Civil War Times August 2017

JOHN BURNS? Do you think it’s possible that the old fellow seated farthest at left in the June issue’s “Details” image of the Gettysburg hospital might be old John Burns, the civilian who fought with the Union on July 1, 1863? Burns favored that style of top hat, and they have the same jug ears and long noses. They also seem to wear similar scowls, but nowadays so do I, at least when I can’t get enough Advil. William Marvel, South Conway, N.H. A FINAL STATEMENT ON CHAMBERLAIN Diane Monroe Smith’s June 2017 letter to the editor takes issue with my April 2017 “Joshua Chamberlain at Petersburg” dealing with the location of Chamberlain’s June 18, 1864, attack at Petersburg. Smith adamantly believes that Chamberlain attacked Rives’ Salient on that date, simply because Chamberlain claims…

ONLINE O.O. HOWARD Over the course of three years, two dozen students at Bowdoin College in Maine pitched in to produce a searchable online archive of the papers of one of the college’s most famous alumni, career military officer Oliver Otis Howard. Sixty linear feet of documents, amounting to about 80,000 letters, photographs, and diaries, were scanned for the project. Howard served for the duration of the Civil War, lost his right arm after being wounded twice at the Battle of Fair Oaks in 1862, and was later awarded the Medal of Honor. Referred to as “the Christian General” because of his conversion to evangelical Christianity, Howard is now best known for his career in the Freedmen’s Bureau after the war and for his role in the founding of Howard University in…

SOMETIME BETWEEN 1863 AND 1865, at the same time Union and Confederate troops waged ferocious, faraway battles, photographer Thomas Johnson took this image of the Von Storch coal mine near Scranton, Pa. Johnson had moved from New York to northeastern Pennsylvania to document the anthracite coal boom. Anthracite was a harder, denser coal than bituminous, and it burned with more heat and less waste. Coal mines had been in the region since the 18th century, but anthracite was usually buried deep in the earth and hard to reach. It wasn’t until the 1840s that mining and transportation technology made anthracite mining more feasible. By the 1850s, canals and railroads were in place to haul the anthracite, and the Civil War caused a surge in demand for the fuel. Factories contracted…

THE WEST HAS ACHIEVED new prominence in recent literature on the Civil War and Reconstruction. Some authors believe that the war, post-Appomattox events, and the West must be brought together to expand a traditional narrative dominated by the axis of North versus South, slaveholding versus non-slaveholding, and the United States versus the Confederacy. What is needed, they believe, is a more comprehensive analytical framing that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, includes Native Americans as well as black and white residents, encompasses borderlands with Canada and Mexico, and erases the usual chronological limits. Some definitions are necessary. “The West” as understood during the mid-19th century could be expansive. Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant were known as “western” men, and during Washington’s Grand Review in May 1865 many observers drew…

BRANDON BIES, the new superintendent of Manassas National Battlefield Park, began his career as an archaeologist 16 years ago at Monocacy National Battlefield. He moved on to increasing levels of responsibility at a number of NPS sites, including George Washington Memorial Parkway, Great Falls Park, and Arlington House, where he shepherded the $12.3 million donation from philanthropist David Rubenstein for the restoration and interpretation of that site. Now at Manassas, he manages issues ranging from too many deer to landscape restoration and land acquisition. CWT: What is your biggest challenge interpreting Manassas? BB: We are in a very urban area with a tremendous amount of development. A lot of people see this as 5,000 acres of open space, and that’s not a bad thing. They see this as a place to recreate,…

WRITING IMPLEMENTS like these helped Civil War soldiers scratch out letters, diary entries, and official army reports whenever they had a free moment. On July 22, 1862, from “Battle Creek,” Tenn., 2nd Ohioan George W. Landrum lamented to his mother, “I only wrote 5 letters this month.” On November 9 that same year, 3rd South Carolinian Tally Simpson boasted to his sister, “I love you and love to write to you.” It is history’s great fortune the armies of scribblers wrote so many documents that survive to provide a wealth of detail about the conflict.–D.B.S. A soldier could get everything he needed—for a reasonable price, of course—by going to a sutler and buying this “Military Portfolio” that contained everything but the ink. That would be a separate charge, naturally. The Silliman Company…