Tag Archives: non-combatants

Clara Barton, Tough Broad

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Another Civil War personality who has changed in my estimation is Clara Barton. Unlike Vallandigham, Lincoln, Joe Johnston et al., though, she has pretty much entered my personal pantheon of saint-like tough broads – a rare combination.

She’s famous, of course, for starting the American Red Cross, but during the war, Barton was a one-woman UN: She went all Doctors Without Borders as a freelance nurse; ran a kind of UNHCR for missing soldiers in Washington; and, with Dorence Atwater, was a de jure two-person UN War Crimes administrator at Andersonville. Imagine what the world would be like with a few more Clara Bartons in it!

Once Barton reached places where the Union and Confederate armies clashed, she cooked gruel, soups and meals for hundreds of patients. Her own apple pie made a good dessert. She changed bed sheets and cleaned bedpans to combat the soldiers’ common curse of dysentery. She cleaned and bandaged wounds — countless amputations among them. She walked along wards and offered sips of water or whiskey. She listened to the lovesick confidences of a soldier whose real name was Mary, a teenage girl runaway from her Maryland family, searching for her sweetheart in a Wisconsin regiment. A soldier wounded at Antietam begged her to cut an unbearable bullet out of his cheek. All Barton had was a penknife — but she did it, with another soldier holding his comrade’s head.

In other words, Barton did a lot of everything that desperately needed to be done.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/09/compassion-under-fire/

Penny for His Thoughts

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(Apologies for the title – I couldn’t resist a little Copperhead joke.)

I’ll be covering Clement Vallandigham in more detail in the long-delayed podcast, but for now it’s worth taking a look at this very controversial personality.

Survey histories, such as the Ken Burns documentary, have little time for complex character portraits, and in most cases will have an editorial bent. The Burns documentary cast Lincoln – as many of us do – in a golden glow, but we forget that he and/or his administration had some questionable policies during the war. Vallandigham was cast as an irritating thorn in the side of Our Hero, and the hissing epithet “Copperhead” made the group sound more nefarious than it might appear upon closer inspection.

As a modern, anti-war and pro-civil rights Canadian, I often wonder how I would have reacted to the events of the day. When Quebec was rattling its séparatiste sabre, I was toeing Greeley’s “let the erring sister depart in peace” line. When the US invaded Afghanistan, I was against the destruction but supportive of the higher aims of creating a secular state with civil rights for all – an ennobled cause like that of Emancipation. As the Middle Eastern wars dragged on, though, I questioned the value of prolonging it. Would I have supported a peace candidate in 1864? And given how much the PATRIOT Act appalled me, would I have had the same feelings of revulsion in reading Lincoln and Hamlin’s names in the paper as I did seeing Bush and Cheney’s? (In truth, I don’t imagine Hamlin got as much say or press as Cheney did.)

Vallandigham, as we learned from the Disunion piece on the Chaplaincy legislation, was a politician who cared about religious freedom, and was an anti-war, free-press protestor who was first jailed, then exiled for thought crimes. I have a feeling I would have voted for him.

Clara Barton

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The more I learn about Clara Barton, the more in awe of her I become. She went from being a clerk at the outbreak of the war, to being a one-woman clearinghouse of information for families desperate to know what had become of their sons, brothers, fathers and husbands. What a little force of nature!

It was her work in finding the whereabouts of missing soldiers that led her to the boarding house on Seventh Street, from which she operated the “Missing Soldiers Office – 3rd Story, Room 9” said the old metal sign which was also found, with “Miss. Clara Barton” printed at the bottom.

It was said that she collected boxes of letters from grieving families across the country, some sending pictures of their missing young men, with the hopes of finding where they were. Of course, the news was usually bad – most were buried in unmarked or poorly marked graves. Apparently as word of her endeavors spread, so did the inquiries and she is credited with handling over 55,000 pieces of mail during the time the small cramped office was open.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

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Another e-book uncovered on my travels, though I’m shocked that I hadn’t included this one earlier: I read it in university, and it’s a very famous account of life as a female slave in the South.  Well worth a read for an insight into the horrors of slavery. Project Gutenberg, as always, provides multiple formats from which to choose.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11030

Joe Brown

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Oh, Joe Brown. If ever one needed the personification of why the Confederacy was pre-ordained to failure, it’s Georgia’s Governor Joe E. Brown. Beloved by his soldiers – dubbed “pets” because he kept them in fine equipage while their fellow Confederates wore rags – he was loathed throughout the rest of the CSA because of his stubborn refusal to do anything to help the war effort outside Georgia.

This is an interesting little biography; well worth a read.

Brown’s ardent belief in states’ rights drove him to support secession. His fear of centralized authority, however, meant that he would also resist the Confederate government’s efforts to consolidate power even during the national emergency of war. Brown loathed Jefferson Davis, going so far as to denounce him as a tyrant. The first disputes over controlling and equipping Georgia forces escalated in April 1862 when Brown directly and openly challenged the new Confederate draft. Despite a lack of support by the state Supreme Court and the legislature, Brown continually worked to create a state military force exempted from the ever-expanding draft. He also opposed the army’s impressment of goods and slave laborers. In essence, even though Brown vehemently supported secession, his stance on states’ rights showed no bias to the Confederate government. Throughout the war, he continued to frustrate Confederate efforts to seize the Western and Atlantic Railroad and to impose occasional martial law, to bitterly criticize Confederate tax and blockade-running policies, and to vigorously denounce the Confederacy’s belated plan to arm slaves in exchange for their freedom.

Nellie Chase

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It’s always interesting to learn about new “characters” of the war; A press release promoting a new book mentions Nellie Chase.

This website gives a neat little biography, supported by photos and period newspaper clippings, to flesh out Nellie’s turbulent early life and her efforts to tend to the Union wounded in Maryland and Tennessee.

http://www.100thpenn.com/nellymchase.htm