Civil War Times December 2016

MAGNIFYING CIVIL WAR HISTORY I have enjoyed CWT since 1962, when it was called Civil War Times Illustrated. Remarkably, I still have a copy of the special Gettysburg centennial issue that I picked up in 1963 at Gettysburg National Military Park. Over the last several years there has been a noticeable change in the magazine’s format. This evolution of the content has fueled my continuing interest in CWT, the war itself and preservation. There is more to the Civil War than battles, even though there is always something new to learn about a certain engagement or campaign. My area of study is the common soldier, the civilians and how the war affected them. Material culture is also an area of study and enjoyment; needless to say, CWT hits the mark on these…

On August 15, 1862, following the unsuccessful campaign to take the Peninsula, Union soldiers stationed at Charles City, Va., rampaged through the courthouse, leaving legal papers strewn on the ground. Now some 300 of those missing pages—dated between 1694 and 1700—have found their way back to Charles City thanks to a family in New Jersey, according to Richmond.com. ¶ Decades ago, the late Karl Urbania had bought a box of old documents—penned on rag paper—from an antiques dealer, and his descendants recently decided to return the material to Charles City. The family’s donation encompasses deeds and wills from an important book of records, so locals are already looking forward to probing the pages for missing bits of family history. But the pages must be cleaned and repaired before being digitized.…

CIVIL WAR COLLECTION FINDS A HOME SOME 3,000 CIVIL WAR ITEMS, ranging from cartes-de-visite to Confederate dice, were donated to the De Paul Library at the University of St. Mary in Kansas City, Kan. Former Marine Bobby Lawrence devoted 30 years to building and cataloging the collection, and after his death in 2013, his family looked for a home to showcase it. Two focuses of the Bobby D. Lawrence collection are women in the war and the regions of Kansas and Missouri. Lawrence particularly treasured a memoir by Emma Edmonds, a Civil War nurse who was also a Union spy. According to Danielle Dion, director of the De Paul Library, the Bobby D. Lawrence Collection will dovetail nicely with the school’s 10,000-item Abraham Lincoln collection, and a plan to digitize the…

ARESTORED GRAY WOOL COAT belonging to CSA captain and hospital administrator Sally Louisa Tompkins was honored in Mathews, Va., on July 23, 2016, two days prior to the 100th anniversary of Tompkins’ death. Named Virginia’s 11th most endangered artifact in a 2015 online survey, the coat was worn by the only woman the Confederate Army commissioned as an officer. In 1861 the recently widowed Tompkins used her inheritance to open a hospital in the Richmond home of judge John Robertson following the First Battle of Manassas. Her hospital was so impressive that President Jefferson Davis named her a captain of cavalry in September 1861, thus allowing her hospital to remain open even after he required all Confederate hospitals to be operated by military personnel. Throughout the war her hospital treated…

www.CivilWarRichmond.com THIS REPOSITORY ON WARTIME RICHMOND WILL SATISFY THE MOST AVID RESEARCHER We’re a demanding lot. Straightforward analysis is no longer enough; we want to study individuals and events from every possible angle. The good news is that between traditional research approaches and the new tools of the digital age, historians are producing increasingly sophisticated work. The bad news? It has only made us greedier. I encourage all those with high research expectations to visit Michael D. Gorman’s “Civil War Richmond” website. Gorman has spent the last two decades gathering, transcribing and organizing sources on nearly every aspect of the Confederate capital during the war era. I first came across the site when I was trying to understand exactly where sick and wounded soldiers from John Bell Hood’s Texas Brigade went for their…

20TH MAINE Infantry member Jewett Williams will get a belated burial in his home state due to the discovery of his cremated remains, which were neglected for decades at Oregon State Hospital in Salem, according to the Portland Press Herald. In 2004 Williams’ remains were discovered among some 3,600 copper canisters containing ashes from cremated patients. Most are still unclaimed, but the Patriot Guard Riders motorcade—which provides escorts for burials of veterans, firefighters and police—took Jewett’s remains to Maine for a September 17, 2016, ceremony. The group left August 1 and made stops at Gettysburg and Appomattox. Williams, who joined the regiment in October 1864, was present at Appomattox and mustered out in July 1865. He married twice and fathered five children, but was alone at age 78 when he was…