Civil War Times February 2020

That takeout from so many sources was an exceptional recounting of where Civil War stands now in American consciousness – John Grady You know I don’t think it’s that people have lost interest in the Civil War. I just think there has been so much discussion about monuments and opposing views that people are completely worn out on the topic. A while back I read a story about how Gettysburg wasn’t going to do their annual reenactment due to decline in attendance….I think doing them every 5 years would create more interest. – Jeremy Ray Hagler In today’s America, there are more veterans than anytime since World War Two. They may sign on, as they get older, a lot of folks served since 9/11. I have three boys, two have no interest,…

PENNSYLVANIA PRIDE On September 14, 2019, the Greater Pittsburgh Civil War Round Table (grpghcwrt.com) gathered on Gettysburg’s Little Round Top to celebrate the recent National Park Service restoration of the 155th Pennsylvania Monument with a third rededication ceremony. Originally paid for by veterans, the monument honors the men from Western Pennsylvania who trained at Camp Howe and left for service on September 2, 1862. They fought at Antietam, faced deadly Confederate volleys at Marye’s Heights in Fredericksburg, and returned to their native state to fight at the Battle of Gettysburg. Following that, they continued to serve until their last engagement at Appomattox. ¶ Originally dedicated in 1886 without the figure of a soldier, the monument was again dedicated following Pennsylvania’s allocation in 1889 of $1,500 for memorials to each state regiment…

THREE PIECES OF HARDTACK soaked in coffee or salt pork grease for every meal, morning, noon, and night, could be pretty monotonous, and Union soldiers welcomed loaves of soft bread as dietary diversions. In the 1887 classic Hardtack and Coffee: The Unwritten Story of Army Life, veteran John Billings recounted how massive bakeries were established at City Point, Va., during the Siege of Petersburg. A “large number of citizen bakers were employed to run them night and day, and as a result one hundred and twenty-three thousand fresh loaves” were brought out of steaming ovens every day. That was just another example of the North’s incredible logistical capability: Dozens of flour-dusted bakers were hired to provide a coveted ration, that was transported by military rail to thousands of hungry soldiers…

WEARING BLUE JEANS, a black T-shirt, a camouflage ball cap and a scowl, Stan Hutson stands among boulders in the infamous Slaughter Pen at Stones River National Battlefield. The 43-year-old Afghan War veteran can relate like few of us can to to the soldiers who fought on this central Tennessee battlefield in the winter of 1862-63. “Those guys are like brothers to me,” says Hutson, who recalls comrades who were killed during his one-year tour in Afghanistan with the U.S. Army. Those horrible memories, the Alabama native admits, left him with survivor’s guilt. On December 31, 1862, soldiers from four regiments—men and boys from Indiana, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Ohio—valiantly held out for nearly two hours in the labyrinth of limestone that Hutson surveys. When the Federals saw their dead and wounded bleeding…

DAVID M. POTTER’S WORK has influenced me throughout my professional career. While in graduate school, I read Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis (1942; revised edition, 1962), The South and the Sectional Conflict (1968), which included a version of Potter’s brilliant essay titled “The Historian’s Use of Nationalism and Vice Versa,” and The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 (1976), a volume in the prestigious New American Nation series. All three revealed Potter’s gifts for writing analytical narratives, explaining complex issues clearly, and highlighting the need to engage historical actors within the circumstances of their eras. Lincoln and His Party alerted me to what Potter calls “the fallacy of reading history backward.” I refer to it as the “Appomattox syndrome,” the phenomenon of beginning with the end of a historical story…

Historic homes, structures, and monuments, these treasures are found across the country—and they don’t take care of themselves. As director of the National Park Service’s Historic Preservation Training Center, MOSS RUDLEY oversees efforts to keep them all in good condition. Armed with a degree in business administration, a minor in engineering, and years in the preservation field, he directs a program based on the Monocacy Battlefield outside Frederick, Md., developing skills to deal with everything from monuments to pest management. Many projects are Civil War related, but others include restoration of structures on the Channel Islands off Santa Barbara, Calif., and fortifications at El Morro in San Juan, P.R. CWT: Tell me about the Historic Preservation Training Center. MR: We have been in existence since 1977. We got started first with repair…