Michael Fellman has died. Sad news. Through his excellent book, Inside War, he was responsible for my deep interest in the Missouri guerrilla war. The most fitting tribute to him would be to add his book to your shelf, and its contents to your understanding of the Civil War. It’s a fascinating chapter, and Fellman was a terrific guide.
Ida Tarbell is a name familiar to Lincoln scholars and Gilded Age historians alike. Our knowledge of Lincoln’s early years is far more rich thanks to her researching (or muckraking, if you will) spirit.
Ferguson says Tarbell was obsessed with Lincoln throughout her life. “After World War I, she went and sort of fulfilled a part of her obsession that she had always wanted to, which was to retrace Lincoln’s movements with his family since he was a little boy, from Kentucky to Indiana and into Illinois. And as she did this, there were still people alive who knew the Lincolns. It’s a part of time that we can’t really get access to any other way,” Ferguson says.
In the days when Lincoln was growing up, Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois were remote areas struggling to develop. “It was just a couple of steps up from the Bronze Age, really,” Ferguson says.
But rather than embracing his hardscrabble background, Foner says, Lincoln distanced himself from frontier culture.
“He doesn’t like hunting, he’s not a violent person, he doesn’t hate Indians, he doesn’t drink. And he understands very early — and where this comes from, who knows — that the way to get ahead is through your mind, not through just hard physical labor, which is what his father does. [Lincoln] gets as far away from the frontier as he can, pretty early,” Foner says.
via Best Books (And Surprising Insights) On Lincoln | WAMU 88.5 – American University Radio.
In recent years, I’ve fallen out of the habit of reading books; I now spend most of my time on Wikipedia. Now that I’m working (or not working, as is currently the case) from home, I thought it time to rectify this error. In honor of the sesquicentennial (and as research for the podcast by which I’m planning to observe it) I’ve been trying to tackle my personal library of Civil War books.
One that has been in my library – and woefully neglected – for decades is Sam Watkins’ famous Co. Aytch, whose original subtitle “A sideshow of the big show” seems to have been dropped. This is a shame, as it’s a terrific précis of Watkins’ memoirs. He repeatedly warns us that he was but a lowly “high private”, and was but one of the millions of faceless men and boys who fought the war. Like all old soldiers, he revels in his anecdotes and tall tales, and sombrely recounts some of the horrors he witnessed.
To do this is but a pastime and pleasure, as there is nothing that so much delights the old soldier as to revisit the scenes and battlefields with which he was once so familiar, and to recall the incidents, though trifling they may have been at the time.
His unmilitary descriptions of battle and tactics are humorously rendered in sound effects and grumbles, as befits a soldier of the line.
After marching four or five miles, we “about faced” and marched back again to within two hundred yards of the place from whence we started. It was a “flank movement,” you see, and had to be counted that way anyhow. Well, now as we had made the flank movement, we had to storm and take the Federal lines, because we had made a flank movement, you see. When one army makes a flank movement it is courtesy on the part of the other army to recognize the flank movement, and to change his base. Why, sir, if you don’t recognize a flank movement, you ain’t a graduate of West Point.
Watkins is good at relaying colorful asides about life in the Rebel ranks. This passage illustrates both the private soldiers’ contempt for staff officers (something you’d never hear about in the books by the “big bugs” under whom he served) and how Sam wasn’t above usurping their privileges when it suited him:
[The average staff officer and courier were always called “yaller dogs,” and were regarded as non-combatants and a nuisance, and the average private never let one pass without whistling and calling dogs. In fact, the general had to issue an army order threatening punishment for the ridicule hurled at staff officers and couriers. They were looked upon as simply “hangers on,” or in other words, as yellow sheep-killing dogs, that if you would say “booh” at, would yelp and get under their master’s heels… In fact, later in the war I was detailed as special courier and staff officer for General Hood, which office I held three days. But while I held the office in passing a guard I always told them I was on Hood’s staff, and ever afterwards I made those three days’ staff business last me the balance of the war. I could pass any guard in the army by using the magic words, “staff officer.” It beat all the countersigns ever invented. It was the “open sesame” of war and discipline.]
One of the best reasons to read the memoir is for the feel of living alongside Watkins and his comrades. Between the horrors of battle, the soldiers had some memorably enjoyable times, and Watkins – a cad and a cutup – would’ve made for a fun companion across four years of hard marching. He certainly was across 200 pages.
As long as I was in action, fighting for my country, there was no chance for promotion, but as soon as I fell out of ranks and picked up a forsaken and deserted flag, I was promoted for it… And had I only known that picking up flags entitled me to promotion and that every flag picked up would raise me one notch higher, I would have quit fighting and gone to picking up flags, and by that means I would have soon been President of the Confederate States of America.
There’s a reason Watkins’ story is so heavily quoted in narratives and documentaries about the war. This is a tale told far less often, and far more endearingly, than the dry, dusty military memoirs. Every Civil War bookshelf needs some Sam Watkins.
In researching one of my Podcast topics, I was directed to The Class of 1846
Sadly, I got caught up with Sam Watkins instead, and my hold is about to expire. I’ve added it to my wish list, though – my library doesn’t feel complete without it.
My sizeable collection of Civil War books expands regularly without me making much of a contribution to the “read” shelf, so I’m making an effort to read more this year.
First up was Burke Davis’ Sherman’s March. It may seem contradictory to start a reading campaign with a title I’ve already read, but in my defense, I was on a Sherman kick and this was the book that introduced me to my favourite manic-depressive, redheaded demolition expert. (Also, in a nice little coincidence, my inscription on the inside cover indicates that it’s exactly 20 years since I bought and read it.)
Davis’ style is easy, and his presentation is heavily reliant on first-person accounts – letters and diaries of soldiers and Southerners. As such, he had a wealth of terrific anecdotes to draw from, and these are presented in short blocks of text that make for a breezy read. He imparts a great image of exactly how big a “pleasure excursion” this was for the troops, how devastating it was for the natives, and how Sherman truly earned his outsized reputation from both camps. The army exhibits its own personality, too:
It was an absurb caricature of an army, with hardly a complete uniform in its ranks. Half the men were barefoot or wore wrappings of old blankets or quilts. Socks had disappeared months before. There was a sprinkling of rebel uniforms, and thousands were in civilian clothes – battered silk top hats, cutaway coats and tight-legged breeches of the Revolutionary era. Some wore women’s bonnets. Trousers were tattered; many wore ony breechclouts. Sleeves had been torn from coats to make patches for trousers, crudely stitched with white cotton twine. Faces were still smudged from pine smoke and gunpowder. Lank hair protruded from ruined hats; many of the hatless wore handkerchiefs around their heads. Hundreds were without shirts, bare to the waist. The 81st Ohio came by with all its shoeless and hatless men merged into one company, men who seemed to march more proudly than all the rest.
I was worried, from the opening few chapters, that Davis – a Southerner himself – harboured a pro-Confederate/anti-Sherman leaning, but he quickly settled into a very pragmatic and even-handed narrative. Sherman’s and his army’s good deeds are chronicled alongside the misdeeds, and he points out that the Confederate forces have never gotten their fair share of blame in the depredations.
As often happened in such moments, Confederates committed outrages as readily as the most undisciplined of Sherman’s troops. This disposition to looting, though rarely recorded in early American history, was to become a familiar phenomenon in many large cities in 20th century America. The young men of the 1860’s, who had grown up in an era when strict morality was the rule, had been guided by standards of social acceptance and decorum – but now, freed of restraint and invited to do their worst, many soldiers defied all authority
My fond memories of the book were justified; this is easily one of my favourites in my collection. Well worth picking up for your own library, too.
I’m filing this under “memoirs”, regardless of the fact that it’s a Twain piece. Despite the huge coincidence at the crux of it, huge coincidences weren’t unusual in the war, and anyways it certainly feels real. You almost feel as though you’re sitting on the porch with Aunt Rachael as she tells it.
“Aunt Rachel, how is it that you’ve lived sixty years and never had any trouble?”
She stopped quaking. She paused, and there was a moment of silence. She turned her face over her shoulder toward me, and said, without even a smile in her voice: –
“Misto C –, is you in ‘arnest?”
It surprised me a good deal; and it sobered my manner and my speech, too. I said: –
“Why, I thought – that is, I meant – why, you can’t have had any trouble. I’ve never heard you sigh, and never seen your eye when there wasn’t a laugh in it.”
She faced fairly around, now, and was full of earnestness.
“Has I had any trouble? Misto C –, I’s gwyne to tell you, den I leave it to you…
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/02/a-true-story-word-for-word-as-i-heard-it/8792/
Since the Ken Burns series rekindled public interest in the war, every diary keeper, North and South, whose writings were stashed away in attics has become a published author. Most of these accounts are repetitive or uninspiring, but I’m sure each one has at least one anecdote of interest. This account contained a term I’d not heard before, but which tickled me:
Charlie wrote about deserters and their ease of leaving the army by joining what he calls the “Blue Ridge Corps,” men who slipped over the Blue Ridge Mountains to escape army life.
I tried a search for “best Civil War memoirs” (listing “Grant” and “Watkins” as qualifiers for quality), and one Amazon list suggested John H. Worsham’s narrative. Found it on DocSouth, and a quick flip through reveals some very entertaining anecdotes, and a sense of irreverence amidst the hard marching and the terrible battles.
We went to bed that night in regular military order, had a camp guard, lights out by taps, etc. Some of the boys, during the day, had purchased whistles, tin horns, and other noisy things, and as soon as lights were put out, the fun commenced: One blew a horn, another in a distant part of the building answered on a whistle. This went on for a few minutes. When the officers commanded silence, no attention was paid to them. When the officers said to the sergeant, “Arrest those men,” the sergeant would strike a light, and go where he thought the noise originated; but each man looked so innocent that he could not tell who it was. By this time, another would blow. Soon there were four sergeants, running here and there, trying to catch the delinquents. This was kept up until the perpetrators became tired, not one being detected.
Thanks to Google’s Books service, I went from a quick consultation of this book to reading a good portion of it online. The first few chapters are available in their entirety – as the book progresses more and more are left out, but it’s enough to gauge the readability, and this one’s very readable. Like Grant himself, it’s workmanlike – not a lot of literary flourishes, here – but genial. Several reviewers ravaged it with one stars, complaining of off-by-a-day dates or lack of tactical military understanding, but I can excuse the former if they’re minor, and the latter usually bores me to tears. My historical preference is for biography, and Grant comes back to life through the anecdotes and quotes Geoffrey Perret provides. If you’re a Grant fan, pick this one up.
Another fine Disunion piece, this one on the importance of the telegraph in disseminating war news to the nation. There is plenty of documentation of Lincoln’s time spent in the Telegraph Office, but I hadn’t realised the genesis nor the explanation for this habit. We have McClellan to thank for the many anecdotes relayed (ahem – little telegraph joke there) by the office’s staff. I’ve listed two more Library “holdings” below as examples.
Perhaps the most consequential adoption of the telegraph was in journalism. In the late 1840s, the establishment of the New York Associated Press made it possible for member newspapers to share the costs of the new technology in order to gather news. By the early 1850s, content from the A.P. comprised at least two columns of every major daily newspaper, and many readers considered this “telegraphic news” to be the most compelling and urgent part of the paper.
By 1860 the A.P. was distributing its news not just in New York but around the country, and this practice began to transform the very meaning of news. Local papers now had the capacity to report national events to their readers in a timely manner, so that “the news” gradually came to connote not just events, but events happening at almost that very moment. Prior to the telegraph, the distribution of news was regulated by the speed of the mail, but now news was potentially both instantaneous and simultaneous.
The immediacy of the news fed a public frenzy for the latest information. Circulation of New York papers rose by more than 40 percent during the war, and in other areas of the nation by as much as 63 percent. During a major battle, editors could expect to sell up to five times as many copies of their papers. While newspaper reporting remained highly competitive throughout the war, the A.P. came to dominate wire news, and this also served the interests of the Administration. The A.P. had regular access to the president and the War Department, and was given exclusive bulletins and announcements to disseminate to the papers. In exchange, the A.P. gave the administration a way to reach the public in a manner that could be carefully controlled and rapidly disseminated.
The Disunion article can be found here: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/13/news-of-the-wired/?ref=opinion%2F%3Fsmid%3Dfb-disunion
The free books are:
Lincoln in the Telegraph Office, by David Homer Bates – http://www.archive.org/details/lincolnintelegr01bategoog. This one is promising! A quick search for “Tad” (there was a great anecdote about Tad Lincoln and a bottle of the Telegraph Office’s ink) reveals a fair number of hits, and there are some facsimiles of Lincoln’s handwritten messages in the HTML version.
A similar, yet much shorter, book is available here: http://www.archive.org/details/glimpseofuniteds00wils – William Bender Wilson’s A Glimpse of the United States Military Telegraph Corps. There are a few, less consequential, personal anecdotes about Lincoln. Still, any time with Lincoln is well spent.