Martin L. Stoever: Moving His Abolition Needle

Two letters appeared in the Lutheran and Missionary in the late summer of 1864 signed, "M.L.S."

The summer session had ended at Pennsylvania College. The campus was quiet, the classrooms were empty. For professors at the college, the brief breaks between semesters were a much-needed respite from the daily grind of professorial life. Any sane professor would use the few brief moments to unwind.

But for Martin Luther Stoever, who had begun the war as a simple professor of Latin, Literature and History, too much had gone by to sit idle. Witnessing the work of the United States Christian Commission in the month after the battle of Gettysburg, operating out of the vacant store on the first floor of his home, Stoever saw firsthand how Christian precepts might ease the pain of the suffering soldier. By 1864, Stoever was heading up Gettysburg's new local chapter of the Christian Commission, organizing supplies and coordinating donations.

But in the summer of 1864, he might have done more.

During Pennsylvania College's break that summer, an aid worked arrived on the outskirts of Petersburg, Virginia. "You will no doubt be surprised to receive a letter from me at this point," the correspondent opened. "I have been here for some days, among the wounded and the dying."

Martin Luther Stoever had seen suffering on a battlefield before. In the months after the battle at Gettysburg, Stoever moved from field hospital to field hospital, aiding the wounded and praying with the dying.

The letter in the Lutheran and Missionary noted all of the valorous shows of courage by the Federal soldiers as they suffered after the assault on the Weldon Railroad. TIn their sufferings, these men were, "showing the spirit of our noble soldiers who are willing to endure so much for the cause of freedom. It is a costly sacrifice. Many victims are required to secure the end. But it is only through tribulation, that great results are achieved."

Before the war, Martin Luther Stoever made a last ditch effort (as did many Americans) to stave off war. He signed a set of petitions from citizens of Adams County supporting compensated emancipation and forced colonization. America's sundry colonization societies were the most lackluster of abolitionist, believing that black shouldn't be slaves, but also shouldn't be Americans.

But something shifted for Stoever as the war dragged on.

In 1864, the correspondent to the Lutheran and Missionary noted he was, "very much interested in what I saw of our colored troops. They are noble, brave men, their hearts earnestly in the work, and many of them sincere Christians." One he met was from nearby Hagerstown, Maryland and knew some of the author's friends. When questioned whether he was afraid of battle, the black soldier responded resolutely, "No! God will take care of me. When I started in defence of my country I determined to stand by her till I died."

"This," M.L.S. noted, "is the spirit which I have seen exhibited by many of these men. God, in his wondrous providence, is doing marvellous things by means of this war... One of the results will be the elevation of the African race, in the confidence it has isnpired in themselves, in making them, as well as others, feel that they have capacities, that they are immortal beings, that they can accomplish something for the good of their fellowmen."

The following year, when Abraham Lincoln was murdered by a bloodthirsty zealot, Professor Stoever confessed in a eulogy to Lincoln that, "we must now admit, even if we did not before, that there is a barbarism in slavery."

Slavery, made incarnate in the rebellious Southern nation, had, "showed its real character in the various atrocities committed during the war, in the heartless treatment of our prisoners, in the brutal massacre of our colored troops, in plotting arson, in attempting to diffuse malignant disease, in commissioning its secret emissaries to burn and pillage our large towns and cities, in striking at every thing that opposed its progress and perpetuity, and crowned its wicked career in the perpetration of a crime unknown in our history," the murder of the President.

Stoever was quite clear on how America could best remember their fallen chieftan:

It is a duty, then, we owe to the memory of the illustrious dead, that this evil be utterly eradicated, that the letter and spirit of the Emancipation Proclamation, be fully acknowledged and faithfully executed; that domestic slavery be forever obliterated from American soil, that the great principles which underlie our Government be vigilantly guarded, that hereafter all, who live beneath the folds of the American flag, be protected in their inalienable rights and treated as freemen, and every human being occupy the position assigned him by his Creator."

Something made that historian's mind shift and change, morph and progress. Perhaps that something was a trip south in 1864, and an opportunity to see black men fighting valiantly for their nation, and kindly shake their hands.

Things Never Change: Piecing Together College Life

Sometimes you stumble on something on eBay you just can't pass up. It's that $6 buy that is awkward, odd and just a little out of your scope. But it's only $6. If you'd buy a burger for $6, you shouldn't pass up an original letter from 1835.

Every letter has a story. And each of those stories has its own drama, its own meaning, its own power. The mundanities of human life can be just as powerful as the battles and charges.

In the waning days of August 1835, George Heilig set pen to paper to send a message off to his brother William. His motives were two-fold. His pastoral duty called him to let a local Gettysburgian, a man named Buehler, know that his sister-in-law was in dire straights near Norristown. A widow and her two children suffered in destitution without their husband and father. But George wasn't quite sure how to contact Buelher. "I could not for certain tell," George wrote to his brother William, "whether he was a black smith, or Dr. or Bookseller or what." William's task was simple: "see to it that he may get the letter in calling upon him & asking him whether he has rec'd an epistle from me."

But George seems to be practicing pretense; he didn't mince words to his beloved brother William. "Why don't you write to us," George pleaded to William, "as an affectionate brother who has more time to engauge in such matter than we."

William Heilig was away at college in Gettysburg, studying at the newly minted Pennsylvania College. His school wasn't north of town; it sat smack dab in Gettysburg's bustling streets at the corner of Middle and High streets. Pennsylvania Hall and the sprawling campus where decades later soldiers would suffer were all just a pipe dream of delusional Lutheran church fathers.

And like every young man far away from home, he forgot to write. "I have been looking for a letter long since but in vain," George told his brother. And news from Gettysburg back toward Philadelphia's outskirts was important to George, pastor of a congregation in Centre Square. "I'm always pleased to receive some intelligence from your place since it is the head quarters of our Lutheran Zion."

That Gettysburg was someone's Zion long before a battle was fought here is hard to imagine. Pilgrims make annual hajjes to the sacred shrines scattered across the town's fields like lost words. They genuflect at altars and offer supplication to violent and, perhaps, Christ-like sacrifices.

Before the Lutheran Theological Seminary and Lutheran College were hospitals and charnel houses, they were the heart and soul of the Lutheran church in America.

Before the violence, before the blood, before the Civil War Zion, there was the Lutheran Zion.

George Heilig walked to the post office to mail his brother the letter. He entered and paid the 12 1/2 cents to mail his letter. The clerk mentioned he had a letter for Heilig, perhaps he said it as he neatly penned the postage rate in the letter's corner. The pastor tore open his own letter, one from Mr. Buehler in Gettysburg. Enclosed was cash for the widow and her orphan children.

His pretense foiled, George asked for his letter back. He ripped open the wax seal and grabbed a pen, scribbling hurriedly. He explained that the letter was unnecessary, that the Buehler's were sound. William needn't bother the blacksmith or doctor or bookseller but to give him the family's thanks.

Then George Heilig carefully resealed the meaningless letter to his brother William and handed it back to the clerk. It traveled the long road to Gettysburg.

Perhaps George never cared about the Buehlers at all. Perhaps news from Lutheran Zion didn't matter. Perhaps he only longed to hear from William.

Perhaps we all have Williams who we long to hear from.

Hopkins and Anthony: A Struggle Over Freedom

This piece is the original draft of a piece I wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer, which appeared last week as part of the paper's Gettysburg sesquicentennial coverage. Here's the full, uncut piece for your perusal:

Standing in the pleasant countryside of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania in the early summer of 1863, it might not have hit you just how quickly the world was changing. That blissful ignorance might have been doubly powerful if you were a young white man, as were the students of Pennsylvania College.

For decades before the Civil War, students from Pennsylvania had mingled with students from Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and other southern states at Gettysburg’s local college. In classrooms and laboratories, sons of slave-owners studied right alongside the native sons of the Commonwealth, cradle of liberty and birthplace of Independence. The fact that many of those students from Virginia and Maryland were now gone, their educational endeavors the cruel victims of a terrifying war, was one bruise among many which Pennsylvania College bore because of its close relationship with slavery.

Gettysburg’s carriage industry drove the ties to the South’s peculiar institution. Fine carriages made in local workshops rolled south into the palatial stables of wealthy planters in the Old Dominion and further south. In turn, the South sent her sons and tuition dollars northward for a fine Lutheran education.

As the nation seemed to shudder and crack in 1860, during the tumultuous election that would see Lincoln ushered into the White House and South Carolina and her friends ushered out of the United States, North Carolinian William D. Anthony sat at his desk in Pennsylvania College studying Latin, Greek and analytical geometry. America was fracturing over the question of slavery as he sat in Gettysburg alongside classmates from Pennsylvania, Maryland and the capitol at Washington City.

Back in North Carolina, John B. Anthony, the toiling student’s father, preached the gospel of love in a Lutheran Church outside of Charlotte. At home, he had a wife and five other children. He also owned one human being who worked around the family's home: a 45-year-old black woman.

In the College Edifice in Gettysburg, William Anthony could have glanced out the window and seen John "Jack" Hopkins working in the grove of trees surrounding the school’s buildings. Hopkins, the college’s janitor, and his family lived in a small home on the north edge of the campus. Whether Anthony paid heed to Hopkins, noticed the man at all, is unknown. But in just a few years Hopkins and Anthony would be set at odds, opposite ends of a convoluted and dangerous spectrum.

The college has a yearbook from the 1860s in its historical collection, still available to view, touch and leaf through in the library’s special collections department. Underneath Jack Hopkins’ picture is the smiling hand-written notation, “Our Vice-President.” A joke to us because the janitor of a college almost certainly could never become this college’s vice-president.; a joke in the 1860s because an African American almost certainly could never become any college’s vice-president.

Who exactly wrote the joke, be they southern son or local Pennsylvanian, is not exactly clear. But that joke would shortly be upended. War was coming and the gears of a mighty machine of progress would be set in motion that would mean men with skin the hue of Hopkins’ could be the leaders of colleges, businesses and even the United States itself.

And the war came. William Anthony returned home to the south.

When Confederates invaded Pennsylvania in June of 1863, Anthony came along with them. He was astride a horse, the bright yellow chevrons of an Ordnance Sergeant on his shoulder. In charge of dolling out weaponry and ammunition to the soldiers in his regiment, William D. Anthony rode back into the Keystone state along with the 1st North Carolina Cavalry.

As the horses and wagons of the Confederate Army poured over the border into Pennsylvania, Gettysburg saw an exodus. Hundreds of black citizens from the town and surrounding countryside disappeared. They ran for their lives. The oncoming Confederate tide meant capture and slavery, it meant never seeing home or family or friends again. It meant torment and maybe death at the hands of the South’s Peculiar Institution.

“Among the most forlorn and pitiable of the victims of the recent invasion,” a Lutheran newspaper in Philadelphia reported, “were many of the colored people, who fled from our border towns and took refuge in our city.”

Somewhere in the forlorn and pitiable throng escaping Gettysburg and running for safety to the north or east were Jack Hopkins and his family. The janitor was perhaps one of the wealthiest black men in the entire town. But his prestige could not save him from the oncoming tide of rebel troops. His skin color was a giant target drawn on his freedom. So he ran.

Both Anthony and Hopkins would survive the invasion unscathed. Anthony survived the campaign, fighting on July 2nd at the Battle of Hunterstown only five miles from the desk where he had studied Greek and plane trigonometry a few years before. The 1st North Carolina Cavalry limped back to Virginia along with the rest of Robert E. Lee’s battered army.

Jack Hopkins and his family returned home after the rebel tide subsided to find their home on the college’s campus in shambles, but their lives together in freedom safe and intact.

And as the smoke drifted away from the battlefield at Gettysburg, America continued changing. The machinery of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation ground slowly, deliberately away against the institution of slavery. A war to save the nation, “a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” as Lincoln would phrase it that fall, was welded onto a war to destroy slavery once and for all.

And even viewed from the now blood-soaked fields of Gettysburg, that war was obviously changing. Jack Hopkins’ son Edward would join the United States Colored Troops that winter, heading south to fight the army that had invaded his hometown and threatened his family’s freedom. And America took one more tenuous step forward on the long road toward equality.

The Semester Ends, The Semester Begins

It's finals week at Gettysburg College, but in another time, it was just the beginning of the
oddest session of college just over 100 students would ever experience.  Some would join
the 26th PEMR, some would run home from the oncoming rebel hordes, and others would
remain in Gettysburg, sitting in the cross-hairs of the war as the slowly rested on
Adams County.

Virtual Sesquicentennial: #Invasion63 Goes Live

I teased this project a short while ago, and now that May has arrived history has begun coming back to life. Over the next three months, the men and women who walked Gettysburg's streets and crossed the Pennsylvania College campus will reenact their lives in the last few moments before Gettysburg changed irrevocably. As May creeps along, more characters will rise from the grave and begin reliving the past.

But this reenactment isn't about goofy clothes. It's not about marching around and pretending to shoot at one another in a grotesque weekend fantasy. It's not about action at all.

This reenactment is all about thought, particularly the thoughts of men and women 150 years ago. What was their life? What did they experience? And how would they have shared that had an iPhone been in their hands in 1863?

This is a virtual reenactment of Pennsylvania College's battle.

And it all began when Adams Sentinel editor Robert Harper joined Twitter 150 years too late:

@AdamsSentinel kicked things off with a few headlines.
Then Lieut. James F. Crocker of the 9th Virginia Infantry came back to life to celebrate Robert E. Lee's victory at Chancellorsville. And then he and the 9th Virginia began a march northward from Suffolk to join Lee in #Invasion63.

@real_JCrocker jumped on celebrating Lee's victory at Chancellorsville.
As the month goes on, professors will complain about too many faculty meetings, students will look forward to their graduation in August and one Gettysburg citizen will tag along as Pennsylvania College's students march off to war. Classes in the summer session of 1863 begin next week. Stay tuned to Twitter, both via the hashtag #Invasion63 and the master list of #Invasion63 accounts hosted by Pennsylvania College's official Twitter account.

Tweet along with history.

Because the past will haunt your keyboard this summer, but only if you let it.

Pennsylvania at Chancellorsville, But Headed Back Home

With the anniversary of the battles around Fredericksburg this week, the Civil War world's eyes seem to be turned toward Chancellorsville and the battles there. Almost as a reflex, my mind has gone there too. I've been thinking about Simon Stein Wolf, the Gettysburgian who faced death at Chancellorsville only to find it terribly displayed in the days after. So today another excerpt from my manuscript, to start re-conceptualizing Chancellorsville through the eyes of a Pennsylvania College dropout:

Far to the south of Gettysburg, in the tight thicket of trees and underbrush outside of Fredericksburg, Virginia, First Lieutenant Simon Stein Wolf, his younger brother Private Henry Wolf and the rest of Company A of the 148th Pennsylvania Infantry faced a maelstrom. Surrounded by enemy firing, with smoke billowing from every direction, the regiment fell back across a field north of Chancellorsville, rebels hot on their heels.

Dulce et Decorum? / PD LOC

The 23-year-old Simon Stein Wolf had spent a year at Pennsylvania College in 1860 as a sophomore, studying Cicero and Plato, Conic Sections and Analytical Geometry. But college life had not fit him, and he returned home to Rebersburg toting his books in his hands. Among them was an autograph book, packed with the signatures of the friends he made in that one short year of life in Gettysburg. In the book’s pages Professor Charles F. Schaeffer transcribed a passage from 2nd Timothy in German, which Wolf could have easily picked his way through hailing from deeply Deutsch Centre County. For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus; the professor wrote, Who gave himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time. Sacrifice and the potential for sacrifice was on the lips and minds of everyone in Gettysburg that spring. Fellow student Joseph Potts Blymyer of the class of 1863 penned a simple Latin phrase from Horace’s Odes, a key text for the Sophomore class, “dulce et decorum est propatria mori.” Death for country would soon leave the realm of the poetic and drift into the real world.

The bawdiest of all of the small inscriptions in Wolf’s cherished book was left by Thomas Duncan Renfrew, graduating senior in the class of 1861 from nearby Fayetteville. Quoting a stanza from Sir Walter Scott’s epic poem The Lady of the Lake, Renfrew mused that although, “Our vicar he calls it damnation to sip / The ripe ruddy dew of a woman's dear lip,” that his friend should, “whoop, Jack! kiss Gillian the quicker, / Till she bloom like a rose, and a fig for the vicar!” The passage, a licentious and devilish song, is piped in Scott’s poem by a soldier.

Both Renfrew and Wolf would soon find themselves standing in Scott’s fictitious soldiers’ all-too-real shoes. Each of the young men joined the fight against the rebellion in the fall of 1862. The following May, the two Gettysburgians were desperately fighting at Chancellorsville as Federal forces streamed back toward United States Ford in front of Robert E. Lee’s dominating army. The Army of the Potomac has been crushed and bloodied. Lee took the opportunity to invade Lincoln’s union.

As the smoke of battle subsided and May crept toward June, each man would return to his native Pennsylvania. Thomas Renfrew and the rest of the 126th Pennsylvania Infantry were mustered out of service by the end of the month. The young man went home and became a teacher in Fayetteville. Simon Wolf’s war would continue through the summer, but his younger brothers’ would not. Henry Wolf died on the 28th of May, 1863. Simon accompanied the lifeless body of his brother home to Centre County, but quickly returned to his unit as Lee’s army began moving northward into Maryland and Pennsylvania. War, it seemed, was coming home, both in the guise of painful pine boxes and in living, breathing Confederate armies.

Big Interp: Processing Massive Meaning

The past uses the future
to see the past.

There's been this term bandied about in the historical circles I've been running in of late: Big Data. As far as I've gathered, it's the byproduct of our information age, when more and more data gets fed into more and more machines and is accessible at the fingertips of more and more inquiring minds.

But I'm not a new social historian. I tend to aim for the micro-historical, not the grand and sweeping systematic conclusions. It means that much of what I produce is ignorant of this new boon for the historical profession. I make, as Brian Jordan lovingly put it once, "brick-in-the-wall histories." My work is the basis upon which, when joined with that of hundreds of my comrades, helps folks like the soon-to-be Dr. Jordan make broad structured conclusions.

I actually love that role. It means that what I do has deeper impact, but that I don't need to fuss with those broader conclusions quite as much.

But the follow on from my role as a brickmaker is that I understand the value of big data, I just can't understand the mechanics of big data.

But I am starting to imagine the scale of Big Data through Big Interp. What does an interpretive project look like when it grows into a massive, sprawling beast? I've been working on one of those projects for nearly a year and a half now. Imagine trying to figure out the inner workings of dozens of peoples' everyday lives 150 years ago, their comings and goings, their ideas, thoughts and beliefs, their fears and thoughts. It's impossible, but not. Tracing people on a landscape becomes far easier than you might think, trust me.

So the project is starting to coalesce. Big Interp, what it means to craft a highly complex web of meaning, which virtual visitors can "pluck" from any individual thread and see the reverberations, just might happen. If all goes well, you'll want to make sure you have a Twitter account by early May. You'll want to make sure you're ready to watch history unfold. You'll, hopefully, be able to relive the Gettysburg #invasion63 through a few curious observers' eyes.

On the Battleground at Gettysburg: A Journey to Remember

I was very pleased to be one of the two speakers at Sunday night's inaugural "Journey to Remember" event sponsored by Gettysburg College. A group of students and community members trekked up the hill from the campus, resting on Oak Hill at the base of the Eternal Light Peace Memorial to hear myself and Janet Riggs, the college's President and a fellow alum. The student organizers asked me to place that place into historical context.

So I did. In about 10 minutes, I tried to bring that ground back to life with the fascinating tales of when students acted.

Rather than let the words die in the aether, I wanted to preserve them. So I share them with you, many of you who couldn't make it out to Oak Hill on Sunday night for the paramount event of the final event of Founder's Day weekend. Maybe they'll help bring that place to life in a new way for you too.

Pennsylvania College: Imperfect Peace

In the early fall months of 1925, planning was underway in houses all across the town. A celebration was in the works. Gettysburg’s Jewish community was readying to celebrate the high holy days. Rosh Hashanah is a time of celebration, a time to blow the shofar and gather with family for a meal of sweet apples and honey.

Others in Gettysburg were planning for another gathering on the weekend of September 18th, 19th and 20th. Bunting was being hung, flags were being put outside of homes and shops. The town was infested with a carnival atmosphere, welcoming guests from across the state.

Rosh Hashanah weekend aligned with the Pennsylvania Ku Klux Klan Reunion in Gettysburg. Friday night, as Jewish shop owners locked up their stores and turned to go home to their families to celebrate the happiest of New Year’s, Model-T Fords streamed through the streets of town, white hoods peaking from their convertible tops, paint on the sides reading “Klan to Gettysburg.”

They gathered right here, in these open fields where just over 60 years before Confederates had made charge after charge forward to strike a blow for a new nation, a revolution to protect white supremacy. Now the Klan was gathering once again, trying again to strike a blow for white supremacy. This time, though, they had a parade instead of a battle.

Through the streets of town, the men in hoods marched. Some of them were dressed as colonial soldiers, carrying signs reading “Spirit of 1776.” Others were dressed like soldiers from World War I, less than a decade past. Another group carried, taught across the street, an American flag. And the people on the sidelines, the spectators and townsfolk and visitors, dug deep into their pockets for dollar coins and tossed them in the air to be caught in this American flag.

One group in town saw this for what it was: travesty. The students of Gettysburg College. The students of Gettysburg College saw the Klan’s actions for what they were. The students saw the Klan as the antithesis of America, the antithesis of what these very fields they stood on mean.

You can read The Blister thanks to
Gettysburg College's GettDigital project
preserving campus (and other) history.

While the Gettysburg Times published a special Ku Klux Klan edition, some students of the college used their own publication, The Blister, to speak out against the fraternal order. “Unless cultural educative processes are set in motion concerning the work, make-up, practices and theory of the hooded order, itself repugnant to the idea of Democracy, America will suffer,” the students announced. “Anyone having the least spirit of America,” the students chided, “anyone who reveres the grave of the ‘Unknown Soldier’ who represents the ‘full measure of devotion’ for the national emblem, anyone who can stand by the avenue of Klan parades and watch docilely the stars and stripes used as a promiscuous coffer to catch coins… and can remain unmoved belongs to a land where national respect and self-respect are a grotesque hallucination.”

That, “full measure of devotion,” that the students spoke of, that sacred death of man for nation, happened right here in these fields. Those words, joyfully stolen from Lincoln, were first heard by, among others, students from our college.
Lincoln chose Gettysburg as the place to link these dead of the civil War, these men who loved and felt, hated and sorrowed, laughed and dreaded, to a larger goal. In a little under 300 words, he made this place about extending freedoms to ever increasing groups of men. Dead men littered the ground where Pennsylvania College students had captured butterflies just a year before. The war quite literally came to our college campus. And as students stood listening in 1863, Lincoln's words made that war change.

The war changed on our campus, the nation bent in our midst. Martin Luther King Jr. once said that, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” One of the places that we can see that bend is here. Ten-thousand men died in the fields in which we run and play, in which we meditate and read. A battlefield seems a terrible place, sometimes, to even begin to contemplate peace.

But this landscape can be a place of peace in its vivid depiction of the breach. On the morning of July 1st, 1863, a 15 year-old student of the College’s preparatory division woke to find a war going on just over the ridge from his school. His father was away in the army, and now Frederick Lehmann wanted his chance at joining history. So he wandered off the campus. On the way, he found a wounded soldier and plucked his musket from his shoulder. He found another who didn’t need his cartridge box any longer. As he wandered toward the sound of the cannons, cannons booming right down this ridge, within our sight, he transformed himself from a student to a quasi-soldier and began firing away at the enemy.

Frederick was captured in the heat of battle, in the midst of making war. He nearly suffered the consequences. A rebel officer was ready to treat him like any other prisoner. But the stakes were even higher. Frederick was a civilian, he was a simple young man like any of you. Picking up a gun, he began to blur the line between army and citizen. If some enterprising Southern officer had felt vindictive, upon finding Frederick, he would have had every right to burn the town to the ground as a hive of insurgency.

They didn’t. Frederick Lehmann was let go instead. A Federal officer plead for Frederick’s release, and he was placed in the care of one of the College’s professors for the rest of the battle. On July 3rd, as the last shots of Pickett’s Charge were echoing away, Fredrick’s curiosity got the better of him. He wandered into the street, where a rebel sharpshooter found him and drilled a hole through his leg with a bullet. Frederick Lehmann walked the rest of his life with a limp, a constant reminder of what war does.

And we are immensely lucky here. We don’t need a bullet hole in our leg as our reminder. This place is a reminder to us, surrounding and enveloping us. For some of us, it’s only 4 years that we experience this horror and sorrow. For others, we are doomed to live in the midst of war’s fruits for our lives, drawn by its tale like a siren song.

But before you leave this place, if you have the luxury after your 4-years’ time to leave this place, wander these fields. Meet the men who fought and bled here. Meet the men and women who suffered through months of horror nursing men back to health or consigning them to their graves. They are still wandering this field like ghosts. And every so often, we see their echoes. Sometimes they come as phantoms in our imaginations as we try desperately to imagine the horror of war. Sometimes they are white-sheeted denizens of hatred marching through our very streets and defiling our sacred flag. Sometimes they are the images of bleeding women and men and children on our televisions as we peer across the oceans into another more modern war-zone.

Talk to them. Understand what war is. Because in understand war, you can understand why peace might be a better answer.

Shattered by War: The Huber Family

Frederick's battered tombstone. / CC Wiki

The tale of Sergent Frederick Huber is relatively well known. The young man, fighting at the battle of Fair Oaks, was struck by three rounds, the final a bullet through his breast that quickly sapped him of his life. The Adams Sentinel reported the incident in the early summer days of 1862, underlining Frederick's bravery in the face of the great beyond. "Tell Father," he reportedly said with his dying breath, according to the Sentinel, "I have died for my country."

But who was that father?

Dr. Henry S. Huber was 48-years-old as his son lay dying in some godforsaken field in Virginia. Up to this point, Huber's life had been relatively uneventful. Most of his medical career he'd spent in Gettysburg, moving to Southern Pennsylvania after a nasty bout of malaria made him leave his practice in Chicago. Aside from his practice, the Doctor also taught physiology at Pennsylvania College, just north of his home on Chambersburg Street.

"As a physician," a former student later recalled, "Dr. Huber displayed a sound judgement in the diagnosis of disease, and in the application of remedies was bold and very successful." But his skill went beyond treating the flu. "As a surgeon he ranked above mediocrity, was dextrous with the use of the knife and operated with skill."

Henry knew what the inner workings of a human body looked like. He knew what happened when you poked and prodded at an organ, when you excised tissue or pierced muscle.

And reading the account of his son's wounds, the bullet piercing through his breast, the doctor-father must have instantly known the pain, known the dread, felt the blood trickling from his son's chest at that long and lonely distance. He didn't need to be told that Frederick had died; his mind would have filled in that gap long before he read the words.

That was May of 1862. Dr. Henry Huber made the long trek to the outskirts of Richmond. He stood in the destroyed hell that is a battlefield after war. He saw the carnage, saw the outcomes of the horror of this war. Then he exhumed his son's battered corpse and saw the true depth of that horror.

How many corpses had he examined like this before? And yet this one was so different. Not a cadaver from a medical school classroom, but the shattered form of the son you loved so deeply. The son who won your pride as he grew to manhood. The son who graduated from the college where you teach human physiology and biology. The son you cradled in your arms when he was tiny. This wasn't just any body, this was Henry's Frederick.

The precious coffin was carted home and placed in Evergreen Cemetery, under a smart looking tombstone and with much local honor.

Time passed. And then the horror of war that seemed destined to remain in Virginia bled into Pennsylvania. And war came to Gettysburg.

Sometime during the fighting, Frederick Huber's eternal slumber on Cemetery Hill was disturbed. A shell plowed through his tombstone, cracking the marble artwork and wiping his name from the marker. Frederick Huber was once again no more. But he felt no terror. He felt no sorrow. He felt nothing when his epitaph was truncated from, "Frederick A. Huber," to simply, "Son of Dr. H.S. & P.J. Huber."

Dr. Huber's signature, as it appears in the
Penna. Border Damage Claims, filed
in the late 1860s and early 1870s.

But where one shell instilled no terror, another would strike nothing but.

On the southeastern corner of Chambersburg and Washington Streets, the living Huber Family cowered. Outside was the hell which had taken Frederick, now come for them too. And then, as the chaos reigned in those first frantic hours of battle of July 1st, their home itself was pierced. A shell entered the third floor, crashing through the front and side walls of the home. Glass rained down as a window frame racked under the force of the speeding missile. A shutter was slammed to pieces and destroyed. Gravity pulled a few bricks down from their cemented perches.

Dust settled. The house still stood, a small scar at its roof-line that would need to be fixed in the weeks after two armies finally left this southern Pennsylvania town. The damage amounted to $25. With new bricks, new window, new shutter, nary a scar remained to show where the shell had hit.

And still, what scars did that small speeding hunk of iron leave behind? What wounds were left that even Dr. Henry S. Huber, the talented physician and surgeon, could never heal even with his best efforts? Some wounds last forever.

“A time to be born, and a time to die.”

This week I'm off on travel for work to Philadelphia, to help run a facilitated dialogue interpretive training. But I don't want to starve everyone of content. So, I thought that a preview of my manuscript-in-progress about Pennsylvania College and the Civil War might be a great way to fill the gap.

Without further ado, an excerpt from Chapter Six - Hell on Earth:

While surgeons were well acquainted with the horrors of a field hospital in the aftermath of a grand battle like Gettysburg, the civilians of the North were woefully unprepared for the carnage at play in the halls of their local institutions and homes until it presented itself in full-colored glory in front of their very eyes. Senior Michael Colver finally picked his way down the long slope of Cemetery Hill, across the borough and onto the campus of his alma mater on Monday the 6th of July. “On our arrival,” he recalled, “we found in and around the building, according to the estimate given us, seven hundred wounded rebels.” The campus was transfigured from the placid and quaint to the grotesque and horrific. Colver ascended the staircase into the hellish depths of the building. “When I came to my room I saw it afforded ample accommodations for three.” One bleeding Confederate reclined in his bed. Two more lay splayed on the floor. As Colver stumbled through the halls, stepping around and over body after body, he heard nothing but, “the moans, prayers and shrieks of the wounded and dying,” of the, “poor, deluded sons of the South.” Enmity melted from his mind. “Only a heart dispossessed of all feeling of humanity,” Colver mused, “could refuse sympathy and help in such a time as that.”

Pouring into the town were hands determined to render just such magnanimous aid. Private citizens from across Pennsylvania, from Baltimore and Washington City surged into the southern Pennsylvania city to give aid and comfort in a sea of suffering. Representatives from the United States Christian Commission and the United States Sanitary Commission began to spur their organizations to undertake the massive mobilization to deal with nearly 50,000 wounded men and their less fortunate comrades. Leonard Gardner remembered the flood of people as, “the surrounding country began to come into town.” Rolling down the spokes of the hub at Gettysburg’s center, “hundreds of wagons and carriages from every direction filled the place.” Each wagon, “brought provisions to give to the wounded and in this way showed their sympathy.” But more so, the wagons were loaded with, “gratitude for the happy results of the battle.” Aid had begun, but not quickly enough for the suffering wounded.

Andrew Cross, a representative of the Christian Commission, moved through the halls of the College Edifice on the morning of July the 6th. As he was passing, “a young, pleasant-faced lad asked us rather anxiously for food.” The boy reported that, “he had not had a meal from Tuesday before, six days.” But food was in short supply in Gettysburg, Cross reported to the wounded young man, on account of, “the burning of the railroad bridges,” outside of town. The starving soldier, “with earnestness,” Cross reported, exclaimed, “Didn't Stuart burn them? So he makes his own men suffer as well as others.” Cross again and again found men suffering from a want of rations. On the first floor of the building, in one of the rooms on the north side, Cross saw, “sixteen lying on floor, all badly wounded, several of whom died.” Each of the men, “looked anxiously for something to eat.” Tomorrow, the Christian Commission representatives counseled the men, help might come tomorrow. As Cross left the room, he realized that in his pocket were. “few dried apples, which we were chewing for our own dinner.” The snack was, “nothing comparatively,” and Cross, “felt ashamed to offer them, and did not expect them to go around one a piece.” Without thinking, he tossed the apples across the room to the bed-ridden men. “Without thought of their wounds, every man exerted himself to catch.” There were just enough. “Never,” Cross recalled, “did we see men enjoy a little thing more.”

When John B. Linn and Jim Duncan visited the campus of the college, they witnessed the horrors of the building before even setting foot inside. “Some rebel surgeons,” Linn wrote in his diary on July 8th, “were amputating a man’s leg on the portico.” Linn mused that, “the citizens of Gettysburg behaved nobly, the shock of such a three days battle over their heads was enough to unstring the nerves of them.” In spite of their efforts, there were simply not enough souls to tend to the detritus of battle. Indeed, Andrew Cross wrote, “to say in such a field that surgeons were busy, is needless.” With so much, “ragged, naked, torn and mangled mortality,” what more, “could they do but work.” The number of doctors to patients was woefully inadequate. “There was not more than one for ten that were needed,” Cross moaned, “every man that could tie a bandage, or give a drink of water, or pour it upon a wound, was at work.” Passing through the halls and between the suffering forms of the South, from every direction came the constant, delirious call to anyone who passed: “Doctor, oh, doctor, won't you attend to my case? Won't you fix my arm, or my leg, or my shoulder, or head?”

Leonard Gardner, who was visiting nearby Carlisle for Dickinson College’s commencement before the rebel invasion interrupted both the ceremony and his vacation, visited Gettysburg as a tourist but quickly tendered his service to the Christian Commission. He was sent to, “Pennsylvania college Hospital, where the confederate wounded were kept.” Gardner found himself surrounded by the prostrate Confederate men on all sides when he entered the building. “Their comrades had to leave them,” he wrote years later, “suffering from every form of injury.” Each of the soldiers, “wore a sad and dejected appearance.” The Pennsylvanian found that, in spite of the animosity between the two warring nations, that he, “had a profound sympathy for them.” Still, like so many of the hundreds of eager hands pouring into the town wishing to help alleviate the suffering, Gardner had no skills to offer. “The most that could be done at that time was to give them something to eat and wash and dress their wounds.”

Presidents' Day in a Land at War

Washington as depicted
in Harpers Weekly the
following year, 1864.

Monday is Presidents' Day, our modern conglomeration of the celebrations of Washington's and Lincoln's Birthdays. Of course, no one but Mary Todd, Tad and some friends were celebrating Lincoln's birthday in 1863. Dying has a way of making special family events into cherished national holidays. Hence Washington, father of the nation who was already cold in the ground, warranted celebration and accolades on his birthday.

But America was a land divided. Washington's gambit at a free and independent republic in the New World was in limbo. And the fate of the concept of freedom hung in the balance

My country, 'tis of thee,

Sweet land of liberty,

Of thee I sing;

In early February, the U.S. Congress passed a Conscription Act. Now any American male of military age could be coerced into service, forced into fighting for a cause he might not find just. The rich could buy their way out; the poor were left largely to brave the bullets.

Land where my fathers died,

Land of the pilgrims' pride,

Joseph Hooker had just taken command of an army that has seen perhaps its worst winter. Battered at Fredericksburg and bitterly politically divided, the Army of the Potomac looked very much worse for wear. Hooker reorganizes and regroups, knowing full well another season of heavy fighting lies in store.

From ev'ry mountainside

Let freedom ring!

And in Gettysburg, the people gather to honor their sainted father. On the 25th of February, the students of Pennsylvania College held a rousing ceremony for their nation and their dead chieftain. "It was rather a hastily planned affair," the Lutheran and Missionary noted, "as student celebrations are apt to be." Still, if the celebration wasn't "elaborate in design and detail, [it] was eminently successful in execution." In spite of a distinct lack in, "stage effect," the students' enthusiasm and patriotism carried the day.

Let music swell the breeze,

And ring from all the trees
Sweet freedom's song;

In front of Pennsylvania Hall, known as the College Edifice in 1863, a grove of trees sat barren in the cold mid-winter. Echoing through the branches at 10 am, the college bell peeled forth. Students streamed across the brown and white wintery campus toward Christ Church on Chambersburg Street.

Let mortal tongues awake;

Let all that breathe partake;

After prayer, the crowd of students and professors broke forth into song, the patriotic hymn My Country 'Tis of Thee ringing in the rafters of the Lutheran church. Half that country was at war with the land these young men loved. Half that nation wanted to break away and craft a new nation. But still the students sang.

Let rocks their silence break,

The sound prolong.

Then speeches followed. Someone read President Washington's Farewell Address. The dead President intoned solemn words of unity through a living voice. "The North," he said, saw industry grow thanks to, "an unrestrained intercourse with the South, protected by the equal laws of a common government." So to, the South, "in the same intercourse, benefiting by the agency of the North, sees its agriculture grow and its commerce expand." How those words must have stung.

The ghost of Washington closed, hoping that his words might help, "to moderate the fury of party spirit, to warn against the mischiefs of foreign intrigue, to guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism." From the grave, he couldn't see the nation torn asunder by party spirit, a benighted institution and the evils of unchecked sectional patriotism.

Our fathers' God to Thee,

Author of liberty,

To Thee we sing.

Then the college's president rose. Henry Lewis Baugher addressed the crowd. He, "showed the points of resemblance between this revolution and the first," a student recorded, "how the same domestic treason, base slander and misrepresentation existed then as now." The man of god damned the idea of disunion and, "proved the utter fallacy of the right of secession, and the great wickedness of rebellion."

Long may our land be bright,

With freedom's holy light,

Other professors spoke, underlining Washington's character as an exemplar. Undoubtedly, they tiptoed past his role as a slave master, focusing instead upon the, "most prominent of his virtues." But then, noon approached and the students rushed off to eat.

Protect us by Thy might,

Great God our King.

The afternoon was a personal celebration where the morning was communal. "Sleighing," the student recounted to the Lutheran and Missionary, "seemed quite a prominent feature." Throughout the College Edifice, the dormitory rooms were crowded with knots of students, "from which came many a hearty laugh and token of mirth."

Gettysburg enjoyed one more day of peace and celebration in a land bitterly torn by war.

Meaningless Lists of Soldiers: Hidden in Plain Sight

Pencil scratches on a page...

This week I had the chance to visit National Archives 1 to do some research for work into the history of the Federal Armory at Harpers Ferry, and particularly the building I work in. Mather Training Center waswas the Superintendent's House before the War came and upended the entire town. It was nice to get back into the stacks downtown and dig through musty boxes of (in this case) Office of the Chief of Ordinance records.

It brought to mind the last time that I got the chance to root around in the trove that is the Nation's repository down in DC. In the fall of 2011, working on a hunch, I ran a lead to ground. Working from a few random Confederate Compiled Service Records I found over in the College's Special Collections, I dug into Confederate prisoner of war records from the Gettysburg Campaign.

In and of themselves, those types of documents aren't all that interesting. The data is plain and simple, a litany of names and units without much more detail. But this lead was different. I was working from the hunch that a manifest of the College Hospital existed thanks to a notation on a CSR index card.

I do that sometimes. I work hunches and tiny leads. In the past, it's lead to finding a Confederate deserter who was a student at Pennsylvania College and another student who pulled a 'John Burns' and fought on July 1st. History is like a sock with a few bare threads sticking out of the seams: pull hard enough and the whole story falls apart, baring all.

This lead took me to Record Group 109, a War Department cache of documents pertaining to Confederates and Entry 211, "Records Relating to Confederates in Union Hospitals." When the cart was wheeled out, my heart leaped. I threw open the "Gettysburg, Pennsylvania" box.

The campaign was so large, with so many wounded prisoners, it warranted its own box. And there, inside box 15, sat a simple set of two sheets of paper with light pencil scrawled on front and back. The document's bureaucratic title still sends chills up my spine: College Hospital transferred July 19, 1863 to Baltimore, Md.

A document is cold, meaningless.

The list is a roll of about 80 prisoners who sought shelter in the halls of the College Edifice through mid-July, when their fortunes suddenly changed and the United States decided to move them out of the Pennsylvania border town.

This all sounds like an amazing moment. But the truth is, it's all really meaningless. The document is just a list of names. Lists and accountings of things have no real meaning but for their weight. Here are 80 men who survived the horror of a Civil War hospital and were moving on toward better times. Beyond that, the list is just a list. It's a dry number: 80.

What does it take? It takes looking at each individual name, one by one, and finding the story. A list is a list. Any monkey can do the type of research I do. All it takes is some dogged determination and the stupidity to follow a lead all the way to its conclusion, no matter the effort. But to take that information and sous out the story? To make this mean something takes more.

It takes finding out more than just Private John Abner Persinger of the 28th Virginia's name and rank, and the sterile fact that he was wounded in the right side. That's all the document tells you. He is pencil scratches on paper. You need to keep digging and discover that he was born on March 2nd, 1842 and lived in Roanoke, Virginia as war descended on the Old Dominion state.

In 1863, as John sat in a college dorm room or library hall with a wound in his side spilling forth a trickle of cleansing blood, at home on a sprawling family farm valued at over $45,000 sat his 53-year-old father James. His mother Emaline waited too. Charles and Marshall, two of John's younger brothers, were 15 and 13. There was much work to be done on a large, prosperous farm. But how many times did their thoughts flit to John in the army. Was he safe? When had his last letter arrived? Was he among the wounded or, worse, the dead?

John Persinger survived his wound from Gettysburg, was transferred on to Baltimore and eventually exchanged. He rejoined the 28th Virginia and fought on, captured again by United States soldiers at Five Forks in the waning days of the war. Four long years of war, and four long years of waiting for father and mother and brothers at home. The 5' 5" tall soldier, with blue eyes and brown hair would return home to his family intact. But the anguish of war, for soldier and for family, would never disappear.

How many untold hours of anguish aren't captured on this simple piece of paper. These aren't pencil scratches, they're the remnants of lives. We don't commemorate pencil scratches. We don't kneel at the graves of worn stubs of graphite and yellowing paper.

It's the people. It has to be. The men and women of the past must be brought back to life in the glowing technicolor of the mind in order for any of this to matter at all. Tactics don't matter. Lines and boxes on maps don't matter. Raw casualty statistics and rote lists of prisoners don't matter.

But men and women? That's the heart of interpretive history. And here are 79 more men waiting to be awoken, remembered and set walking the world once more.

Fear in Illinois: A Father's Grief

Like a prose poem, the passage leaped off of the page of the Lutheran and Missionary as I scanned the newspaper's columns. Sitting in the reading room of the Abdel Ross Wentz Library at the Lutheran Theological Seminary, my heart raced. It's not often that you find new words penned by someone you've been studying for years.

Under the headline, "Hospital Experience," in the September 25th, 1862 edition of the newspaper, a simple column of text speaks to a harrowing and sorrowful experience in a federal hospital. Just days after the bloodshed and destruction of the Battle of Sharpsburg, the caring hearts of Pennsylvanian Lutherans were yearning for some glimpse into the reality of war that had lapped at the shores of the Commonwealth and crashed in a devastating cascade along the mountains to the south.

The article is signed, "H. L. B.," almost certainly Pennsylvania College President Henry Louis Baugher. The last (that I've found) in a series of short articles about Baugher's experience in a Federal hospital in Quincy, Illinois, the article is the most touching of the lot.

Tragedy had drawn the Pennsylvania minister to the West. The President's son Nesbitt Baugher, lawyer and newspaper editor, lay in grave condition in a hospital bed in Quincy in the spring of 1862, bloody and gored by bullet wound after bullet wound at the Battle of Shiloh. Nesbitt began his struggle full of vigor and headstrong from the success of the armies in the battle, writing from his bed to his father that he had, "news for you – great, glorious news for our country, but not quite so for me."

Baugher had been hit seven times in total by enemy bullets. His condition was grave. The young lieutenant's father wrote:

A young man, full of animal vigor, and animated by lofty patriotism, is wounded, it may be once, twice, or oftener. The pain of the wounds is not very great; he is carried to the hospital; under the influence of chloroform his system is prepared for a comparatively painless probing and dressing. He is able to write home to loved ones, that he was wounded and is doing well, and that his is not seriously ill. In a few days fever sets in, slow but certain. There is nothing to alarm. Symptoms encouraging; wounds healing; physicians say the patient will get well. Still the slow fever continues. Unexpectedly there is a chill, then delirium; the soldier is once more in the battle field, and it is his last. Nature, enfeebled by disease, is no longer able to resist, and death approaches and obtains an easy victory. If you ask the physician what was the immediate cause of death, he will probably say that the puss discharged from the wounds thus vitiated and carried to the brain caused delirium and was unable longer to sustain life.

I've known for some time that President Baugher visited his son's bedside as he lay dying. When I give tours of the campus, I usually gave that aspect of the tale one solemn line: 'he made it to Illinois just in time to hold his son's hand and pray over him as he died.'

But it was so much more than that.

There is true pain in the words of a father who has lost his own. You can easily conjure forth the form of a father, bending by his son's bedside as he thrashes in a delirious haze, watching as, "death approaches and obtains an easy victory."

Each of Baugher's three letters
are equally heartrending.

A few beds down the ward, another soldier lies prone, his, "head has been opened by a fragment of a shell, and the brain forced itself out of the opening." Drifting in through the door are the excruciating screams from yet another man, "the piercing exclamation repeated again and again," Baugher calls it, of the words, "Oh! God, be merciful!"

You can see President Baugher's face, stained with briny streaks. "Kind nature," he mused, "opens the fountain of tears that the breaking heart may find relief through this opened channel."

And you can hear a father's plaintive voice, asking the question of why his boy had to die, and the surgeon's coarse and clinical reply: "the puss discharged from the wounds thus vitiated and carried to the brain caused delirium and was unable longer to sustain life."

War becomes real. Painfully real.

College Kids with Guns: Hidden in Plain Sight

The College Church, across the street
from these scene of today's tale.

Sunday morning found me out in the field with a stalwart group of Gettysburg devotees: the Gettysburg Discussion Group's annual spring Muster. When the coordinator of this year's Muster put out the call for something a bit different, perhaps something in town for Sunday, my ears perked up. I've been looking for groups to test out the nuggets of the College's Civil War story on and the GDG seemed like the perfect group of guinea pigs.

The GDG has been around for a healthy stint, trading barbs about the Gettysburg Campaign and various other topics for years. I was first turned onto the group in 2004 and have alternated between an active member and a detached lurker. One thing that's never changed: these are battle-centric people. The conversations revolve chiefly around the obscure idiosyncrasies of the battle. In short, they focus on the type of thing that tends to cure insomnia for the bulk of folks out there.

If I could interpret for these folks, and help them see value in the civilian story alongside the military story they so deeply care about, I could begin to prove a major point on interpretive theory. Shifting our stories, telling different stories on these landscapes than those we've traditionally presented, will not alienate our traditional audiences. Instead, it only serves to give them even more reason to care about these places than the same tired reasons they've already found.

Of course, like all these types of revelations, I stumbled upon the answer accidentally. The most powerful moment on the tour came at a stop I hadn't quite planned.

Charles Schaeffer in 1862, from a
brilliant Tyson Brothers album in the
Gettysburg College Special Collections.

As we moved from the former President's House on the south end of campus into the borough toward our final stop on the Diamond, the group began straggling. Stopping to let them catch up, I realized just how close we were to the home of Professor of German Charles Schaeffer. The professor's home became a shelter for one of the most awkward and unique participants in the battle at Gettysburg during the dark days of July. Inside those walls, Frederick Lehmann sought solace and safety.

Frederick Lehmann was a student in the Preparatory division at Pennsylvania College in 1863. A native Pennsylvanian from outside Pittsburgh, Lehmann got an itch on the morning of July 1st as the sound of battle echoed over the hills west of Gettysburg. Like much of the town, he went rubbernecking.

But the teenager Lehmann did more than go look. He picked up a rifle from a wounded Federal soldier. He scrounged for a cartridge box and cap pouch. He joined the fight. Somewhere in the melee of the day, the young student was captured by Confederate forces. With help of the persuasion of a Federal officer, the rebels let him go and placed him in the care of Professor Schaeffer.

But curiosity got the better of Frederick on July 3rd. He wandered into Chambersburg Street in front of the Professor's house and quickly found himself the target of a bullet through the lower leg. He recovered, but forever bore a limp, the painful reminder of a curious young kid.

The GDG folks had never heard the story of Frederick Lehmann before. They stood transfixed. The first question out of their mouths was simply, "how did you find that?"

So I walked them through the research process. They had the vicarious thrill of discovery as I explained the tiny steps I made toward understanding who Lehmann was. For this crew, the joy of discovery was just as powerful as the tale of Lehmann itself.

Sometimes history is like a grand police procedural. The thrill is in the chase, not in the story completed. Piecing the story together bit by bit, from piece of evidence to piece of evidence, can help give a visitor the joy of discovery that the historian feels in the archive. When they finally have the clues and their minds line up all the pieces, when they become their own historians, that spot will forever be remembered as a meaningful place of discovery for them.

For the group I had the honor of leading on Sunday, that spot is the south end of the 7-11 parking lot. Maybe not that illustrious of a place, but it's the humble spot of pavement where Frederick Lehmann came back to life for them for just a few moment, resurrected from the cold paper records of history.

Haupt-enstance: Whatever Became of Herman?

Tom Lehrer, on his 1965 album That Was The Year That Was, sang a send-up of then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey with his, "Whatever Became of Hubert." The song's been going through my head this past week or so, but with the name "Herman" taking the place of LBJ's second-in-command.

One of my students, a good chap named Cory who just graduated, has been railing about how the college pays no attention to our most famous Herman: Herman Haupt. I have to admit, I hadn't paid much thought before this year to Herman Haupt, nor has much of the rest of Gettysburg's huge historical community of researchers, guides and authors. To be fair, Haupt is a relatively obscure Civil War personality. Haupt was one of those officers too good at his job for his own good. Like fellow masters of the mundane Montgomery Meigs and Winfield Scott Hancock, Haupt found himself relegated to the world of supply and support. Field command was beneath the engineering genius' genius.

Haupt's connection with the borough of Gettysburg before the war runs deep. Haupt found God in the town, baptized under the roof on St. James Lutheran Church in March of 1837 by Reverend Keller. He found love here, too, marrying the pastor's daughter a year later and settling into a quiet life in the Pennsylvania crossroads.

Haupt, the skilled engineer who graduated from West Point at 18 and went immediately to work surveying for railroads throughout the southern half of the Commonwealth, designed and built his own brick mansion on the ridge west of town. He christened the manse, "Oakridge." Years later, the building would be used to shelter wounded men from the elements as the work of war raged around its walls. Even later, on my first visits to Gettysburg, my mother would ogle the building and dream of someday buying the beautiful Queen Anne mansion. You've probably dreamt that dream too; it's that beautiful house on the south-east corner of West Confederate Ave and the Fairfield Road.

Haupt worked as a brilliant professor of science at Pennsylvania College during the 1840s, helping to spearhead the initiative to form a scientific society on campus and to design and build their grand home: Linnaean Hall. His writings in the society's journal run the gamut of subjects, from physics and chemistry to the study of weather patterns and putrefaction of natural materials. He was what you might call a Jack-of-all-Trades.

When war erupted, Haupt tendered his services as a railroad engineer, repairing and laying out new lines to support the operations of the armies in the field around Washington, D.C. As cannon roared in the three-day volcano of Gettysburg, Haupt painstakingly organized the repair of Pennsylvania and Maryland's ravaged rail infrastructure. Rail service to Gettysburg was restored by Haupt's careful work within days of the battle, a job Meade expected to take the better part of a month. Rail cars were flowing into Gettysburg in time to give General Daniel Sickles a smooth trip from the field of battle back to the halls of Congress to help crucify his former commanding general in front of the Committee on the Conduct of the War.

General Herman Haupt, surveying the work of
the General Herman Haupt. Yup, Haupt was so
cool they named a train after him.

Haupt more than likely had a hand in aggravating Lincoln's growing frustration with Meade over not following up on his massive victory at Gettysburg. It was Haupt who alerted the War Department of Meade's intentions to stay put and not pursue Lee. The telegraph, sent over Haupt's own newly repaired lines, was quickly passed on to Lincoln who was infuriated at yet another slow, plodding general in command of the Army of the Potomac.

Haupt walked the campus of Pennsylvania College and the streets of Gettysburg, not simply as a soldier but as a citizen and scholar. Gettysburg was where he cut his teeth, crafted his skills and found his life as a young man. Haupt's valiant work recreating the rail networks in the aftermath of the battle brought food to a tired and worn Federal army when they needed it most. Gettysburg was Haupt's home. What added meaning did this place have as he tried desperately to help in its defense?

And why have I never heard of Haupt, except as a footnote to a footnote? I'm still digging and piecing the story together, but Herman Haupt seems to be a key player in both pre-war Gettysburg society and the swift recovery of the army after a trip through flaming, dripping hell. He's certainly not a footnote. He was a key piece in the chess game that was Federal victory at Gettysburg.

Once Upon a Time in Gettysburg: Sometimes It Works

Monday night, I took my class out on the 'battlefield.' I know some of them are taking my class because, "it's Gettysburg College and I should take a Civil War class before I leave." I couldn't resist the siren call to show them where they have lived for four years and transform the meanings of that ground for them. So we went on a campus tour, the battlefield they walk everyday when they go to class or dinner or out to party on a Friday night.

The College Boys who broke and
ran: one of my keystone tales
on the campus. / CC Deb Pittenturf

I showed them the Beachem portico, where construction workers once unearthed human bones, the remnants of a long forgotten amputation. I showed them the quad in front of the Library where Jack Hopkins' house stood during the battle, while Hopkins himself ran from the oncoming Confederates, unable to hide from the color of his own skin. I showed them the south portico of Pennsylvania Hall, where amputations took place in the open air and men nearly drowned in rivulets of water from the rains following the battle. I showed them the doorway where Alice Baugher, the College President's daughter stared coldly into the eyes of Robert E. Lee. I showed them the dining room where President Baugher sat down to a cordial dinner with former favorite student turned Confederate soldier James Crocker in the bloody aftermath of the battle.

This semester has been tough on me. It has felt like a never ending struggle to reach these kids, to show them that history can be exciting and personal and deeply human. On the first night of class, after going through the syllabus, I asked the question I ask of anyone with a desire to study history: "why do you hate history?"

Typically it conjures answers swirling around lists of dates and names with no context, no meaning.

Back in January, after we had reviewed the required reading and research paper for the course, it elicited a different response from one student: "I hate reading and I hate writing."

I was incensed that night, a holy fire lit within my gut. I didn't know how I would make it through the semester. I didn't know how I could reach out to these students. That night has haunted me this whole semester, constantly nagging at me and making me doubt that I could get through.

Monday night, I got an e-mail from the same student who said she hates reading and writing:

I come home to write science papers, but instead find myself googling Crocker and Hopkins! There is so much interesting stuff documented from the war.... This stuff is so cool!”

As we all walked back from the President's House toward Weidensall Hall, she admitted to me that as she started reading Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering for class, she was already thinking how "gross" it must have been on the campus in 1863.

I guess that's as good enough a reason as any to do this. She closed her note Monday night with a simple comment: "Hope that wasn't the last of the tours...."

I hope so too.

Confederates in the Dorm: Hidden In Plain Sight

By late June 1863, Penn Hall had all
but completely emptied of students. /
Harpers Weekly 22 June 63

You can imagine the terror in the young 21-year-old's eyes as he realized who was charging down the Cashtown Pike into Gettysburg on the 26th of June. You can feel the chill that might have run down his spine as he realized that the rebel army he had deserted, the one he had escaped by running to the Federal lines, was crashing down upon him again. And the deserter's fate during this war was simple: execution.

Last week I cancelled office hours. Cancelled might be a strong term: I delayed them from 7:45pm to 9:00pm. I know, it broke the solemn vow of my professorial duties. But I left a nice note on the office door and headed to Special Collections on the fourth floor of Musselman Library.

Gettysburg College's Special Collections never ceases to amaze me. Every time I wander through the doors on some wild lead or another, I find the most dumbfounding artifacts of a past long forgotten. Wednesday was no different.

Students living within the main edifice in 1863 at Pennsylvania College were required to be back in bed by a certain time each night. The college's tutor, Mathias Richards, performed bed checks. He kept meticulous notes on who was tardy, who was absent and who caused particular trouble in what otherwise were supposed to be quiet halls.

Who has looked at the Record of Absences from rooms or building for Pennsylvania College in 1863 since Mathias Richards penciled in the notes in tight block letters? I would wager very few eyes, more than likely a few interns writing a catalog record or two. Other than that, I would guess no one has spent much more than a moment to glance at the register.

Richards, with many of his classmates, joined the local company of volunteer militia bound for Harrisburg to defend the Commonwealth against the rebel invasion. The register became haphazard after his absence, with a long column of ditto'd observations that a majority of the college left on the 17th of June, either to fight or to flee. Of the 102 college and preparatory students who lived in the college edifice, only 19 students remained on campus after June 17th - 5 Seniors, 3 Juniors, 1 Sophomore, 1 Freshman, 2 Partial course and 7 Preparatory students. That's a scant 16% of the whole student body still living within Pennsylvania Hall.

One of those who remained behind was a partial course student named Arthur Markell. While his classmates evacuated to the safety of their homes, and other joined the Pennsylvania Militia, Markell found himself stranded. His family home in Winchester, Virginia was very much inaccessible, behind Confederate lines. Even if he could have made it to his family in the Shenandoah Valley, his welcome mightn't have been so warm. Arthur Markell was on the lam. He had broken a sacred vow. He was a wanted man.

First Lieutenant Arthur Markell had deserted from the 5th Virginia Infantry in March of 1862.

For one Confederate, the watchful
gaze of Mercury became home for a
short respite from war.

In 1861, as war was looming on the horizon and Virginia's fate was yet to be decided, Arthur Markell was a student at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia. But the Old Dominion's hesitant decision to leave the Union would change that quickly. The young student returned home, and was instructed to join up with his local militia company at Harpers Ferry. He eventually found himself coerced into service in the 5th Virginia Infantry, Company A.

Arthur Markell ran from the army in March of 1862. He made his way between the lines, surrendering to General Banks at Charlestown, Va. He was sent to the Old Capitol Prison in Washington City, where he let fly every piece of information he had on where the Confederate forces were situated in the Valley. After signing an oath of allegiance, he was let go.

Markell wandered northward, ultimately ending up in Gettysburg just two months after he had skedaddled from the rebels near Winchester. Pennsylvania College, like Roanoke College, was a Lutheran college. Markell would have fit in perfectly among the Pennsylvanians and Marylanders who dominated the school's population. He settled down to his studies once again.

Until June of 1863, he was safe. But as soon as Markell got wind that Confederates were setting their sights on Gettysburg, he headed south. His friends in town had begged him, "to seek a place of safety," from the oncoming tide of Confederates. If Markell was caught, he clearly knew his fate. Deserters were low scum in the Civil War. Traitors who revealed secrets to the enemy were doubly vile. Markell was running for his life. The Federal army, he wagered, was his best bet for safety. Down the Emmitsburg Road he ran, until he was stopped by a curious officer. When questioned, the young, naive and scared man more than likely told the truth. He was a Confederate deserter seeking protection from his own former countrymen. The officer arrested him.

Markell found himself once again imprisoned, this time held at Fort McHenry in Baltimore. He begged the Commander of the Middle Military District General Robert Schenck for his release, explaining his story in a detailed letter. Many prominent citizens of Gettysburg banded together and vouched for Markell's loyalty in their own letter to General Schenck. The young man was finally released in early August after signing another oath of allegiance. He never returned to complete his studies in Gettysburg. Pennsylvania College's rebel deserter had escaped once again, this time from a much more awkward fate than marching and fighting. He had escaped both the executioner's bullet and the Federal prison.

Prominent citizens vouched for Markell,
including Robert Harper, David
McConaughy & College President
Henry Louis Baugher.

My biggest question is how this all went undiscovered for so long. The Battle of Gettysburg, out of every topic within the Civil War, has had more eyes passing over more documents in more archives than any other. The gaps within the scholarship though, particularly in the civilian end of the story, are huge. Not simply huge, they are drive-a-Mack-truck-through-them huge. It is frightening how little even some of the experts on this field know about the citizens who lived here before it became a battlefield.

This whole tale emerged from one line in the attendance register buried away in Special Collections. Markell, unlike the rest of his fellow students who, the ledger explains, "Left after 17th," is instead listed as, "Left as Refugee." Those three words were a tiny thread. They were tantalizing words waiting to be pulled. Am I weird that these types of dangling threads nag at the back of my skull until I yank them and run the lead to ground? Am I odd that this type of thing keeps me up culling databases until 2am on a Saturday night, bleary-eyed and hunched over my laptop's glowing screen as I marvel at some long-dead deserter's paper trail?

Jake and I have a mutual friend, a colleague in the world of public history. Invariably when we're around her we start spouting random historical tales we've recently run across in our research. Invariably, her response is the same: "Where do you guys find this stuff? Don't you have a life?"

Yes, yes I do have a life. But I also have an unquenchable thirst for discovery. I want to see more new things, touch more undiscovered documents, see more pieces of the 'true cross' that no one has ever laid eyes on before. I have an insatiable curiosity for historical tidbits. I think that curiosity is the prime tool for any historian to posses. I want to be the first person to the pinnacle of this or that historical mountain. But I want to climb that mountain not to brag that I was first, but simply to see how weird and wild the view is from up there.