2012 Civil War Tours

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Ad coming out in the December issue of The Civil War Monitor (vol. 1, no. 2)

"Army museum's morbid oddities resettled in Maryland" (from the Associated Press)

read the full article here.

This undated handout photo provided by the National Museum of Health and Medicine shows the bullet that killed President Abraham Lincoln on April 15, 1865, and is among the items on display at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Silver Spring, Md. The military museum recently moved to its new home in Silver Spring due to the closing of the nearby Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington.

This undated handout photo provided by the National Museum of Health and Medicine shows the shattered right leg bones of U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Daniel Sickles on display at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Silver Spring, Md., along with a cannonball similar to the one that hit him during the Civil War Battle of Gettysburg. The military museum recently moved to its new home in Silver Spring due to the closing of the nearby Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington.

The bullet that killed Abraham Lincoln is mounted under glass, like a diamond in a snow globe, in its new home at the National Museum of Health and Medicine.

The lead ball and several skull fragments from the 16th president are in a tall, antique case overlooking a Civil War exhibit in a museum gallery in Silver Spring, just off the Capital Beltway.

The military museum, known for its collection of morbid oddities, moved in September from the former Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. At Walter Reed, visitors had to pass through a security gate and find the museum on the campus, where parking could be a problem.

The new building stands outside the gates of Fort Detrick's Forest Glen Annex. Visitors can just drive up, walk in and come face-to-face with a perpetually grinning skeleton directing them to an exhibit on the human body. There, one can see a hairball from the stomach of a 12-year-old girl and the amputated leg of a man with elephantiasis — a disease that causes limbs to become bloated. The leg floats upright in a glass jar like an enormous, pickled sausage.

browsing the Civil War blogosphere

    WORST CIVIL WAR BOOKS   
Ted Savas, at A Publisher's Perspective has turned the table on the ubiquitous “favorite books” list by asking readers to name the worst Civil War volumes they’ve personally read. I immediately weighed in with John Bowers’s, Chickamauga and Chattanooga, the Battles that Doomed the Confederacy. Bowers, a novelist, is confused about what constitutes non-fiction. In one scene, worthy of a South Park episode, he has Bragg passing gas so forcefully that the tent flaps are fluttering. Seriously.

    HERE LIES A PART   
If, like me, you won’t be visiting Higginsville, Missouri anytime soon, drop by Nick’s Battlefield Wanderings blog for some photos of the Confederate Memorial Park there. They lay claim to some part of William Quantrill’s remains. Just what part is unclear.

    OZARK LIMBO   
Things could be worse. You could be a ghost—somehow unable to fully transition to the next level—and doomed to spend eternity in Arkansas.   

    TRAINMEN    

I could read about trains and trainmen all day, even post-Civil War. Robert Moore, of Cenantua’s Blog fame, remembers some of his Union veteran ancestors work on the iron rails in this meaty blog entry. My grandfather was a station agent and telegrapher for the Minneapolis and St. Louis railway, and his father, and uncle—among other family members—worked on the “Peoria Gateway” as well. That road took my grandfather from Minnesota into South Dakota, where he met his wife, a Norwegian farm girl, and it took him down into Iowa as well, where my mother and father put down roots in a sea of corn.

    SMALL PRESSES, BIG THEATERS   
Hands-down, for my money, the best Civil War book blog out there is Drew Wagenhoffer’s, Civil War Books and Authors. I especially enjoy that he doesn’t give short shrift to Western and Trans-Mississippi titles, and that he recognizes good work being done by small presses, such as the Camp Pope Publishers. Where else are you going to read a detailed and authoritative review of Iowa’s Martyr Regiment: the story of the Thirty-eighth Iowa Infantry, by David Wildman? I’m amazed at how many books—in areas of specific interest to me—I hear of for the first time on Drew’s blog.

    HASKELL COUNTY CLOWN   
My second stop for book postings is Civil War Librarian, which brings together reviews of new books from myriad sources, as well as news, commentary, and useful preservation updates. I was glad to stumble upon this David Blight opinion piece, reproduced from the Kansas City Star. Blight is telling it like it is. Read it and weep, Governor Perry.

    BODY BAGS   
United States Patent Number 39,291 was issued for Dr. Thomas Holmes’s “Improvement in Receptacles for Dead Bodies.” Jim Schmidt writes about that at his Civil War Medicine (and Writing) blog, in this case a reprint of his regular Civil War News installment. Pretty damn interesting.

    A HERO IS BORN   
Once Brooks Simpson moved on to create his own blog (Crossroads), Ethan Rafuse stepped up as the principal contributor over at Civil Warriors, and has seemingly single-handedly managed to keep one of the oldest and most respected Civil War blogs fresh and interesting. I am more than a little interested in reading his new biography of Stonewall Jackson.

    HOUSTON AND TEXAS CENTRAL   

Andy Hall taught me what a Ferroequinologist is, even though I have been one myself for many years. I rarely surf through my Civil War blogroll without dropping in on Dead Confederates. It’s that consistently enjoyable to read.

    SAY THAT FIVE TIMES FAST    

Reading about the October, 1861 Chicamacomico Races at Emerging Civil War brought to mind that famous Monty Python war cry from The Search for the Holy Grail: “Run away, run away!”  

    IF GRAFFITI COULD TALK    

As good as blogs get: Mysteries and Connundrums. Would that all major battlefields got the same treatment as this blog does for the Spotsylvania and Fredericksburg area. Check out these multi-part entries on graffiti at Chatham and Falmouth.

    PRESERVATION FAIL    

What the hell were they thinking? The Brandy Station Foundation utterly failed in its pledge to preserve the “natural and historic resources of the Brandy Station area.” Someone had to say it, and Eric Wittenberg said it with gusto over at Rantings of a Civil War Historian. This and the numerous follow-up posts chronicle the debacle and its aftermath.

    BONES IN THE HOLE    

Everything’s bigger in my home state of Texas, including atrocities. There was the Great Hanging at Gainesville, of course, a mass murder that neo-Confederates forget to mention to their children. But Victoria Bynum digs deeper at her deliciously substantive blog, Renegade South. This story about Unionist bones in Dead Man’s Hole is so well done, some Texas quarterly should pick it up and send her a check.

    DUST IN THE DISTANCE    

“High Rock,” in Washington County, Maryland, in the South Mountain range, affords “the most beautiful mountain scenery,” so records a regimental history of the 3rd Pennsylvania Cavalry. General Buford himself reportedly stopped there on June 29, 1863, and could see the dust from a Confederate column in Greencastle, Pennsylvania (McLaws’ Division?). One day I’m going to hire John Miller to take me to this spot, which I enjoyed reading about at War Returns to South Mountain, a blog of good, solid essays by a devoted local historian.

    RETREATING TO VICTORY    

The Confederates held the battlefield at Wilson’s Creek, but they lost Missouri at Pea Ridge.  Even as a graduate student, Bob Pollock knew what he was talking about, and he writes about it now at Yesterday and Today. 

Remembering some Civil War Forum Battlefield Tours

Bob Krick at Chancellorsville stylishly sporting
a SF Giants ballcap and a 49ers logo shirt (2003)

 Bob Krick at Fredericksburg (2003) 

 With Krick at the Muleshoe, Spotsylvania (2003)

 Gordon Brown, Atlanta History Center (2008)

 Some prized kepis in the Atlanta History Center collection (2008)

 Logbook of the CSS Shenandoah, Atlanta History Center (2008)

 Richmond's Hollywood Cemetery.
Matthew Fontaine Maury in the foreground.
President James Monroe in the background (2011)

 State Historian James Wooten, Pickett's Mill (2008)

 Bobby Krick at Beaver Dam Creek (2011)

 Scene of "The Crime at Pickett's Mill" (2008)

 Author Russell Bonds on Pine Mountain
site of the death of General Leonidas Polk (2008)

 Russ Bonds at Big Shanty, with The General (2008)

At right, Professor Nystrom, New Orleans (2010)

 Atop Malvern Hill (2011)

 Johnston's Chattahoochee River Line (2008)

 Stuart monument at Yellow Tavern (2011)

 Fort Pike, New Orleans (2010)

 Atlanta tour guides: Russell Bonds, Charlie Crawford,
Gordon Jones, Stephen Davis, Greg Biggs (2008)

 Detail from a Scaife map at the Atlanta Cyclorama (2008)

 My youngest son, bored to death, but patient
at the Laura Plantation in Louisiana (2010)

 Slave cabin at Laura Plantation (2010)

 Oak Alley Plantation (2010)

 Historian Jim Ogden, Stones River (1998)

 Ewell's grave in Nashville (2006)

 Ed Bearss at Appomattox (2007)

 Historians Ron Wilson and Patrick Schroeder
at Appomattox (2007)

 Bearss and Wilson on Lee's Retreat (2007)

 Lee's Retreat Tour (2007)

 McClean Parlor (2007)

 William Garrett Piston, on right, at Wilson's Creek (2004)

Ed Bearss and the late Brian Pohanka on the
bank of the Mississippi River at Vicksburg (2000)
[photo by Rudy Perini]

Horace Porter and John Paul Jones

John Paul Jones was one of my first heroes. I loved the very sound of his name. I loved the images it evoked—all of the excitement and tension of "Master and Commander" before Hollywood had the technical ability to make those images seem real.

I read a biography of John Paul Jones when I was a child, but can't remember the name of the book or much else about it, other than that it left me with a life-long impression of a virtuous and brave naval giant taking on the all but invincible Royal Navy, and prevailing. Where ordinary men would accept defeat, he had not yet begun to fight!

Living in the land lubber states of Nebraska and Iowa at the time, I had a great love of tales from the Age of Sail, particularly the stories of great explorers, and of desperate battles at sea by great wooden ships. I built crude models of early American warships, and dreamed of one day visiting Old Ironsides in Boston, the flagship of the United States Navy. I was 29- or 30-years-old before I managed to do that, though a visit to her sister ship Constellation in Baltimore, when I was in junior high, helped tide me over as I went on to build models that covered the long lineage of American ships of war and exploration, through WWII iterations, and extending even to vessels with those same names among the fleet of Federation starships. Oh how I wished the Bonhomme Richard had survived the war. But she may turn up yet. At least five major expeditions, most recently in 2005, have failed to locate the wreck, believed to be off the coast of Yorkshire, but the search is not over. 

In time I came to learn that there may be a little residual sea salt in my blood. I was gratified to discover that some of my earliest ancestors in this country "went down to the sea in ships," settling the area around Salem, and homesteading at the head of the Bass River (today's Beverly, Massachusetts). They had taken up residence on Cape Ann initially to harvest cod for the Dorchester Company, which founded Gloucester of "Perfect Storm" fame—some of the very first settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.  Continuing the maritime theme, one of my distant New England ancestors—Levi Woodbury—went on to become the Secretary of the Navy under President Andrew Jackson. [He is, incidentally, reported to be one of a small group of people to have served in all three branches of the Federal government: in addition to Secretary, he was a senator from New Hampshire, and a Supreme Court Justice—and according to an unknown Wikipedia author, one of only three people to complete the Federal trifecta who also served as a state governor]. Sadly, the one bona fide warship named for him, the destroyer USS Woodbury (DD-309) did not fare well, crashing into the rocks off California's Point Honda in 1923 with six other destroyers in a spectacular and tragic accident.

But I digress. I've never lost my interest in tales of the sea, and now, in 2011, I finally got around to reading another biography of John Paul Jones. But this time it was a modern treatment, Evan Thomas's, John Paul Jones: Sailor, Hero, Father of the American Navy.  This summer, as I read it, I was about six years older than Jones was when he died (an increasingly dismaying fact when studying historic figures is that we today are world-class slackers). He's still a towering figure to me, but oh so human now.

Thomas's portrait of Jones provided one revelation after another. I did not ever consider that Jones might be a petulant, vainglorious egotist, whose incessant whining caused even his closest supporters to scold or avoid him.  But there it is, well documented in his letters.

I didn't know his name was really just John Paul, and that the Jones was added later, probably due to his wanting to distance himself from an unfortunate incident resulting in the death of a crewman. I didn't even know, because I don't speak French, that the Bonhomme Richard was a tribute to Ben Franklin's famous publication.

Model on view at the Jones cottage in Scotland.

Nor did I know that Jones was largely forgotten in the United States after his death in Paris in 1792 (even citizenship was bestowed upon him posthumously). The American minister to France, Gouverneur Morris, couldn't be bothered to attend his funeral, or to appropriate funds for a burial befitting the "Father of the United States Navy." 

ENTER HORACE PORTER

Horace Porter is well known to most students of the Civil War. A well-heeled West Point graduate, third in the class of 1860, he began his war service on the southeastern seaboard, at Fort Pulaski, and Secessionville, and by the summer of 1862 was on the staff of Maj. Gen. George McClellan with the Army of the Potomac. After Antietam, he went to the West, to General Rosecrans's staff, was at Chickamauga—where he earned a Congressional Medal of Honor—and Chattanooga, where he eventually became attached to the headquarters of Ulysses S. Grant.

Horace Porter

Porter, whose successive brevet promotions took him all the way to brigadier-general by war's end, served on and off with Ulysses S. Grant for the next 11 years, from the summer of 1864 to 1873, and remained close to Grant for the rest of Grant's life. After the war, he was Assistant Secretary of War under interim Secretary Grant (1867-1868), and President Grant's Executive Secretary (1869-1873) during the White House years. His 1897 memoir, Campaigning with Grant, is a mainstay in Civil War studies, being first published serially in "The Century." It is accurate in the main, but, typical of the genre, contains many post-war embellishments. Shortcomings aside, Porter's glimpse's of Grant behind the scenes, and his recollections of the wind down-to Appomattox, should be read by anyone interested in primary accounts of some of the most dramatic moments in the Civil War.

I knew all about Porter's Civil War service, but being so long preoccupied by the Civil War years in my reading, Porter's life for me pretty much began in 1860 and ended at Appomattox. I don't know why that is, but it's often a revelation to learn that someone you thought little about in the Civil War era had a long and interesting life, with achievements wholly unrelated to "the Late Unpleasantness." That reminds me. Back in 2007 I did a blog post about officers who survived the war, but died of something other than natural causes after the war, by surveying entries in Eicher & Eicher's, Civil War High Command. Have a look: "When Luck Runs Out."

Back to the story. Porter's service to his country did not end with the Grant administration. For eight years beginning in 1897, he was the United States Ambassador to France. For the last six of those years, of his own accord, he oversaw an exhaustive search for the long lost grave of the American naval hero John Paul Jones. After an ill-fated stint in the Russian Navy, Jones had returned to France in slowly declining health, finally succumbing to multiple health issues in his Paris apartment on July 18, 1792, nearly 13 years after the Bonhomme Richard slipped beneath the waves of the North Sea.

Through the generosity of a French aristocrat, he was buried in an more costly, tightly-sealed lead coffin, and preserved in alcohol, should the Americans ever come looking for their great seaman. But the Americans never came. In time, the cemetery land where Jones was buried was put to other uses in the ever-growing City of Lights, mostly built over, and even the names of the surrounding streets had been changed between Jones's death and Porter's eventual discovery of the site in 1905.

Map of the St. Louis Cemetery showing the 1792 street names and the 1905 names. The cemetery itself is about 120 feet long on Rue de la Grange aux Belles and 130 wide. The oblong mark shows Jones' coffin. The higher courtyard was not used for burials. By 1905 both were built upon. —Sons of the American Revolution site:

http://www.southcoastsar.org/Rcvry_JPJ.htm#vn

Porter, who himself was descended from an officer in the Continental Army (his grandfather was Andrew Porter), launched the search for Jones's remains without any prompting from his government, and at his own expense. By the time he discovered the cemetery and began negotiations with landowners for access, then-president Theodore Roosevelt asked Congress to appropriate funds for the excavation, but the money was not forthcoming for many years. Porter lamented the treatment Jones had received after death, writing, 

After having studied the manner and place of his burial and contemplated the circumstances connected with the strange neglect of his grave, one could not help feeling pained beyond expression and overcome by a sense of profound mortification. Here was presented the spectacle of a hero whose fame once covered two continents and whose name is still an inspiration to a world-famed navy, lying for more than a century in a forgotten grave like an obscure outcast, relegated to oblivion in a squalid corner of a distant foreign city, buried in ground once consecrated, but since desecrated by having been used at times as a garden, with the moldering bodies of the dead fertilizing its market vegetables, by having been covered later by a common dump pile, where dogs and horses had been buried, and the soil was still soaked with polluted waters from undrained laundries; and as a culmination of degradation, by having been occupied by a contractor for removing night-soil.

Amazingly, Jones's lead coffin was located, and his remains were remarkably well preserved. For an interesting account of "The Two Burials of John Paul Jones," see this website with its many worthwhile links.

President Roosevelt, eager to make the United States into a naval power second to none and cognizant of the patriotic fervor that could be built up around the repatriation of Jones, was eager to bring home the remains of the naval icon. After much pomp and circumstance in Paris, Jones's body was shipped to his adopted home on a 13-day voyage ending with a parade of naval vessels up the Chesapeake Bay to Annapolis. Horace Porter, as he had done at the dedication of Grant's tomb, gave a speech in an elaborate ceremony at the United States Naval Academy on April 24, 1906, welcoming the hero home. It would be another seven years before Congress settled on Annapolis as Jones's final resting place, and there, beneath the chapel, his sepulchre was built. Information on visiting Jones's crypt can be found here.  At the base of the tomb, his epitaph reads:

JOHN PAUL JONES, 1747-1792


U.S. NAVY, 1775-1783

HE GAVE OUR NAVY ITS EARLIEST TRADITIONS

OF HEROISM AND VICTORY


ERECTED BY THE CONGRESS, A.D. 1912

Now, having read a sampling of Jones's own writing, reported in Thomas's biography, I know that Jones was not larger than life, but he was certainly full of life, a fierce, proud warrior, fearless on the open sea. He's still my hero.

Letterman on the Civil War

Thursday, May 15, 2008
TOP TEN SIGNS YOUR TEACHER IS DRUNK
Number 9:  Insists the Civil War was fought between Jack Daniel and Jim Beam

Thursday, April 8, 1999
TOP TEN WAYS TO MAKE GOLF MORE EXCITING
Number 3:  New hazard: Civil War re-enactments. 

Monday, May 2, 1994
TOP TEN SIGNS YOU'RE NOT GOING TO GRADUATE
Number 9:  In essay on Civil War you wrote about Tom and Roseanne break-up
 

(for complete listings, click on the title of each top ten list) 

Was Nicolas Cage a vampire during the Civil War?

This imaginative eBay listing has since been removed. Perhaps the item was sold. The original auction was entitled, "Nicolas Cage is a Vampire / Photo from 1870 / Tennessee," with an asking price of $1,000,000. Imagine what it would be worth if you could get Cage to sign it. (Thanks to my brother for bringing this supernatural item to my attention.)

Original c.1870 carte de visite showing a man who looks exactly like Nick Cage. Personally, I believe it's him and that he is some sort of walking undead / vampire, et cetera, who quickens / reinvents himself once every 75 years or so. 150 years from now, he might be a politician, the leader of a cult, or a talk show host.

This is not a trick photo of any kind and has not been manipulated in Photoshop or any other graphics program. It's an original photo of a man who lived in Bristol, TN sometime around the Civil War.

I've had a lot of questions asking where I purchased this. As followers of my website know, I collect antique memorial photography - images of dead people - from the 1800s. This photo was found in the very back of album that contained an unusual number of Civil War era death portraits (which is why I purchased it). All of the other people in the album, living and dead, were identified by name - this man was not.

Reviews Forthcoming

George Crook: From the Redwoods to Appomattox, Paul Magid (University of Oklahoma Press, 2011).

Shooting Soldiers: Civil War Medical Photography by R.B. Bontecou, Stanley B. Burns, M.D. (Burns Archive Press, 2011)

Dakota Dawn: The Decisive First Week of the Sioux Uprising, August 17-24, 1862, Gregory F. Michno (Savas Beatie, 2011).

In the Cornfield

Yes Virginia, you can produce regular, lengthy blog entries and still find time to write a book

There are too many Civil War books to keep up with (or catch up with) these days, so one has to be fairly discerning about how to fill those precious few hours available for reading (it's hard enough to keep up with all the blogs). But even though his Facebook entries evince a startlingly pronounced and deeply disconcerting [New York] Yankee bias, I'm going to take time to read Brooks Simpson's newest work from Praeger's, "Reflections on the Civil War Era" series. Reflections should always be characterized by well-informed and well-considered opinions, and I'm confident Simpson won't disappoint on that score, whether or not you concur with his observations. 

P.S. I can see what the dust jacket designer was going for with the Grant image on top, and the Gettysburg map below, the Civil War in the East, of course, but you just know some reviewer is going to count coup by pointing out Grant wasn't at Gettysburg.

Georgia Adds Swastika, Middle Finger To State Flag

I don't know how I missed this controversial story from the late 1990s. It must have gotten lost in a busy news cycle.

[News in Photos, November 4, 1998, The Onion]

Ed Bearss' favorite Civil War books

No, Ed did not mention a book on Glorieta Pass in his top five, but I'll bet you he read this one, and thought highly of it. On his tours of Glorieta and Valverde, no doubt he crossed paths with the late historian Don Alberts, who sadly passed away from Parkinson's in November of 2010. I love the New Mexico desert, and I love Don's book on Glorieta (read Don's account of the battle at the Civil War Trust website).

I started thinking about Don's book when I stumbled upon this link over at the fine "Past in the Present" blog, a Billings Gazette article that asked Ed Bearss to list his five favorite Civil War books. I was very curious to see what Ed would list, since these kinds of things are so subjective, and imagining what any one person would say after a lifetime of study is difficult. Battle Cry of Freedom and Grant's memoirs are unassailable choices. I imagine a great many people would list them as a "must" for any top five ranking. I do.

I was interested to see the Sears' book on Gettysburg—which I have not read—make the list for best book on a single battle. Now I feel like I have to read it, though before today my chances of getting around to it were less than 50-50. Still waiting on my metaphorical nightstand is Steven Woodworth's single volume Gettysburg history, Beneath a Northern Sky (about which Jeffrey Hall wrote a fairly penetrating review).

Invariably at some point when reading a book by Sears, I find myself distracted by the author's emotional reaction to one thing or another, one officer or another. Since McClellan was not at Gettysburg, perhaps the distractions of his book on that subject are more fleeting. I should say that Sears' book on Antietam, Landscape Turned Red, was one of the truly seminal books in my own Civil War reading. Powerful stuff. I might have included it in my own top five had I re-read it any time in the last 15 years. I can't really remember it that well now. His Seven Days book is a great contribution.

For personal gratification, I was hoping Bearss would name Mark Bradley's book on Bentonville, Last Stand in the Carolinas, which I assembled in Quark on my Mac in the dining room of our then Santa Clara apartment. Ed did make it known he considers Mark's tome a landmark work. I won't take issue with Ed's choice of Killer Angels, only say that it's a gripping story the first time you read it, but harder to revisit the more you learn about the Civil War. At least that was my experience.

Of course picking five "favorite" books from a list of literally thousands of titles is pretty impossible, like naming your favorite five novels of the 20 century, or favorite five movies of the last 40 years. But like Rob in Nick Hornby's brilliant novel (later movie) High Fidelity, ranking items in lists is something we are inclined to do as a way to get a handle on things.

My five favorite Civil War books (not counting reference works, for which I have an inordinate fondness)? I thought you'd never ask. One has to distinguish between "favorite" and "indispensable." Edward Porter Alexander's, Fighting for the Confederacy is indispensable, and a good read, but I guess I wouldn't rank it among my top five favorites. Likewise, Charles Roland's, The American Illiad is my favorite concise single-volume history, but you can't have two single-volume histories in your top five, can you? Isn't there a rule about that? Anyway, if it's Monday, then the list must read this way:

1. Battle Cry of Freedom, by James McPherson

2. Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant

3. Decision in the West, the Atlanta Campaign of 1864, by Albert Castel

4. A Stillness at Appomattox, by Bruce Catton

5. The Battle of Glorieta, Union Victory in the West, by Don E. Alberts

What's your top five, just off the top of your head?