Buckeye Blood Waters the Longleaf Pines

In the woods south of Wilmington, men in blue uniforms moved forward in a loose skirmish line. They were probing, trying to find General Hoke's last line of defense. Brig. General Charles Paine sent the men forward to develop the enemy. But in the pine thicket ahead, in a thin, ragged line, the bedraggled rebel troops likely had more to fear than bullets as those skirmishers probed and prodded on a February day in 1865.

The skirmishers moved through the sandy soil along Federal Point Road. Behind them, the entire third brigade commanded by Colonel Elias Wright was crashing through the woods. And the color of their skin was the greatest weapon of the war.

The skirmishers of the 5th United States Colored Troops found the enemy strung out in a thin single-file line. But the rebels' fire was strong, a last ditch effort to defend the Confederate capital's final lifeline. The rebels were commanded by Major General Robert F. Hoke.

Hoke, facing off against these black soldiers, must have felt some trepidation. The world was changing. At home in Lincoln County, his mother Frances owned six human beings as property, including two men who by 1865 were old enough to wield a gun for the United States and fight in a war of freedom and revenge. Those skirmishers were a familiar and frightening bogeyman for any southern man: slave rebellion on a grand scale.

When the war broke out, the population of the county where those men now marched was nearly half enslaved. Now, through the pine forests where slaves had once gathered resin, distilled turpentine and harvested straight timber, black men marched for freedom.

And they bled as the rebels opened fire.

John Byrd bled when a musket ball blasted through the flesh around his left knee. He stood, before his knee was mangled by a rebel ball, at 5 foot 8 inches tall, with a shock of black hair and dark eyes. He farmed a field somewhere near Wooster, Ohio before joining the army. And Byrd had never tasted the bitters of slavery. Yet he fought for men with skin the same color as his.

Edgar S. Wright was wounded as well. His finger was hit by a musket ball during the assault. The 19-year-old Wright was born in Fayette County, Ohio. He had already had one close scrape with rebels; just a year before in May, Wright was captured by rebel troops, but escaped their hands. Had he stayed locked behind enemy lines in 1864, he might have been enslaved. Not again, but for the very first time. Wright was born free, risking his safety so that others might be free as well.

The 5th United States Colored Troops was pushed back, one final repulse before Hoke's line gave up the ghost and retreated in the darkness a few hours later. And as the men poured back to the safety of their comrades' line, William Alexander was likely struck in the back by a hunk of hot iron. The 36-year-old farmer from near Hillsboro, Ohio was a slight man, standing only 5 foot 5 inches. He enlisted in August of 1864, and never received a single cent from the Federal Government. Yet still his black skin was good enough to bleed in the North Carolina sand for the freedom of men he had never met.

The 5th United States Colored Troops, formerly known as the 127th Ohio Infantry, marched into Wilmington a few days later. Byrd, Wright and Alexander didn't. The men of the 5th USCT saw, standing on the city's edge, "an aged colored woman," who cradled in her hands an American flag, squirreled away somewhere during the long years of war as a symbol of hope. The men cheered. In the streets, the black men and women swarmed the men of the 5th USCT. "Glory to de Lord," a white officer of the brigade remembered them cheering long after the war, "The blessed day ob salbation am cum. De good Lord bress Massa Linkum."

Byrd, Wright and Alexander likely heard little of the cheering; they were too busy suffering in agony from rebel lead and iron. Alexander had been shuttled back to Fort Fisher to be treated. He died 4 days after being wounded on the skirmish line. Wright and Byrd were brought into Wilmington, suffering in the general hospital in the newly liberated city for weeks. The two men died within hours of one another in mid-March.

And they're buried in sandy, humid graves now, far from their Ohio homes. Private William Alexander has a gravestone, a marker at his head. But Byrd and Wright have none.

The National Cemetery at Wilmington is filled with unknown graves, both white and black. And there, likely, the other two sleep. These men from the Buckeye state, who freed a city and a nation from man's inhumanity to his fellow man, gave all that that nation might live. Because in giving freedom to the slave, they assured freedom to the free - honorable alike in what was given and what was preserved.

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.

Born in Slavery: One Grave in Chambersburg

A simple epitaph with amazing impact: "Born in Slavery, Died Feb 15 1908." Those words speak and speak loudly. Thomas Burl wanted it to be known for eternity that he was a slave. And he wanted it to be known that he wasn't when he died. That label defined his whole life. It defined who he was when he had the name "slave" forced on him when he was born. And it again defined him through its absence after 1863.

Thomas Burl knew he was free, precisely because he knew the antithesis of freedom. And he died a free man in a free land.

And now, if you wander through Mount Vernon Cemetery in Chambersburg, Burl will still be standing there to remind you what freedom means: put simply, it is the utter absence of slavery.  That's all Thomas Burl needed to know.  He told us through his epitaph that that knowledge was enough.
 

Requiescat in pace et in libertate, Thomas.

Gettysburg's Other Unknown Soldier

What happens when you don't die
clutching a photo of your kids? / PD LOC

We all know the name Amos Humiston. We know he was found on the first day's field. We know he clutched the image of his three children, an unknown soldier until his wife Philinda Humiston saw her children peering back at her from a copy of that picture. We know his drama and the agony of Philinda, we know the heartbreak and horror.

But who's buried next to him?

We know Amos Humiston, but the man next to him is a mystery. To the New York father's right is another man, another soldier who fought and died for the flag, for the nation, for the freedom of four million. He has a last name, partial information, a unit and not much else.

And searching finds relatively little on him. "Chamburg" of the 134th New York is a relative mystery. There are no Federal soldiers named Chamburg listed in the rolls of the Army of the Potomac. Not a one.

The 134th New York Infantry did have a Private Jesse P. Chamberlin who was killed at Gettysburg. The man buried next to the famous Gettysburg unknown is more than likely Private Chamberlin.

But who was Chamberlin, then?

In 1860, a Schenectady County census enumerator recorded the details of Jesse P. Chamberlain and his family. The 40-year-old laborer had a young 28-year-old wife, Hulda. Safe in their home in Duanesburg were twin 4-year-old boys, Arthur and Oscar, and a new 2-year-old daughter named Cornelia. And Jesse Chamberlain left them all behind when he enlisted in the 134th New York in August of 1862.

Moved toward the front just after the battle at Sharpsburg, stood in reserve at Fredericksburg and suffered only eight wounded men at Chancellorsville, Gettysburg would be their true baptism by fire.

News of the battle at Gettysburg began trickling into the Schenectady Evening Star and Times in the first few days after the battle. On July 9th the editor ran an excerpt from a letter written in the frantic moments after the battle. But the news was piecemeal. The friends and family of the 134th New York Infantry waited, fearing.

The next day, more casualties. More fear. Henry Teller wrote to the paper that the, "regiment went into the fight about three hundred strong, and came out with twenty-seven men and five officers." That simple sentence must have ricocheted in the minds of the men and women of Schenectady County. Did Hulda Chamberlain hug Arthur and Oscar tight to her side as she heard the news? Did she hope as she tucked Cornelia in to her bed that her beloved father was alright?

July 11th brought glad tidings. Lieutenant Colonel Allan H. Jackson had survived the harrowing first day of the battle, ferreted away in the town as rebels swarmed through the streets and, under cover of darkness, "by running through the rebel pickets got back to our army." It seemed anyone might have survived.

What does gripping horror in the
newspaper do to the folks back home
still waiting?  How many times do
they put their husband's face on
Jake Trask's body?

On July 13th, more news and a few more names appeared in the Schenectady Evening Star and Times. Orderly Sergeant William H. Howe wrote to readers back home that it was only, "through kind Providence I was spared to come out safe, without a scratch." As the 134th charged forward, "they fired grape and shell at us." Although they stood strong for a brief moment, the line buckled and, "they drove us and when we fell back they killed a great many of our boys." The friends of Jake Trask must have read in horror as Howe described how a shot passed, "through the breast and he laid right over and died in five minutes after. Poor Jake!"

Had Hulda figured it out yet? Did she know? Or did she still hope against hopes that her husband would return to his two sons and daughter?

All hope died on July 22nd, as a complete list of killed, wounded and missing was passed along to Schenectady by Colonel Jackson. There, in hard black-and-white, the only man listed as outright killed in Company H: Private Jesse P. Chamberlain.

All-told, 37 men were killed in the fighting on July 1st, Jesse Chamberlain among them. Arthur and Oscar would never see their father again. Cornelia more than likely wouldn't remember him at all. Another father among thousands buried beneath Pennsylvania's soil.

But unlike Humiston, whose grave eventually was marked properly and is venerated by thousands who come to meet the soldier who J. Francis Bourns made into an icon, Jesse Chamberlain gets no mourners. As visitors stand at Humiston's grave, do they ever wonder who "Chamburg" is?

I never did before. I'm a bit ashamed of that. How could I stand there and not obsess over who was buried in that grave?  But now I know I should kneel down at Jesse's side too and mourn along with Arthur, Oscar and Cornelia. I'll wipe away Hulda's tears 150 years too late. Then I'll move on to the next grave and do the same.

After all, that man died for freedom too. Just like Amos Humiston.

And Jesse Chamberlain.

Dark Town's Wealth: A 150-Year-Old Rock-and-Roll Concert Review

Reading history.

I have a lot of odd things scattered around my house, weird ephemera and bric-a-brac that I've picked up here and there as I've studied history.

Some of them are treasures, like CDVs of long-dead College professors and original pieces of decking from the USS North Carolina. Some are less treasures and more, well, junk. Most folks toss old newspapers within a few days of reading. In the Civil War Era, I'm sure many a page of newsprint went to start an honest mother's hearth in the morning or a pile of moist kindling in some godforsaken camp.

But I've accumulated some of those scraps of newspaper that didn't end up in a campfire or under a cooking pot. I love reading them. To flip open, sometimes quite literally, the pages of the past is an amazing feeling.

In New York, 150 years ago this morning, newsprint was still drying on a page I hold in my hand today. And the news was fit to print and, more importantly, fit to be read. Filling the front page of the New York Tribune that April the 11th was news of Charleston Harbor. Inside the editor recalled that, "it is the anniversary of the attack on Sumter - two years today since the Rebellion broke into open War." Those two years had been, "crowded with events, brilliant with victories and saddened by defeats, but ennobled throughout by a fortitude which no suffering could weaken, and a determination which no disaster has been able to shake."

The war continued.

And so did life. New York, as she always is, was abuzz with culture. In a tiny piece in a far right column of one page, the Tribune reported on a concert in Irving Hall, in the neighborhood of Union Square. "Mr. Gottschalk, whose name is talismanic to draw crowds of admirers, has been giving two concerts this week, to brilliant audiences," the paper crowed. And tonight would be no different, as he showed once again, "the taste and skill which have made him equally renowned in Europe and America."

If ever there was a quintessentially American product in the 19th century, it was Louis Moreau Gottschalk. Born in New Orleans in 1829 to a Jewish businessman and a Creole mother, Gottschalk grew up in a largely integrated family in a largely integrated city. The household even included Gottschalk's mulatto brothers and sister, the product of a series of encounters his father had with a mistress of another race.

New Orleans, that odd amalgam of cultures which seep together, ebb and flow, oozed its way into Louis Gottschalk's soul. And those cultures oozed out once again as his fingers touched the ivory keys of his beloved piano. Where Europe had piano virtuoso Frédéric Chopin, whose work mirrored his classical roots and mimicked Bach and Beethoven, America got music from Gottschalk's fingers that was an offspring of our weird cultural mix. Part a product of the independent spirit of the nation, part borrowing, stealing and lovingly appropriating the black rhythms and culture in which he was brought up, Gottschalk's image of classical piano was decidedly bent.

Syncopation, atonal pairings of chords, crazy grace-notes and quick staccato moving lines all suited Gottschalk. He was shifting music, injecting a new soul of black folk where there had been an absence before.

In his Bamboula (Danse des nègres), Gottschalk literally injected the black musical voice into American (and world) musical vernacular. In doing so, Gottschalk set America on a path to Jimi Hendrix.

From Gottschalk's ivories, quite obvious when you listen to any of his pieces played today, was born nearly fully-formed that quintessential of American musics, ragtime, and its king, Scott Joplin. And from Joplin and the commercialization machine of Tin Pan Alley, America found a new taste in rhythm, where driving beats, quick tempos and jarring syncopation were commonplace. Gottschalk beget Joplin. Joplin beget Ragtime. Ragtime beget Jazz. Jazz beget that strong rhythm section and those chord progressions we still hear infesting our radios today. Add in a dose of folk and hillbilly guitar to the mix, stir, and Rock-and-Roll isn't far off. Without Gottschalk there is no Elvis Presley. There is no Chuck Berry. There is no Motown. And there is no Jimi Hendrix, shredding on a guitar on Purple Haze to a driving back-beat to which Gottschalk himself could have jammed right along.

So my newspaper isn't just a relic of the past. It's one of the very first Rock-and-Roll concert reviews. Louis Gottschalk beget the musical world we live in today.

Whether Gottschalk played Bamboula or not, the paper doesn't say. It doesn't record whether or not The Banjo was on his set list. We don't know what he played. But we know that in a crowded music hall just a few blocks off of Union Square Park, Rock-and-Roll was played, 150 years ago tonight.

Tool of Revolution, Piece of the True Cross

One of the treasures on display in Special
Collections, a receipt for a slave's labor on the
defenses of Richmond.

One of my former students, brilliant researcher and Gettysburg College Senior Lauren Roedner has been pulling together an exhibit from the private collection of Angelo Scarlato, displayed in the display cases in Gettysburg College's Special Collections. The exhibit, Slaves, Soldiers, Citizens: African American Artifacts of the Civil War Era opens officially on Monday. But I was able to sneak a quick peak on Wednesday night of the exhibit-in-progress.

There are some amazing artifacts, from freedom papers to slave collars, which pluck at the very heart of the 19th century's driving institution and struggle.

But one in particular caught my eye on Wednesday night. It is a rifle musket, like any other used in that war to preserve the United States. Carved in the stock are the initials, "I.J.W." and a unit, "CO. F 43." But the inscription doesn't have a state.

The gun was carried by Isaac J. Winters as he marched through Virginia during the war with the 43rd United States Colored Troops. Winters was a native Pennsylvanian, a free farm laborer from the outskirts of Philadelphia. As the war began, the 32-year-old man had a wife Margaret and two children, a daughter named Eliza and an infant son named Charles. As the war progressed, Winters' fledgling family continued to grow; his wife Margaret was pregnant with a girl as the calendar turned over from 1862 to 1863.

That flip of the calendar was important for all of America too. The war which the nation had been mired in for nearly two years was transforming. America began fighting, quite literally overnight, for a new goal: the freedom of 4 million held in bondage in the South. The Emancipation Proclamation opened the floodgates of freedom, transforming the war's aim. It also opened the United States military for men of a darker hue. They could start becoming real citizens.

Isaac Winters found himself, like many other citizens, caught in the new concept of conscription. He was drafted and subsequently mustered into the 43rd USCT in the late summer of 1863. The 5 foot, 9 inch tall black man was suited in a uniform and issued a weapon to fight on behalf of his nation, the new-found freedom of the citizen and, for Winters, the new-found obligation as well. He left Margaret and three children behind, his newborn daughter Anna cradled in the arms of his wife. And he fought.

The 43rd plunged through Virginia, part of a new American revolution. These were black men marching to tear men, women and children who looked just like them from the grip of slavery. According to an account from one member of Winters' unit, as they marched through Virginia, the 43rd was, "instrumental in liberating some five hundred of our sisters and brothers from the accursed yoke of human bondage." As the men crossed the Virginia countryside, the soldiers could, "see them coming in every direction, some in carts, some on their masters’ horses, and great numbers on foot." The slaves saw black faces and black hands carrying the tools of revolution and freedom, and said the sight, "seemed to them like heaven, so greatly did they realize the difference between slavery and freedom."

Winters carried that gun, that sainted relic, while he and his comrades freed their fellow human beings. He marched with it at his side while the roadsides teemed with the newly joyous, newly hopeful, newly free men and women of Virginia.

And he carried it on July 30th, 1864 as well, as the 43rd USCT watched a cloud mushroom from the rebel lines as a mine exploded beneath their feet. And into the maelstrom of the Battle of the Crater, Winters and the 43rd USCT plunged. As the battle progressed, Winters was wounded. He would spend months in the hospital before returning to his unit late that fall. He made it home safely to Margaret, Eliza, Charles and Anna by the fall of 1865.

But that gun is not simply a relic of Isaac J. Winters; it is a relic of a revolution. That weapon freed slaves. It is not a metaphorical object, though it certainly is that as well. It is a true relic, a piece of the true cross in the sacrificial struggle to bring freedom to the slave.

And for now, at least for the next few months, you can visit Gettysburg College and pay Isaac J. Winters' gun its proper homage. You can kneel at this small shrine to freedom and thank Winters for taking a step forward on that road toward equality which we're still walking today.

Choice Poetry: Valiant Manhood's Flinch

Throughout the war, the front page of Gettysburg's newspapers, regardless of your political stripe, had an evergreen column. Poetry graced the upper left corner each week. Sometimes raucous, often love-lorn, chiefly patriotic, the poems must have buoyed many a Pennsylvanian spirit as America floundered in the depth of Civil War.

Most of the poems were mainstream schmaltz, passed from paper to paper as each editor read a line or two he liked and thought his readers might appreciate. The poems spread like a particularly odd malignant cancer from organ to organ.

But every so often, there appeared a unique poem. Usually they were headed with the terse words, "For the Adams Sentinel," or "For the Compiler." In the last few days of March 1863, the Sentinel ran one of those simple, local poems on its front page.

The poem was simply titled A Soldier's Musings, written from the perspective (and perhaps pen) of some boy wearing a blue uniform and fighting in the Federal ranks. The first lines shake with simple power: "The soldier's life, the soldier's life / is not the life for me." It flies in the face of every patriotic ditty and rousing aire we remember from the war.

This particular soldier seems depressed as he wrote that he is, "often sad and lonely too." It was love that strained his heart along with the perpetual boredom. "Alas, how oft in vain, / A missive from my much loved Kate, / and then I breath her name," he lamented.

But the soldier was quite certain of what all this love-sickness called for. "If e'er this soldier's life is o'er," he pined, "I'll quickly then return, / I'll never shoot a bullet more, / Or make a rebel moan." Love called not for violence or killing. Love called not for death and destruction. Love called for the opposite.

"I'll ask her then," the soldier resolved, "to change her name, / From that of Katie Love."

And what of war?

"And if I'm free again once more," the soldier-poet declares, "By Sam I'll ne'er be caught." If conscription would seek to separate their happy home, to drive a wedge between soldier and Kate, this man's choice was quite clear and certain: ""I'll take my Katie dear, / And right away to Canada, / I'll go the draft to clear."

Such was the valour of one Gettysburgian, one possibly-imagined, possibly-real American man in the face of a long and interminable war. Discretion would ultimately prove for him the better part of valour. And love would conquer war.

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.

Food, Fuel and Fodder: Civil War Carbon Footprints

Thursday morning finds me presenting to a group of fellow NPS folks on the possibilities of the interpretive futures. So I've dragged out some older, weirder interpretive dreaming from a few years back. It's something I worked up for my friend and boss David Larsen to prove that topics like Climate Change can be discussed from any perspective and in any context.  

But this sort of dreaming can't stay locked in drawers, left on the backs of envelopes and stuffed away in digital filing cabinets back at work.

So here's a peek at what I'm presenting. It's a way of visualizing impacts, Civil War and otherwise, on the world around us.

Trains and Horses, integrally tied.
/ PD LOC - NHNYCW

The logistics of the American Civil War were staggering. For example, the Army of the Potomac, in 1863, had 69 individual artillery batteries scattered among its six different Corps. Each of these batteries had, on average, six cannon. These cannon and their limbers were typically towed by 6 horses, giving the typical battery around 36 horses.

The guidelines for field artillery in the United States army called for each horse to receive 14 pounds of hay and 12 pounds of grain (oats, corn or barley) per day. If fed to military guidelines, one battery of field artillery required 504 pounds of hay and 432 pounds of grain each day.

Within the Army of the Potomac, if fed to military guidelines, the entire cadre of field artillery required 34,776 pounds of hay and 29,808 pounds of grain each day. For a sense of scale, a typical modern acre of corn yields about 8,000 pounds per year. A typical modern acre of hay yields between 8,000 to 12,000 pounds per year. Every day of the war, the Army of the Potomac’s artillery required about 3 ½ acres of hay and 3 ½ acres of grain.

If fed to army specifications, in a year, the artillery batteries of the Army of the Potomac would eat 10,879,920 pounds of corn and 12,693,240 pounds of hay. This is 5,439 tons of corn and 6,347 tons of hay each year of the four year war.

The armies in the field often foraged for supplies from the land, using the crops and stores of the country they occupied to feed themselves and their animals. This mass of supply, however, simply was not available. Across the entire state of Virginia in 1860, the state where the Army of the Potomac based much of its operations, cornfields did yield roughly 2 billion pounds (or 1 million tons) of corn. But two armies vied for resources in Virginia, and the theatre of operations encompassed very little of the state in the larger scope.

Suppose that even just half of the fodder required by the Army of the Potomac’s artillery (21,756 tons of corn and 25,388 tons of hay over the course of the war) was shipped to the east from the western states, most likely from a large hub like Chicago. Chicago is around 700 miles from Washington, D.C. by rail.

The amount of coal required to haul one ton of freight one mile with a mid-nineteenth century steam engine was around 6-8 ounces. Hauling 47,143 tons of freight 450 miles requires 198,000,600 ounces or 12,375,038 pounds of coal.

Burning coal emits CO2 gas at a rate of 1/2.93. For every 1 pound of coal burned, 2.93 pounds of CO2 gas are produced. If northern steam engines burned 12,375,038 pounds of coal to haul feed to the Army of the Potomac’s artillery, they produced 36,258,861 pounds of CO2 gas in a four year period.

Today’s coal power plants produce about 3,941,865,250,000 pounds of CO2 gas per year.

There are about 600 plants in the nation. If each produces roughly the same amount of CO2, this works out to 6,569,775,420 pounds per plant, per year. A plant, running 24/7, 365 days a year, produces 17,999,384 pounds a day or 749,974 pounds per hour.

Meaning, the Army of the Potomac’s Artillery’s horses fodder for the entire four years of war required a transport carbon cost roughly equal to just 48 hours of power production from a modern coal burning power plant.

This work contains material based upon or wholly the work of a National Park Service employee, created during the course of official duties. As a work of a federal government agency, such work is in the public domain and free to be redistributed, reused or remixed by anyone for any purpose.

Two Kosciuszkos: Fighting for Liberty

I got in trouble down in the District of Columbia before Christmas. I made the mistake of asking friend and fellow blogger Aaron Urbanski why I should care who Thaddeus Kosciuszko was. He went mildly ballistic. Aaron has a soft spot in his heart for the old Polish general, partially because his last name is Urbanski. I can't begrudge him that.

So the name "Kosciuszko" has been rattling violently around in my head since December. Recently it broke free. And it was because of the Civil War, Gettysburg and a Pennsylvanian general that I found out why Thaddeus Kosciuszko might matter to me.

-----

Did these woods see the footfalls
of the young Samuel Kurtz Zook?
 / CC Nathan Rein

On a farm in southeastern Pennsylvania, a young boy heard family stories passed down from generation to generation and sat in wonder. They were stories of excitement, of war, of revolution.

Family stories are powerful. Our ancestors can be exemplars of where we're going and who we are. They can just as easily be signposts on the road of life warding off pitfalls. They stick with us for some reason. Maybe the blood in our veins sings when it hears the stories of the ones in whose veins it coursed before. Maybe humans are just hardwired to love stories.

The 1820s and 1830s were a time of wonder for Samuel Kurtz Zook. He lived on his mother's family farm outside of Philadelphia. Both of his parents were descended from Quaker farmers who lived in the hills north and west of Philadelphia. His mother's father, Welsh immigrant Abijah Stephens, had farmed the lands for years. The young Samuel Zook played across the open fields once plowed by his Grandfather, the first of nine children.

Those fields were special, and so were the tales that revolved around the house. Outside the windows decades earlier, America had been defended. Beyond the walls, America had been saved in the shivering cold. Beyond the doorstep, America was molded in the cold winter of 1777-1778.

Samuel Kurtz Zook grew up playing in the fields of Valley Forge, the winter encampment where George Washington's puny and fledgling force of militia became a true army. And the family stories he grew up on were of revolution, excitement, danger and patriotism.

His ancestors were pacifists. They did not fight with that army at Valley Forge. But they did help. Zook's Grandfather, Abijah Stephens, according to potent legend, had a, "gift in medicine," and was known throughout the area as a sort of doctor, though he had no degree or formal training. Managing a farm and family dozens of miles from the bustling city center of Philadelphia meant fending for yourself and keeping your family safe in spirit and body.

Another decedent of Stephens recounted that his, "grandfather was a self-taught surgeon and practitioner in the art of healing ulcers, abscesses of various kinds, setting of broken bones and dislocations, curing spasms, cuts and bruises." The off-license doctor, his grandson later published, "went early every morning to the camp and stayed late in the evening, waiting on the sick."

Used as a headquarters, the Stevens' home saw the footfalls of many a famous general cross its threshold. The Marquis de LaFayette frequented the home often. More Frenchmen, Duportale and Duponceau, met the family. And the Polish freedom fighter, Thaddeus Kosciuszko, visited as well.

The mysticism which must have surrounded the family stories of the Stevens and Zook clan seeped into Samuel's young soul. He was entranced by the fields surrounding his home, commanding, according to one historian, his schoolmates in a company drill. The young children made a game of, "playing on the old fortifications on the site of the Valley Forge encampment." And what better playground to envision the grand victories of the child's mind?

The monument at Gettysburg
to Samuel Kosciuszko Zook
/ CC Michael Noirot

The young Zook would grow. But the memories of his family and that place remained with him forever. He wore them, quite literally, as a badge on his person. Samuel Kurtz Zook rechristened himself, changing his middle name to Kosciuszko. He took the name of the foreign general who fought as a stalwart defender of true liberty.

Kosciuszko's name means more. The Pole hated inequity of all stripes. He despised slavery. And Zook would go on to fight in a war over that very question. What was the equitable state of things in America? Did slavery have a place in a nation which had fought so hard, shivered so long at Valley Forge, to craft an America where, "all men are created equal," and were ensured, "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

And at Gettysburg, he would fall. He bled, in part, for the death of the benighted institution that his chosen namesake despised. Was battle like it had been in his childhood dreams? Was fighting and dying to save his country as sweet as his imagination had told him it would be so long before on the slopes of Valley Forge?

Samuel Kosciuszko Zook died at Gettysburg on July 2nd, 1863, a death that seemed almost fated. Another Kosciuszko fighting once again to save America from despotic rule.

-----

Great assistance for this piece was provided by Chapter 2 of A. M. Gambone's 1996 biographical history of Zook's life, "...if tomorrow night finds me dead..." The Life of General Samuel K. Zook: Another Forgotten Union Hero published by Butternut and Blue.

"...let the spinning wheel turn": A Piece of Gettysburg Lost in Rebeldom

"What goes up, must come down..."

Everything eventually comes full circle. The past meets the present meets the future. And we find echoes of the past in the things we do today. It's not a new sensation.

In the early days of January, 1863, one Gettysburgian found an echo from his town in the most unusual (but not unexpected) of places. "It was a cool day yesterday," a soldier, writing under the pen-name Fergus reported to Compiler editor H. J. Stahle, "and as I passed along the street leading towards Winchester, I observed a large two-horse carriage that had arrived in town with a load of ladies for the purpose of shopping."

Fergus was stationed in Harpers Ferry, at the gap in the mountain range where Shenandoah and Potomac poured out toward Washington City and the sea. This was still enemy Virginia, albeit occupied and relatively calm on this January day.

Fergus and I share a compulsion. Whenever I go into a diner, I pick up the coffee cup and read the maker's mark underneath. I'm looking for, "Syracuse China," embossed underneath, reminding me of my hometown. It's like touching the home once again, through a piece of dime-store ceramic.

"From some idle
curiosity I stopped...."
Idle curiosity is
a wonderful thing, eh?

"From some idle curiosity," Fergus stooped down at the carriage. He, "found that it bore the name of 'Danner & Ziegler, makers.'" Suddenly, a place and time flooded back over him. "You may imagine," he wrote, "what recollections it called to my mind of those pleasant, good old times, when your little city of Gettysburg, famous for its good coaches, used to drive a thriving business with these people."

Gettysburg was carriages in the prewar years. The local economy was dominated by the manufacture of quality buckboards, wagons and hacks. William Frassanito, in his Early Photography at Gettysburg, marks that no fewer than 10 carriage shops dotted Gettysburg's streets as war descended on the nation. The chief market for the carriages? Northern Virginia's plush farmlands, where sprawling landscapes birthed sprawling agriculture and immense wealth.

"How many in your midst," Fergus continued, "remember that when their husbands started forth with their long line of carriages it was only for a short time and the to return with an honest equivalent." Gettysburg traded with the south, allied itself with the south, profited alongside the south. Gettysburg benefited from the prosperity of Virginia's tarnished and slave-blood soaked soil. Carriages were blood money.

"Through some mismanagement what a change has taken place," Fergus benignly mused to Stahle back in Gettysburg. But Fergus, writing to the Democratic-partisan Compiler, eschewed the money's source in favor of its vast benefit. To him, Gettysburg had lost because of the scourge of war. Where once her husbands drove wagons into the south and cleaned up with a tidy profit, now the trade was quite different.

"Instead of their carriages they have been compelled to take up arms and march forth to battle, and many will have seen their homes for the last time, many will return crippled in limb and health, only to drag out a miserable existence among friends," Fergus floridly wrote, "Such is war and its consequences."

War was evil, war was wrong and war directly harmed Gettysburg. In January of 1863, for a good number who trod the streets of this still-obscure borough, the war needed to end and radical schemes be set aside for prosperity, freedom of four million set aside for the greater success of the nation.

Dissent is universal. Maybe that's because, no matter where on the spinning wheel you stand, dissent is one of the chief tenants of America.

Bells on Bobtail Ring: A Cold Day in Hell

Sleighing, as depicted in
Harpers Weekly in late 1864.

"Snow and sleighing," are, a correspondent in the Franklin Repository opined in January of 1864, "delightful words to the young, and foolish, and careless." Still, the elder correspondent was keen to, "thank time! we have outgrown such follies."

It's not that sleighing's attendant activities caused indigestion. "We don't in the least object to the merry laughter of the belles or cheery ring of the bells as they hurry past our window," the experienced and much warm correspondent wrote, "but we stir the fire, and do wonder how they can prefer discomfort to comfort, frosted feet to slippers, and frozen noses to genial warmth."

"We hardly think we would get very cold should we take a short ride," readers of the Repository read. But the one sleigh ride that the man holding the pen had taken in those first few days of January of 1864 was considerably more chilly than simple air rushing past the nose could prove. "We have taken one more sleigh-ride -- to Gettysburg," the Chambersburg correspondent reported, having, "once again enjoyed the luxury of frosted feet, frozen ears, blue nose," and the chill to the bone of Adams County's frosty winds.

Imagine the cold of a wind whipped January, skidding across the snow on the way down the slopes of the gaps leading down into the rolling plains which surround Gettysburg. Imagine the horse trotting along in the cold, steam rising from his skin as you hear your hair crinkling in the cold near your ears. Imagine that inexpressible cold of a few hours' tour over the South Mountains and down toward Gettysburg.

But a chill of the body could not match a chill of the soul.

"We were chilled all the more at the sight of the numerous rebel graves dotted here and there on hill-side," the correspondent recalled, "and in hollow-nameless graves where the poor fellows lie, dishonored and neglected." As the sleigh slid across the frosted battlefield, the story was laid out in front of its chilly occupants by eyewitnesses. "Each historical location pointed out with painful minuteness, but we confess the vividest impression upon our mind is that of carnage, slaughter, death."

For a moment, vile and cold January melted and thawed into a warm July of the mind. A sleigh sat in a vivid field of wheat and hell swirled beyond its runners. The jingling of sleigh bells gave way to the ear's imagining of explosions, of shrieks of pain, of ultimate and final shouts of horror or regret or sorrow.

The field becomes frozen again. "We were compelled," the editor wrote, "to believe what before we were afraid was an exaggeration." Gettysburg, and Hell, become real on a cold January day in 1864 in a small sleigh threading its way across the fields and hills.

The wind whipped the occupants on the way back west through the gaps. To one side of the highway stood Thaddeus Stevens' iron furnace, "that is the stack of the Furnace... a speaking commentary upon the chivalry of the South," the correspondent added glibly.

Chambersburg hove into view. "We were very cold when we reached home--indeed, as a Southern friend of ours used to say, cold as blazes."

Resolute on the Eve of Emancipation

In the eyes of William Lloyd Garrison, Abraham Lincoln stood waffling on the issue of slavery in the early days of December 1862. To be quite fair, in Garrison's eyes nearly anyone aside from William Lloyd Garrison stood waffling on the issue of slavery most of the time.

The future of the Emancipation Proclamation still was not yet written in the final few days of 1862. In the White House, Lincoln was polishing and weighing his words. But outside the walls of the Executive Mansion, there was doubt and uncertainty. Would he? Countless ministers in the north penned petitions urging him to follow through on his threat of September. But were the petitions enough?

For one man on the Peninsula, it wouldn't matter. His name was Tom, Garrison's Liberator reported in a snippet reprinted from The New York Tribune. Tom's conversation with a Tribune reporter named Samuel Wilkeson was both intriguing and incisive. Wilkeson was traipsing about the area around Norfolk and Fortress Monroe, speaking as he went, "with many intelligent men of color," on the question of emancipation and freedom.

While Sam Wilkeson was fighting a war with a pen, paper and the telegrapher's key, his son Bayard was fighting with field artillery and hot iron. As the ink dried on the Tribune and Liberator that December, Sam was serving as First Lieutenant in the 4th Light Artillery, Battery G., lobbing shells across the Rappahannock River at the rebel hordes. Eventually, Bayard would fight at Gettysburg to disastrous results. Each Wilkeson fought the battle against the Slaveholder's Rebellion in his own peculiar way.

While America sat tensely awaiting Lincoln's pen, Sam Wilkeson spoke with a black man, a former slave named Tom.

Wilkeson asked a simple question. Why didn't the black men of the South fight for the United States?

"They expected to, sir," Tom told Sam, but they, "were driven from your lines and camps, and pretty plainly told that you didn't want anything to do with us; that you meant to carry on the war, and leave us in slavery at the end of the war."

Still Tom, from his perch on one of the lowest rungs of society, could see the plain truth: "The North can't conquer the South without the help of the slaves.... We know, too, that if the war lasts, one party or the other party will give us our freedom." Whichever side offered the slaves their freedom would win their loyalty. "We mean to sell ourselves for freedom," Tom exclaimed, "we hope to you Northern men."

The dream of a slave...
in blue or possibly gray.

Tom could see more. "How long would this war last, if we were freed by act of Congress and the President's Proclamation," the wizened slave explained, "the rebel armies would melt away in a week." But if the war were to be won, then it needed to be won in whole. If the United States was to be won, Tom explained, "you can't save it without the social revolution," without destroying slavery.

Sam's account ended with a keen warning from the former slave. "You white men of the North will go into slavery," Wilkeson reported, "unless you take us black men of the South out of slavery; and Mr. W., you have not a great deal of time left in which to decide what you will do!"

Did Tom really exist? It's tough to say. He very well might have been a clever literary device derived by an anti-slavery reporter trying to capture the stakes in the waning moments before Lincoln would or wouldn't make his move.

Sam Wilkeson's opinion was clear regardless. The words of Tom, whether he existed or not, should be heeded. For Sam Wilkeson, abolitionist reporter, emancipation must come. And through the blood of thousands of black and white soldiers, including Sam's son Bayard, emancipation would come.

Kings and Princes: Christmas in Gettysburg, 1862

Sire, the night is darker now,
And the wind blows stronger;
Fails my heart, I know now how,
I can go no longer."
"Mark my footsteps, good my page;
Tread thou in them boldly;
Thou shalt find the winter's rage
Freeze thy blood less coldly."

Good King Wenceslas, John Mason Neale, 1853

In a house along the first block of the north side of Chambersburg Street, a small metallic ticking noise signaled change. The calendar read December 24th, 1862. The rhythmic tapping was a voice, reaching out in code along thin strips of metal dangling from poles running to the east out of town. Soon, "Hanover, York, Harrisburg, and Baltimore," were sending their glad tidings to Gettysburg's citizens. Then soon, Gettysburg found herself on that Christmas Eve connected, "with all the world and the rest of mankind," the Adams Sentinel reported. In the home of John Scott along Chambersburg Street, the telegraph had come to Gettysburg. Lightning could now send words to the far-flung corners of the nation from the Adams County seat.

Outside the doors of the home, Gettysburg was busy, but not extraordinarily so. The youth of the town were gathering supplies for the next day's reveries. As dawn broke, "'Young America' was on hand in the morning," the Gettysburg Compiler reported, "with firecrackers, &c., but we do not think that the usual investment was made in that sort of thing." The surrounding countryside saw its fair share of muted but still joyous noise. As Christmas Day crept into night, the flames of a fire flickered through the darkness south of town. "We were informed," the Compiler reported, that the fire was, "the burning of several stacks of hay and fodder at Dr. Shorb's." The culprit for the blaze? "The fire is supposed to have been caused by fire-crackers."

Other Gettysburgians found themselves in far less familiar surroundings that Christmas. A member of the 165th Pennsylvania Infantry reported home that his surroundings were bleak that yuletide. Writing from Virginia, the soldier found, the country from Norfolk to Suffolk shows the ravages of war. Everything is laid waste." The soldier, chatting with an officer, learned that near his camp had stood seven barns in the span of just a few hundred yards. "And what is left? Nothing! Yes, nothing - all destroyed, and the fertile fields laid waste."

Still, in a desolate landscape like Southern Virginia, the soldiers from Adams County were undeterred in their Christmas plans. "My mess concluded to have a grand Christmas dinner," the corespondent penned, "so, with that intention I went to town." Visions of a grand dinner swam before the soldier. "A turkey, or a young fat goose?" he dreamed. But when he arrived at the market, "there were but three turkies, and they were poor, and as for a goose, there was none at all." Christmas dinner that year in a camp in Suffolk, Virginia consisted of, "three pounds of pork, three pounds of corn flour, a quart of molasses, and a package of pepper." Still, the stalwart reader of the Democratic Compiler reported, there was little benefit in complaining. No one, he wrote, groused, "as hard as the Abolitionists." Through his politically slanted eyes, the Abolitionist soldiers, "groan at an awful rate for home."

The days of December were growing short, and 1863 was just on the horizon. And what would 1863 hold for Gettysburg? The Compiler's editor, Henry J. Stahle, stared into the tea leaves of, "an old tradition, published many years ago," in the form of a poem. "Christmas," he noted, "came on a Thursday." Then came the poem, lilting and brash. Perhaps it was a slight bit prophetic, considering the coming harvest of blood in July of 1863:

If Christmas on Thursday be,
A windy Winter you shall see,
Windy weather in each week,
And hard tempests, strong and thick,
The Summer shall be good and dry.
Corn and beasts shall multiply;
That year is good for lands to fill;
Kings and princes shall die by skill."

Adventus: The Great Coming of 1862

Detail from Thomas Nast's 2-page spread in Harper's Weekly lauding Emancipation.

A couple of weeks ago, I spent a weekend in Harpers Ferry helping to interpret that amazing place for the National Historical Park's annual Christmas 1864 event. One of the greatest joys of my desk job in interpretive training is getting back out into a parkscape to test out new ideas and practices. This time it gave me the chance to experiment out in the field, wearing the olde-timey clothes of the 1860s and discussing how hammers, anvils and black labor won the war through the U.S. Quartermasters Depot at Harpers Ferry. The event is amazingly fun and infinitely powerful in its most intricate moments.

The weekend also gave me the opportunity to once again take on the annual Saturday evening lantern-light tour. Typically, that event focuses on the town's contributions to Sheridan's operations in the field in the last winter of the war.

How can you focus on the U.S. Army
Quartermaster's department when
these images haunt your nightmares?

But this year felt like it needed to be different. Even though the event was focused on 148 years ago, my mind kept slipping back just two years further. As I planned out the program, I couldn't help but keep coming back to the idea of 1862. On the whole, very little has been focused nationally on the sesquicentennial of the first national crack in the wall of American apartheid, a crack whose size would wax and wane over the course of the next century and a half. It felt like a duty to the slaves who waited anxious in 1862 to tell their story this Christmas.

Mel Day, stalwart coordinator of the living history volunteer program in the park and the woman who taught me much of what I know about how interpretation functions, asked me what I wanted the evening tour titled. "Should I just put it down as, 'Captain Flagg's U.S. Quarter Master City: Approach of Peace 1864,' same as the event?" she asked me over the phone.

"No!" my mouth answered gruffly before I could temper it. I reeled for a minute. What to name it, I thought quickly, what to name it?

"Emerging from the Darkness: Christmas in a Land at War," I heard my mouth say.

"Did you just think that up now?" Mel asked. I answered that I had. "I don't understand how your mind works like that sometimes," Mel said. Sometimes I don't either, I thought.

I started 'reading' the audiobook of Penn Jillette's new book Everyday is an Atheist Holiday on the way in to work that week as well. His first chapter is all about Joy to the World and celebrating the mundane days (and not simply waiting for future redemption) as a way to make life really matter.

Penn's words melded with 1862, and inspired this Park Ranger. My mind was racing. Suddenly, it all fit together.

The opening stop of my tour was simple, but oh so sweet. It was one of those moments. And this is somewhat like what I said that night in the big tent, as my crowd prepared to bundle up and walk into the cold streets and back in time...

-----

We come into this place from the darkness, the cold of winter. The Civil War was a period of intense darkness for America, a time when men killed men and when America tried to tear itself apart over the question of freedom. But this time of year is also considered sacred, and has been by cultures around the globe for centuries. Dozens of cultures, across the centuries, have had a festival in the dark, cold months of the winter.

In the 1860s, in America, one of those festivals was Christmas. 150 years ago right now, America was preparing for another Christmas in a land at war, with sons in fields far flung from home.

The period before Christmas, the four weeks before, are called Advent, which comes from the latin adventus which means arrival or approach, or simply coming. Christians in 1862 were preparing for Christmas in this time of advent.

And one of the ways that Christians prepare for the coming holiday is through songs and carols. Joy to the World is one of those songs. The lyrics were first written in the 18th century by Isaac Watts. The music wasn't added until the the 1830s. Like so many great American songs, we stole that tune. It was cribbed in 1839 from Handel's Messiah by preacher Lowell Mason.

"sins and sorrows" seems the most perfect
literary description of American slavery in
three words I could ever think of.

But Watts' lyrics, Mason's song, isn't about joy in the world right now. It is truly a song of advent, looking forward to a second coming of Christ and joy still coming. "No more let sins and sorrows reign, and thorns infest the ground," is an incantation for a future, not a present.

In December of 1862, there was another advent going on, another expected coming. This advent wasn't waiting for a savior to descend but for a simple document. Months before, in September, Abraham Lincoln had penned the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, promising that, "on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State... in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free."

And America began a long advent, a time of intense waiting.

For some in the South, it was waiting with dread at the potential collapse of their social structure, dread of revolt by a population living in their midst that in places outnumbered whites 3-to-1.

For some in the North, it was waiting with baited breath, incredulous at the thought that, after a long, dark night of injustice, heartache and imprisonment, that slavery could begin ending with the stroke of a pen, if only Lincoln kept his promise.

It was advent. It was a time of waiting for this world of, "sin and sorrow," to pass away and a new, different, uncertain and frightening world of freedom to take its place.

And in that time of advent, there were songs too. Songs of hope and of freedom yet to come.

One of those songs, which slaves would sing in the streets of a Virginia city south of here just a few short years later as United States soldiers marched to their salvation, went like this:

"Slavery chain done broke at last,

broke at last,

broke at last,

Slavery chain done broke at last,

Gonna to praise God 'til I die.

"Way down in that valley

Praying on my knees

Told God about my troubles,

And to help me if He please.

"I did tell him how I suffer,

In the dungeon and the chain,

And de days were with head bowed down,

And my broken flesh and pain.

"I did know my Jesus heard me,

'Cause the spirit spoke to me

And said, 'Rise my child, your children,

And you shall be free.

"Now no more weary traveling

'Cause my Jesus set me free

And there's no more auction block for me

Since He gave me liberty.

"Slavery chain done broke at last,

broke at last,

broke at last,

Slavery chain done broke at last,

Gonna to praise God 'til I die."

Freedom was coming, and America sat waiting in that long, cold advent of 1862 on pins and needles. And that song echoed backwards and forwards through that long, dark winter. Would freedom come? Would this advent end?

So now we step out into the darkness, to find the roots of that freedom. We step out to find the joy of its coming, the sorrow of its coming, the fear at its coming. We step out into the darkness to find uncertainty.

Welcome to the long dark advent of the Civil War. And as we venture into the darkness, we can take that song of hope with us.

"Slavery chain done broke at last,

broke at last,

broke at last,

Slavery chain done broke at last,

Gonna to praise God 'til I die."

Divided Maryland: Antietam 150th Interpretive Talk

Sanctuary (noun). 1. A place of safety, refuge or protection.

A few weeks ago, I spent an amazing weekend interpreting the Dunker Church. Not many of you were able to visit that amazing place on that amazing weekend.

For those of you out there who didn't get to see my talks that weekend, or for those of you who would like to live them again, check out this MP3 recording of the presentation, with added music and sound.

Close your eyes and transport yourself to a hard church pew in Western Maryland...

MP3 Audio of "Divided Maryland" (19 MB, approx. 20 minutes)

Falling Like Autumn Leaves: Cutler's Brigade at Gettysburg

147th New York Monument
CC Flickr user Runner Jenny

The 147th New York's monument stands along Reynolds Avenue, silently (and incorrectly) marking where the regiment bravely fought and fell on that July day in 1863. The monument lists the brigade, division, and corps of the regiment, along with the various other battles that are part of the regiment's story. It also lists the regimental losses as well - out of 380 men that started the fight on July 1, 212 men were killed and wounded. Placed by the veterans themselves, they knew what that monument represented. It represented the entire ordeal of their regiment and its brigade on the first day of Gettysburg.

For, Cutler's brigade, of which they were a part, was one of the first U.S. infantry units to fight in the battle of Gettysburg. Comprised of hearty New Yorkers and Pennsylvanians, the 147th and the rest of Cutler's brigade battled it out on the first day west of town with troops from North Carolina and Mississippi. In a few short moments, Cutler's brigade, and the 147th New York along with it, was decimated as it struggled to buy time for the rest of the United States Army to arrive on the battlefield.

One of the first to fall in the opening engagement was Major Grover, commanding officer of the 76th New York, the 147th's sister regiment. One of the initial Rebel volleys killed his horse, dismounting the major. Not losing a step, it was recalled that the Major could be seen waving his sword as he raced on foot up and down the line of the New Yorkers. Soon though, a bullet struck close to his heart. He pleaded with his men as they were falling back, "You will not go off and leave me will you?" Some of his men attempted to carry him off, but to no avail - Major Grover realized he was dying. "Boys, it is no use carrying me an farther..." he told them. Major Grover lived just long enough to hand off his watch and rank badges to a friend before passing. Grover was a Methodist minister before the war. At 32 years of age, he left behind 3 daughters and a wife back in Cortland, NY.

Major Grover, one of the first to fall
Courtesy of the NY State Military Museum

Captain Story, also of the 76th, had a close call when they first arrived on the battlefield - a cannon ball passed between his legs plowing up the ground behind him. Later, Story was wounded in the thigh, the ball shattering his bone in three parts. He was taken to Mrs. William Culp’s home in town. There, surgeons were only able to remove some of the broken bone. Story's wife and sister were with him when he passed on August 6th. All told,  Major Grover's boys of the 76th New York suffered over 150 casualties on the first day of Gettysburg.

the 147th, from Oswego, New York, another town outside Syracuse, fared even worse on July 1st. Fighting just south of the 76th, the 147th was out in front and bore attacks from multiple sides. The first to fall in the 147th was a man by the name of Fred Rife. Rife and his partner in the battleline, Hiram Stowell, fell almost at the same time. A 33 year-old farmer-laborer, Stowell left behind his wife Charlotte and two children.

Soon into the engagement, the 147th New York was forced to fall back from its initial position. During the retreat, Lieutenant Guilford D. Mace cheered on his men, shouting words of encouragement, "Do not fall back, boys, but give the Rebels what they deserve!” Although Mace had been slightly wounded earlier in the fight, he refused to leave the field. In fact, Mace never did leave the field alive. As his men were retreating, Mace fell with a shot in both the neck and the back, the wounds breaking his back and severely paralyzing him. Lying on the field, Mace sent word to a friend, to write his wife and tell her he was dead. As he was making known his last wishes, a shell exploded near him, ripping his body to shreds. Back home in Fulton, New York, Mace's wife was just made a widow, and Mace’s three young children just became fatherless.

The original color-bearer, affectionately known as “the big Swede”, standing a fair-haired, blue-eyed, 6 feet 2 inches, Sgt. John Hinchcliff, was shot several times during the retreat. One of the bullets pierced his heart as he fell to earth wrapped up in the bloody and torn flag. A gas fitter from Rochester, New York, John left behind 3 children - John Jr., Rola, and Panneila, and his wife Elizabeth.

Lt J. Volney Pierce remembered that men were “falling like autumn leaves,” as the 147th abandoned the field. During the retreat, Pierce found Edwin G. Alyesworth lying on the ground, a mere 21 year old boy, mortally wounded. Edwin recognized Pierce, calling out to the Lieutenant not to leave him behind. Sgt Peter Shuttz and Pierce tried to carry the young private to the rear, but they couldn't manage to carry Alyesworth, who was wounded in the thigh. Fearing their own lives, the pair dropped Alyesworth and ran for their lives. For the next twenty-five years, Pierce recalled that he could still vividly remember Edwin’s last words to him. “Don’t leave me, boys,” haunted his dreams. Alyesworth’s leg was later amputated on July 3. Just hours before his father arrived in Gettysburg on July 10th, Alyesworth died from the wound.

News reached upper New York of the horrible fight at Gettysburg just as many towns were putting the final preparations together for Independence Day celebrations. Instead of celebrating, the towns prepared to mourn. Later, on July 6th, several wounded officers from the 147th arrived home in Oswego, the first eye-witnesses to tell of the terrible fighting. War came and touched Gettysburg on July 1. In the coming days, it touched town after town, city after city across the United States as news of the battle reached home. The monuments that stand on the fields of Gettysburg are just markers, made of stone and metal. But those markers also recall a story, one that touched not only Gettysburg, but towns, people, and places across the United States.