything Hollywood could dream up.

He was conscripted by the Confederates to serve as a pilot on the Planter, a Confederate side wheel ammunition ship.

Smalls took the Planter about 2 a.m. May 13, 1862, after the white officers aboard left for a night in town.

“An interesting thing about those officers is they were not part of the Confederate Navy – they were actually civilian contractors,” said Carl Borick, the assistant director of the Charleston Museum. “The military really couldn’t take much recourse against them for leaving their posts.”

Not every black on the Planter crew was in on the plot. Those who weren’t went ashore but never raised an alarm. Smalls and the seven crewmen headed back up river to pick up the nine family members and friends. The group included his wife, Hanna.

Smalls knew the harbor channels and the signals to make it past the Confederate batteries.

via SC events mark little-known Civil War incident | The Augusta Chronicle.

Tapping into “Taps”

Posted on June 1, 2012 by Eireann

The Wall Street Journal recounts the history of Taps, which didn’t officially enter military service as quickly as I’d thought. The power of printing in enshrining army traditions!

Once played in camp, the new call spread quickly among neighboring brigades—thanks to its tranquil theme and Butterfield’s clout. But the catchy melody did not replace “Extinguish Lights” until 1874, when military manuals were updated.

Even then, Butterfield and Norton’s melody continued to be known as “Extinguish Lights” in manuals until 1891, when “Taps” finally became its official name. “Soldiers then had always referred to the last call as ‘Taps’ because at the end of ‘Extinguish Lights’ there were three loud taps of a snare drum,” Mr. Villanueva said.

Since it took me longer to find than I expected, I’ll upload the YouTube video as a hunting trophy. Here’s the bugle call it replaced:

via Tapping into “Taps” – WSJ.com.

“My Kingdom for a Map”

Posted on April 29, 2012 by Eireann

An interesting piece showing the influence of terrain and quality maps on a battle, using Ball’s Bluff as an example. Much is made over Stonewall’s foot cavalry, but I wonder if his mapmaker, Jedediah Hotchkiss, is deserving of more credit than he gets. Stonewall’s famous 10′ map of the valley would’ve allowed him to manoeuver with more skill and confidence than any of his less cartographically-gifted opponents.

Hindsight can hardly capture the dynamic of the chaos at Ball’s Bluff. But the historian Richard F. Miller has emphasized the absence of maps as contributing to the outcome. Had Stone known more of the difficult topography, perhaps he wouldn’t have sent across anything more than reconnaissance units across the river. Union troops had occupied Harrison’s Island — directly across from Ball’s Bluff — since Oct. 4, long enough to map the region, or at least to recognize the daunting obstacles that lay across the river. And in sending the initial reconnaissance patrol, Stone might have been seeking to improve knowledge of the area…

Sneden’s beautiful map of Ball’s Bluff was drawn a few weeks after the battle, and includes some errors such as the identification of the 40th Massachusetts, which was not there. But notice how he emphasizes the terrain, and thus vividly conveys the sense that Union forces were trapped not just by the Confederates, but by the landscape itself. Yet the terrain took on importance only because of the battle, and especially its outcome. It speaks volumes that the Union dubbed this the Battle of Ball’s Bluff, while Southerners termed it the Battle of Leesburg. For the Federals, the bluff was the battle.

via My Kingdom for a Map – NYTimes.com.

The Death Count

Posted on April 26, 2012 by Eireann

After 150 years, historians are taking a second look at the estimated death count of the war. A new thesis, based upon census data, suggests a significant boost in the numbers.

The true death toll was probably about 750,000 – 20 percent higher than the traditionally quoted figure of 620,000 – and might have been as high as 850,000, according to J. David Hacker of New York’s Binghamton University…

Hacker’s conclusions, published in the December issue of the journal Civil War History, are “already gaining acceptance from scholars,” the New York Times reported today.

The journal called the article “among the most consequential pieces” it has ever published, and Columbia historian Eric Foner told the Times the study “further elevates the significance of the Civil War” and “helps you understand, particularly in the South with a much smaller population, what a devastating experience this was.”

via Civil War deaths much higher, analysis concludes.

Unknown No More

Posted on April 25, 2012 by Eireann

NPR puts a name to an unknown soldier. This is a fascinating piece of modern detective work.

Now that we had the regiment, the next step was to visit the New York soldiers index, where a search in the National Parks Service Soldier and Sailors Database turned up four possibilities with the right initials: Thomas Abbott, Thomas Adams, Thomas Ardies and Thomas Austin.

Our next stop was visiting Vonnie Zullo, a professional researcher who does a great deal of her work at the National Archives in Washington.

At the Archives, we pull the pension files and military service records of our four soldiers — all with the first name “Thomas,” and the last initial “A.” Very quickly, Zullo rules out two of the possible candidates: Adams and Austin.

“One never actually reported to his unit,” she says. “And the other soldier was in a band — and he was 35 years old and much larger.”

And then there were two…

Unknown No More: Identifying A Civil War Soldier : NPR.

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