Tuesday, September 17, 2024

It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleedin' [lyric, Bob Dylan]: Tell Ma Not To Worry I'm Buried In Gettysburg on a Farm

 



“Too Much for Human Endurance”: The George Spangler Farm Hospitals and the Battle of Gettysburg and "Tell Mother Not to Worry": Soldier Stories From Gettysburg’s George Spangler Farm, Ronald C. Kirkwood, 320 pp. & 408 pp. 

Savas Beatie Publishing, available in hard cover and paperback

Too Much For Human Endurance and "Tell Mother Not to Worry" together are over 700 pages and describe one farm hospital  behind the Army of the Potomac's battle lines at Gettysburg. 

The bloodstains are gone, but the worn floorboards remain. The doctors, nurses, and patients who toiled and suffered and ached for home at the Army of the Potomac’s XI Corps hospital at the George Spangler farm in Gettysburg have long since departed. Fortunately, what they experienced there, and the critical importance of the property to the battle, has not been lost to history. Noted journalist and George Spangler farm expert Ronald D. Kirkwood brings these people and their experiences to life in “Too Much for Human Endurance”: The George Spangler Farm Hospitals and the Battle of Gettysburg.

Using a large array of firsthand accounts, Kirkwood re-creates the sprawling XI Corps hospital complex and the people who labored and suffered there—especially George and Elizabeth Spangler and their four children, who built a thriving 166-acre farm only to witness it nearly destroyed when war paid a bloody visit in the summer of 1863. Stories rarely if ever told about the wounded, dying, nurses, surgeons, ambulance workers, musicians, and others are weaved seamlessly through gripping and smooth-flowing prose.

A host of notables spent time at the Spangler farm, including Union officers George G. Meade, Henry J. Hunt, Edward E. Cross, Francis Barlow, Francis Mahler, Freeman McGilvery, and Samuel K. Zook. Pvt. George Nixon III, great-grandfather of President Richard M. Nixon, would die there, as would Confederate Gen. Lewis A. Armistead, who fell mortally wounded at the height of Pickett’s Charge. In addition to including the most complete lists ever published of the dead, wounded, and surgeons at the Spanglers’ XI Corps hospital, this study breaks new ground with stories of the First Division, II Corps hospital at the Spanglers’ Granite Schoolhouse.

Kirkwood also establishes the often-overlooked strategic importance of the property and its key role in the Union victory. Army of the Potomac generals took advantage of the farm’s size, access to roads, and central location to use it as a staging area to get artillery and infantry to the embattled front line from Little Round to Cemetery Hill and Culp’s Hill, often just in time to prevent a collapse and Confederate breakthrough.

“Too Much for Human Endurance" introduces readers to heretofore untold stories of the Spanglers, their farm, those who labored to save lives, and those wh
o suffered and died there. They have finally received the recognition that their place in history deserves.

CWL: Kirkwood's efforts are very much in the tradition of Gregory Coco's pioneering literary works which focus on the first person accounts of the wounded and dying as well as those who are attending and burying them. Kirkwood's writing style is straightforward and reportorial; he relies upon accounts made by the wounded and their caretakers. Confederate General Armistead's wounding and death is covered in a satisfactory manner with very little speculation. Ambulance wagon drivers' Doctors' and nurses' accounts are on every page. The Spangler family's living conditions are featured as well. Kirkwood's work is likely to have a spot on lists of essential Gettsyburg books.

The Child Is a The Father of the Man: Lincoln and Grant Biographer Tackles Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain:

 

On Great Fields: The Life and Unlikely Heroism of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Ronald C. White

512 pages, $22.00, Random House Publishing. 

Before 1862, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain had rarely left his home state of Maine, where he was a trained minister and mild-mannered professor at Bowdoin College. His colleagues were shocked when he volunteered for the Union army, but he was undeterred and later became known as one of the North’s greatest heroes: On the second day at Gettysburg, after running out of ammunition at Little Round Top, he ordered his men to wield their bayonets in a desperate charge down a rocky slope that routed the Confederate attackers. Despite being wounded at Petersburg—and told by two surgeons he would die—Chamberlain survived the war, going on to be elected governor of Maine four times and serve as president of Bowdoin College.

How did a stuttering young boy come to be fluent in nine languages and even teach speech and rhetoric? How did a trained minister find his way to the battlefield? Award-winning historian Ronald C. White delves into these contradictions in this cradle-to-grave biography of General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, from his upbringing in rural Maine to his tenacious, empathetic military leadership and his influential postwar public service, exploring a question that still plagues so many veterans: How do you make a civilian life of meaning after having experienced the extreme highs and lows of war?

Chamberlain is familiar to millions from Michael Shaara’s now-classic novel of the Civil War, 
The Killer Angels, and Ken Burns’s timeless miniseries The Civil War, but in this book, White captures the complex and inspiring man behind the heroHeavily illustrated and featuring nine detailed maps, this gripping, impeccably researched portrait illuminates one of the most admired but least known figures in our nation’s bloodiest conflict.

CWL: Splendid. Clear, crisp narrative style. Pays attention to Chamberlain's faith and character. Enjoyable to read and even suspenseful at times. 

American Civil War Archives: Their Lives and Afterlives

 


War on Record: The Archive and the Afterlife of the Civil War
, Yael A. Sternhell, 
320 pages, Yale University Press, $37.50, 2024.

Winner of the 2024 Tom Watson Brown Book Award  

Shortlisted for 2024 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize
 
The Civil War generated a vast archive of official records—documents that would shape the postwar era and determine what future generations would know about the war. 

Yael Sternhell traces these records from their creation during wartime through their deployment in a host of postwar battles, including those between the federal government and Southerners seeking reparations and between veterans blaming each other for defeat.
 
These documents were eventually published in the most important historical collection ever to have been assembled in the United States: 
The War of the Rebellion: The Official Records of the Union and the Confederate Armies
Known as the OR, it is the ultimate source for generations of scholars and writers and ordinary citizens researching the war. 

By delving into the archive, Sternhell reveals its power to shape myths, hide truths, perpetuate rancor, and foster reconciliation. Far more than a storehouse of papers, the Civil War archive is a major historical actor in its own right.

Friday, September 06, 2024

Investing In Slaves During Wartime and a Time of Currency Inflation

 

An Unholy Traffic: Slave Trading in the Civil War South        Robert K.D. Colby, Oxford University Press, 360 pages, $35.00, 2024





The Confederate States of America was born in defense of slavery and, after a four-year struggle to become an independent slaveholding republic, died as emancipation dawned. Between Fort Sumter to Appomattox, Confederates bought and sold thousands African American men, women, and children. 
These transactions in humanity made the internal slave trade a cornerstone of Confederate society, a bulwark of the Rebel economy, and a central part of the experience of the Civil War for all inhabiting the American South.

As
 An Unholy Traffic shows, slave trading helped Southerners survive and fight the Civil War, as well as to build the future for which they fought. They mitigated the crises the war spawned by buying and selling enslaved people, using this commerce to navigate food shortages, unsettled gender roles, the demands of military service, and other hardships on the home front. 
Some Rebels speculated wildly in human property, investing in slaves to ward off inflation and to buy shares in the slaveholding nation they hoped to create. Others traded people to counter the advance of emancipation. Given its centrality to their nationhood, Confederates went to great lengths to prolong the slave trade, which, in turn, supported the Confederacy. 
For those held in slavery, the surviving slave trade dramatically shaped their pursuit of freedom, inserting a retrograde movement into some people's journeys toward liberty while inspiring others to make the risky decision to escape.

Offering an original perspective on the intersections of slavery, capitalism, the Civil War, and emancipation, Robert K.D. Colby illuminates the place of the peculiar institution within the Confederate mind, the ways in which it underpinned the CSA's war effort, and its impact on those attempting to seize their freedom.
Introduction
Chapter 1: "No Money, and No Confidence": Slave Commerce, Secession, and the Panic of 1860
Chapter 2: The "Uncongenial Air of Freedom": Union Occupation and the Slave Trade
Chapter 3: "Old Abe Is Not Feared in this Region": The Revival of Confederate Slave Commerce
Chapter 4: "Negroes Will Bear Fabulous Prices": Inflation, Speculation, and the Confederate Future
Chapter 5: "Liable to Be Sold at Any Moment": State-Making, Continuity, and the Slave Trade
Chapter 6: Sold "Far Out of the Way of Lincoln": Emancipation and Counterrevolutionary Slave Commerce
Chapter 7: "Broke...All Up": The Ends and Afterlives of the Wartime Slave Trade
Epilogue, Notes, Select Bibliography, Index
Author  Interview   
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/an-unholy-traffic-slave-trading-in-the-civil-war/id1729723969?i=1000655641457

 

2024  Society of Civil War Historians Watson Brown Book 

 

War on Record: The Archive and the Afterlife of the Civil War Hardcover, Yale University Press, $38.00, 320 pages, 2023.

 
 
The Civil War generated a vast archive of official records—documents that would shape the postwar era and determine what future generations would know about the war. Yael Sternhell traces these records from their creation during wartime through their deployment in a host of postwar battles, including those between the federal government and Southerners seeking reparations and between veterans blaming each other for defeat.
 
These documents were eventually published in the most important historical collection ever to have been assembled in the United States: 
The War of the Rebellion: The Official Records of the Union and the Confederate Armies. Known as the OR, it is the ultimate source for generations of scholars and writers and ordinary citizens researching the war. By delving into the archive, Sternhell reveals its power to shape myths, hide truths, perpetuate rancor, and foster reconciliation. Far more than a storehouse of papers, the Civil War archive is a major historical actor in its own right.





Rape, Culture & Antebellum Dixie


Sexual Violence and American Slavery: The Making of a Rape Culture in the Antebellum South, Shannon Eaves,

University Of North Carolina Press, April 2024, 242 pages, paper, $27.95

From the publisher:   It is impossible to separate histories of sexual violence and the enslavement of Black women in the antebellum South. Rape permeated the lives of all who existed in that system: Black and white, male and female, adult and child, enslaved and free. Shannon C. Eaves unflinchingly investigates how both enslaved people and their enslavers experienced the systematic rape and sexual exploitation of bondswomen and came to understand what this culture of sexualized violence meant for themselves and others.

Eaves mines a wealth of primary sources including autobiographies, diaries, court records, and more to show that rape and other forms of sexual exploitation entangled slaves and slave owners in battles over power to protect oneself and one's community, power to avenge hurt and humiliation, and power to punish and eliminate future threats. By placing sexual violence at the center of the systems of power and culture, Eaves shows how the South's rape culture was revealed in enslaved people's and their enslavers' interactions with one another and with members of their respective communities
.

Author Interview Podcast: paste into browser

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sexual-violence-and-american-slavery-the making/id1729723969 i=1000668269870