Civil War Times June 2017

I am the author of Chamberlain at Petersburg, the book Dennis Rasbach takes issue with in his April 2017 article about Joshua Chamberlain at Petersburg. Rasbach implies that I wrote my book after considering only Chamberlain’s postwar testimony and does not acknowledge the many sources I employed, which included those of numerous witnesses besides Chamberlain. I disagree with Rasbach’s assessment on several counts. Let’s start with his main point, that Chamberlain did not know where he and his brigade fought on June 18, 1864, despite the fact that Chamberlain led his brigade to the position where the assault began, and coordinated and led the attack. Rasbach provides no convincing evidence that causes me to agree with his premise that Chamberlain didn’t fight at Rives’ Salient, but at the future site of…

A never-before-published image of Harriet Tubman recently turned up in a photo album of 19th-century activist and educator Emily Howland, a close friend of Tubman. Howland met Tubman after she had moved to Auburn, N.Y., not far from Howland’s home in Sherwood, N.Y., where Howland’s family had long been active in the Underground Railroad. Tubman’s biographer Kate Larson told the Auburn Pub that the image was likely taken around the end of the Civil War, when Tubman was in her mid-40s. All other images show Tubman much later in life, a small and bowed figure who hardly seems capable of the daring feats of rescuing, scouting, and spying that have made her a national hero. ¶ Tubman stood barely five feet tall and suffered from what historians believe was temporal…

THE JULY 1-3, 1863, Battle of Gettysburg resulted in 26,000 wounded soldiers, and dozens of field hospitals were quickly established in the area to take care of the human wreckage. This image of the Union 2nd Corps hospital located on the Jacob Schwartz Farm next to the Baltimore Pike was taken between July 9-11. Tent hospitals like this were scenes of great suffering as doctors and nurses struggled to care for the injured. Cornelia Hancock, a 23-year-old volunteer nurse from New Jersey who arrived at the hospital on July 7, wrote that as she reached Gettysburg, “A sickening, overpowering, awful stench announced the presence of unburied dead....” After arriving at the field hospital, she noted that a “wagon stood near rapidly filling with amputated legs and arms....” But “every hour…

TACTICAL AND OPERATIONAL STUDIES occupy a prominent place in the literature devoted to the Civil War. Admirable examples of well-researched, analytical military narratives published over the past several decades include Edwin B. Coddington’s pioneering The Gettysburg Campaign: A Study in Command (Scribner’s, 1968), Richard J. Sommers’s detailed Richmond Redeemed: The Siege at Petersburg (Doubleday, 1981), John J. Hennessy’s graceful Return to Bull Run: The Campaign and Battle of Second Manassas (Simon & Schuster, 1993), Albert Castel’s revisionist Decision in the West: The Atlanta Campaign of 1864 (University Press of Kansas, 1992), and Timothy B. Smith’s gripping Shiloh: Conquer or Perish (University Press of Kansas, 2014). Multiple volumes by authors such as Stephen W. Sears, Peter Cozzens, Earl J. Hess, and Gordon C. Rhea underscore the vitality of this genre of…

NEARLY EVERY CIVIL WAR INFANTRYMAN, like Private Valerious C. Giles of the 4th Texas (right), went into battle with a leather box full of cartridges for his muzzleloading musket. Millions of cartridge boxes were produced during the war, and while they varied in size and construction, most were approximately 7.5 inches tall, by 6 inches wide, by about 1.75 inches deep. Cartridge boxes were not glamorous pieces of equipment, but the essential accoutrements carried the “forty lead pills,” as a New Jersey private referred to his cartridges, that wrought so much battlefield carnage. In the implement pouch under the main flap, every sergeant was supposed to carry a mainspring vice; a combination wrench and screwdriver; an extra cone, or nipple; a ball puller and worm for cleaning the barrel; a tompion…

MARK LAUSE, labor historian at the University of Cincinnati, published, Free Labor: The Civil War and the Making of an American Working Class in 2015. The title plays off the magisterial work by English historian E.P. Thompson: The Making of the English Working Class. Lause presents a complex tapestry of what happened to labor unions and strikers throughout the country during the Civil War. CWT: What did unions and the labor movement look like before the war? ML: You have small craft unions going almost back to the Revolution. You get the first labor party in the U.S. in the 1820s. But these are episodic things. In an economic downturn, the first response in the 19th century is to pick up and move. Or you move on to another city where there…