Out of Sorts: Finding the Passion behind the Article

A familiar handwriting
and inflammatory content...
must be Stahle!

The individual letters used to layout and print a newspaper in the 19th century were called sorts. Each letter was a sort. But the individual sorts that make up the words don't always give you the full story behind an article. They often aren't quite enough.

Digging hard into odd historical files, you find amazing things. Most recently it happened to me at Adams County Historical Society, my perpetual Thursday night haunt. Doing an in-depth dive, in essence living inside of an archive for years, you get to know the collection so intimately that it becomes a friend.

The vertical files in particular are amazingly odd creatures. They bear the fingerprints of anyone who has worked as at gathering the raw material together, in this case in Adams County. They're weird. They're wild. They're the mixed bag of history.

A few weeks ago, I opened a mixed bag up and found the amazing. In a folder on the Gettysburg Compiler, the borough's often-inflammatory conservative newspaper of the 19th century, a yellowing page has iron gall ink scrawled across it. I thought I recognized the handwriting.

The title screamed at me, "Thaddeus Stevens' Late Speech." The opening lines were just too good to resist diving in deeper. "Without following Mr. Stevens in his meanderings through marsh, swamp, fen, bog and slough of political despond, let it suffice to approach the threshold of this quagmire of abolition heresies." The editor continues on, excoriating Stevens in interminable diatribe.

The tone is spot on for Henry J. Stahle, the newspaper's editor. So are the politics and the handwriting. In the end, Stahle demands every good, right-thinking American to:

defend our free institutions; defend our liberal, toleration of religion; defend our homes, our altars, and our fires from the ruthless hands of conspiring demagogues and abolition traitors; defend the purity of the ballot box; defend the President in his Constitutional policy of restoration and re-Union; and God will bless and save our country from the ravages of another civil war."

A photo, alongside the handwritten manuscript
in the folder, showing the Compiler's wartime
office on Baltimore Street.

The letter is amazing in its content and its vitriol. It was eventually published in the September 18th, 1865 edition of the newspaper on page 2 as written. Surrounding it is the real aim of the editor: a concerted effort to deny David McConaughy a seat in the State Legislature, and thereby prevent real black voting rights from becoming a reality within the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Where civil war had divided North and South, racial war threatened to divide states, counties and even small towns as the "War Between the States" subsided and the war over the future of the black man began.

But what's most exciting is the realization of the process. This diatribe was handwritten, with underlined words peppered throughout the page. The vitriol is in the words, but it's just as evident in the stroke of the pen. Touching the paper, the rage seeps through. These words were real for Stahle, they were things he believed so passionately and felt had such dire consequences that he penned them in neat but violent hand.

Where in the newspaper, Stahle's fear of America becoming, "a government of a single idea," is rendered in italics, in his draft each word is underlined of its own accord. Stahle fears the, "abolition traitors," because they threatens to transform America into, "a government of a single idea." That idea is ever-extending freedom to the oppressed and punishing those who deny that freedom. And as you look at the words, look at the simple ink on a page, you can almost see Stahle's pen underlining each separate word in the phrase, a short underscore for each word resolutely placed below. This wasn't the America he wanted. And he let that fact be known.

When they were translated into type, when the sorts were laid in the trays and the paper was ready to print, the italics became uniform. The anger was there, but not nearly as palpable. But in touching a simple sheet of paper, a tool of hatred from nearly a century and a half ago, you find Stahle's soul in neat, dark ink.

Old, Worn Bibles: What Did She Feel?

What is the emotion here?

A simple photo for today, taken back in September standing in the Dunker Church. A visitor, giddy and laughing, gets so close to the Dunker Bible standing inside of the footprint of the Dunker Church on the eve of the anniversary of battle.

Why? What is it that made her so happy?

Was it knowledge? That surely came into play. She needed to have some background and understanding of that place, she needed a feel for the forces at play. But it's not knowledge she's getting from those pages. It's just a book like any other.

On Monday, Obama laid his hand on a plain 1853 pocket Bible, published by Oxford University Press. To open it, to read it, it is a King James Bible. Likewise, the Dunker Bible is a plain English Bible, easily read. The 23rd psalm is the same in both books as any other hunk of dead trees and cow's skin you find on shelves and in churches across America.

So what's the power?

It's the talisman. It's the meaning. The book doesn't really matter all that much. It adds weight, but not substance. If Lincoln had set his hand upon Punch Magazine to swear out the oath of office, if the Dunkers had read from a sacred copy of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus right before the battle at Sharpsburg, we would drool over those pages of wood-pulp and ink.

It's the fact that these object were there, but it's something more than that fact too.

It's the romance and wonder of that proximity. It's the understanding that we cannot shake Lincoln's hand any longer. We cannot hear the Dunker's songs that Sunday before the battle any longer.

But we can meet the library's silent witnesses. So we stand slack-jawed with our camera, not gaining knowledge. There is none to be gained from these books.

We instead gain something to feed our soul.

Sunrise with Lincoln and Meanings with Chuck

From darkness to light.

I walked 150 years on Monday. I walked across a great chasm of history.

Physically, I walked from the Arlington Cemetery Metro Station across Memorial Bridge, then continued down the National Mall to 4th Street, where I witnessed one of the most peculiar regularly scheduled celebrations that Americans observe: the Inauguration of the President.

But along the way, I met the past alive on the landscape. I watched the sky turn from murky black into hopeful, bright pink and orange sitting alongside the savior of the nation. Lincoln and I watched as the early light of sunrise silhouetted the brightly-lit Washington Monument. We watched the dark melt to light, the chaos and unknown melt into bright order.

The two of us sat on the steps of his Memorial and watched his nation. It's a nation he could have never dreamt of and yet one he saw clearly in his greatest hopes. The man in the White House, Lincoln's house, looks like the slaves that Lincoln helped begin to truly free 150 years ago. His skin is the same dusky hue.

Meeting him on the street in 1858 in Washington, you might have assumed he was some man's property.

But meeting him on the street in 2013, you can only assume he truly is his own man, as are we all, and you would instantly know he is the leader of a vibrant and constantly evolving nation.

The man who lives in the White House looks like the slaves did, in this, the Sesquicentennial of their freedom. And Lincoln smiled down from his seat in his Memorial. A land he could never imagine, and dreamt of every night.

Reflecting on war and meaning.

I left my friend the Emancipator and dove forward in history. I stooped down to shake hands with Dr. King on the spot where he begged to cash a check of freedom. I walked past the wall which chronicles the war he fought with all his soul to keep from killing more of America's sons, just as Lincoln had hoped to do a century before when he chose to free a race of men. I glanced back and saw a young songbird, singing, "My Country Tis' of Thee," from a high perch. And I watched as she melted into an old woman, still singing for freedom and equality and to a Lord she knew held her in his hands.

I peered a the line that marks old from new on the side of Washington's Monument, the scar of a war and the resolve of a people to do honor to their father. And next door I saw the foundation of a new museum dedicated to the race of people that that father held in bondage: irony is telling.

Then I stepped onto The Mall and democracy came alive. Walking down the long muddy front yard of the nation, flanking both sides of the path, a chorus of, "good morning." Over and over. High-fives and handshakes from strangers. This wasn't a strange place. We were being welcomed home.

And then Senator Schumer began to speak. His words were brief, but powerful. They were solid and heavy, they soared like a light dove on the wing.

They were interpretive.

I've placed a full transcript of Chuck's short address in the new 'Sources and Miscellaneous' tab above. They're worth another read if you heard them, and a first read if you didn't.

Chuck spoke like a seasoned interpreter, carving meaning where none existed before for the stunned audience. The black smudge on the skyline, the fuzzy statue at the crest of the Capitol Dome, became something more.

Welcome home.

It wasn't bronze. It was resolve. It wasn't a sculpture. It was the comeuppance of slave-set-free Phillip Reid. That statue, a metal representation of Freedom became in a flash the embodiment of Americans', "stubborn adherence to the notion that we are all created equal and that we deserve nothing less than a great republic worthy of our consent."

In fewer than 5 minutes, the moment had passed. The celebration continued. But Charles Schumer had taken those moments and used them to transform that meaningless statue, to ignite it like a torch in the soul. That's what interpretation is: we, at our best, take the meaningless and turn it into a beacon to guide the heart and comfort the mind. And bronze became lighthouse Monday morning.

"So," Schumer concluded, "it is a good moment to gaze upward and behold the statue of freedom at the top of the Capitol Dome." And what could the statue provide? "It is a good moment to gain strength and courage and humility from those who were determined to complete the half-finished dome."

Strength, courage, humility, drawn from a simple hunk of bronze atop a cast-iron dome masquerading as marble. And yet, there it stands: strength, courage, humility... and Lincoln's wildest dreams fulfilled.

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.