Tag Archives: non-combatants

Black Confederates

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The Union County Historic Preservation Commission voted unanimously Thursday to approve a plan for a privately funded marker to honor 10 black men, nine of whom were slaves, who eventually received small state pensions for their Civil War service.

It will be one of the few public markers of its kind in the country, and arrives in the midst of state and national commemorations of the Civil War’s sesquicentennial. The granite marker will be placed on a brick walkway at the Old County Courthouse in Monroe in front of the 1910 Confederate monument.

“I’m glad to see Union County is finally stepping out of the Jim Crow era and being all-inclusive of its history,” said Tony Way, the local amateur historian and Sons of Confederate Veterans member who has led the push for the project…

In pension applications, all 10 men were described as “body servants” or bodyguards. They hauled water, carried supplies and helped build forts. Two were wounded.

I have mixed feelings about this kind of news. On the one hand, slaves were brought along to the front lines, and no doubt they made their contributions. Their descendants certainly seem thrilled at the gesture. But such a monument, championed by the SCV, leaves a bitter aftertaste of pandering, particularly when one reads what kind of duties are being honored with bronze. Methink they doth celebrateth too much.

via Union County board approves marker honoring slaves who served in Confederate Army | CharlotteObserver.com & The Charlotte Observer Newspaper.

Clara Barton’s Inner War

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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.

Gov. William Buckingham

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I’m familiar with a few Civil War state governors, but William A. Buckingham’s name was new to me.  Funny how venerable men can fade from history as the years pass.

The story goes that President Abraham Lincoln was at work in the White House executive office one day when he was interrupted by a visitor from Connecticut.

Rising from his chair, the lanky, care-worn president clamped his hand down on the man’s shoulder and exclaimed: “From Connecticut? Do you know what a good governor you have got?”

Lincoln knew well what Connecticut today has largely forgotten: Its Civil War governor, William Alfred Buckingham, was one of the greatest leaders in the state’s long history.

One of only four Union governors to serve throughout the entire Civil War, Buckingham proved an able, energetic administrator, a staunch and often eloquent opponent of slavery and a vital supporter of the Lincoln administration. His decisiveness and political courage in the days immediately following Fort Sumter assured that Connecticut was among the first states to answer Lincoln’s call for volunteers to put down the Southern rebellion.

When the crisis refused to die quickly, Buckingham’s administration worked tirelessly over the next four years to raise and supply troops…

For years afterward, Buckingham Day observances were held. But today, Buckingham’s legacy has been largely forgotten.

via Gov. William Buckingham: Gov. William Buckingham, Faded From History, Played National Role During Civil War – Hartford Courant.

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.

Volck at the NPG

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If – like me – you’re planning a visit to DC during this 1862 sesquicentennial year, be sure to add the National Portrait Gallery to your must-sees.  In addition to an exhibition of Brady’s portraits of the Union generals, there’s a collection of Adalbert Volck etchings on display.

A Volck lithograph was reproduced in the very first Civil War book I was ever given, and his clean, line-drawn caricatures and wicked sense of humour immediately caught my attention.  I’m excited to see what’s on view.

A dentist by trade, Volck served the Southern cause in a myriad of ways, including smuggling medical supplies to Virginia across the Potomac River. However, Volck’s most significant contribution to the Confederate cause was his production of pictorial propaganda that vilified Lincoln, abolitionists and Union soldiers in his publication Sketches from the Civil War in North America.

 

 

via The National Portrait Gallery/Exhibitions/The Confederate Sketches of Adalbert Volck.

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.

The Telegraph: A Series of Wires

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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.

The Walt Whitman Archive

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I was looking for the source of Walt Whitman’s war reminiscences, and happened upon the Walt Whitman Archive. Not only does it have the published anecdotes, it also offers all his poetry and a trove of letters, too.

Whitman’s writing is very readable. I planned to leaf through some of the Memoranda, and wound up reading almost the entire collection. It’s a fantastic resource they’re offering, here.

http://www.whitmanarchive.org/

The Great Escape of Judah Benjamin

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Noting this was a small press story, I wasn’t prepared for a deep, detailed narrative of the flight of Confederate cabinet member Judah P. Benjamin. Well done, New Port Richey Patch!

And, while Judah was well-liked, he was very reserved when it came to both his private and professional matters, perhaps a trait that Confederate President Jeff Davis liked.

Among his golden rule was to destroy any and all correspondence or anything that might aid or enlighten a person who shouldn’t be enlightened.

In April 1883 Benjamin wrote,

“I have never kept a diary or retained any copy of a letter written by me. No letters addressed to me by others will be found among my papers when I die. With perhaps the exception of Mrs. Jefferson Davis, no one has many letters of mine; for I have read so many American biographies which reflected only the passions and prejudices of their writers, [for] that I do not want to leave behind my letters and documents to be used in such a work about myself”

Benjamin’s position was no more evident then when the Confederate capital fell in Richmond and when his last days there were spent burning the secret service papers of the Confederacy.

But, it was after Richmond’s demise where our story begins.

http://newportrichey.patch.com/articles/the-great-escape-judah-p-benjamin

Reminiscences of Fred Seward

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Another free book added to The Library; Fred Seward’s Reminiscences of a War-Time Statesman and Diplomat. Fred was the son and wartime administrator of William H. Seward, Secretary of State. He was gravely injured in the assassination attempt on his father, as part of the plot that killed Lincoln. I have no idea if this book contains much of interest, but given his proximity to the great men and his unwitting participation in that fateful night, I imagine there’ll be an anecdote or two worth reading.