The Creation of Gettysburg National Cemetery

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The Creation of Gettysburg National Cemetery

On July 4th, 1863 Meade’s Union army rejoiced as the sights and sounds of a Confederate army in retreat ensured them of their victory.  For the North, Independence Day 1863 was a day of rejoicing and confirmation with victory at both Gettysburg and Vicksburg.  But in the midst of victory, July 4th was also sobering for the men who fought around that Pennsylvania town for it was the first chance they had to inspect the battlefield and attend to the dead...The Union soldiers and Gettysburg civilians that looked over the battlefield on July 4th saw a level of death and destruction that was overwhelming and seemingly impossible to take care of.

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Memories of Hazel Grove: The III Corps at Gettysburg

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Memories of Hazel Grove: The III Corps at Gettysburg

Daniel Sickles was an infamous figure even before the war began.  Sickles is notorious for his role in the Battle of Gettysburg, a role that was debated between generals and officers after the war, a debate that continues today.  The III Corps under Sickles arrived at the battlefield over a period of time from the evening of July 1 after the fighting had calmed for the day into the morning of July 2.  Meade intended the corps to extend his line along Cemetery Ridge, attaching themselves to the end of the II Corps line and ending at the base of Little Round Top.  Whether Sickles misunderstood his orders or willfully disobeyed them, the III Corps ended up in another position entirely.

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"I Give Him To Your Charge": Young Soldiers in the Civil War, Part II

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"I Give Him To Your Charge": Young Soldiers in the Civil War, Part II

"By this time," Charles Bardeen wrote in his memoirs, entitled A Little Fifer's War Diary, "my readers are wondering how my family allowed me to enter the army at so early an age, while I would still go off alone and cry if anybody spoke harshly to me..." My readers are probably wondering the same thing. Modern parents cannot imagine allowing their 13 or 14-year-olds to go to war and yet, as we saw in my first post, many boys fought in both the Union and Confederate armies. Where, we might reasonably wonder, were their parents? What would compel mothers and fathers to allow boys far below the legal enlistment age of 18 to enter the army and put their lives on the line?

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Editorial: Charleston, America, and the Confederacy's Legacy

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Editorial: Charleston, America, and the Confederacy's Legacy

Last week, twenty-one year old Dylann Roof shot and killed nine people in Charleston, South Carolina’s historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.  An act of violence and racial hatred, the tragedy has sparked a nationwide debate over racism and, in particular, the symbolism of the Confederate flag.  The flag of a now-dead nation dedicated to the defense of slavery, the flag that appears in photographs with Dylann Roof, and the flag that today floats free over the South Carolina Capitol grounds.

I suspect, owing to public outcry and political pressure, the flag in Columbia will come down.  The governor of South Carolina has called for its removal, and yesterday Alabama removed its Confederate flag from the Capitol grounds.  Yet while the flag faces greater scrutiny, the current debate cannot merely rest on the Confederate flag. The discussion instead needs to encompass the Confederacy’s legacy in the United States—what the Confederacy stood for, what it means today, and the place (if any) it should occupy in 21st-century America.

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Hidden Gems of Gettysburg

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Hidden Gems of Gettysburg

If you are heading to Gettysburg for the anniversary this July or plan to travel there in the future, there is a lot to see!  Many visitors utilize the NPS resources and driving tour (which is certainly a good option), but if you want to get off the beaten path here are ten hidden (or less visited) gems of Gettysburg to check out.

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Seceeding from the Secessionists: Creating West Virginia

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Seceeding from the Secessionists: Creating West Virginia

From the very beginning, there was division between eastern and western Virginia.  Families in western Virginia did not usually own the land on which they lived which excluded those white men from voting, and they generally did not own slaves.  This was very different than eastern Virginia where there was a larger degree of land and slave ownership.  Western Virginia was largely tied to white wage labor in a rapidly industrializing economy and many of the area’s residents supported abolition because they felt slaves were taking jobs that white laborers should be paid to do.  The start of the Civil War brought those tensions to a head.  On April 17, 1861, right after the firing on Fort Sumter, a convention of Virginians voted to submit a bill of secession for a vote of the people.  Many western delegates marched out of the Secession Convention and vowed to create a state government loyal to the Union. 

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The Power of a Picture: The Burial of Amos Humiston

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The Power of a Picture: The Burial of Amos Humiston

Amos’ identity was initially unknown; there was no identification on the body and his regiment had already moved on, so no comrades could identify him.  The children were the only clue to who he was.  Philadelphia physician, John Francis Bourns, who had spent time helping the wounded, decided to use the image to try to find the father’s identity.  On October 19, 1863, the Philadelphia Inquirer published the story with a description of the children and a plead to other newspapers to also publish the information.  “Whose Father Was He?” asked the headline.

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"Consent in Case of Minor": Young Soldiers in the Civil War, Part I

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"Consent in Case of Minor": Young Soldiers in the Civil War, Part I

Edwin Jemison has a famous face. If you've taken a history class in the United States, you've almost certainly seen him in your textbook; if not there, then in a photo montage in any documentary. There's something about the look in his eyes that seems to have captivated historians, textbook authors, and the general public.

 We see his fictional counterparts portrayed in the media, as well, for that same emotional effect. In Cold Mountain, for example, the first character we follow across the screen is a young, beardless, enthusiastic Confederate soldier, of whom Jude Law's character observes, "He can't be old enough to fight, can he?" Predictably, the young soldier is wounded and dies within the first fifteen minutes of the film.

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Slavery? States Rights? Secession.

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Slavery? States Rights? Secession.

However, if you listen to the public slavery is one of a variety of answers, and it is not always the answer that comes first or most often.  States’ rights is most often put forward as the cause of secession with Lincoln’s election, economic and cultural factors, and the settlement of the west also earning some votes.  Scholars and historians may but forward a (mostly) unified answer that slavery was the cause of secession, but the public will not.  And Civil War sites have to find ways to work through this divide, because no matter what you interpret at your site or how visitors will always ask the question: “What caused the Civil War?”

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The Unfortunate Case of David O. Dodd: "Arkansas' Boy Martyr" or Fool?

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The Unfortunate Case of David O. Dodd: "Arkansas' Boy Martyr" or Fool?

Young David O. Dodd hung on the end of a rope in the yards of his alma mater, St. Johns’ College.  His death was not a merciful one, as the rope stretched and nearly five minutes passed before Dodd finally passed away.  Convicted of spying on occupation forces in Little Rock, Arkansas, David had been sentenced to death by Union forces.  The date was January 8, 1864, and David Dodd was only seventeen years old.

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Mental Stress in the Union Army

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Mental Stress in the Union Army

The conditions and new experiences of the war were unsettling to the volunteer soldier, and they had to deal with them mentally as well as physically.  Some men adapted to the war better than others, but all were affected by what they saw, did, and felt.  As Argentinean writer José Narosky said, “In war, there are no unwounded soldiers.”  Becoming callous to the death and destruction of battle did not mean that soldiers were impervious to its effects.  Men had to overcome and reverse their cultural understandings of killing other men to be effective soldiers; for many men it was easier to die than to kill. 

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The Mayhem & Mystery of May 3: Joseph Hooker and the Battle of Chancellorsville

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The Mayhem & Mystery of May 3: Joseph Hooker and the Battle of Chancellorsville

Complacency endangers history.  The first plausible answer is not always the correct or solitary one, yet all too often we content ourselves with simplistic solutions to murky questions.  Civil War historians have grappled with the Battle of Chancellorsville for nearly 150 years, and we (surprisingly) we still have very simple rejoinders for why Joseph Hooker and the Army of the Potomac lost a struggle which they entered into with every advantage.  Joe Hooker lost the Battle of Chancellorsville because of his own arrogance and errors.  Joe Hooker lost Chancellorsville because he was no match for the Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia.  Fighting Joe Hooker lost Chancellorsville simply because Fighting Joe Hooker lost confidence in himself.

In all likelihood, there are grains of truth to all these theories.  Yet one should be careful of placing too much emphasis on anyone of them singularly.  Instead, I wish to focus on a forgotten answer to the age old question of what went wrong for the Union army and Joe Hooker in May of 1863.  On the morning of May 3rd, General Hooker was wounded, probably suffering a severe concussion received from Confederate artillery fire.  This event, minimized and overlooked in many accounts of the battle, perhaps played a far greater role at Chancellorsville than history has given credit for.

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The “Murder” at Shy Mansion: Embalming in the Civil War

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The “Murder” at Shy Mansion: Embalming in the Civil War

In 1977, during the restoration of the Shy Mansion in Franklin, TN workers noticed a disturbance in the estate’s family cemetery.  A grave had been opened, a hole cut in the cast iron case, and a body lay half out of the grave.  When they called the authorities in, the sheriff determined it to be a recent homicide where the culprit had attempted to hide the body in the older grave.  He sent the body to Nashville for examination by Dr. William Bass.  Bass noticed that the clothing on the deceased was not made of any synthetic fibers and the coat was in an older style.  When testing the tissues, he found that he was examining a body that had been embalmed with arsenic.  The man who lay on the table before him was Colonel William Shy in a perfect state of preservation 113 years after his death at the Battle of Nashville.

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Scapegoat or Scandal? J.E.B. Stuart and the Battle of Gettysburg

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Scapegoat or Scandal? J.E.B. Stuart and the Battle of Gettysburg

The June 12th, 1863 edition of the Richmond Examiner seethed.  Just days before, Confederate cavalry had been caught completely by surprise in a daring strike by their Union counterparts at Brandy Station Virginia, and only after a hard fight with the help of Southern infantry was the enemy repulsed.  “But this puffed up cavalry of the Army of Northern Virginia,” the Examiner crowed, “has been twice, if not three times, surprised since the battles of December, and such repeated accidents can be regarded as nothing but the necessary consequences of negligence and bad management.”  Such humiliations were unacceptable, and the Examiner concluded by charging that better organization, more discipline, and greater earnestness among “vain and weak-headed officers” was needed.  Other Southern papers offered more of the same.  The Richmond Sentinel called for greater “vigilance…from the Major General down to the picket.”  The Charleston Mercury thought the affair an “ugly surprise,” while the Savannah Republican thought it all “very discreditable to somebody.”  The commander of Confederate cavalry, James Ewell Brown (Jeb) Stuart, had to be wondering if the Brandy Station fight wasn’t “discreditable” to him...

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Turning the “Gate of Hell” into the “Gate of Heaven”: The Secret Andersonville Death Roll of Dorence Atwater

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Turning the “Gate of Hell” into the “Gate of Heaven”: The Secret Andersonville Death Roll of Dorence Atwater

In late June, Clara received a note from one Dorence Atwater who requested a meeting with her concerning information he had about approximately 13,000 of the missing men she was looking for.  Intrigued, Clara visited Atwater at his Washington hotel.  Atwater had enlisted at the beginning of the war, even though he was only 16.  Captured after the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, he was first imprisoned at Belle Isle and then transferred to Andersonville when it opened in February 1864.  Impressed by Atwater’s superior penmanship, the commander of Andersonville, General John H. Winder, assigned him to the surgeon’s office with orders to keep an official record of all union prisoners who died and were buried there.  The Confederates promised they would turn the roll over to the Union government after the war, but Atwater suspected their sincerity as he experienced the cruelty of the prison and recorded over 100 deaths per day.

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A Forgotten Anniversary? The Escape and Capture of Jefferson Davis

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A Forgotten Anniversary? The Escape and Capture of Jefferson Davis

The small town of Irwinville, Georgia would become the setting for one of the greatest and perhaps overlooked episodes of the sesquicentennial story.  In a piece announcing the victorious capture of Davis in Harper’ Weekly, a Union officer commented on the night of May 11, 1865, “a fight ensued, both parties exhibiting the greatest determination…the captors report that he (Davis) hastily put on one of his wife’s dresses and started for the woods, closely followed by our men, who at first thought him a woman, but seeing his boots while he was running, they suspected his sex at once.” And so begins the legend of Davis the cross-dresser.

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