Longtime Strawfoot readers will recognize this post. I wrote it on September 17, 2012 for the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Antietam. I reposted it again on July 1st 2013 for the sesquicentennial of the first day’s fighting at Gettysburg. Now, for the final time, here it is on the anniversary of Appomattox. It is difficult to believe the Civil War Sesquicentennial is ending. When it began with the remembrance of John Brown’s raid in 2009 I had just gotten married and my father was still alive.
History of course is not as neat as commemorations suggest. Life just doesn’t work that way. The fighting still went on even after Lee surrendered to Grant. Joseph E. Johnston did not surrender to Sherman until April 26. Edmund Kirby Smith’s Trans-Mississippi Army finally laid down its arms on May 26. Still Lee’s army was the most significant, and logic dictates that April 9 is the day we pause and remember. I know that the blog has taken a few turns over the past four years, especially after I attended the World War One Centennial Trade Show in Washington last June. Still, the Civil War is my primary research interest and will continue so. Anyways from 2012…
Wesley Merritt’s 1897 interpretation of Lee’s surrender
Today is the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest day in American history. Last night my wife and I were watching some of the C-SPAN and other coverage, which led to a conversation about the Civil War’s role in my life. Some things have the ability to captivate us always. My list includes the Beatles, New York City, Elvis, both World Wars, Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, Sinatra, and the American Civil War. Don’t ask me to explain; how does anyone know from where in the human imagination such interests arise? Now middle-aged, I have nonetheless reached that point where I am so removed from the events of my younger days to see where the roads turned. For me, the Civil War path has taken several twists.
The first was when I was ten and my uncle gave me a book of Matthew Brady photographs. I was too young to pick up on at the time but the book was a reprint of Benson J. Lossing’s History of the Civil War. Thankfully I was also too young to read the dense prose. If I had I might still be influenced by its early 20th century take on the War of the Rebellion. It was something like the Time-Life books about the Second World War many people had in their living rooms in the 1970s and 80s. Fun to look at, but not especially reliable. Still, the Civil War photo were captivating, especially to a latchkey kid whose parents had uprooted him from his home in Connecticut and transplanted to Florida before divorcing two years later. I lost the book over the years until seeing it again for $10 in a Border’s a few years ago. I shelled out the money but eventually gave the book away, worried about the accuracy not just of the text but even the captions on the photographs themselves. For starters, we now know that many “Brady” photos were actually taken by Alexander Gardner, Timothy H. O’Sullivan, or other members of Brady’s studio. The captions on old photographs are often wrong as well. I have read my Frassanito.
I got away from the Civil War during my high school and college years but had my interest piqued again when Ken Burns’s documentary was released in 1990. It is a dramatic film, beautifully choreographed, that inspired many of us to delve more into the literature. This in turn led me to purchase Bruce Catton’s American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War when it was re-released with updated maps, art work, and photographs in 1996. At this time I was going to graduate school and working fullltime at a large chain bookstore to make ends meet. Often I worked until midnight and came home too wound up to go to sleep immediately. I would sit at my tiny kitchen table eating my 1:00 am dinner and reading Catton’s lyrical prose. I was still too young and unaware that Catton was part of any historiographical “school.” Ironically, I never took a Civil War class in either grad or undergraduate school. This is especially unfortunate because I did my undergraduate work at the University of Houston and could have studied with Joseph Glatthaar.
The next turn came with the release of Tony Horowitz’s Confederates in the Attic in 1998. Many readers enjoyed it for its anecdotes about the levels of farbiness one finds at Civil War reenactments. What I most took from the book though was how little we know about the war, despite the tens of thousands of books written on the subject. Self serving regimental histories. Lost Cause mythology. The foggy memories of aging veterans visiting the battlefields of their youth. Flaws in the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion. It was all new to me. It was (and is) terrifying also to think that everything one knows about something could be wrong. Even worse is realizing that there might be no way ever to know the full story of something, even by extension one’s own life. The next year I visited Shiloh for the first time when I went out to visit my dad. Other than a quick one hour stop at Fredericksburg in 1997 when I got off the freeway during my move to New York, I had never visited a Civil War battlefield before. After that we visited Pea Ridge, Vicksburg, and Shiloh again. This is where I became fixated on the myths and memory of the war.
In 2008 I visited Gettysburg for the time, and the following year I went back with the woman who became my wife a few months later. That year we also went to Sharpsburg in what has become something of an annual pilgrimage. There is no substitute to walking a Civil War battlefield. On that same trip we also visited Harper’s Ferry on what was the anniversary year of John Brown’s raid. This got me thinking harder about the sesquicentennial and the opportunity it presented to think harder about American Civil War and its place in our history. I never romanticized the Civil War–and I was certainly never a Lost Causer–but I believe I think more critically and less sentimentally about that conflict than I might have when I was younger. This in turn led to another path, the one I am on now, where I started this blog to make the leap from buff to serious writer. I feel I am now finding my niche, which include the Civil War in New York, and Civil War veterans in the Gilded Age among other aspects.
In a nutshell that is the Civil War in my life. Last night, looking at the images from over the weekend on the Antietam NPS Facebook page, I couldn’t help but wonder how many of the children taken to the event by their parents will become captivated by this tragic event in our history. Some will forget almost immediately, but years from now others will look back on the commemoration of 2011-2015 as the spark that started it all.
(image/Art and Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. “The Surrender At Appomattox.” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1897. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e0-ff16-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99)
Over the course of the day today at Governors Island, amidst the rededication of the Merle Hay monument, the author talks, and the rest of the programs, many of us noted that today is the 155th anniversary of the Battle of Antietam. It is hard to believe the sesquicentennial of that event was five years ago. While Americans were preparing for the Great War in summer 1917 they stopped to note the 55th Sharpsburg anniversary. Brooklyn held its own ceremony in Prospect Park on Saturday 15 September. As the headline notes above, there were still plenty of Grand Army Men around at this time. It is worth noting that what we now call Grand Army Plaza was still Prospect Park Plaza; the name change did not come until 1926. Some of the most prominent veterans at the 1917 turnout were Red Legged Devils from Brooklyn’s 14th Infantry Regiment. The juxtaposition of the two headlines, taken from the 16 September issue of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, reveal how the country was looking backward and forward at the same time.
