Civil War Times Summer 2023

Thank you for including the article “Nothing of the Kind Ever Took Place” by Marc Storch and Kevin Hampton regarding the exploits of 2nd Wisconsin Captain William Strong in the Spring issue. I have a letter in my possession written by Private Levi B. Raymond of the 6th Wisconsin Infantry that calls into question the actions of Captain Strong. I had always wondered how well known the story was, and the article paints a very clear picture of just how controversial Strong’s story was. In the letter, dated October 13, 1861, to a friend back in Wisconsin, Raymond quotes Captain George Ely of Company D, 2nd Wisconsin, saying, “the whole story in regard to Capt Strong’s pretended adventure was a sheer fabrication from beginning to end, and the story he tells,…

The National Portrait Gallery in February unveiled a rare portrait of President Abraham Lincoln. The nine-foot-tall portrait, painted by W.F.K. Travers in 1865, is one of only three known full-length renderings of the 16th president and will be on loan to the Smithsonian gallery in Washington, D.C., for the next five years. The painting, which hung for decades in a municipal building in a small New Jersey town, has been restored and is now part of the “America’s Presidents” gallery Lincoln sat for Travers in 1864, and Travers completed the oil painting in Germany shortly after Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865. Travers then sold the painting to an American diplomat living in Frankfurt. In 1876, the painting was displayed at an exposition in Philadelphia, where Mary Todd Lincoln was reportedly “so overcome…

ON APRIL 3, Civil War Trails unveiled a new sign at the first Civil War Trails site that champions the story of Jewish soldiers. Located at the Love Hope Center for the Arts in Fayetteville, W.Va., it tells the story of men commanded by future-President Rutherford B. Hayes and camped in the wilds of West Virginia who managed to pull together the items required to properly observe the Passover holiday in 1862. “In the midst of our nation’s darkest hour, these soldiers came together, enabled by the larger community and in doing so they offered peace and hope to a nation at war,” said Drew Gruber, executive director of the Civil War Trails program. The project is the result of several years of dedication by local historians; Temple Beth El in Beckley;…

AFTER MORE THAN two years of work, Shenandoah University’s McCormick Civil War Institute, an affiliate of the Council of Independent College’s Legacies of Slavery Project, debuted its digital history site “The Spirit of Freedom”: Preserving Emancipation’s Legacy in the Shenandoah Valley. The site centers around an array of primary documents that illustrate the ways African Americans in the Shenandoah attempted to preserve the Civil War’s emancipationist memory. Explore the site at mcwi.omeka.net.…

EDMUND JONES had served aboard commercial ships for many years and with the start of the war found himself acting master aboard the gunboat USS Itasca. In January 1862, his ship broke the chain boom blocking the Union fleet from entering the Mississippi River at New Orleans, and he led a band of sailors to reconnoiter that the passage was sufficiently open. He returned to Itasca, and it joined the attacking fleet only to soon become disabled. Hit 14 times, several below the waterline, Itasca was out of the fight. Naval theory indicated that cannon shots could not penetrate more than five feet below the waterline; however Itasca proved that wrong. To emphasize this, Edmund Jones kept a broken copper bolt taken from over eight feet below the waterline which,…

EARLIER THIS YEAR, members of Historic Gettysburg-Adams County Inc. installed new signs for Civil War hospital sites in areas surrounding the Gettysburg Battlefield, including at the Crist Farm, John Sachs Mill, Shank Farm, Ross Farm, and Sarah Patterson Farm. The signs are manufactured by students in the Gettysburg Area High School’s technology program. Additional signs at other sites will be installed later this spring. At Manassas National Battlefield Park in March, new wayfinding signs were installed to help visitors better navigate around the battlefield. New gateway signs also let visitors and passersby know they are passing through or by a National Battlefield Park.…