I had no idea there was a National Civil War Photo Contest, but I do now! The winner’s a real corker, too.
Buddy Secor of Stafford County has been judged the grand prize winner.of the Civil War Trust’s annual photo competition for his richly colored image of a misty dawn at Fairview on Spotyslvania County’s Chancellorsville battlefield.
via Stafford man wins national Civil War photo contest – Past Is Prologue.
Between an intense work contract and a lingering cold I caught soon after, I haven’t updated here in weeks. Sadly, I missed some interesting events, as well as the 150th anniversary of Antietam, early this month. Here’s a cool feature by NPR, showing a modern wetplate photographer’s retracing of Alexander Gardner’s steps on the battlefield. Make sure to click through for the before/after shots!
The image you see below was shot in 2012 by wet plate photographer Todd Harrington. He retraced Gardners steps at Antietam, using the same type of equipment: a stereo wet plate camera and glass plates. If you toggle using the “now” and “then” buttons, another image fades in and out: Thats what Gardner captured in 1862.
Whats striking is how, actually, not much has changed. Trees have gotten bigger and roads have been paved. If you look closely at the Dunker Church image, youll see portable toilets in the background; telephone poles along Hagerstown Pike; construction cones sitting on Burnside Bridge. But whats haunting is that the major difference between now and then is a lack of bodies.
Petersburg gets a long-awaited visitors’ center, and it promises to be a beauty, as well as historically significant. Can’t wait to visit again – I remember my first visit and the distinct lack of interpretation!
The South Side Railroad was the final railroad to be severed by Union forces. When it was captured on April 1, 1865, said Mary Koik, spokeswoman for the Civil War Trust, "it was a foregone conclusion" that Petersburg would surrender. Richmond surrendered a day later.A room on the second floor of the depot was used as an office after the war by Confederate Gen. William Mahone, a railroad president who later was a founder of Virginia State University.
via Petersburg South Side Depot to be restored as Civil War Center | Richmond Times-Dispatch.
I link a lot to stories like this, because I’m both touched and proud of the people behind them. The Internet has made projects like this easy to undertake, but there are few who actually undertake them. Kudos to Ms. Greenhagen for her civic enthusiasm and contributions.
Today, Greenhagen is compiling photos and information on every Civil War monument in the state for a website.”I guess you could say I was inspired by Gettysburg,” she said.She is asking for help from people throughout the state to check their hometowns — cemeteries, village greens, parks — to see if there is a monument there; if there is, she asks them to obtain information about it and take a photo. She will put the photos and information on the website.
If you decide to take one of the self-guided tours I linked to yesterday, remember that technology allows us to carry a guide with us. The group mentioned in the article below has created a free, online guide to the Fredericksburg-area battlefields. Isn’t technology wonderful?
Via YouTube, iPods, iPads and smartphones, people can view video introductions to the Fredericksburg area’s Trail to Freedom, which traces the path of thousands of African-Americans who sought refuge behind Union lines. Their mass migration was one of the largest in U.S. history, and helped turn the Lincoln administration and the Northern public toward emancipation.
“The Civil War brought so much anguish and destruction and cost so many lives, there isn’t really a lot to celebrate, except this,” Moncure said. “And Stafford has so much to do with the freedom story.”
As per yesterday’s post, here is the full archive of Charles Leale’s report on the Lincoln assassination.
(I was going to emphasize “handwritten report” until I remembered that the only contemporary alternative was telegraphic code.)
You’d think all the Lincoln documents would’ve been unearthed, after 150 years of access, but you’d be wrong, thankfully.
The latest news is Charles Leale’s official report on the assassination. Leale’s experiences are already well-documented – Sarah Vowell quotes extensively from a letter to his mother in the days following – but new documents are new documents, and I’ll happily take them. (Can you tell I was a history student? So jealous of these stack-diggers who uncover the gems!)
A doctor’s account of his frantic efforts to save the life of President Abraham Lincoln has been rediscovered in the United States, after being lost to history for 150 years.
It was found by chance among hundreds of boxes of old medical reports in the National Archives.
On April 14, 1865, Dr Charles Leale happened to be in the same Washington theatre as the US President, watching the play My American Cousin, when he heard a gunshot and saw a man leap onto the stage.
Leale, 23, who had only received his medical degree six weeks earlier, then became the first person to tend to Lincoln’s wounds and documented the tragic encounter in a 21-page handwritten report.
via A doctor’s bid to save dying Lincoln – timesofmalta.com.
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.”
Here’s a novel twist on reenacting: Recreating the technological, rather than the social, aspects of the war. I love the witty spin he puts on it by photographing reenactments. I probably wouldn’t have noticed the station wagon unless it was pointed out to me.
This Civil War photograph was …wait, are those porta-potties in the background? And a station wagon? Yes, this photograph is less than a year old, but you can imagine someone cropping it and using it as a Civil War photo sometime in the future. Photographer Richard Barnes shoots Civil War reenactments using techniques authentic to the period, such as wet-plate photography.
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…
