Preview: The War Outside My Window [Forthcoming]

Text authored by Harry Smeltzer: Preview – Croon (Ed), “The War Outside My Window” on April 17, 2018

Note: Bull Runnings is Harry Smeltzer's weblog on the First Battle of Bull Run/Manassas 

CWL: note the paragraph which begins 'Undoubtedly . . . '

This is a little different for Bull Runnings. The good folks at Savas Beatie sent me a digital, advance unedited galley of a unique diary, The War Outside My Window: The Civil War Diary of LeRoy Wiley Gresham, edited by Janet Elizabeth Croon. The story of this diary, which I’ll describe below, has been bouncing around for quite some time – here’s a WaPo article from 2012.

I’ve read snippets of LeRoy’s diary, and enough of other online sources which you can find yourself to get a good idea of his back story (note this is a preview, not a review.) Here’s the gist – he was a very bright, well-read, and articulate young man, living in Macon, GA. He suffered from a disease resulting from a severe injury to his leg – when the diary opens, he’s already an invalid and would need to be pulled about in a wagon of sorts. Unlike the reader LeRoy was of course unaware that his condition was mortal, and he would barely outlive the war that understandably occupied so much of his thoughts. Our knowledge of his impending doom makes his daily writings, spanning the whole conflict and very much of and in the moment, all the more poignant in their innocence, ignorance, and wit. You’ll feel for the kid.
Here’s young Gresham’s entry for July 22, 1861, with the early news of the fighting at Manassas:

Macon July 22 1861: Another great battle at Manassas! Sherman’s Battery taken! Terrible Slaughter on both sides! The enemy retired from the field. The Fight commenced 4 oclock this morning and continued until about seven. The battle raged with terrible force and a heavy loss on both sides. There has evidently been a signal Victory at Bulls Run. President Davis’ message is out. It is not only well written, but beautiful in contrast to the boorish effort of Doctor Lincoln, Chief magistrate of United States. Raining very slightly before breakfast this morning. Sad news Gen. F. S. Bartow is killed. Macon Gaurds in the fight. President Davis commanded in person; Beauregarde + Johnson’s army both engaged 40 000 to 70 000 on a side. Beauregarde’s horse shot from under him. It will be sometime before we can get the truth of it. Dressed my back this morning and its healing though very slowly. General Wise has also gained a signal Victory in western Virginia, killing 150 federals and losing few of his men. Julia Ann is up and about again. Very heavy shower this afternoon. Uncle John, Deo Volente [God willing], leaves for Athens tomorrow. Father comes home but there are no more reliable dispatches. The battles undoubtedly sends a thrill of Anguish to many an anxious heart in the newborn Confederacy. Ave Maria Jose [goodbye].

Undoubtedly, some will latch on to the undeniable fact that LeRoy was a youth of privilege and wealth, a member of a slaveholding family with personal servants, and may argue that these are the most important, or even the only, aspects of his life with which we should concern ourselves, to the exclusion of all others. To the contrary, young Gresham’s story and personal observations give great insight into the mind of someone raised in the reality of the times, and should provide a tool for historians to interpret those times in context as opposed to retrospect. I mean, that’s their job, after all. It’s not everyone’s job. But it is that of the historian.

It’s hard to tell you what you’ll get with the final product. Of course you get the diary and detailed annotations in bottom of page footnotes; illustrations including a few of actual diary pages with what we refer to today as “metadata” (doodling, sweat stains, etc.); Hal Jesperson maps; extensive dramatis personae; and appendices related to LeRoy’s medical condition. A lot of detective work went into this.
[Dennis Rasbach, MD, has written an e-book (not yet available), I Am Perhaps Dying: The Diary of LeRoy Wiley Gresham and the Medical Backstory of his Private Battle with Tuberculosis During the Civil War. Keep on the lookout for that.]
The War Outside My Window is scheduled to drop in June, with national coverage and a feature in the Sunday Parade magazine. Advance orders or signed copies are being taken at the Savas Beatie site linked above. I think this will be an important work, and well worth your time.

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News--Confederate Battle Flags Captured by US Colored Troops Exhibited in Richmond, Virginia

An African American leader brings a provocative take to expanded Civil War museum, Gregory Schneider, Washington Post, April 15, 2018

 

Caption:   Christy Coleman, CEO of the American Civil War Museum, which is headquartered at the site of the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond. 

 

  Christy Coleman spends a lot of time among artifacts of the Civil War, and two that touch her deeply are a pair of tattered Confederate battle flags. This seems odd for an African American woman, until she explains.

One banner has a single word stitched on it: Home. The white material of the flag, it turns out, was cut from a wedding dress. The other flag is a traditional Stars and Bars, like you’d see on a T-shirt or shot glass. But this one was captured at the Battle of the Crater in Petersburg by United States Colored Troops.

Both relics hint at deeper human stories, and that’s where Coleman finds meaning in her job as chief executive of the American Civil War Museum, an institution created from the ruins of this city’s Confederate ironworks.

As the nation wrestles with its heritage of racial discrimination, and as the symbols of the Civil War show fresh power to divide, no place has a deeper stake than Richmond — a majority-black city where Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson still cast long shadows. And no one is more on the spot to figure it all out than Coleman.“To have someone, a woman, who’s African American, at one of the most important museums in the former capital of the Confederacy — you can’t underestimate how important that is,” said Kevin Levin, a Civil War historian. “She really stands out.”

Coleman is using that position to look for a new way to tell the story of the Civil War, a conflict so easy to render in stereotypes. With a major expansion of the museum underway, her goal is to show the conflict from multiple points of view — not just North and South, but through the eyes of women, Native Americans, enslaved blacks, immigrants. If you can change perspectives, the thinking goes, issues begin to look different. Assumptions waver. 

That premise will be put to the test long before the expanded museum opens later this year. Coleman is helping lead a commission appointed by Richmond’s mayor to recommend what to do with five enormous statues of Confederate leaders along the city’s grandest residential boulevard, Monument Avenue.

Those statues are as fundamental to Richmond’s identity as Thomas Jefferson’s Capitol building. Coleman is conscious of the violence that has ripped other communities, such as nearby Charlottesville, over the same issue. But it’s not the first time she has confronted the nation’s most troubling legacy in a controversial and public way.“America’s reckoning with her sin and her trauma,” Coleman said, “is really what we’ve got to get to.” 

Coleman, 53, grew up in Williamsburg, in the workaday city behind Ye Olde Colonial Facade. Her neighborhood and church were filled with the tradespeople who groomed the gardens, sheared the sheep or ran the printing press in the historic area.  Most of the costumed interpreters didn’t look like Coleman, despite the fact that in Colonial times more than half the residents of Williamsburg were of African descent.

But she was captivated by them and won an audition for a reenactor role when she was only 17. The other historic interpreters worried about her. “They were preserving trades,” she said. “I was portraying an enslaved person.”

She saw something horrible overcome visitors who encountered her in that role. The modern veneer slipped aside and out came racial epithets or crude sexual comments. As a young woman, she struggled to process those situations. But she stuck with it, the thrill of giving voice to the voiceless more powerful than the revulsion. By the mid 1990s, after starting at William & Mary and graduating from Hampton University, Coleman became Colonial Williamsburg’s director for public history. She oversaw all of the historical interpreters.

One of her first big events was an annual market day, reenacting the way Colonial Virginians auctioned cattle and land. A staffer pointed out the obvious: The real market would have sold slaves, too.Coleman decided it was time to do something radical. She took a plan to upper management to stage a live slave auction. And she would be one of those on the sale block.The idea touched off a national debate. “Black and white folks thought that . . . it was going to stir up stuff that didn’t need to be stirred up in America,” Coleman said.

A massive crowd and international media showed up. Plainclothes police stood among the onlookers, just in case. And Coleman and three other African Americans let themselves be sold to the highest bidders.

Today, that event is viewed as a landmark success in the modern retelling of American history. After generations of avoiding the topic, other major institutions — such as Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and James Madison’s Montpelier — now confront enslavement as a major component of their interpretation.

But it exacted a heavy price on Coleman. The emotional stress brought on panic attacks that stuck with her through years of therapy.

She never repeated the auction. A few years later, she was wooed to Detroit to run the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. Nearly a decade into that job, Coleman was married and had two small children and wanted to slow things down a bit. She got word of a small museum back home in Virginia that was looking for a shake-up. Richmond long portrayed its past in a one-sided way. After the Civil War, widows and wives of Confederate veterans gathered memorabilia and displayed it in the old Confederate White House. From that collection, arguably the most extensive of its kind anywhere, grew the Museum of the Confederacy.

The full text of the story is continued at----Full Text: Washington Post

News--Lincoln's Last Hours and a Mary Lincoln's Guest at The Peterson House

 News--Lincoln's Last Hours and a Mary Lincoln's Guest at The Peterson House,  National Institute of Health


This week, Circulating Now marks a pivotal event in American history with a short series of posts. 150 years ago on April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in a crowded theater in Washington DC. On April 15th he died and an autopsy was performed. Several doctors supported Lincoln in his last hours but no medical intervention could prevent his death and bystanders could only watch and wait.

On the night of April 14, 1865, a lone assassin shot the President of the United States at point-blank range during an evening performance at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C.  That evening, John Wilkes Booth made his way into the theater and to the box where President Abraham Lincoln, his wife Mary Lincoln, and two guests, Major Henry Rathbone and Miss Clara Harris were enjoying a performance of Our American Cousin.  Pulling out a single-shot, derringer pistol, Booth aimed the gun, pulled the trigger and fired a bullet at the President’s head.   Many of us know the details of what occurred at Ford’s Theater that night, but what transpired after the fatal shot was fired and during the many hours before the President succumbed to his wounds?

Among the many accounts of that evening is one by physician Charles Leale,  an assistant surgeon with the U.S. Army and the first physician to reach Lincoln after he was shot.  Seated in the dress circle of the theater, not far from the Presidential box, Leale heard the gunshot and saw assassin John Wilkes Booth leap to the stage snagging his spur on the draped flag.  As shouts rang out that the President had been murdered, Leale rushed from his seat to the President’s box.  “When I entered the box,” Leale recounts, “Mr. Lincoln was seated in a high-backed arm-chair with his head leaning towards his right side supported by Mrs. Lincoln who was weeping bitterly.”   Leale took charge of the President’s medical care and immediately began to assess his injuries.  He was soon joined by physicians Charles Taft and Albert King.   After consulting together about the President’s condition, the three physicians decided it was best to have Lincoln moved from the theater to the nearest house.

Full Text continued at :
 
News--Lincoln's Last Hours and Mary Lincoln's Guest at the Peterson House

Image Source:  Taken by Alexander Gardner in February 1865, two months before Lincoln’s assassination.      Courtesy National Portrait Gallery