Civil War Times August 2018

I read Scott Fink’s June issue article “Behind the Barricade” about the identity of the dead Confederate sharpshooter at Gettysburg who was photographed by Alexander Gardner a couple of days after the battle. The body of this young man has been identified as Andrew Hoge of the 4th Virginia, identified from Gardner’s photo by Hoge’s cousin, Captain John T. Howe, who was with him when he died. I am a Hoge descendant and have a copy of a family history written around 1920 by a Hoge relative, Major Daniel Howe, titled Listen to the Mockingbird. The author was a World War I army officer. In that book, there is a copy of Gardner’s famous photo with Andrew Hoge identified as the victim. I would love to see a photo of young Andrew…

Most Civil War battlefield visitors can only imagine billowing gunsmoke, but actual plumes of smoke and flames have been seen lately rising into the air. The conflagrations, however, are not the result of battle, but part of several prescribed burns performed by the National Park Service. Manassas National Battlefield Park held its first ever prescribed burn April 11, and Gettysburg National Military Park conducted a controlled burn later that week, April 14. A prescribed burn reduces the build-up of debris and non-native vegetation, and restores or maintains wartime landscape conditions. ¶ “This is a great opportunity to restore a significant segment of the battlefield back to its Civil War appearance,” said MNBP Superintendent Brandon Bies. “Through the use of prescribed fire, native grasses will flourish, and soon visitors will experience…

ARSINOE MARTIN, a native of Elkhart County, Ind., lives on in the newly formed Arsinoe Martin Chapter of the Ladies of the Grand Army of the Republic. Martin contracted yellow fever in 1863 while nursing Union soldiers in Corinth, Miss., and died after returning to Indiana. On March 13, 2018, the chapter, which had raised money for a new grave marker, honored her restored gravesite at the Pine Creek Cemetery with a ceremonial rifle salute. Martin’s father, a farmer, helped fugitive slaves escape, and in 1862 his schoolteacher daughter Arsinoe joined the Indiana Sanitary Commission and helped recruit soldiers. She then nursed troops in Tennessee and Mississippi. Unlike many of her unremembered colleagues, Arsinoe Martin survives in photographs and words. In a letter written shortly before her death, she observed,…

Rising east of Culpeper, Va., along a crucial east-west corridor, the mile-long Hansbrough’s Ridge was the setting for battles, an enormous Union winter camp, and signal station. It has now been preserved, thanks to the Civil War Trust, the Virginia Outdoors Foundation, the Virginia Department of Natural Resources, and others who pulled together the $900,000 purchase price. On June 9, 1863, during the Battle of Brandy Station the ridge’s eastern slope was a strategic defensive site for Confederates blocking Federal troops from fighting J.E.B. Stuart’s forces on nearby Fleetwood Hill. The following winter, the 174-acre site was home to 10,000 troops of the Army of the Potomac that included vast earthworks and a hospital. John Hennessy, chief historian and chief of interpretation at Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park, explained…

www.americanhistory.si.edu/documentsgallery/exhibitions/nursing On May 13, 1864, Amanda Akin entered Ward E of Washington, D.C.’s Amory Square Hospital to discover 28 new patients. Wounded soldiers had poured in all night, and Akin admitted that she felt “sick and weak…to see almost every bed filled with a new patient and with a ghastly wound.” She had been nursing for a year, but the devastation of the fighting that spring stunned Akin much as it did the men in the field. Akin’s wartime experiences are the focus of “The Diary of a Civil War Nurse,” a digital exhibit hosted by the National Museum of American History and the National Library of Medicine. While a small online exhibit, the pages at this site, accompanied by Akin’s digitized memoir, provide a useful lens through which to better understand…

The controversy over development adjacent to Nashville’s historic Fort Negley is over. Following an archaeological survey that found a high probability of human remains on the 21-acre site, Mayor David Briley has decided against developing the land, where an abandoned stadium now sits. On March 13, 2018, Briley announced funding for demolishing the stadium and seeding the land with grass. He also stated, “We have a unique opportunity to bring the community together to design a park that will honor the sacrifice of the slaves who died building this fort while providing active park space in a growing neighborhood that will be enjoyed by residents for generations to come.” CIVIL WAR TRUST GENERATIONS EAGER YOUNG HISTORIANS reenact the September 17, 1862, Federal charge across Burnside’s Bridge at Antietam as part of a…