News---The Civil War's 750,000 Dead, Disease, and A Republic Not Necessarily Suffering As Much As Thought

The Civil War Death Toll, Reconsidered, Nicholas Marshall, New York Times, April 15, 2014

Excerpt: What did the Civil War’s death toll mean to those who lived through it? We are now told that wartime deaths were unprecedented and overwhelming, and constituted one of the fundamental experiences for the wartime generation. But is this really true? 

In recent years, statistical descriptions have been used by historians — including renowned scholars such as James McPherson, Eric Foner and Drew Gilpin Faust, but also celebrated filmmakers Ken and Ric Burns, among many – to drive home a characterization of the war based on the scale of death. They may be found across the range of media regarding the war, in films, museums, popular histories, scholarly treatises and lectures. 

One such statistic is that the number of soldiers’ deaths in the Civil War – approximately 750,000 – was greater than the total number suffered in all other American wars combined. A second point makes use of the first figure: If one calculates the proportion of the total population who died while in military service during the war, and applies this percentage to present-day population figures, the equivalent number of deaths in the 21st century would reach above 7 million. This is a staggering figure that suggests that the Civil War generation made almost inconceivable sacrifices.

But while factually correct, the statistics work to exaggerate the impact of the war. At its essence, the use of these statistics is designed to provide perspective, a laudatory goal. It is supposed to allow those of us looking back on the war to get a clear sense of the emotional texture of the time. The problem is that doing so violates one of the central codes of historical analysis: avoid presentism.

Instead of putting us in the minds of those who experienced the Civil War, it conjures up significance by equating disparate eras. And it is not enough simply to speak about numbers. To understand how deaths affect a culture, it is essential to examine the meaning ascribed to them beyond the statistics. In the case of the Civil War, historians have not adequately taken into account the context of death and dying in the period. 

Solid scholarly work exists on the central importance of death in antebellum America and the ordinary experience of death during the war, but Civil War historians have tended to sidestep this literature in order to claim the war years as exceptional. They have also underplayed the significance of the demographic realities that Americans faced before, during, and after the war. These reveal a society constantly coping with large-scale mortality. Americans throughout the period were lucky if they survived into middle age, and they recognized that life was more fragile than we do today.

. . . .

Evidence for the extraordinary importance of affliction in the lives of antebellum Americans may be found in nearly any historical source from the period. Newspapers almost always included both poems about the death of loved ones and advertisements for nostrums claiming to cure a variety of ailments. Health became an important focus of advice manuals, and fiction frequently made use of death and sickness as plot devices. In many cases, private correspondence concerned matters of health to the exclusion of most other topics, and diaries overflowed with descriptions of suffering.

Given these circumstances, it is important to remember that approximately two-thirds of the deaths of soldiers came as a result of disease, rather than on the battlefield. Looking back from today, these numbers are difficult to fathom, and the image conjured by them is of horrendously unsanitary conditions in military camps. After all, these deaths seem to be as much a product of war as those that resulted from wounds: soldiers in camp were there to fight the war and they died because the conditions were necessary to conduct field operations with a massive army.

The evidence from the period makes clear that historians need to re-evaluate the way we have come to understand the carnage of the Civil War. The war added to an existing demographic and cultural problem rather than creating an entirely new one. Given this milieu, the nearly ubiquitous use by historians of a set of factually correct, yet misleading, statistics needs rethinking. To make a case for the bloodiness of the war in this manner says more about how we interpret these figures today — and the uses we make of them — than about the way Americans actually experienced the wrenching conflict.

---

Nicholas Marshall is an associate professor of history at Marist College. This article was adapted from Professor Marshall’s article “The Great Exaggeration: Death and the Civil War,” published in the Journal of the Civil War Era 4 (March, 2014).

 

Full Text of Article at New York Times, April 15, 2014. 

Image Source: RVA News

What did the Civil War’s death toll mean to those who lived through it? We are now told that wartime deaths were unprecedented and overwhelming, and constituted one of the fundamental experiences for the wartime generation. But is this really true?
In recent years, statistical descriptions have been used by historians — including renowned scholars such as James McPherson, Eric Foner and Drew Gilpin Faust, but also celebrated filmmakers Ken and Ric Burns, among many – to drive home a characterization of the war based on the scale of death. They may be found across the range of media regarding the war, in films, museums, popular histories, scholarly treatises and lectures.
One such statistic is that the number of soldiers’ deaths in the Civil War – approximately 750,000 – was greater than the total number suffered in all other American wars combined. A second point makes use of the first figure: If one calculates the proportion of the total population who died while in military service during the war, and applies this percentage to present-day population figures, the equivalent number of deaths in the 21st century would reach above 7 million. This is a staggering figure that suggests that the Civil War generation made almost inconceivable sacrifices.
But while factually correct, the statistics work to exaggerate the impact of the war. At its essence, the use of these statistics is designed to provide perspective, a laudatory goal. It is supposed to allow those of us looking back on the war to get a clear sense of the emotional texture of the time. The problem is that doing so violates one of the central codes of historical analysis: avoid presentism.
Instead of putting us in the minds of those who experienced the Civil War, it conjures up significance by equating disparate eras. And it is not enough simply to speak about numbers. To understand how deaths affect a culture, it is essential to examine the meaning ascribed to them beyond the statistics. In the case of the Civil War, historians have not adequately taken into account the context of death and dying in the period.
Solid scholarly work exists on the central importance of death in antebellum America and the ordinary experience of death during the war, but Civil War historians have tended to sidestep this literature in order to claim the war years as exceptional. They have also underplayed the significance of the demographic realities that Americans faced before, during, and after the war. These reveal a society constantly coping with large-scale mortality. Americans throughout the period were lucky if they survived into middle age, and they recognized that life was more fragile than we do today.
Evidence for the extraordinary importance of affliction in the lives of antebellum Americans may be found in nearly any historical source from the period. Newspapers almost always included both poems about the death of loved ones and advertisements for nostrums claiming to cure a variety of ailments. Health became an important focus of advice manuals, and fiction frequently made use of death and sickness as plot devices. In many cases, private correspondence concerned matters of health to the exclusion of most other topics, and diaries overflowed withdescriptions of suffering.
Given these circumstances, it is important to remember that approximately two-thirds of the deaths of soldiers came as a result of disease, rather than on the battlefield. Looking back from today, these numbers are difficult to fathom, and the image conjured by them is of horrendously unsanitary conditions in military camps. After all, these deathsseem to be as much a product of war as those that resulted from wounds: soldiers in camp were there to fight the war and they died because the conditions were necessary to conduct field operations with a massive army.
But this is a present-minded understanding of the circumstances, because it ignores the epic antebellum confrontation with disease. If we work from an assumption that deaths from disease were not viewed at the time as war casualties, but rather as a continuation of prewar circumstances, instead of 750,000 casualties faced by Civil War-era Americans, we are left with 250,000. If we divide this figure by the four years of war, we have a crude estimate of 62,500 battlefield deaths per year.
But even this figure requires context to understand its significance. It is important to keep in mind that death rates were tremendously variable in the period, even within relatively stable locales, because of the unpredictable nature of contagious disease. Some areas reported rates that varied from below 2 percent up to 6 percent. A conservative estimate of a 2 percent death rate for 1860 would have meant about 629,000 deaths that year for the nation as a whole, while a 3 percent rate would have resulted in 943,000 deaths (today’s rate is consistently below 0.8 percent). The additional battlefield deaths in the war would thus represent an increase of between 7 and 10 percent over the normal rates. Significant, but hardly catastrophic.
If we look at changes in estimated death rates from Massachusetts that include antebellum, bellum and post-bellum periods, we notice that these Civil War variations had contemporary parallels. The largest single change in the 19th century in Massachusetts (including the Civil War years) occurred between 1871 and 1872, a 22 percent increase. However, the greatest change in the death rate between single years for Chicago between 1847 and 1864 was an astounding 296 percent. The Civil War additions, therefore, would not be out of line with normal variations before and after the war.
The experience with epidemic sickness and death in other historical moments should also remind us that Americans have been much more blasé about death from sickness than they are today. During the global flu epidemic at the end of World War I as many as 100 million worldwide, including 600,000 in the United States (roughly five times the number of American casualties in World War I and approaching the total number of deaths in the Civil War), perished over the course of just a few months. In addition, this was an unusual strain of influenza that killed mainly the healthiest cohort of the population (those in their 20s and 30s) through a violent immune response. If any event should have triggered re-evaluation of the nation’s approach to death (based solely on changes in incidence and scale, as Civil War historians often calculate), this would be it.
Yet one historian’s book on the subject is titled “America’s Forgotten Pandemic,” and he spends a significant portion of the book trying to explain why the epidemic seemed to disappear from public consciousness so soon after it waned. The answer, in part, is that well into the 20th century Americans viewed disease — and the death that came with it — as a constant, as something that had to be dealt with as part of everyday existence.
This is not to say that deaths in the war were not emotionally wrenching, or that they did not raise any number of new issues for Americans. The antebellum evidence shows that within a sentimentalized culture, death was indeedan important and profoundly disturbing event. Deaths in the war were also viewed in this way, and the trauma associated with them was real, heartfelt and an added burden.
The demographic picture that spans the war years, however, undermines the idea that the magnitude of death in the war necessarily forced Americans to reassess the implications of the carnage. Furthermore, because so many people died young in this era, the casualties would be interpreted very differently than today. The sense of loss that 21st century Americans associate with the relatively rare death of a young person was not the standard mode of response then.
Moreover, the connection of the deaths in the war to a greater cause imbued them with a meaning that should not be overlooked, and that may be seen as an improvement over the struggle to make sense of the vast numbers of dead during the antebellum period. In some way, the significance ascribed to deaths while in the service of protecting the Union or Confederacy obviated the antebellum need for understanding God’s will when those in the prime of life were cut down. For family members of soldiers, the interpretation was easily found. As a Minnesotan soldier named Patrick Taylor noted in a letter to his parents upon the death of his brother (the two fought side by side at Gettysburg), “Isaac has not fallen in vain. What though one of your six soldiers has fallen on the altar of our country. ’Tis a glorious death; better die free than live slaves.’”
The evidence from the period makes clear that historians need to re-evaluate the way we have come to understand the carnage of the Civil War. The war added to an existing demographic and cultural problem rather than creating an entirely new one. Given this milieu, the nearly ubiquitous use by historians of a set of factually correct, yet misleading, statistics needs rethinking. To make a case for the bloodiness of the war in this manner says more about how we interpret these figures today — and the uses we make of them — than about the way Americans actually experienced the wrenching conflict.
- See more at: http://hnn.us/article/155305#sthash.rlbC0sWN.dpuf

What did the Civil War’s death toll mean to those who lived through it? We are now told that wartime deaths were unprecedented and overwhelming, and constituted one of the fundamental experiences for the wartime generation. But is this really true?
In recent years, statistical descriptions have been used by historians — including renowned scholars such as James McPherson, Eric Foner and Drew Gilpin Faust, but also celebrated filmmakers Ken and Ric Burns, among many – to drive home a characterization of the war based on the scale of death. They may be found across the range of media regarding the war, in films, museums, popular histories, scholarly treatises and lectures.
One such statistic is that the number of soldiers’ deaths in the Civil War – approximately 750,000 – was greater than the total number suffered in all other American wars combined. A second point makes use of the first figure: If one calculates the proportion of the total population who died while in military service during the war, and applies this percentage to present-day population figures, the equivalent number of deaths in the 21st century would reach above 7 million. This is a staggering figure that suggests that the Civil War generation made almost inconceivable sacrifices.
But while factually correct, the statistics work to exaggerate the impact of the war. At its essence, the use of these statistics is designed to provide perspective, a laudatory goal. It is supposed to allow those of us looking back on the war to get a clear sense of the emotional texture of the time. The problem is that doing so violates one of the central codes of historical analysis: avoid presentism.
Instead of putting us in the minds of those who experienced the Civil War, it conjures up significance by equating disparate eras. And it is not enough simply to speak about numbers. To understand how deaths affect a culture, it is essential to examine the meaning ascribed to them beyond the statistics. In the case of the Civil War, historians have not adequately taken into account the context of death and dying in the period.
Solid scholarly work exists on the central importance of death in antebellum America and the ordinary experience of death during the war, but Civil War historians have tended to sidestep this literature in order to claim the war years as exceptional. They have also underplayed the significance of the demographic realities that Americans faced before, during, and after the war. These reveal a society constantly coping with large-scale mortality. Americans throughout the period were lucky if they survived into middle age, and they recognized that life was more fragile than we do today.
Evidence for the extraordinary importance of affliction in the lives of antebellum Americans may be found in nearly any historical source from the period. Newspapers almost always included both poems about the death of loved ones and advertisements for nostrums claiming to cure a variety of ailments. Health became an important focus of advice manuals, and fiction frequently made use of death and sickness as plot devices. In many cases, private correspondence concerned matters of health to the exclusion of most other topics, and diaries overflowed withdescriptions of suffering.
- See more at: http://hnn.us/article/155305#sthash.rlbC0sWN.dpufWhat did the Civil War’s death toll mean to those who lived through it? We are now told that wartime deaths were unprecedented and overwhelming, and constituted one of the fundamental experiences for the wartime generation. But is this really true?

In recent years, statistical descriptions have been used by historians — including renowned scholars such as James McPherson, Eric Foner and Drew Gilpin Faust, but also celebrated filmmakers Ken and Ric Burns, among many – to drive home a characterization of the war based on the scale of death. They may be found across the range of media regarding the war, in films, museums, popular histories, scholarly treatises and lectures.

One such statistic is that the number of soldiers’ deaths in the Civil War – approximately 750,000 – was greater than the total number suffered in all other American wars combined. A second point makes use of the first figure: If one calculates the proportion of the total population who died while in military service during the war, and applies this percentage to present-day population figures, the equivalent number of deaths in the 21st century would reach above 7 million. This is a staggering figure that suggests that the Civil War generation made almost inconceivable sacrifices.

But while factually correct, the statistics work to exaggerate the impact of the war. At its essence, the use of these statistics is designed to provide perspective, a laudatory goal. It is supposed to allow those of us looking back on the war to get a clear sense of the emotional texture of the time. The problem is that doing so violates one of the central codes of historical analysis: avoid presentism.

Instead of putting us in the minds of those who experienced the Civil War, it conjures up significance by equating disparate eras. And it is not enough simply to speak about numbers. To understand how deaths affect a culture, it is essential to examine the meaning ascribed to them beyond the statistics. In the case of the Civil War, historians have not adequately taken into account the context of death and dying in the period.

Solid scholarly work exists on the central importance of death in antebellum America and the ordinary experience of death during the war, but Civil War historians have tended to sidestep this literature in order to claim the war years as exceptional. They have also underplayed the significance of the demographic realities that Americans faced before, during, and after the war. These reveal a society constantly coping with large-scale mortality. Americans throughout the period were lucky if they survived into middle age, and they recognized that life was more fragile than we do today.

Evidence for the extraordinary importance of affliction in the lives of antebellum Americans may be found in nearly any historical source from the period. Newspapers almost always included both poems about the death of loved ones and advertisements for nostrums claiming to cure a variety of ailments. Health became an important focus of advice manuals, and fiction frequently made use of death and sickness as plot devices. In many cases, private correspondence concerned matters of health to the exclusion of most other topics, and diaries overflowed with descriptions of suffering.

Given these circumstances, it is important to remember that approximately two-thirds of the deaths of soldiers came as a result of disease, rather than on the battlefield. Looking back from today, these numbers are difficult to fathom, and the image conjured by them is of horrendously unsanitary conditions in military camps. After all, these deaths seem to be as much a product of war as those that resulted from wounds: soldiers in camp were there to fight the war and they died because the conditions were necessary to conduct field operations with a massive army. What did the Civil War’s death toll mean to those who lived through it? We are now told that wartime deaths were unprecedented and overwhelming, and constituted one of the fundamental experiences for the wartime generation. But is this really true?

In recent years, statistical descriptions have been used by historians — including renowned scholars such as James McPherson, Eric Foner and Drew Gilpin Faust, but also celebrated filmmakers Ken and Ric Burns, among many – to drive home a characterization of the war based on the scale of death. They may be found across the range of media regarding the war, in films, museums, popular histories, scholarly treatises and lectures.

One such statistic is that the number of soldiers’ deaths in the Civil War – approximately 750,000 – was greater than the total number suffered in all other American wars combined. A second point makes use of the first figure: If one calculates the proportion of the total population who died while in military service during the war, and applies this percentage to present-day population figures, the equivalent number of deaths in the 21st century would reach above 7 million. This is a staggering figure that suggests that the Civil War generation made almost inconceivable sacrifices.What did the Civil War’s death toll mean to those who lived through it? We are now told that wartime deaths were unprecedented and overwhelming, and constituted one of the fundamental experiences for the wartime generation. But is this really true?

In recent years, statistical descriptions have been used by historians — including renowned scholars such as James McPherson, Eric Foner and Drew Gilpin Faust, but also celebrated filmmakers Ken and Ric Burns, among many – to drive home a characterization of the war based on the scale of death. They may be found across the range of media regarding the war, in films, museums, popular histories, scholarly treatises and lectures.

One such statistic is that the number of soldiers’ deaths in the Civil War – approximately 750,000 – was greater than the total number suffered in all other American wars combined. A second point makes use of the first figure: If one calculates the proportion of the total population who died while in military service during the war, and applies this percentage to present-day population figures, the equivalent number of deaths in the 21st century would reach above 7 million. This is a staggering figure that suggests that the Civil War generation made almost inconceivable sacrifices.

Esteemed Members

This all should be up on the site soon, but for the time being, hers the rough schedule of events for the Muster, which is scheduled for Friday, June 6, Saturday June 7 and Sunday, June 8.

Friday: (3:00 pm) John Rudy will lead a town tour based on the??conditions in Gettysburg one year after the battle.

At the annual meeting/cocktail hour, Goerge Franks will offer a presentation on his book on the Battle Of Falling Waters.

Saturday; (8:30 am) Chuck Teague has offered two choices:?Wrights Brigade on? July 2 or the or the Union Defense?of Cemetery Ridge at the same time.? I'm torn.?

Esteemed Members

This all should be up on the site soon, but for the time being, hers the rough schedule of events for the Muster, which is scheduled for Friday, June 6, Saturday June 7 and Sunday, June 8.

Friday: (3:00 pm) John Rudy will lead a town tour based on the??conditions in Gettysburg one year after the battle.

At the annual meeting/cocktail hour, Goerge Franks will offer a presentation on his book on the Battle Of Falling Waters.

Saturday; (8:30 am) Chuck Teague has offered two choices:?Wrights Brigade on? July 2 or the or the Union Defense?of Cemetery Ridge at the same time.? I'm torn.?

Proposed Conversion of book shelf space to Communications Department digital camera studio space

Ground floor

To the right of Brian Carr’s office

15 feet wide, 19 feet deep [285 square feet]

Entrance door on the right side.

Construction: One wall with one door.

Forthcoming and Noteworthy---Manassas: A Battlefield Guide

Manassas: A Battlefield Guide, Ethan Rafuse, author; Erin Greb, cartographer;  University of Nebraska Press, 232 pp, 47 maps, 2 appendices, $21.95. [May 2014].

From the publisher:

This volume is the essential guide to the Manassas battlefields, site of two of the Civil War’s critical campaigns. Ethan S. Rafuse, a distinguished scholar of the Civil War, provides a clearly organized, thorough, and uniquely insightful account of both campaigns, along with expert analysis and precise directions for armchair traveler and battlefield visitor alike.

The July 1861 Battle of First Manassas and the August 1862 Battle of Second Manassas unequivocally influenced the course and outcome of the Civil War. The first battle dealt a decisive blow to hopes that the inexperienced armies of the North and the South could bring about a quick military resolution of the secession crisis. The second battle was the climactic engagement of a spectacular campaign that carried the war to the outskirts of Washington DC and marked the coming of age of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.

Manassas: A Battlefield Guide presents readers with a clear, convenient guide to the sites in northern and central Virginia that shaped the course and outcome of these campaigns. Lucid, concise narratives give readers a better understanding of the events that took place on these battlefields and of the terrain, personalities, and decisions that shaped them.

Ethan S. Rafuse is a professor of history at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College and has led staff rides and tours of historic battlefields for many military and civilian groups. He is also the author of several books, including Antietam, South Mountain, and Harpers Ferry: A Battlefield Guide (Nebraska, 2008) and McClellan’s War: The Failure of Moderation in the Struggle for the Union.

Blurbs: “This guidebook explores the campaigns of Manassas like no other. It will take you to obscure places long forgotten and accord them significance; it takes the familiar and illuminates them in ways not done before. Well written and dashed with analytical twists both thoughtful and helpful, Dr. Rafuse’s work is by far the best of its kind.”—John Hennessy, author of Return to Bull Run: The Campaign and Battle of Second Manassas

“No other work juxtaposes Lincoln’s writing and speeches with contemporary commentaries and criticism of him. Rawley’s careful selection of these documents and his judicious interweaving of his historical analysis and background come together to create a powerful dialogue with the reader as well.”—From the foreword by William G. Thomas

CWL:   Manassas: A Battlefield Guide is fifth volume in the This Hallowed Ground: Guides to Civil War Battlefields edited by Brooks D. Simpson, Mark Grimsley and Steven E. Woodworth.   Other volumes in the series include guides for 1] Antietam, South Mountain and Harpers Ferry, 2] Gettysburg, 3] Chickamauga and 4] Wilson's Creek, Pea Ridge and Prairie, Grove. CWL owns and frequently uses 1], 2] and 3].  These books are dashboard friendly for driving tours and readable at home. Both the maps and the narrative are clear, concise and cogent. 

Lower Image is of the author, Ethan Rafuse.

New and Noteworthy---The Civil War In Popular Culture: Memory And Meaning Is Both Incisive and Accessible

The Civil War In Popular Culture: Memory And Meaning, Lawrence A. Kreiser and Randal Allred, editors, University of Kentucky Press, 257  pages, bibliographic notes, index, $40.00.

The eleven essays, introduction and afterward offered in The Civil War In Popular Culture: Memory And Meaning are each scholarly, informative and entertaining.  The perspectives and focus of the fourteen authors' essays are both broad and unique. A casual bookstore browser may think that it is another book about reenactors for reenactors but that would certainly be a mistaken impression. The essays chosen and edited by Kreiser and Allred are compelling for the questions they address.

What do we know of how Civil War veterans came to psychological terms with the aftereffects of killing? Where Confederate amputees viewed as whole men who could be married? What value did veterans and early visitors to Chickamauga battlefield park during 1890s place on relics they found there?

If 80% of all Americans receive no historical training beyond high school, then what success can the Gettysburg National Military Park have in placing slavery into the battle and its legacy?  Is the Civil Preservation Trust's rebranding itself as the Civil War Trust, its investment in Internet web pages and mobile phone applications eliminating actual visits to the battlefields that the foundation has preserved?

What does the history of Civil War board games tell us about what the popular culture views as entertainment and hobby? Have Lincoln movies homogenized the president who confessed his own childhood was among the simple annals of the poor? Has Lincoln the lawyer become both a vampire slayer and a pragmatic emancipator in the popular mind?

Does the film Glory offer an honest depiction of Civil War combat? There is indeed one essay on reenactors. How do today's Good Ol' Rebel reenactors understand racism, slavery and their Lost Cause?

Clear, concise and cogent, the essays are both incisive for the scholar and accessible to the general reader. The bibliographic notes appear at the conclusion of each essay and encourage readers and graduate student to realize the dynamic nature of the field pursue new avenues of research in popular culture.

News---Netflix's House of Cards, The Grant Memorial in Washington D.C. and the Army of the Tennessee

A Different Kind of Civil War Memorial, Dennis Montagna, The Wall Street Journal, March 30-31, 2014.

The opening credits of "House of Cards," the new Netflix-produced political thriller, are set against time-lapse views of Washington that include the Capitol and the Kennedy Center. Yet the most prominently featured landmark, the Ulysses S. Grant Memorial, is likely to be less familiar to most viewers.

Honoring a hero and symbolizing the nation's new prominence on the world stage at the dawn of the 20th century.

Its relative obscurity today is unfortunate, because this monument is one of the greatest works of commemorative art this country has produced. More than a monument, it is a symbol both of Washington's aspirations as a city at the dawn of the 20th century and of the nation's increasing prominence at that same moment. 

More than 250 feet wide and 70 feet deep, the memorial sits at the foot of the Capitol. An expansive reflecting pool fans out before it, with the National Mall beyond. At the center of a broad stepped marble plaza, a bronze portrait of Grant stands atop a tall marble pedestal. Four recumbent lions flank the statue, while low-relief panels on the pedestal's sides depict marching infantrymen. On either side but at some remove are two massive bronze sculptural groups, one depicting a cavalry charge, the other a field artillery unit wheeling into battle position. 

After his death in 1885, Union veterans who had served under Grant campaigned for a monument to be erected in Washington. Their efforts led to Congress appropriating $250,000 in 1901, at that time an unprecedented sum for a federally funded monument. The following year, the three-member Grant Memorial Commission selected New York sculptor Henry Merwin Shrady from a field of 27 candidates, most with far more experience in the realm of public sculpture. 

The memorial would become his life's work. He spent 20 years on it and died at the age of 52, just weeks before its dedication in 1922. But if you're going to leave only one masterwork, you could do a lot worse than this one. The visitor who takes the trouble to seek it out is rewarded for the effort. 

The project's ample budget allowed for a more complex memorial than the standard general-on-horseback. The massive cavalry and artillery groups are placed on low pedestals complemented by built-in seating. They provide a portrait of men and horses gripped by war's hardship and carnage seldom seen in earlier memorials. 

In the former, a cavalry captain leads the charge with sword upraised. The soldier beside him, a self-portrait of the sculptor, tumbles headlong over the mount that has been shot from beneath him. The rider behind shields his eyes with his forearm. Across the plaza, Shrady presents another scene of struggle and endurance. Traversing rough and muddy terrain, a field artillery unit, pulled by a four-horse team, comes to a halt. The horses strain; one breaks free from his reins and presses forward. With expressions ranging from pain to stoicism, three soldiers ride atop the caisson gripping whatever they can for support and bracing themselves against one another. 

Shrady presented Grant much as had other sculptors, as a brooding, taciturn leader astride a horse that is both still and alert. But his portrayal of soldiers at war creates a powerful counterpoint. Grant is the calm center overseeing the maelstrom of battle. In this way Shrady memorialized not only the leader, but his troops and the relationship that existed between them. Shrady's presentation of troops under duress introduced a thematic tone that set it apart from nearly every earlier Northern monument. The earliest major Civil War monuments, built in the decade after 1865, mourned the dead. Those erected in the 1880s and '90s typically celebrated the Union's triumph. But the Grant Memorial presents the specter of war and sacrifice as ongoing, an idea embraced by many in 1900 as a fact of modern American life.

The text of A Different Kind of Civil War Memorial is continued at Wall Street Journal, March 30-13, 2014  .  The top photo is by Melissa Golden for the Wall Street Journal.

Photograph of lion on the House of Cards opening credits is from Ghosts of Washington D.C.'s article on House of Cards.

CWL notes that the "Union veterans who had served under Grant campaigned for a monument to be erected in Washington," were the veterans of the Army Of The Tennessee. The drive to erect a monument to Grant was begun in the 1890s by Society of the Army of the Tennessee.  The Grant Memorial is situated in Union Square and is situated beside the Capitol Reflecting Pool.  The marble platform for the monument is 252 feet long, 71 feet wide and is divided into three sections. The tall, middle section features a 10,700 pound, 17-foot-2-inch  high equestrian statue depicting Grant astride Cincinnati his war horse which rests on on a 22½-foot high marble pedestal.  These dimensions are in  James M. Goode's The Outdoor Sculpture of Washington, D.C.: A Comprehensive Historical Guide [1974] as cited in the online encyclopedia  entry for the U.S. Grant Memorial.

News---GNMP Licensed Battlefield Guides' Test To Be Updated by Late 2015 During GLBG Association's 100th Year; No Test in 2014

Jarrad Hedes of The Gettysburg Times newspaper reports that GNMP [Gettysburg National Military Park] superintendent  Ed Clark will review and update within the next year and a half the testing process for prospective Gettysburg Licensed Battlefield Guides [GLBG]. "What we want to do is come up with a way to give guides a greater understanding of the testing process and procedure.  The exams need to be difficult and challenging, but efforts need to be made to greater prepare applicants to take the test," said Clark as  reported by Hedes.

The 2012 exam was taken by 149 applicants and 20 moved on to a preparatory seminar held in early 2014. Of those 20, eight has so far taken the oral exam and three have passed.  The oral exam consists of a two hour tour for a NPS ranger and an ALBG member. Impacting content and delivery of  current tours are the means by which audience travels the battlefield.  Possibilities include automobile, horseback, horse and wagon, bicycle, and Segway. "Depending on how you take the tour, it's going to be different," said Angie Atkinson to Hedes.  Atkinson is the GNMP supervisory park ranger. Clark reported to Hedes that 12 of the 20 candidates from the most recent text still must take an oral exam; he feels the number current number of GLBGs along with the successful candidates of the 2012 test will suffice for the coming two years.

This is a summary of Jarrad Hedes'  story located on the front page of the Gettysburg Times
for April 4, 2014. 

Image Source: Civil War Librarian LLC.    The image is of GLBG Guillermo Bosch on April 5, 2014 at the 98th Pennsylvania Regiment's Monument on the north west slope of Little Round Top.

News---Postal Historian's Collection Includes Confederate POWs Letters From Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Some Captive Rebels Took A Different Trip, Len Barcousky, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, March 31, 2014.

Don't call Daniel Telep a stamp collector. Mr. Telep explained to home-schooled students gathered at North Park Baptist Church that his interest is "postal history." "I collect the entire envelope with its cancellation and, hopefully, a letter in it," he told students gathered at the church in McCandless. The envelope, the stamp, the post office cancellation mark and correspondence inside provide powerful tools to bring history alive, he said.

Mr. Telep, 70, is the owner of Crossroads Development Group, a Sewickley-based consulting firm that advises companies on "predictive business growth." He also is a director of the Sewickley Valley Historical Society and a faculty member at Grove City College. His passion since he was a boy growing up near Detroit has been collecting, displaying and selling postal memorabilia. He started collecting stamps at age 6 or 7. He was about 9 when his father, Mike Telep, bought him an envelope stamped and mailed in Middlesex, Mich., in 1876.

"I just thought this was a lovely piece of American history," he said of his first postal cover. He has since collected postal items used by businesses and individuals. Postal covers tell more complete stories than stamps alone. "The bills and letters inside -- along with the envelope information on the postal rate, the date of mailing and the location -- give you a bigger bang for your buck," he said.
He meets about four times each year with home-schooled students on their "enrichment" days, teaching them about his hobby and sharing the history behind his collections.

In the late 1970s, he assembled a collection of letters and their covers written by Van J. Sellers, a captured Confederate soldier, while he was a prisoner in Western Penitentiary. That prize-winning collection was the subject of several news stories and reports in hobbyist magazines. It has since been sold.

Mr. Telep, a Marine Corps veteran, served in Vietnam in the 1960s. His current interests include an award-winning assemblage of North Vietnamese covers from the war years in Southeast Asia.
He also has been collecting items linked to Pittsburgh's postal history. Those treasures include correspondence sent to Fort Pitt, including a letter from George Washington, during the American Revolution.

His interest in all things postal is reflected in his home office in Sewickley Heights. There, he has re-created the counter and mailboxes that would have been found in a rural post office.
Mr. Telep said he could name as many as 10 reasons for his interest in collecting postal items. "The No. 1 reason is to keep in touch with our national roots and to better understand American history," he said.

The second reason is the satisfaction of making something that is greater than the sum of its parts. "It's the passion to collect, form and shape something that never existed before," he said.
Mr. Telep and his wife, Catherine, are the parents of four adult children. None has inherited their father's collection gene, but he has hopes for his five grandchildren. "I try to send them a letter every week," he said.

Full Text Link: Pittsburgh Post Gazette March 31, 2014

Off Topic--UK Trash Collection Driver Finds 5,000 WWI Photos In The Course Of His Life Time

Dustman saves 5,000 Rare First World War photos From Rubbish Dumps, Keith Perry,  The Telegraph, March 24 2014

A former dustman has amassed one of the Britain's best collections of First World War photographs after spending decades rescuing them from rubbish tips and bins. Bob Smethurst spent 36 years working as a refuse collector and began saving the remarkable pictures during the 1970s. He believes as soldiers from the conflict grew old and passed away a lot of their remarkable pictures and memorabilia was often thrown out especially in the 1970s and 1980s. Over three decades Mr Smethurst made it his mission to try and save anything he spotted which otherwise could have been lost forever. 

Mr Smethurst, from Sussex, now has more than 5,000 photographs capturing everything from the horror of the trenches to haunting images of young friends smiling together before battle. As well as being an amazing national record of the 1914-18 conflict, his collection could also be worth thousands as just one picture can sell for as much as £30 to collectors.

Mr Smethurst, who considers himself a custodian of the collection, said the value for him was in saving something so important which could otherwise have never been seen again. "I found the majority of the photographs on the 'dust' during the 70s and 80s when those who fought in World War I were probably passing away. "Probably the boys working today will find them from World War II.
"In the early days we used to carry the bins on our shoulders. Therefore, when we emptied the bins you used to see the paperwork coming out, and the photographs.

"You didn't find them all the time because the only time you were aware of some was when they started to be mashed up.

"We had relatives that died in both the First and Second World War and of course it means something to keep these memories alive.

"There is nothing like being able to pick up and examine an object or picture, see it with your own eyes, understand how it works and was used. If everything is thrown away future generations will not be able to have this joy or knowledge.

"I've got photographs from the trenches, photographs from Commonwealth Indian regiments and pictures from the Germans.

"The German soldiers used the pictures almost like postcards, they would write their unit and even where they were and when. The British side weren't allowed to do that.

"I have not given a great deal of thought about what will happen to my collection, but I do have children and grandchildren. Not to mention several collecting friends who keep dropping hints
"The trouble is, if it is donated to a museum most things will never be seen again, just stored and forgotten and no joy to anyone."

Mr Smethurst said his collection also included memorabilia such as medals, letters and even a handkerchief with a bullet hole in it had been found in the rubbish.

He said: "I have a long photograph like the kind that would have been in a frame hanging on a wall of a complete squadron of the Royal Flying Corps - it was just lying on the landfill.

"In another there's some soldiers posing with a massive naval gun - it turned out the picture was actually taken by a photographer from near my home.

"I actually found some letters that were just with some papers in a bin. They were designs for the memorial plaques for medals killed in the war.

"Having been to auctions and postcard sales these kind of photographs used to go for 20 to 50p in the old days. Now if you have something like a picture of a tank or something else it can go for £30 each."

Mr Smethurst said the treasure of his collection was a series of photographs of the London Scottish regiment, which fought a battle at Messines in 1914. No other photos of the regiment were previously known to exist. When he discovered his first letter, Mr Smethurst said: "I looked at it, I thought it was interesting - this was the first world war. "Once I've undone it, I found out the chap was killed in action. This was his last letter. I thought well hang on a minute, you can't throw that sort of stuff away."

 Complete Text With The Photos at The Telegraph March 24 2014

News---Two Images of Lincoln's Funeral Procession In NYC Found, Maybe.

Maryland Man May Have Found Two Lost Or Forgotten Photos Of Lincoln’s Funeral Procession, Michael E. Ruane, Washington Post, March 19, 2014.

In the first photograph,the crowd outside the church seems to be waiting for something to come down the street. Children stand up front so they can see. Women, in the garb of the mid-1800s, shield themselves from the sun with umbrellas. White-gloved soldiers mill around. And a few people have climbed a tree for a better view.

In the second shot, some heads are bowed. Men have taken off their hats. And the blur of a large black object is disappearing along the street to the left of the frame. What the scene depicts, why it was photographed, or where, has been a mystery for decades, experts at the National Archives say. But a Maryland man has now offered the theory that the two photos are rare, long-forgotten images of Abraham Lincoln's   funeral procession in New York City.

 

Paul Taylor, 60, of Columbia, a retired federal government accountant, believes the scene is on Broadway, outside New York’s historic Grace Church. The day is Tuesday, April 25, 1865, 11 days after Lincoln was assassinated at Ford’s Theatre in Washington. And the crowd is waiting for, and then seems to be paying homage before, a horse-drawn hearse, whos motion makes it appear as a black blur as it passes by in the second picture.

If Taylor is right, scholars say he has identified rare photos of Lincoln’s marathon funeral rites, as well as images that show mourners honoring the slain chief executive.
Plus, it appears that the photographs were taken from an upper window of the studio of famed Civil War photographer Matthew Brady which was across the street from the church. “It’s a big deal,” said Richard Sloan, an expert on the Lincoln funeral ceremonies in New York. “What makes it even a bigger deal is to be able to study the people. Even though you can’t see faces that well, just studying the people tells a story.” Sloan added, “It’s as if you’re there, and you can see the mood.” Many people, including children, are in their Sunday best. A few look up at the camera. Flowers are in bloom. But there is no levity.

Sloan said he is convinced that the pictures show the funeral scenes: “There’s no doubt about it.”
But experts at the Archives caution that although the theory sounds good, there could be other explanations, and no way to prove it conclusively. The digital photographs were made from some of the thousands of Brady images acquired by the federal government in the 1870s and handed down to the National Archives in the 1940s, according to Nick Natanson, an archivist in the Archives’ still-picture unit. Next year is the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination. The two photos in question, both captioned “scene in front of church,” apparently had gone unnoticed for decades.
“We’ve had many inquiries about many images in the Brady file,” he said. “I can’t remember . . . any inquiries about these two particular images. I don't think I ever noticed them before.”

Full Text Continued at Washington Post March 19, 2014

New And Noteworthy--Learning From The Wounded: The Civil War And The Rise of American Medical Science

Learning From The Wounded: The Civil War And The Rise of American Medical Science, Shauna Devine, University of North Carolina Press, 384 pages, 26 illustrations, 3 tables, appendices, bibliographic notes, index, $39.95 [March 2014]

Nearly two-thirds of the Civil War's approximately 750,000 fatalities were caused by disease--a staggering fact for which the American medical profession was profoundly unprepared. In the years before the war, training for physicians in the United States was mostly unregulated, and medical schools' access to cadavers for teaching purposes was highly restricted. Shauna Devine argues that in spite of these limitations, Union army physicians rose to the challenges of the war, undertaking methods of study and experimentation that would have a lasting influence on the scientific practice of medicine.
Though the war's human toll was tragic, conducting postmortems on the dead and caring for the wounded gave physicians ample opportunity to study and develop new methods of treatment and analysis, from dissection and microscopy to new research into infectious disease processes. Examining the work of doctors who served in the Union Medical Department, Devine sheds new light on how their innovations in the midst of crisis transformed northern medical education and gave rise to the healing power of modern health science.

Shauna Devine is visiting research fellow in the department of the history of medicine at the Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry, Western University.

Early Reviews

"An important contribution to the history of medicine in the United States. Devine does a remarkable job of showing how wartime experience catalyzed and reconfigured the evolution of American medicine along scientific lines, stimulating vastly increased attention to pathological investigation, experimentation, specialization, and probing of the nature of disease. She argues convincingly that the war gave American physicians enormous opportunities to do work on native ground that only small numbers of them had previously been able to observe in European centers."

--Michael Bliss, author of William Osler: A Life in Medicine and Harvey Cushing: A Life in Surgery


"Transforming three generations of scholarship, this book changes the story of the development of the American medical profession. Rather than depending on the magisterial but opinionated Medical & Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion, Shauna Devine returns to the manuscript reports of the period and asks the simple question, What did the doctor do during the Civil War? She finds over ten thousand doctors dissecting--because they were ordered to, because the bodies were available during the war, and because the Army taught them how. Others went beyond anatomic pathology to do physiologic and clinical experiments. They all went home to shape an American medical science, preparing the social, political and scientific ground for the next generation of European apostles. This is the most exciting book in nineteenth-century American medical history in the last fifteen years."

--Dale C. Smith, Ph.D., Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences


"Learning from the Wounded is more than a path-breaking study of how the American Civil War transformed American medicine and medical research. It opens a wide window onto the individual and institutional players who shaped this transformation, giving the overall story the sustained and in-depth attention it has long deserved as part of, and not apart from, the broader history of the Civil War. With this artful and engrossing achievement, Shauna Devine makes an important contribution to the field that deserves to be read by anyone who is interested in the relationship between war and society and especially in the context of medicine and science."

--Jeffrey S. Reznick, author of Healing the Nation: Soldiers and the Culture of Caregiving in Britain during the Great War and John Galsworthy and Disabled Soldiers of the Great War: With an Illustrated Selection of his Writings

Text Source:  University of North Carolina Press

News---The Historian Who Unearthed '12 years A Slave' : The Journey Lasted 78 Years

The Historian Who Unearthed “Twelve Years a Slave”, Michael Schulman, New Yorker, March 7, 2014. 

Accepting the Oscar for Best Picture on Sunday—technically, it might have been Monday at that point—Steve McQueen took a moment to thank “this amazing historian Sue Eakin,” who “gave her life’s work to preserving Solomon’s book.” It was an unusual shout-out: we’re used to seeing Harvey Weinstein or God get thanked, not historians from Louisiana. But it’s safe to say that without Eakin, who died in 2009, at the age of ninety, none of us would be talking about Solomon Northup, or Patsey, or the other once-forgotten souls portrayed in this year’s Best Picture.

Eakin, who taught at Louisiana State University at Alexandria for twenty-five years, spent her career rescuing Northup’s memoir from obscurity. “There were five of us, and Solomon was the sixth,” Eakin’s son Frank said the other day, from his home in Texas. “There was never a time when he was not part of the conversation.” Eakin grew up near Cheneyville, Louisiana, the eldest of nine children, and discovered Northup when she was twelve.

One summer day in 1931, her father, a planter, drove her in a flatbed truck to the nearby town of Bunkie, not far from the property once owned by Edwin Epps (the Michael Fassbender character). They were visiting Oak Hall Plantation, where her father had business with the owner, Sam Haas. Haas brought young Sue to the library on the second floor (“My mom was a big-time bookworm,” Frank says), where he handed her a dusty copy of “Twelve Years a Slave,” first published in 1853.

“I began reading the old book as rapidly as I could, becoming more and more excited with every page,” Eakin wrote later. “I recognized local place names like Cheneyville, where our mail was delivered.” The family names were familiar, too: the Tanners, the Fords, the McCoys. Eakin was rapt, but her father picked her up before she could finish reading. Back then, the book was in scant supply. Eakin didn’t find another copy until 1936, when she arrived at Louisiana State University and spotted the book at Otto Claitor’s Bookstore. She asked Mr. Claitor how much it cost. “What do you want that for?” he said. “There ain’t nothin’ to that old book. Pure fiction.” He sold it to her for twenty-five cents.

Eakin devoted the rest of her life to proving him wrong. As a white woman growing up in Jim Crow-era Louisiana, she had been forward-thinking about race. In 1944, she invited a black choir to sing at the Haas Auditorium, in Bunkie, causing community uproar. A burning cross landed on her front yard. After church one Sunday, she discovered some kids trying to set her house on fire. “I never let it worry me,” she later recalled. But her weapon of choice was history, and Solomon became her obsession. (Her many other books include histories of Cheneyville and Rapides Parish.) She wrote her master’s thesis on “Twelve Years a Slave,” and, in 1968, published the first modern edition. But her research continued. She contacted descendants of Northup and Epps, and helped preserve a side house on Epps’s former property. (In the movie, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Brad Pitt are shown building it.)

With state funding, she developed the Northup Trail, a tour of key locations from the book. “I said, ‘Mom, I know how much this means to you.’ But I didn’t want her expectations to be unmet,” Frank said. “All you had was a bunch of rusty signs. Not many people showed up.” Nevertheless, Eakin believed that someday Northup’s story would get its due. Frank recalled going to courthouses and descendants’ houses as a child. “If she had any news of anybody that could contribute, we were off to the races in the car with the fifty-pound tape recorder and an old camera,” he said. In 1983, she even wrote a musical based on Northup’s life.

Eakin spent her last years working on an expanded edition of “Twelve Years a Slave,” including the decades of research she had accumulated since 1968. But her health began to decline, and her eyesight was poor. Frank’s sister helped her edit the new version, and, in 2007, at the age of eighty-eight, Eakin published the enhanced edition, with maps, pictures, and historical notes. She wrote in the acknowledgments, “Now Solomon and I can rest.” Two years later, she died.

Every couple years, Eakin would get a phone call from someone interested in turning “Twelve Years a Slave” into a movie. Nothing came of it. (Besides, the story was in the public domain.) The year she died, there was another call—Frank spoke to someone and shrugged it off. It wasn’t until 2011, two years after his mother’s death, that Frank heard that Brad Pitt’s production company, Plan B, was making the film. He offered to help however he could. Steve McQueen flew Frank to the Hollywood première, where they discussed his mother’s contribution: “Steve said, ‘There wouldn’t be a movie if it wasn’t for your mom’s discovery when she was twelve.’ ”

Frank spent Oscar night at a viewing party in Texas. “When Brad Pitt introduced Steve, everything was complete silence,” he said. Hearing his mother’s name, he was dumbstruck. “I couldn’t believe my ears. I looked around and said, ‘Did did he say that?’ ” As the publisher of his mother’s edition and the audiobook, Frank has been busy in the wake of the film’s success. But mostly he’s happy to see his mother posthumously validated: “She never sought personal publicity. Her passion was history, getting the history out.” Even the Northup Trail is getting refurbished—no more rusty signs. “Yesterday, I was on the phone with the tourism commission,” Frank said. “They see this as a large tourism opportunity.”

Full Text and Image Source:  New Yorker, March 4, 2014

News---Most of Gettysburg's Wax Museum Contents Goes On The Auction Block

The American Civil War Wax Museum is selling the contents of the building on Saturday March 15. The auction is located at the building which is being renovated. The museum will re-open with a focus upon Adams County civilians during the Gettysburg campaign, and the Underground Railroad. The location of the building is upon the land of the northern most portion of the July 3rd Grand Assault, also known as Longstreet's Attack and Pickett's Charge.  The small theater which contains the Pickett's Charge exhibit will remain.  For sale are wax and vinyl figures, the scenery within the small exhibits, oil portraits, tapestries, furniture, books, tinware, uniforms, and weapons.

The business will reopen  in 2014 as the Gettysburg Heritage Center. The American Civil War Wax Museum company estimates that since its 1962 opening 9 million people have walked through the displays. The sale preview dates are Wednesday March 12, 12 noon to 5:00p, Thursday March 13, 4:00 to 8:00; Friday March 14 12 noon to 5:00p


Here is the link to the auction's contents:  Public Auction, National Civil War Wax Museum

Image Source:  Exhibit of Brook's Assault on Sumner

Forthcoming--Was The American Civil War A Living Hell?

Living Hell: The Dark Side of the Civil War, Michael C. C. Adams, Johns Hopkins University Press, 304 pp., 2014.


Many Americans, argues Michael C. C. Adams, tend to think of the Civil War as more glorious, less awful, than the reality. Millions of tourists flock to battlefields each year as vacation destinations, their perceptions of the war often shaped by reenactors who work hard for verisimilitude but who cannot ultimately simulate mutilation, madness, chronic disease, advanced physical decay. In Living Hell, Adams tries a different tack, clustering the voices of myriad actual participants on the firing line or in the hospital ward to create a virtual historical reenactment.

Perhaps because the United States has not seen conventional war on its own soil since 1865, the collective memory of its horror has faded, so that we have sanitized and romanticized even the experience of the Civil War. Neither film nor reenactment can fully capture the hard truth of the four-year conflict. Living Hell presents a stark portrait of the human costs of the Civil War and gives readers a more accurate appreciation of its profound and lasting consequences.

Adams examines the sharp contrast between the expectations of recruits versus the realities of communal living, the enormous problems of dirt and exposure, poor diet, malnutrition, and disease. He describes the slaughter produced by close-order combat, the difficulties of cleaning up the battlefields—where tens of thousands of dead and wounded often lay in an area of only a few square miles—and the resulting psychological damage survivors experienced.

Drawing extensively on letters and memoirs of individual soldiers, Adams assembles vivid accounts of the distress Confederate and Union soldiers faced daily: sickness, exhaustion, hunger, devastating injuries, and makeshift hospitals where saws were often the medical instrument of choice.

Inverting Robert E. Lee's famous line about war, Adams suggests that too many Americans become fond of war out of ignorance of its terrors. Providing a powerful counterpoint to Civil War glorification, Living Hell echoes William Tecumseh Sherman's comment that war is cruelty and cannot be refined.

Praise for Our Masters the Rebels: A Speculation on Union Military Failure in the East, 1861–1865

"This excellent and provocative work concludes with a chapter suggesting how the image of Southern military superiority endured in spite of defeat."—Civil War History
"Adams's imaginative connections between culture and combat provide a forceful reminder that Civil War military history belongs not in an encapsulated realm, with its own categories and arcane language, but at the center of the study of the intellectual, social, and psychological currents that prevailed in the mid-nineteenth century."—Journal of American History

"We often wrap the American Civil War in a romantic veneer. In Living Hell, Michael C. C. Adams strips away the facade to provide a necessary and compelling dose of reality about the war as it was seen and experienced by those who lived it. This is not another story of battles and campaigns. It is instead a broad tapestry that takes the reader to many dark corners of the war which are often left unconsidered."—D. Scott Hartwig, author of To Antietam Creek: The Maryland Campaign of 1862

"Michael C. C. Adams sees the Civil War for what it was, and not how we like to imagine it.... Living Hell brilliantly recovers the terrified voices of men who were emotionally torn and twisted by combat. This is a compelling and important book that forces us to think deeply about how we "celebrate' the heroism of Billy Yank and Johnny Reb."—Peter S. Carmichael, Fluhrer Professor of Civil War Studies, Gettysburg College

Michael C. C. Adams, Regents Professor of History Emeritus, Northern Kentucky University, is author of The Best War Ever: America and World War II, published by Johns Hopkins, and Our Masters the Rebels: A Speculation on Union Military Failure in the East, 1861–1865, winner of the Jefferson Davis Prize for the best Civil War book, awarded by the Museum of the Confederacy.

Text Source: Johns Hopkins Press

New And Noteworthy: Appomattox--A Defeat? A Victory? The End of The War?

Appomattox: Victory,  Defeat, and Freedom At The End Of The Civil War, Elizabeth R. Varon, Oxford University Press, 2014, 305 pp., 1 map, 33 b/w illustrations,  end notes, index, $27.95.

Francis August Schaeffer, a 20^th century American theologian, philosopher, and pastor, held to a  particular approach to answering the questions of the age.  His illustration of ‘the universe viewed from two chairs’ promoted the examination of worldviews.  Appomattox: Victory, Defeat, and Freedom At The End Of The Civil War, offers a discussion of two worldviews; one typified by Robert E. Lee and one typified by Ulysses S. Grant. 

In popular culture, ‘The Brothers War’ comes to an end at Appomattox Courthouse, April 9, 1865.  The very dignified Robert E. Lee surrenders to the very muddy Ulysses S. Grant.  Lee is accompanied by one other staff officer; Grant brings about a half dozen generals and their staffs.  At the surrender ceremony Lee, like during the war, is vastly outnumbered. Varon’s work views the surrender ceremony  from two chairs: Lee’s and Grant’s personal interpretation of the surrender. 

For Varon, Grant’s terms for surrender created one spirit of Appomattox; Lee’s interpretation of the terms created another spirit of Appomattox.  Grant’s view understood the surrender as offering reconciliation; Lee’s view understood the surrender to recognize that he was overwhelmed by numbers but unbowed.  Lee felt Grant understood this.  Grant’s terms were not his usual unconditional surrender terms; Lee’s soldiers left the surrender site with some of their arms, their horses and food in their stomachs.  

Grant’s and Lee’s understandings are contested by Andrew Johnson, northern Peace Democrats and Copperheads, moderate Republicans and radical Republicans, the war’s white and black veterans.  Should Reconstruction become the war waged by non-military means and achieve a racial reformation of the South?  Varon states and supports the argument that war left most questions set forth in 1860 unanswered and created new problems.  The author is explicit in stating that the political problems of 1860 were not solved upon the surrender of the Confederate armies. 

Both Lee and Grant believed they transcended politics on April 9, 1865. For northern soldiers and politicians, individual courage and God’s cause of justice won the war.  For southern soldiers and politicians, individual courage and the rightness of their cause was not enough to fend off the immigrant hordes in the Federal army which supplied by the North’s vast agriculture to deliver food and industry’s capacity to deliver armaments.  

The familiar story of Appomattox is opened up by Varon and in it she sees a variety of interpretations which the participants held.  The author offers both an event based and a worldview based telling of the surrender and its immediate implications.  Confederate, Federal, and African-American veterans, civilians, and politicians on both sides are well described in their own words.  Using a narrative style that is accessible to most readers, Varon presents both worldviews with sharp details.  Appomattox: Victory, Defeat, and Freedom At The End Of The Civil War is superb.

Historian Sue Eakin Thanked By 12 Years A Slave Director

Sue Eakin Thanked Onstage At Oscars For Work Verifying Story Of ‘12 Years A Slave’, Kyle Peveto, The Advocate, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, March 5, 2014.

A Louisiana historian who dedicated decades to researching the 1853 book “Twelve Years a Slave” received international attention Sunday when the film based on the book won the Academy Award for best picture.

During his acceptance speech, the film’s director thanked Sue Eakin, a Rapides Parish native and historian whose research for the 1968 LSU Press edition of the book helped prove the veracity of the story of Solomon Northup, a free man who was kidnapped and sold into slavery. “I’d like to thank this amazing historian, Sue Eakin, whose life, she gave her life’s work to preserving Solomon’s book,” director Steve McQueen said while accepting the Oscar.

“Twelve Years a Slave” tells the firsthand account of Northup, who was kidnapped, enslaved at plantations in central Louisiana and freed to return to his family. Eakin was 12 when she read an original edition of the book in the early 1930s. She found her own copy at a Baton Rouge bookstore when she entered LSU in 1936, according to an essay she wrote later in life, and dedicated her graduate studies in history at LSU and at the University of Southwestern Louisiana (now University of Louisiana at Lafayette) to researching the book. She died at 90 in 2009.

“I think it’s vital that everyone understands it’s a true story and there’s a lady from Louisiana who spent her lifetime dedicated to authenticating it,” said her son, Frank Eakin, of The Woodlands, Texas, who broke into tears when McQueen mentioned his mother from the stage.
“The very last thing I expected was that recognition,” he said. When the book was published in the 1850s, it became a popular best-seller, said Raphael Cassimere Jr., a retired professor at the University of New Orleans. “Timing was bad, because even though it sold 30,000 copies, which was a lot for a book, it came out a year after ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ and it kind of was forgotten for some time, except by local people,” Cassimere The Advocate in October.

Some locals regarded Northup’s book as fiction when Sue Eakin first read the memoir.
Sue Eakin, who commuted to Baton Rouge from her home in Bunkie to complete her master’s degree in the 1950s and 1960s, researched the people and places mentioned in Northup’s memoir of enslavement at plantation in the Bayou Boeuf area. In the 1960s, she began working with Joseph Logsdon, a professor at LSU-New Orleans, now the University of New Orleans, to create a scholarly edition of the book.

Sue Eakin investigated all the Louisiana people and places mentioned in the work, while Logsdon focused on researching Northup’s home in Saratoga, N.Y., and other places of interest in the north. Their 1968 annotated edition reintroduced Northup’s story to college students across the country, who read it in history classes. “If that hadn’t happened, then none of the other things could have happened,” said MaryKatherine Callaway, director of LSU Press. “It took their work first to begin this whole journey toward this film.”

Filmed at south Louisiana plantations and in New Orleans, “12 Years a Slave” earned $50 million worldwide and won three awards Sunday. Lupita Nyong’o won best supporting actress for her role as Patsey. Screenwriter John Ridley, who said in media interviews he leaned heavily upon the LSU Press edition of the book, won best adapted screenplay.

Logsdon and Eakin continued researching Northup’s story after their 1968 edition rescued the book from obscurity. When Logsdon died at 61 in 1999, he was planning a trip to New York to investigate Northup’s mysterious disappearance, Cassimere said in October. Descendants of the slave owners and other characters in the book approached her with archives of family history while she taught history at LSU at Alexandria, Frank Eakin said. Sue Eakin published her final annotated version of “Twelve Years a Slave” in 2007 when she was 88.

Text Source:  The Advocate, March 5, 2012
Image Source: Barnes and Noble.com