Transcripts For CSPAN3 American Civil War Museum Annual Symposium 20180224

Good afternoon, everyone. Joining uso much for for the American Civil War symposium. Ordinary people, extraordinary times. T up on our roster where she received the 2016 great teacher award. She taught previously at the state of at the university of new york in the state of albany. She received her phd studying under dr. And dr. Gallagher. Dr. Taylor is a member of the board of editors of the journal of southern history and advisor editor for the civil war monitor magazine and coeditor of the university of Georgia Press is on civil war series. Her current book project of the manyy thousands of men and women and children who fled slavery during the civil war and examined how their day to day experiences shaped the way emancipation unfolded in the United States. Book derived from her dissertation provided family in the civil war. In 2005. Published that book is the topic of her program today. I present to you dr. Amy morel taylor. It is indeed a real pleasure to be back here in virginia, where much of my research and interest in this history was ignited. I want to start today with this image. I think im not the only one out takes a specific book, a specific moment, a teacher, may be a story that first ignited our interest in this history. Booke part of me was this that part of my interest was this book. In 1887. Blished a pectoral book of anecdotes and incidents. It looked old, therefore looked kind of cool on the shelf. Occasionally i would find myself in moments of boredom, picking it up. And starting to look at some stories that were contained in this ready thick volume. Stories of the unusual, stories of the outlandish. I had sort of been raised to assume the civil war was not funny. My eye was drawn in particular to headlines like love and treason. That rebel is my brother. Stories of divided families. Families that could not work for their political differences. Families in which brother sometimes guns and turned around and killed one another in the process. Husbands andhich wives found themselves arguing over slavery and secession and union. Me that i part of would assume these stories were really made up because they are dramatic and eyecatching. They couldnt be true, right to . Hey make a good story there are a number of authors out there who have made these stories are integrated them. Wrong, and thats what i learn in the years i followed the discovery this book. And began looking more deeply into the lives of civil war families. They existed and surprising numbers. Their stories were every bit as dramatic as they described in a book like this. Im going to tell you about some most of families and all about the struggle that was so elemental in this war. I think we often have the came. Tion that war they stuck with that side and was pretty clearcut. These families show us how wartime allegiances can be quite conflicting, quite agonizing. They could change over time. The civil warof up your far less clearcut than their stories. This is Health Misery newspaper put it in 1861. There is scarcely it scarcely a family that is not divided. He wrote that there are thousands of families in the same situation. Out, is noit turns exaggeration and low balls the total number. In states and the upper south and border region, states like missouri and tennessee, kentucky and maryland, delaware, and right here in virginia. This is where the civil war most often hits families. This is also the region where we see members of statehouses against one another. Region as one kentuckian put it, where treason and loyalty overlaps. Its the region where Mary Todd Lincoln came from, from kentucky, from lexington. Kentuckian herhe found herself facing half sibling on the confederate side. Stonewall jackson found himself pretty painfully divided from his sister. Those are two of the bestknown cases but this is the phenomenon that affected the ordinary in keeping with our team today. I think its important to point out that this is a phenomenon deeply connected in many ways. This is something that white families experienced. Lee talked about the hardships of africanamerican families, the way they were torn apart in different families. Did,s what white families African Americans of course were pretty unified around the union. This existence of whites divided families is all the more when one considers how these americans in the middle of the 19th century. Cherished about family. Constant, onene belief shared by americans north and south, east and west, it is that family life was to be private. Occupy life what they consider to be public life. Family was to be a protected space. Increasingly considering a heartless competitive public world. This is especially important to the civil war generation as they had lived through some pretty wrenching change already. The United States was increasingly no longer a land of independent farmers, but a place where factories are being established. A place where cities were markets,p around those where immigrants were coming to populate those cities, and where railroads and canals and steamboats were allowing immigrants to raise rates all across the land. Panic came and went. A war with mexico in the 1840s. Throughout the wrenching change, the family was idealized. It was supposed to remain that way during the civil war. At least thats what brutus clays brutus clay thought. , you mayclay immediately think of henry clay. Brutus had a brother named cassius. Named brutus and cassius. I dont have to explain. Cassius was an outspoken abolitionist at the time. A member of the kentucky state house brutus was a member of the kentucky state house. The civil war was about saving the United States from ruin. Owner. Clay was a slave he owned 100 men, women, and children. He believed slavery was best protected in the union. He felt this was so obvious and self evidence that he couldnt even imagine why some kentuckians would consider orng or watering wanting their state to secede. Son beganwn expressing some secessionist 1860s he had begun attending prosecession rallies. In time he to, despite being the son of the unionist father, began talking like a diehard sympathizer. A dilemma on her hands, we might say. It was and who tended to be home toh zeke, watching over metric matters while brutus was away at the state capital. The first one to figure out that father and son may seem to be heading down these divergent paths. What should she do . Should she tell brutus what is going on . That would undoubtedly infuriate him. She wanted to avoid that as much as she could. She even believed to zeke in the first place. She knew zeke was a bit of a hothead. She thought this was useful acting out. Maybe when over time things will settle down. She kept quiet. The war changed and seek did not settle down. One day she came upon him on her living room where she was on the charges gun cartridges. He merely said im just making these for my father. He told and he was going loon hunting. Thats not what he was doing. That evening off and left behind this note. I leave for the army tonight. I beg forgiveness. Goodbye to you all. It says you will hear from me soon. Thats the kind of note i would leave for my parents. And clay was infuriated come it was bad enough he had gone off to join the confederacy. He had to fight his father. Brutus, upon hearing the news, and i will use the note to stand heard thee, when he news he didnt stop to fume or to write a response. He simply announced he would immediately disinherit seek. He wrote back and said can i keep my wristwatch . He had his priorities. Zekesys reaction to partner was others were quick to see their sons departures. Just like another comingofage struggle on a young mans road to adulthood. That is the most common pattern. You do not tend to see a confederate father with a union son, it was usually the reverse. This was a boy who wanted to assert his independence from his father. Of course a boy like that is going to be seduced by the mystique of the rebels. Parents did not see this as an act of deeply felt politics. Brutus was not about to start debating politics with his son. Matters the war may have rudely intruded on their family life. Possible to deflect the awards deflect the wars again. That was brutus clays way of doing that. When he announced this he will be dealt with. Im going to reassert my power over him. Some opted to retrieve their sons from the Confederate Army and make them stay home. Still others refused to send money or aid when their sons asked for it, using the leverage of their accustomed parental support to force their sons return home again. Briskly may have opted for the most extreme form of punishment summits inheritance against zeke. And maybe in part because he was already feeling pretty powerless over another errant child, his daughter, martha. I dont have her picture, either. In the 1850s, martha had married a man named Henry Davenport and moved with him to jefferson county, virginia, now, west virginia. And although she was initially sympathetic with the north in the secession crisis, when her new husband opted to side with the confederacy in the war and actually join the Confederate Army, martha switched loyalty to the south. She became pretty outspoken about her newfound confederate loyalty and her letters home to her father, and reading them, is are we dealing with zeke and now hes getting letter from martha letters from martha that are very proconfederate and sentiment. In nearly drove him mad. He wanted to do something about it, but it took the unlikely intervention of his brother, clay. Caches he says i figured to overlook her secession is him, because it is a virtue and a woman to go with her husband and all things very so dont think about her politics, dont take the politics that seriously, whats important is she is deferring to her husband, lets honor that Marital Relationship read relationship. Thats exactly how u. S. Army major from vermont approach his own situation in situation. Willard may be filled familiar to you. Like to stay in highend hotels, you know the Willard Hotel. The was named after joseph and his brother, who were owners of the hotel during the civil war. Course is where the lincoln stage, before lincolns first inauguration, it was also the site of so many visits and meetings between Union Political and military notables during the war. Joseph did not begin the war he left ite hotel, behind in the hands of his brother and when often served in the new army. By march 1863, he was assigned to guard duty at old capital prison in washington. In that month he was called on to escort a new prisoner there. A woman named antonio ford. Ford was the daughter of a prominent local merchant in fairfax, virginia. As well as a loyal confederate. She had been61, camp an honorary aid to cade for jeb stuart. And sometime in the intervening years, she worked her way into a position spying for the confederacy. A entirely surprising, women were some of the confederacys best spies. Because there were plenty of men out there who were unwilling to believe that a woman would mix yourself up in such matters, and so her gender provided a great cover. Unit officials eventually wised at oneords actions and point, accused her of providing Key Information to the confederacy that enabled a successful confederate raid on the new headquarters in fairfax courthouse. After doing that, Union Authorities arrested her. Forward brought ford to the prison and to Joseph Willard. They struggle conversation pretty quickly and this would continue over the six months that she was imprisoned at old capital. Forde end of it, antonia founded that she would quote love you as long as i live. The confederate spy and reunion guard had fallen for one another. They werent the only ones. The war created all sorts of situations that brought enemy men and women together, from the occupation of towns that run unit soldiers and women together on the streets, to the prisons that incarcerated disloyal women like ford, to the hospitals that mixed surgeons, nurses, patients, and volunteers. And very often their interaction was very bitter, often violent. And there is some really Important Research that being done right now about assault and rape that certainly emerged from these sorts of interactions. Though, as this case suggests and many others, familiarity doesnt always breed contempt and violence. Enemywere other ways the men and women responded. Thats what the little Daily Journal noticed when it sent a reporter to nashville. Theite the women walking streets with pistols and getting arrested for spitting on Union Officers, the paper noted that over time, such hostilities seems to be softening in nashville. A number of young ladies of nashville who were at first very fierce towards the u. S. Officers, have come around. We said they would. Another paper reporting from nashville these are union papers, the missouri statesman wrote women in the city by early 1865 or quarter dropping off into the arms of Union Soldiers. Ifl the boys down in dixie they dont return soon, they wont find a single girl or widow below conscript age in these parts. The National Daily press noted that a number of such relationships had formed among volunteer nurses, patients, and doctors in the city. Mds seem 1864 that the to make the most headway in marrying the fair daughters of dixie. What a world we live in, it exclaimed. These relationship for fascinating and very likely exaggerated and even made up his newspapers. Echoi cannot go can what he said about newspapers. They made a a lot and they loved to make up stories about these families. Why would they do it . In some of these cases, but these articles are really doing is jabbing at those confederate men. Look whats happening in your absence. Youre not only losing your women, they certainly are not paying attention to you anymore. What kind of men are you . The kind of gender warfare, you might say. Even if these are all exaggerated or made up, intersectional romances did exist. Those involved were less fascinated by the situation then worried in the time of war. They wanted nothing else than to keep their relationships secret and out of the press. They didnt want people talking about them. Because one thing, the reputations were on the line. The loyalty could be called into question. Joseph willard knew this well. What would it look like for a Union Officer to fall for a confederate woman . Even worse, what would it look like for a man to fall for a woman who failed to defer to his politics. Its a virtue of a woman to go with a husband and all things, so what kind of man was he to put up with Something Else . Joseph willard could not let her go either and they began envisioning the future together. At one point, joseph proposed to antonia, suggesting they get married secretly. But there, antonia drew the line. You know i love you, she said, but major, i can never consent to a private marriage. Instead, she offered another way out. I know you are true to the government and i love you nonetheless for it, she continued. But the obstacle is with you, not me. Joseph could remove that obstacle by resigning from the union army. He laugh, just wait. Joseph considered her plan seriously, but was concerned, again, not telling his superior officers that he wanted to resign to marry a confederate. With either accept his resignation on those grounds . Probably not. But then he gave with another plan. He would resign, on the grounds of needing to tend to his familys business back in washington, d. C. And thats what he did. He did resign, they married and went quietly to the Willard Hotel in washington and had three children. You might wonder how on earth is actually worked. There wasnt that much discord between them. . Ow did they make this work the key was similar to what we saw with fathers and sons. Retreating into private life and making sure both spouses were no longer talking more acting publicly on their loyalty. Men had to resign and willard was not the only one who did the best thing. Women had to stop getting involved publicly, parading their politics visibly as antonia ford had done. It was less like that to attract attention and to attract critics. They could kind of live with their opposing sentiment and manage it as long as it was contained in the family and the private sector. As long as the kind of domesticated their differences. This was much harder to do for siblings divided across the Union Confederate border, especially brothers. They quickly realized that differences in political opinion can translate into opposing sides in an actual battle. During the wars opening months, some of them tried to take action to prevent that worstcase scenario from happening. One confederate decided to rush to volunteer first before his brother did, thinking it might discourage his brother from then volunteering for the other side. As he wrote to their sister, he must not take sides against me, i am the oldest and have a right to the first choice. And if i decide to fight, is what he is saying. But that eventually, conscription came, leaving brothers with less of a choice about whether to take up arms, and in many cases then, this was met with quite a change in june. In tune. If he is ever exchanged a mutiny on the battlefield, i will fight him or anybody else wrote a missouri unionist on hearing the news of his confederate brothers imprisonment. I would strike down my own brother if you dare raise a flat a hand to destroy that flag wrote another unionist in virginia. In still another if i could meet any of my relatives or my brother on the battlefield, they were there be considered as my enemies and treated as such. Some of this may be the kind of bluster we would expect in a time of war, in the heat of the moment. It was also in keeping with the pervasive sense of honor possessed by Civil War Soldiers. This was another way they could prove themselves to be diehard partisans for their cause, if they said they were willing to confront their kin in battle. Brothers though, more than any other family relation divided by this war came to embrace the idea that there can should be treated like an enemy. And yet they still have their limits. This is only how they related to one another in the heat of battle. As soon as the fighting stopped, though, Something Different took over. That enemy became a brother again. Ill give you one example. That appeared in an article in the little Daily Journal louisville Daily Journal, reporting from perryville. , theding to this article regal battle, there were two brothers with the last name hopkins. They didnt identify the first names. One brother was a confederate and the other was a unionist hopkins. And fighting is broken out and a one point, the new miss shoots into a crowd of confederates and shoots his own brother, and he falls. According to the article, the Union Brother approached his wounded brother immediately thereafter, told the mortally wounded confederate that he had quote done on purpose, and then left. Night, as things that settle down, the new brother returned to the scene of the battle, brought water on a blanket and stayed with his ailing brother for half the night. The weber explained the actions of that brother by the fact that he was quote a man of family. And this is quite a story. Was it all true . Newspapers did look to talk about instances of brother versus brother, heres one article, brother against brother you see in the headline. If you go through the civil war newspaper you will see brother shoots brother, brothers blood, these are the sorts of titles you see through the stories. And again, many are exaggerated and some made up altogether. And thats how i viewed the original story, i just always assumed it was made up and contrived. Until i moved to kentucky and befriended some of the staff and they got interested in the story and have since confirmed there were two brothers named hopkins, one in the indiana regiment and another from the mississippi regiment were there that day. So maybe this was true. Who knows . Regardless, even if the story and some of the others were made up, it does illustrate a more widely repeated pattern of brothers, divided brothers. Assuming kind of a dual relationship as one brother put still privatemies friends. We can privately be brothers, but publicly, we are enemies. Even as these families went to varying lengths to separate their private lives from public conflict, there was Something Else working against their efforts. Something else that was less inclined to believe that husband and wife could safely maintain their relationship with her brothers still love each other, yet maintain loyalty to each side. Something or someone else preferred to look upon these families with more suspicion. Aboutomewhat im talking is really a collective of governing officials on both sides. Governments both union and confederacy looked upon divided families with suspicion. Mike these families use their personal connections to pass secrets . Offer thereses aid to the cause . Can these families be trusted . That was the question that started to grow and loom among officials on both sides. Union prostion that martial officials asked in many places, when he works to prevent families from traveling across the line. There were restrictions affecting anybody trying to cross the lines in this war, but divided families that little understanding. They were deemed suspicious and often not allowed to travel across the lines. Was also a question, can these families be trusted, that was , who whenail sensors family or anyone tried to send mail, they would find their mail opened and read. There was a union policy that if you wanted to send a letter across the lines, not only did you have to pay the postage of both sides, but your letter can only be one page long and it had to be focused only on quote family and domestic affairs. According to the policy is supposed to be benign and so forth, but soon, some of these mail centers even found a little troubling to see these warm sentiments being passed across the lines between Family Members. Ill come back to that in a moment. Whole questions of can families be trusted, after Abraham Lincoln and his extended top relatives. An agent four when one of his wifes halfsisters, martha todd white, from alabama, she visited the lincolns in washington and got passed from lincoln himself. And she found herself subject to skating news accounts in the weeks that followed, aid and comfort for the enemy, was the title of one of the news accounts. Story, the reporters accused white of smuggling gold in her skirt on her way back to the south. Other articles went further, accusing lincoln of being overly indulgent of his confederate Family Members in granting martha todd white a pass to travel. And some went so far as to say well, lincoln, he has offered aid and comfort to the enemy. The union is thus betrayed in the white house screamed one newspaper account. These reports were great exaggerations. Theit was no coincidence most exaggerated stories of martha todd white strip came from democratic newspapers. Lincolns greatest breaks in the north and this was in 1864, so this was his reelection year. Tothe story was trumped up really jab at him in election year. Beganncolns essentially mccain did exhibit a for why divided families should not be trusted. When that sort of distress led to these very restrictive pass of policies, out of these divided families expect to maintain any sort of emotional bonds if they lived on either side of the line . Here they came up with some interesting ways of maintaining contact. In 1863, the richmond inquirer and the New York Daily News launched an ad exchange. They launched what we can call an ad exchange, and how it worked was somebody could take out a personal ad in the New York Daily News and in the richmond inquirer would reprint those ads so people in virginia could read it. The reverse was true as well. His familyd having members started taking out these short ads to try to communicate to a Family Member and the other state. I will read one for you. This one here, you can see this on the screen is from albany, new york written by a woman named fanny, and she is writing to her mother in richmond, virginia. She says your communication was thankfully received as i was very anxious to hear from you. Not having received any word from you since april last, he was indeed welcome. Home, alll and at joined in sending love, hoping to meet soon, your affectionate daughter, fanny. A daughter in new york to her mother in richmond. Heres another one. This will just read the entire added. Edward c huntley, richmond, virginia. Well, no word from kate. And sarah dad. Money in bank for you, homes executive. Im keeping hotel at catskill, i started twice to see you, couldnt get there. Heard from you sometime ago answered for direction. Let us hear from you again. Jack. In a very short amount of space, he jammed all sorts of updates in there. Its short and very public and not very intimate. It seems kind of innocuous communication across the lines. ,ot really much of a big deal it doesnt seem like it should be from the Vantage Point of human or confederate authorities. There was one unit in who did find it problematic. Union judge advocate general joseph holt. When he got wind of this ad exchange, he quickly shut it down. He concluded the system was quote a violation of the laws of war. Why . They added they offered aid and comfort to the enemy and therefore quote have a very great effect in inducing them to persevere in their disloyal and traitorous purposes. Getting just an expression of love from a Family Member in new york is giving them enough comfort to continue on with their fight for the confederacy is what holds is seeing here. Assist reason. Both newspapers roundly criticized joseph holt for this decision. The New York Daily News lamented that the judge evidently believes quote a mothers affection is treason. But they had no choice and both newspapers complied. And they shut it all down. Show that no matter how much these families thought they can handle the differences on their own, privately, not how much they thought they could separate the private relationship from their public loyalties, they were plenty of others around it like joseph holt who were less confident in their ability to do so. Even a private relationship with problematic in this war. War, strained these families and by the end of the war, he took some real work for that private relationship to survive intact. Immediately after the hostilities ceased, it was pretty common to see the human Family Member in particular reach out to a confederate and their family. Sometimes they would reach out by offering tragical assistance, they might offer money, they might offer hey, do you want to come live with me . Help in even offer appealing to you and the authorities for parole or a pardon for a confederate Family Member. We see very commonly in the immediate aftermath some kind of sense of duty is kicking in for of these Family Members and they recognize that their confederate family have a long way to go to get back on their feet. In the clay family, i will come back to them. Clay hady 1865, brutus been elected to congress from kentucky, was elected back in 1863. Using washington, d. C. And in january 65 he writes home to his wife and says he has gone right to the top for help in getting his son some assistance. What did they do need . He remained in the Confederate Army and had been captured and imprisoned by union forces. Brutus saw an opportunity to get him a little help, even though he already disinherited his son, terry complicated. He wrote and so i called to see the president today in regard to ezekiel. He treated me kindly and gave me his promise to release him as a prisoner of war on his parole to go home. You may therefore expect him home soon. Deal to getgotten a the gut of prison. The part of the deal was that he was not going to be exchanged to go back to fight, he was going to come home. He was going to be washed over by his family again. Among the willard and for families, in this case, you would expect the war to taking quite a toll, because among the 750,000 killed in this war, and tony afford lost a brother who served in the Confederate Army. And yet the two remained married. They had their children and just after the war, Joseph Willard extended a sort of all of branch to the ford family in virginia. For some for younger siblings to come live with them in washington and he would pay for their education. And one of her sisters did agree to come and do that. Antonia died in 1871, not too far after the war. Joseph never remarried. They had a son, also named joseph, who went on to serve in the Virginia House of delegates and later became Lieutenant Governor of virginia. And he became an ambassador to spain under woodrow wilson. He, in turn, had a daughter, their granddaughter who would later marry colonel roosevelt, the son of Teddy Roosevelt of new york. You have this virginia and new york family intermarry in. Other families found it much, much harder. Even as they may have offered gestures of practical assistance across the lines, it was just simply very difficult to achieve any full reconciliation. Any sort of emotional reconciliation. And in that respect, these families felt the permanent scars of war. These divided families tried not to let that happen. They tried not to let resentment and anger overtake any affection they once had for one another. And the most common way they tried to do it was earth one another to simply forget what happened. Forget the war, forget what it was all about, forget what we differed over. And if you look at their letters from the immediate postwar period, i can tell you the number of times these races are included. Let bygones be bygones, let the dead past, there is dead. They are imagining reconciliation but imagining it is one that requires forgetting, for getting quite a bit. And thats a big thing to ask, how can they forget after four years of war and 750,000 killed . How can they simply put the civil war and everything that this war was about behind them . They had a hard time, and so the emotional wounds remained very raw. In some families, correspondents stopped over time, so maybe it had continued right after the war, but eventually it died out. In some cases, a portrait was turned against the wall of the Family Member. Some never saw each other again. George henry thomas here in virginia never visited his confederate sisters again. It all jackson, stonewall jacksons unionist married to aen confederate and a different political allegiances played a part in that. Survived,nal scars even if family duty could in some degree survive. The stories of these families, and their difficult and incomplete family reconciliation became a metaphor for the nation. These families became very useful in the decades, later decades of the 19th century. Grapplingcans were about the ways to remember this war, grappling for ways to forget slavery and forget much of what this war was about, these divided families became very useful. The are central image in fiction of the time, and the poetry of the time, in the cartoons of the time. As avision the nation family that divided that now is reuniting is to envision the nation and reconciliation in a way that forgets what divided them, but really emphasizes what had always kept in their from the start. I will leave it there and thank you for your attention. [applause] im also happy to answer any questions you may have. Thank you so much for your wonderful talk. A couple of questions i have got is thinking about generational divides, you said you mentioned andt the sons rebelling joining the confederacy against the newness father. And the other part of my question is about a change over time, i suspect. For example, with the confederacy, there were times when women do to hardship at home demanded that there has and come home. Later on when union armies invaded the home, women move back towards being the fiercest confederates of them all and attacked the husbands and sons for cowardice. Right question. You brought up generation and yes, one of our speakers later this afternoon has written a wonderful book about generations and seven men in this war. As peter carmichael, just advertise this book. The women, the scenario you justice described to the women youre talking about, there are plenty of confederate women out with who get disenchanted the war effort, but not the confederacy. They draw distinction in their minds. They might want their husband to desert and come home, but they are not become a unionist, necessarily. At the same time. Theres an important distinction to draw there, to being disenchanted with the local cause and being subjected with the war effort. You throughout 750,000, how did we go from 620 i threw that out there like it except conventional wisdom. I dont know when this one is but sometime in the last 10 years, there was a really horrible work done to recalculate the civil war dead and there was an article in the journal Civil War History by j david hacker was really the lead researcher on this and he just took a different approach to accounting. He did a very complex analysis of the census getting into the postwar period. Im not a quantitative person myself mechanics play and how it works, but i found it convincing. A measure that sounds convincing to you. Now is the new conventional wisdom. As a result. Thank you for your talk. Im intrigued by the willard story. Antonia ford, any further context . Did you just stop her spying, anymore context there . I didnt find any evidence of further spine, though that would be quite a coup on her part. No, there wasnt any indication of that. She got a really interesting story and there was some postwar denial that she ever really on theor the confederacy part of some union men and also even some confederates. Into a lot ofback the documents of the time, its pretty clear that she was up to something and there was a reason why the union arrested and imprisoned her for six months. But it was a little bit of postwar denial going on, wanting to diminish the significance and not just what she did, but i think some of these confederate women in general, or any woman who was acting in such a political outwardly political sort of way. But no evidence that she continued spying. I was curious about the clay and davenport families. Your sources for the clay the letters where the best sources for those that you used . In that particular case, their Family Members are available in manuscript form at the university of kentucky special collections. When i first started this book, i still a kind of just started as a curiosity thing. I didnt know if i would find any examples of this being real and true. I wantedgo find family papers. I did what youre about it from newspapers to start with the reasons we talked about. I wanted to hear it from them. It was a difficult task to find those collections. They are not catalogued under divided family. So wasnt easy to find. Did start to find if you go to an archive in kentucky or maryland or missouri and virginia, the states i mentioned , youre not going to have trouble finding some. I just happened upon the clays. I had read some older works about the clays that had mentioned some family divisions, so that gave me a clue. But this was just all in their papers that they left behind. Dr. Taylor, thank you for that. Little onfollow up a adrians question about he describesnd kind of a hardened domesticity with distinct roles for private space and public space. That equally amongst northern waiting households and southerly leaning households . Im thinking back to an older generation of historiography that describes Southern Households as for economic demands a little more open, but also open public platforms for masculine honor. And if you find that this hardened domesticity in Southern Households as well, what does this suggest about southern family life in contemporary america at the time. Just to bring anybody up to speed on what were talking about here, there has long been an assumption that in the 19th century, ideals about family underwent a shift and we see it really sort of coming out of the north, out of the industrial north, the urban north and middleclass families in particular who could start to envision work as something separate from their household. They were no longer living in households that were productive units and farms, but they were starting to be able to live in households where a man would leave and go work somewhere else during the day, and this will shift started generating a belief that this was the ideal, this was how things should be. It should be a difference between public and private, that hardened domesticity that you are talking about. We long assumed that the south with its plantations and its households that are very much focused on production of the south would not have attached themselves to this idea. When i found was they still talk that way. Theres a big difference between the way people talk and what they aspire to and what they think is right and how family should be. Theres always a gap between that and what things really are. See in sounds we can these families a lot of intersection between public and private life. But they still come in their literary journals, and their magazines and so forth, they are talking about how they should be a great distinction between public and private. But these families show is you can talk this way, but families are never going to be insulated from public life. Its always going to intrude and i think everything one of these families, north or south, shows that. You mentioned something about how many times you read let bygones be bygones, lets just forget all about this. When you mentioned that, it made me think about all the monuments and memorials and the Confederate Flag having directed them and of course, still being around. And i thought about if we had completely forgotten about it, that stuff would still be here send all whicht of comments on social media that have been forgotten. Was the whole moveon movement and the memorialization movement to separate movements two separate movements . How do they feel about each other . I would say they are all part of the same thing and when i described in these families is a more explicit explicitly theessed and its also in monuments. What these families are saying lets not talk politics, lets not talk slavery, lets not talk about all the things that bothered us and in the latter part of the 19 century, when you see these monuments go up as part of this lost cause memorialization effort, a lot of what its doing is forgetting or at least setting aside so we cant see the difficult issue of slavery that was really behind this war. Its all of one piece and i for these families become a very useful image and metaphor of the memorialization effort. Stand t see divided divided families of statues, but theyre living stories of these families who sort of emphasized the nation as a family read we can come together based on our shared path, our shared when you envision the nation as a family, you are emphasizing what you share and downplaying what divides you. Thank you. I really enjoyed your talk and the topic here. However, i was mostly very much intrigued by your first slide, by the books that have drawn your initial interest. I have not seen anything like that. When was this published and how big was it . And what was it what was in it . 1887 comments its part of an interesting i noticed genre of anecdote book. I know dr. Robertson has a huge library and he probably knows more about this type of publication. Sometimes they pulled from newspapers from the civil war years through i dont know where they get some of the stories, but they are very short. Less than a page, halfpage or less. Just exactly what it says, anecdotes and incidents of the rebellion. Sometime the latter part of the 19 century, people wanted a little bit of humor and fun about this war. It is still a piece with the memorialization effort. Thank you. [applause] all right. Its time for another 10 minute. Reak for those of you dont know when you go back and watch all of this and reconsider, during these breaks, cspan3 is actually showing little 10 minute clips on Civil War History. For those of you dont know when you go back and watch all of this and reconsider, during theseso something to enjoy. You have 10 minutes, be back soon. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2018] coverage watching live from richmond, virginia, the American Civil War museums annual symposium here on cspan3s American History tv. After the break, were back with historian jane saltz talking about civil war hospital workers. Until then for the next six minutes or so, here is part of the 1938 silent film from the national archives. This portion documents the 75th anniversary of the battle of gettysburg. Over 1800 civil war veterans attended the event, most of whom would have been over 90 years old in 1938. For nearly 20 years, in depth, has featured nonfiction writers with life conversations about their books. This year, were featuring bestselling fiction writers for in depth, fiction edition. Join us live at noon eastern. The most recent book is the , and the final that recountovels the military history of america. Will behe program, we taking your phone calls, tweets, and facebook messages. The special series in depth, issue fiction edition, sunday, march forced from north fourth march 4 on cspan2. Covers from richmond, virginia of the American Civil War museums annual symposium are on cspan 3s American History tv. Will ben james schulz discussing hospital workers and shes the author of women at the front, hospital workers in civil war america. All right, everyone. We are getting ready to get started again. Now the break is over, i would like to take a moment now to introduce our next speaker. Dr. Jane schulz. Jane is a professor of english at Indiana University Purdue University indianapolis, where she has taught since 1988 and where she received the trustees 2016 andching award in establish faculty award in 2015. We believe this is really the first time that the museum and the symposium have included a professor of english on the program, but theres a reason for that. As you will see from the printed programs, dr. Schulz is essentially an honorary historian and she has held adjunct appointments in her Universitys Department of history and also in the department of medical humanities and health studies, american studies, womens studies, and philanthropic studies. Her medical is works, published programs and media appearances have been at the intersection of the disciplines of history, medicine, and literature. She has also served as a visiting professor in the school of nursing and the college of liberal arts and sciences at the university of connecticut, university of sydney, australia, and cambridge university, england. Known in the Civil War Community as the author of women at the front, female hospital workers in civil war america, buzzard and this published in 2004, a finalist for the lincoln prize. Her program today is entitled what they worked for gender, power, and hospital toil, 1861 to 1865. Ladies and gentlemen, dr. Jane schulz. Dr. Schulz i think of myself as a closet historian. I want to thank John Koskinen for inviting me to this event, and to john and christie and the staff for all of their hard work and arrangements for this. I know it takes an amazing amounts of forethought and coordination to pull this off and of course, thanks to endured theiras entire saturday with us. We are very grateful you are here and we hope to continue the conversation with you for many years. Advantages of being invited to a venue like this is that it allows us to meet those whose works weve read about but might not have ever had the chance to meet. Im pleased to meet amy taylor for the first time, but robinson, who have also never met but i known his work for many years. Im also glad to see my own my old friend p carmichael after a few years, also happy to make the acquaintance of laura lee. Im going to talk about the medical war this afternoon, in the context of three fairly ordinary people who lived through extraordinary times before returning to ordinary but change lives after the war. One area of the civil war that has been classically understudied has been health care. Until the last decade or so, a decade or 15 years. Just after the war, of course, the Union Surgeon Generals Office and the Army Medical Departments published a number of books and pamphlets, many of which are up at the National Library of medicine in washington. In their work culminated six volume behemoths collection, medical and surgical history of the war and the rebellion. 1875s published between and 1888. And during the war, confederate as well as Union Medical journals offered information about new procedures and medicines to surgeonsand 1888. And during the who have the time and inclination to read them. But of course, the Largest Laboratory was out there in the rear of battles in Military Hospitals, where people learn by doing, which of course, has always been one of the watchwords of medical training. You see one, you do one, you teach one. And i think thats often what happened during the civil war as well. Aside from the appearance of doctors and blue, by adams and doctors engraved by cunningham in 1952 in 1958, and several contribution histories about relief workers in the United States sanitary commission, there really were not very many secondary sources until recently. I think the primary archives archives of primary material have been beckoning us, however. The national archives, which is my second home, state and local archives as well as hundreds of published and unpublished accounts by medical workers, some of which are obviously in the new materials that but robertson was talking about this morning. And indeed, accounts of the that these hospital workers and surgeons took care of, all of these were waiting, waiting patiently for a new generation of scholars to investigate in hope of assembling a greater portion of a very complex fabric that was the medical war. Why this began to happen in the first decade of the 21st century is up for interpretation. But as medical matters have played an increasing role in american lives and american consciousness in this new millennium, its not surprising have providedies this emphasis and really begun more to turn this direction. Since 2000, weve seen books and articles on surgery, on the surgical core, on various diseases, on trauma, we are in a talked about this morning i will say little more about it, on hospitals, both confederate and union, and relief work, these have been written by people like margaret humphreys, susan mary grant, shot a divine, todd savage, just to name a few. There are many more people out there who have been invested in this work and i write now have a doctoral student in pittsburgh who is actually working on such a topic. So im very happy even though im in indiana and shes in pittsburgh, she is working on this. This sort of work i think has got us taking more carefully about how the health of fighting forces was integral to the prosecution of the war and in referencing the interactions of military and civilian medical workers, weve also gained thatht into the politics assigned medicine a more powerful status in the United States after the war than that of other professional groups like nurses, for example. Interactions and medical future growing prominence in the mid19th century revealed to us a lot how such individuals negotiated with one another, given their gender racial and class identities. It centered on the free professional history of nursing and relief work, and network i have attempted to tease out from the ambiguities of job assignments, among an early women who worked in Military Hospitals. I have done this in a number of articles and two books, women at the front, which is out there on the table in front, which was thisshed in 2004, and then which is fairly extensive edited and annotated diary from this woman, harriet eaton, who was born in boston area and moved to hartford, connecticut and spent most of her adult life in portland, maine. And had lots of interesting things to and had lots of interesting things to say about her various power struggles with darius surgeons, even though she tried to do it very politely. The first conclusion of this work on nursing history was for me to note that more than 21,000 women were hired by Union Hospitals alone to provide all manner of Relief Services during the war. Women were copying, they were doing washing, they were feeding and helping faith patience and delivering medicines and reading to patients, they were writing , some of them could play the piano and were singing with their patients, having their patients sing with them. They help people pass the time of day in addition to providing these various domestic and custodial services. For more than a century after the war, folks were trying to such womenwork of and few historians were interested in doing this, they spoke of around 3000 nurses who had been hired in the union, given the rank of nurse, by the army nursing super superintendent, dorothea dix whose name many of you will recognize as one of the primary activists for other reform of Mental Health in the United States. Was these historians were only looking at a very small crosssection of those who had been appointed as nurses, women who had been given their because of elite social status and a high degree of whole. Y skills on the we look at records in the national archives, it becomes clear that among these 21,000 women who provided Relief Services, working women and women of color had not been called nurses when they entered the service, but instead they had been named cook, laundress or matron, despite often performing many of the same tasks that nurses did. In the confederacy, we also have thousands of Women Hospital workers with one third to one half we believe being slaves. The difficulty in plotting out the confederate numbers is that many medical records were destroyed in 1865 with the burning of richmond. We do not have an accurate sense. Our confederate hospital morning reports and from this we can estimate about how many we think there were and what percentage women were such slaves or possibly freed people. The issue of how we categorized hospital workers led to another significant finding or problem. That was the pension inc. The army nurses 30 years after the war had happened in 1892, a nurses pension act was finally passed. This act stipulated that only those who had been called nurse and who had served a minimum of six months in hospitals and who could prove they had served that long were granted pensions. That tension was a 12 monthly pension. You see the problem. All of those cooks and laundress 12nd matrons who needed a monthly stipend more than many of the more wellheeled women who had been called nurse were now in eligible to apply for pensions. One of the people im going to talk about this afternoon is among those who filed for pensions but had not been called mariah, i that is will talk about her in just a bit. Let me just pause and provide an outline of where we are headed. To three people im going talk about all had connection to the medical service. All came to it as outsiders. They were outside to the elite that made upcians the union Army Medical Department and later the Surgeon Generals office. They were outsiders to the army nurses superintending office, they were outsiders even to many of the ladies aid societies that made up the u. S. Sanitary commission and similar confederate groups. What i want to suggest about all three of these people is that despite significant differences in each individuals background prospects, work, and so forth, they all shared a neophyte status, they were all tender feet that kept them humble and ofnerable to the whims handlers who sometimes knew less than they did about the conditions of men in the field or men and women in hospital cots. They had an area of expertise that was perhaps not as valued as it might have been. I see the work that scholars have that scholars are doing now on the war as an attempt to bring us back to understand how important this was. Think their, i hardwon experience during the war gave them the sense they had a claim to National Citizenship and they might not have had that before the war. They have this claim despite the fact that one of them was a confederate in poverty after the war and another was a domestic for the rest of her working life. This was while she was able to work. The first person im going to talk about is Union Assistant surgeon Morgan Baldwin who was from indiana, from a small town about 20 miles north of indianapolis. Assistant surgeon was quite miraculously attached to the 32nd massachusetts infantry, a regiment whose chief surgeon was the colorful adams of boston. Baldwinsk about experience at gettysburg. The second is a woman who escaped slavery and went to work for the Union Hospital outside of washington as a laundress. Maria. E was we know of her because she made an application for a pension in 1895. Mariacord of women like is rare given the dearth of alludedation that people like her during the war. The third person i will talk about is Kate Cummings. She was a confederate nurse from mobile, alabama, who ive been thinking about for the last 30 the most who left us eloquent diary about nursing to come out of the war between the states. , as richardable hart well understood in 1959, for its details about soldiers, their afflictions, their medical treatment, the politics of hospital space, and the slow death of confederate medicine and confederate well as medical supplies and other supplies dwindled. At the start of the war, im going to start with Morgan Baldwin. To point outi want that at the start of the war the Union Medical service was underprepared and i imagine the same goes for the Confederate Medical Service as well. In 1861, there was a surgeon general, 30 surgeons called usa , 84 assistant surgeons and 100 hospital beds. That is not very many hospital beds. After there had been far greater attention to the fact that this war was not going to last for three months, it was going to last much longer, we still had one surgeon general, now we have an assistant surgeon general, we had a medical Inspector General and six medical inspectors, 170 u. S. Army surgeons, 547 surgeons of volunteers, 2100 regimental 3000 880 two assistant regimental surgeons, 85 acting staff sergeants, and 100,000 hospital beds. Im glad it is not today otherwise everyone would be complaining about how much money we spent on it. This is quite an extraordinary development. Afraid i do not have the same data on the confederacy and i apologize for that. This will give you an idea of what the challenges were. Heads, administrative the Surgeon Generals office began to shelve medical officers with orders and circulars, it was not easy for them to manage surgeons at the regimental levels. You see how many of them there were. At the libraryng of congress, every time im in the area i try to go somewhere and read a manuscript or two. On aneen working autobiography by a Union Surgeon who was all over the eastern and western theater and ultimately a man a usa volunteer, called William Mcdonald who advanced quickly over the course of a couple of years from in it from an inexperienced assistant surgeon to finally a chief surgeon of a regiment. And under surgeon to an army corps. , he was very tactical about it, he got recommendations when he needed them and got people to speak well of him. He was definitely a promotion seeker. We know that the Surgical Service was extremely hierarchical, it commanded a certain form of obedience and tact and diction from the surgeons who wanted to get promoted and he was very successful in making his way through the ranks because as an assistant surgeon he did not want to be associated with regiments where some of the physicians did not have particularly good medical training and many of the men were not fit for service. He was always upset about the too many recruits should have been turned away at the door because after one winter it was clear they would never recover and they do not have the constitution to be good soldiers. Morgan baldwin was one of these regimental surgeons. He was thrilled to be associated i amthe boston regiment, afraid i do not have a photograph of him, i am sorry about that. Background was he had grown up in a small town in the midwest where he was apprenticed as a young teenager to the town doctor, who as it turns out had no formal medical training but had learned through being a country doctor that there were certain things he could do like pull teeth. He was able to prescribe and so forth and gave these medical books to morgan to Morgan Baldwin and baldwin became interested in something that his master could not teach him, which was surgery. He was fascinated by this. I would say that by the late his master help tempt get to the Medical College of ohio in cincinnati which was relatively close to where he lived. 25month courses and he goes back to indiana and apprentices for a couple of years with the new knowledge she has gained and he begins to see advertisements, announcements from the Surgeon Generals office which are advertised in local newspapers about the union armies need for more surgeons, particularly at the regimental level. He sends out and application, they want to talk to him, he goes to washington for examination because at least in the first half of the war people were very careful to make sure doctors knew what they were talking about in matters of medicine and all of the other areas of medical learning that they wanted for people taking care of soldiers in regiments to have and he learns he has been appointed an assistant surgeon to a boston regiment, again the 32nd massachusetts, which had recently lost its own assistant surgeon. Ofs was right around june 1863. Baldwin was thrilled to be among eastern surgeons who had had elite training in medical schools like the university of pennsylvania and he was assigned call things like take sick every morning, soldiers that did not feel well would talk about their complaints, he would prescribe something for them or give them something. He did this, he started to learn about what would happen when there was a battle. If you note from that date, here he was in the eastern theater, as the armies began to a near gettysburg and chambersburg in late june, he was close by. His first medical experience was at gettysburg. Talk about trial by fire. This is not a photograph, it is a graphic i think conveys something of what this was like. There are a few photographs you can see them in frederick, maryland, at the civil war medical museum. They have several good ones. They are not always willing to share their images, otherwise i would be showing them to you now. The 32nddams of massachusetts was known for keeping dressing stations where soldiers would be carried if they were wounded in battle, he kept them very close to the rear of battle lines and usually within range of the firing. Quiteade Morgan Baldwin anxious, to say the least. He was at gettysburg all three days and here is what he told us on the second day, july 2. He tells us that the medical unit for the regiment was compelled to move three times because shots kept getting closer and they were concerned that some of the medical staff would be wounded. This happened fairly regularly during the war. They move their jazzing stations three times during that day. At the last of these three stations, a man with exposed intestines starts to scream for baldwins help. Fairlyurely it is clear that he is mortally wounded. At the same time baldwin is attempting to help this man, surgeon adams goes by and screams at baldwin, saying you cannot be helping a dead man. You have to go on to somebody who can be saved. This is the form of triage that people are dealing with. , as surgeonight baldwin is returning to the where adams and other surgeons are performing amputations, he comes upon a group of loose hogs who are feeding on deceased bodies outside. This was not a good day. Perhaps this first day under fire, it was officially the second day, i think it was probably his worst day in the service and it happened right at the beginning of his true service. I will say about this is i think it made him a veteran very quickly. In theructed him terrible choices that surgeons had to make, and they were always making such choices. Like soldiers, they would wait around and wait around, the surgeons did the same thing until there was a battle and that was unimaginable brutality and staying up all around the clock, being extremely exhausted, hardly able to focus. After the war, surgeon baldwin is around for quite a bit longer but he is released before the end of the war. Indiana and he Practices Medicine, taking over for the man to whom he was apprenticed, though he never again and the medical emergencies he witnessed during the war. When he wrote about this medical work in the war years later, he noted ironically that the war itself had been his best mentor havingknew that witnessed so much loss of life, so much human sacrifice, that he would dedicate himself to keeping his community from harm in any way that he could. He Practices Medicine in his Little Community until a ripe old age. To maria tolliver. The lack of medical records make it very hard to find the marias of the war. Until i located an obscure microfilm at the national archives. I want to say this is also about 25 years ago, which listed pension application numbers and names of women who had filed for , or had beenr 1892 awarded pensions by special act of congress after the war. Women who had been fugitive slaves and had gone to work in Military Hospitals were invisible to me and everyone else, or should i say, i knew they existed from the oblique references to them in the personal accounts of the literate, and i did not know how their waridence of experience, particularly in their own voices. Once i got that microfilm list, i began looking at all the pension applicants and i found those who had been slaves or free people in reading through around 2400 pension applications. Occasionally i got a handout beause after the name would colored. Here is a person of color, i will reproduce this quickly so i can take it home and digest everything that is there. Ist we know about maria this, she was born on a plantation in williamsburg, virginia around 1840 and she was sold into King Williams county as a young teenager. We have no image of her, either. She escaped to washington in 1862 as a slightly older teenager, making her contraband and after several months she found work with dr. James pettijohn to work at a hospital in camp barker which was a was a brand which contraband hospital, a place that looked like this. This is not the exact hospital, this is one in nashville, tennessee. This was also known as friedmans hospital as freedmans hospital in washington dc. You can find references to it in other wartime accounts. Hired under the category insistsress, tolliver in her pension that both she and her husband henry were nurses at the hospital and they would wait on patients, give them medicine, and had full control of the patients. This is what she writes in her pension deposition. And henry contracted small parks while they were serving and they were sent to the small parks to the smallpox ward of the hospital. This is where they were sent to theyerate and at the time were able to be more notes thatt, maria they nursed both black and white patients. She makes a particular point of testifying that she did not cook , she did not wash close, she took care of other sick people, both black and white. Names other workers who could cooperate the pension claims. One was a woman called louisa who notes that she did the nursed, but that maria the smallpox patients. Fraser testified she had gettingy seen maria medicine at the dispensary and she came to the kitchen to pick up food and deliver it to her patients. Another witness somebody else mentioned in marias application was betsy lawson. It was betsy lawson who was tollivers nurse when she fell ill with smallpox. Betsy lawson notes that as tolliver recovered she did all manner of work but especially nursing. We know these things because application to the Pension Bureau in 1895 and was busy finding witnesses to testify on her behalf, naming names not only of the people she worked with but the surgeons who sponsored her work and so forth for two or three years it took her to put all this information. Service recordhe of hospital attendants from the American Civil War, and i did this about 20 years ago, we learn that among those 21,000 union female hospital workers, about 11 of them were africanamericans. That is that we can identify from those index cards. My guess is there was probably a higher percentage, a higher number and percentage of africanamerican women, especially in the eastern theater. Women,that many black especially fugitives who do not want to be discovered, were simply not counted. This is where we get into fuzzy math. Died, really it was more like 750, the same we can meet the same can be said for people who provided more service. Says evidence i have found we have undercounted the representation of black women. Were appointed to these low prestige jobs, this particular frame is of a woman in the sea islands who is a laundress. It seems like such a bleak photo to me but it is also such an important photo because even though the woman in it is a small portion of this very large photo of buildings and so forth, it really does tell us that this is the kind of work that many slave and contraband women were assigned to do. These kinds of jobs did not necessarily put them in close contact with surgeons or soldiers, although there were exceptions. Thatow from photographs there was at least one black nurse who served on the union ship red rover, some of you may know about this case. Sometimes black women were hired such as white nurses matilda cleaver john who was a welleducated black woman in washington who cared for the wii is a may alcott and the abolition who cared for Louisa May Alcott when she fell end ofgeorgetown at the 1862. Heres a picture of that hospital. People have ugly things to say about this hospital which had been retrofitted from a hotel and they talk about things like the latrines in the hospital being contiguous with the kitchen and so forth. We know that germs abounded there before anyone knew what germs were. Quite a lot of surgeons who begin to understand the principles of antisepsis, even before pastor was widely eurraced even before past was widely embraced by the medical community. The workses directed of many of the black relief workers and this gave many of to worke women alongside black women for the first time in their lives. Women like susie taylor who had inaped from the sea islands 1862 with her uncle, she became a regimental laundress for the 33rd u. S. Colored troops and continued to move north. Who haded patients diphtheria, she took care of shoot a guncould and knew how to clean guns and so forth. She did every possible kind of work, including nursing but was still known by the government as a laundress. The fact that we can hear marias voice through her pension record is evidence that she wanted recognition for her war work and she was finally granted her pension. She was able to make the case and they accepted it when she was no longer able to work herself in her she considered herself a citizen with rights, despite the jim crow world in which she was living at the time. She was lucky because not all fugitiveser position, who went to work in hospitals ,ere paid regularly, if at all could prove that they, too, did the work of nursing. 1890s,kers died by the such women were generally not grant pensions. Many women who were deserving of this were not able to get their monthly stipend for their war work. I shall move on to Kate Cummings. Is her portrait still hanging in the museum . Can anybody tell me . No one knows . Its not there. Ok. I have to locate it again. It may be down in alabama at this point. Thats working cummings was from. Thats where Kate Cummings was from. As a confederate nurse, Kate Cummings was a more likely hospital nurse than we might have first imagined. Testimony of people like wilson, aevans helreceived not novelist, testifies that white women concerned about reputation took a rather dim view of hospital work. She is quite worried of a single solely herwill reputation as a single woman that will sully her reputation. It became clear that by 1862 that women did not take up this burden in the confederacy regardless of their marital status. Chestnut shrank from the prospect of doing such work, unlike her friend, alisa mccourt. I always wondered why is that chestnut demurred when it came to doing much work in the hospital. She occasionally brought food, but she is not what i would consider a nurse like cummings. Perhaps because chestnut did not have any children of her own. His hit her in a place Kate Cummings was a spin stress who perhaps have than widowed women who had to go to work. We have a picture of phoebe yates, one of my favorite women from the era. She had been widowed just before the war insert in this citys hospital, which im sure all of you know about. She took a practical view of the work that she was doing. R, but she poo wanted to be independent of her family. This job gave her that opportunity. She simply poohpoohed the idea that this would harm her socially in any way. Addition edition of her reminiscence of the hospital in the 1860s. She falls into a similar category she is left a relative fortune when her husband dies. She uses that fortune to fit out hospitals in alabama and tennessee. She used all the money she had at her disposal to make hospitals move into those areas. Cumming, she was born in scotland sometime around 1830, we think. I looked for her on ancestry. Com. I havent quite found her. She immigrated with her parents and many siblings, one of 10 children, to montreal in the 1840s. Sometime in the early 1850s, the family went down to mobile. Her father was a grocer and a banker and a smalltime businessman and the family ended up at the gulf of mexico in mobile. Her mother and one of her sisters helped Florence Nightingale in crimea. Kate notinctly asked to volunteer for nursing for the confederacy, which i find interesting. 1862, just after the battle of shiloh, kate got her chance when a group from her church was deputized to help the wounded around florence, mississippi. She talks about her travel over to corinth from mobile. She tells us that, for the first nine days in attendance on soldiers when she arrived, that she was unable to wash herself or anyone else, she was unable to undress, she was unable to sleep on anything but the floor, and that is for maybe a couple of hours a day. Once, she slept on a box. Her skirts were tipped with blood and other effluvia. Quite an initiation for her. Time, one ofover the stalwarts of surgeon samuel stout in the medical corps of the army of tennessee, which pioneered the flying hospital system, a mash unit. Cumming spends the next 3. 5 years watching confederate troops and Government Support disintegrate. I think of her as a cheap witness to the destruction of the confederate body. Because shenusual was quite frank in criticizing confederate troops in her diary for what she saw as a lack of physical and psychological fortitude. Of course, the diary was a private form, so she was more candid in it then maybe writing but she was anxious to publisher diary after the war. She felt it would make a good source of income for her in that assumption, im afraid she was terribly wrong. When her papers at the Alabama Department of archives and its in montgomery letter after letter talking about the difficulty she had selling her diary. That is to louisville publishers she finally got john morton of louisville to publish it in 1866. 1890s, she publishes another version of the diary. It is quite interesting to read it. While we see her critical of the confederacy, shes equally disgusted with yankee depredations that she witnessed. Really, i think she left all of her nonconciliatory references to soldiers and to president lincoln in the published texts. Those are there for anyone to see. They are quite striking. What i want to zero in on with regard to cumming is that her realistic depiction of medical trauma deteriorates over time. Its not so much her ability to chronicle what she sees as it is the sense that language no longer has the power to represent what is with the civil. Initially, she gives is highly descriptive catalogues of suffering. Heres one of them. Maybe withly, again, in a month or so after she joins the forces in 1862. First mang the war, to write is mr. Robbins, about 50 years of age, the doctors say hes one of the worst wounded. There is very little hope of his recovery. Mr. Mcveigh is an irishman, much i emaciated. The bonus protruding about an inch. To the left is mr. Gruber, wounded in both knees. While marching, a cannonball took off one and part of another. The very sight of his base is distressing. The effluvia from his wounds is sickening. There are a dozen or so badly wounded. One without a leg, one without an arm, and one with ones that are awful to look at. Theres an irish man with his arm in a sling. Opposite him is mr. Horton, another great supper. Sufferer. Sparks,e of him is mr. Whose leg wound makes him grown day and night. Mr. Robinson is about 17. Half of his leg is a solid sore. He wails most dolefully. We find it impossible to assuage his pain. Its like this all over the first part of the diary. Cumming is careful in the first months. She provides the names and regiments of the men she nurses. She goes home with the deposition of the property so relatives can come claim it. By the second year for service, she has scaled back her effort. Men die nameless in amputation wars. Men brought in at night are dead by morning. The stretcher bearers have not the least idea of the names. You see this terrible pall fall over hospital work. 1864, she goes for six weeks without drafting a single entry like she had previously been doing every couple of days. In the last dismal months of the war, she writes only sporadically, abandoning mosttive for a practice closely resembling medical charting. When a soldier of the third florida infantry dies unexpected leak, she knows hes one of five brothers have died in service. When a record in these few words. She simply alludes to language she cannot create. She is fatigued beyond language at this point. 1865, sometime after appomattox, she travels home 400 miles. Shes 400 miles from mobile at that time. When she canagon get a ride. Otherwise, she walks. She can get one very short boat ride. She spends much of the rest of her life trying turn money for herself and for other women left penniless by the war. She becomes a sunday school teacher. This is the ordinariness she returns to. We can say about kate cumming that she clearly suffered from the burnout that other medical workers also experienced. We can surely say this about Morgan Baldwin and maria oriah tolliver. Pensions were not considered a handout, but fair payment for federal service. It with hered support of the washington, d. C. Hospital. What we come to understand is that the trauma associated with battlefield events did not affect only soldiers but, as lauren put it so eloquently this morning, and visited many families and children and indeed those who had laid hands in healing on sick and wounded men. These try must did not dissipate because the war ended in 18 to five. After people even returned to ordinary lives, bubbling up unpredictably throughout their lifetimes. Usis incumbent upon all of to remember that we only get fragments of stories. Theres always more that we do not see under the surface of the visible. When lucy buck says we shall never any of us be the same as we have been, shes in joining us to think and imagine what is visible because it is finally are only way to encounter the fullest mysteries of the past. Thank you. [applause] questions. Comments. Kathleen . Louisa may kept hospital sketches. Its virtues and limitations y gosh. Ae i havent talked it for a while. Budvirtues are perhaps what was talking about first thing this morning. She is very successful in exacting feeling through this narrative, particularly of olcotts narrative of john, who she calls a virginia blacksmith, but weve learned in recent years that hes actually from pennsylvania. Gets closer than just about any narration or narrative of relief worker patient interaction to telling us what is really important about the war. And makes visible the work that women did, putting their hands on a patients body to let them know that someone was there with them, holding them and helping them through what was often great pain, fear of death, and a number of other things. Is what ist marvelously wonderful. Commentst to which he on racial issues she is very clear about racist behaviors among hospital staff. She is a person who comes from a butly abolitionist family, she is not herself trying to escape that category, either, as a white person. She is fairminded about what happens when white women, white men who hadnt lived in communities with people of color before met and interacted with them andnteracted with certain racial assumptions muddied those interactions. Kate calls them out. The hospital sketches paradoxicalay in way be the humor of that text. In a paradoxical way be the humor of that text. Partly the lighthearted prose style that all caps has all caught has a sensible readers will always get that some of that comedy is covering the tragedy. That is off the top of my head. Thank you. I think your point about burr bound struck me. It was part of her career as a writer. Do you think burnout was more prevalent . After the war, they found it difficult. There isnt a sense that this was a period in which they rights that would be used in a struggle for womens rights. There was a break after the war of deep and period painful adjustment to the conditions of peace. Fullyont think i heard your question. About burnout. Im sorry. I didnt get that. It did take people a long time to recover from this. As i wanted to suggest i dont think they ever really did fully recover from it. As we know from the work of eric about later wars and part of the civil war, soldiers certainly suffered from repeated episodes of trauma and im sure that these hospital workers did as well. Some of them actually write about it. Not many, but some talk about having fearful dreams after the war. She herselfbecause is being treated for mercury poisoning. Shes being treated in a way that subjects are to that after the war. Delirium ise interio being created by that its fairly common that people would return to the war in this particular way and the trauma would resurface. Once people see images like that, they are very hard to erase. It takes a long time to arrest them altogether. I was thinking about this this morning with laurens collection of images. These images are so strikingly powerful, its both hard to look at them and each time i intended to look away, i was drawn back to them. I think theres a kind of compulsion about this that is probably fairly true for those who witnessed hysterical scenes during the war with a measure of consciousness and receptivity. You happy how mercy street turned out . What was missing from it . I was always teasing have you seen mercy street, people in the audience . Good. I was really i had a great time working on this program, in part because i was able to comment on all of the scripts. The same guy who did the scripts zabel, he wasid the presiding man for the screenplays for mercy street. He was in doubt a draft of a new episode send out a draft for a new episode. Whether i was teaching or grading papers, i would drop everything to read it. I would spend the whole day reading the script and commenting on it. It was quite fun. A lot of what i would do aside from trying to correct what i thought would be blocking mistakes they wouldnt have done it this way, they would have done it that way. A lot of what i did was to comment on language that was too 21st century. Thats not how they would have said it. They would have said it this way. I won some of those battles and lost some of those battles. In general, they were very receptive to it. If i have a criticism about the way these 12 episodes turned out, its that they tried to load every unusual circumstance that happened in any Military Hospital anywhere in the union or confederacy into each episode. Sometimes, it seemed like too much. The pace of time in hospitals was very slow that our current mode of cinematic display to give you rough jump cuts edited very quickly so the audience doesnt get bored but maybe some people would have conveyed the idea of what was going on in civil war hospitals a bit better. [applause] thank you. Thank you very much. We have another 10 minute break. When we come back, we will have our last speaker, dr. Peter carmichael. You are watching live coverage from richmond, virginia of the American Civil War museums annual symposium on cspan3s American History tv. After the break, we will be back with historian peter carmichael, the director of the Civil War Institute at gettysburg college. His talk is titled will the real common Civil War Soldier please stand up . 1990, hundreds of and actors assembled to portray the april 1865 surrender ceremony at appomattox courthouse virginia. This is a portion of national s film documenting the reenactment. [no audio] [drumming] [drumming] [no audio] for nearly 20 years, in depth on book tv features the best nonfiction writers, live conversations about their books. This year we are featuring bestselling fiction writers for our Monthly Program in depth fiction edition. Donna sunday, march 4 with jeff sharon. His most recent book is the frozen hours. His other books include the man, storm, to the last plus 11 more novels which recount the military history of america. Tom the American Revolution the korean war. We will be taking your phone calls, tweets, and facebook messages. Sunday, marchries 4 life from noon to 3 00 p. M. Eastern on book tv on cspan2. Youre watching live coverage from Richmond Virginia of the American Civil War museums annual symposium on cspan3s American History tv. The final section is about to begin. Peter carmichael, director of the Civil War Institute at. Ettysburg college will present we are on 48 hours every weekend bringing you lectures and roundtable discussions, historic sites, archival films, and more. You can find our tv schedule on cspan. Org history. Professor of civil war studies and director of the civil war at gettysburg college. He wrote his dissertation under the direction of gary gallagher. , thebecame his third book last generation young virginias in peace, war, and reunions published in 2005. His own work and in his teaching, he has emphasized making scholarships accessible. At an organization of american historians distinguished lecture, and gettysburg natural nash first scholar in residence. He works closely with the gettysburg and pn staff. Before he was associated close gettysburg,y with he began working and the Richmond National battlefield park. I suspect many of you may have taken towards that sometimes towards towards at some time. It was during those years that he researched and wrote his first two books on the purcell, crenshaw and electric artillery, and on colonel william p graham. His program is based on a book coming out in october. You will be getting a nice snake the. You will find sneak peek. Todays talk is the war, or the common soldier. It is a volume in the littlefield series on the history of the civil war era. The last time he spoke for this museum was in 1997. The year before we began our partnership with the library of virginia. You may remember he had an audience arrange their chairs in a big circle. He can interact more informally, the way he was accustomed to doing on battlefield tours and in the classroom. The seats in this auditorium do not move. Stay put. If he tries again, just ignore him. To answer the question will the real common soldier please stand up, i give you dr. Peter carmichael. [applause] if we could move our chairs in a circle, i am sure cspan would not go for that. For those of you on my battlefield tours, maybe you would remember me if i put my major rick at back on and covered up this hair. Let me say how honored i am to be here, how appreciative i am. It is always a joy to be back in richmond. I would not be here speaking about this topic if it wasnt for dr. Robertsons work. Dissertation, it was a book i read in junior high school. I still have that copy. It was a book that had such a profound impact on me. You all heard dr. Robertson speak this morning. Like his talk today, and he has a great empathy for the subjects that we love so much. That empathy is it essential to being very businessoriented. It is great to see dr. Robertson and have an opportunity to thank him for all he has done for the field and his influence on my own scholarship. Book, i seted the out to find the one man who could stand for all of the experiences of the approximately 4 billion in the armies. It reminded me of a tv show i enjoyed when i was a kid. A i the truth, i have have a panel of four hollywood celebrities. Kitty carlisle was always present. Contestantssk three a range of questions with the idea of exposing the imposters. By elimination, you would reveal the one individual who had often done something unusual in their life. To identify the person who could stand up as the real common soldier, i came up with my questions. Did the men have strong, political convictions . Was he courageous in battle . Did he forge a bond with his comrades . Was he religious . Did he remain moral . Man doll else, did this his duty . Questions, according to prevailing historical wisdom, the answers must be yes, or the man cannot stand up and be counted as the common soldier. My research led me to the letters of charles better come, he was a farmer. 1861, heeered in didnt make it through the summer, he was discharged because of sickness. Two years later, he enlisted in the one for the first one 147th. Above all else, he wanted to redeem himself in the eyes of his family. He had issues. I had the perfect childhood. He did have issues. He called himself the black sheep. He confided to his wife. They never gave him credit for being much of a man. Patriotism didnt mean much to him. He didnt see himself as a freedom shriek or, or a union saver. His ledgers, published under the title no freedom shrieker. Collectionsstanding of letters. He gets into the army, october 4, 1863, he steps off of a train , enters the barracks, hes given a blanket, russians, he can barely sleep that night. He wrote to his wife he thought was have a foundation of a discharge already laid in the shape of a bad cold and rheumatism. He did not get that discharge. Virginia, where the army of the potomac is in winter quarters, he joins the one 47th new york. He starts criticizing the officers. He says they were incompetent, cruel, and slowly killing the men through needless marches. All he had to do was look at his own body for proof. A started to wear down during november march. His leg swelled, the area struck, and by his own calculations in a 24 hour period , he expelled over 30 passages of the bowels and passed so much blood and mucus and became so weak that i could hardly stand alone. Back in camp, you can imagine what he did. He approached a surgeon, sought a discharge, and was denied because his claim was for rheumatism, that was the ploy of the malingerer. He was pushed almost of his , he nearly boiled over on december 27. He wrote cursed be the day that i saw my name drawn as a conscript. Damn the hour i made up my mind to come as a drafty. If it was not for you and my children, i would blow out my brains. South, the war, and all that had anything to do in getting it up. The armymay, as readied itself for its Spring Campaign, he was hobbling about camp. He approached the surgeons and they said no. Dontmrades came and said let the doctors get in the way. You need to join the blue ridge corps. Deserters. Hemism for their compass only points one direction, the direction is north. It. Ecided against he decided to turn his back on his wayward comrades. He followed the army of the potomac into the wilderness. The next two months, there is continuous marching and fighting. He was eventually outside of richmond. On june the 12th, he wrote to his wife men are beginning to get sick now, that is the excitement of battle. Friendsried of those had been what has been done and what is left to be done. He could not imagine another day in the ranks, let alone two more years in enlistment. He hated this life worse than a cat does hot soup. Out, if i ever get out, i will stuff my uniform and stand up in a corner when i feel out of humor just to remind me that home is not the worst place in the world where a man can enjoy life. Later, he was issued a new boss. He had to bid farewell to his old unit. He still wanted to send it home. He wanted to send it home not as but now hebag, wanted to display his coat as a sacred artifact attesting to his services and sacrifice. As a souvenir of the , i shouldt battles like to keep it with all of its dust, samples of different soils from culpepper to this place. Now, itt much of a coat is torn and ragged, it is ripped under the arms. Still, as i look at it as it hangs on the but of my musket, i think more of it than i ever did of any article of dress ever owned in my life i4. In my life before. The battlefield filled a void in his life, yet his confusion about combat was born out in his equal vacation over how to treat his dirty coat. Should he preserve it is a treasured artifact of the emotional and patriotic value . Or burn it with the rest of the ragged and filthy uniforms . His indecision over keeping it underscores how he was drawn to and repulsed by the killing fields of war. Stunned by what he had done and seen. So many, its fallen by his side. Their death unleashed a newfound love for union well ceiling his sense of obligation to his comrades. His example shows that soldiering was never a state of being, but a process of becoming. The labelt to put common soldier on a man encourages stereotyping of the rank and file. A stereotyping that pivots around the following. Was a man loyal or dislike . Brave or cowardly . Political or a political . Idealistic or disillusioned . Reveals he was all of these things at different times in the war. He also reminds us of the importance of evaluating soldier letters within the swallow advance over and expended extended period of time. Reactionsn extracting from a single letter. It is this cherry picking of quotes that reinforces the popular characterization that Civil War Soldiers were men of duty who saw the world with astonishing clarity and acted upon the perceptions of servitude. Simply did notes consult their principles and sentiments and act accordingly. It did not take long for these men to appreciate that circumstances controlled army life. And that is adaptability more than any other trait. That is what distinguished the ways Civil War Soldiers thought and acted. This heptured captured this perspective when he outlined the essential qualities. We want a man of greater flexibility of character. And ready energy who also knows how to adapt himself to the circumstances and all conditions. To adapt himself to. Ircumstances that is at the core of a spontaneous plosser v in civil war armies that can best be described as pragmatism. To illustrate pragmatism, i am going to narrate the story of three men. Those three men are charles anding, alexander keever, john foster. You are going to see all three of these men were always improvising and thinking in the moment. Always flexible in their actions and trying to survive while also trying to meet their obligations. To god, family, and the nation. In the weeks that followed the disastrous union defeat at going sburg, char is Charles Bowen awoke greeted by the panoramic view of raise tights and the raised heights and the old battlefield. He had survived the slaughterhouse, he took cover behind a corpse that he described as having the whole top of his head carried off by a shell. The eyes were open, and stared at me when i looked at him. Anymore andtake it he exposed himself to enemy fire and pushed the corpse aside. The next morning he made his way back into town. What did he find . The host of the army of the potomac engaged in the looting of the city of fredericksburg. Fray, he got himself drunk. He stole some food and made his way down into a house lowered by the sound of another drug soldier playing a piano. He joined these other men in singing a song. He leaves his regiment, engages , then looting of the town admits to it in a letter with his wife. I got on my bottle of wine and felt as good as general burnside or any other man. Militaryn disregard of law and authority is startling. His example shows how Civil War Soldiers were weighed down by extreme physical, and emotional stress. They rewrote notions of duty to meet demands of the moment. He couldve never have imagined that the bold soldier boys of 1861 could have embarked on a rampage in fredericksburg with such a wild and fierce joy. Since the battle, he was feeling lonely and sad, she was caring for his wife was caring for his infant daughter. It was made worse by the fact that the union cause was utterly doomed. His outcry against the war was tied with an ugly not of , or generalship, a callous bureaucracy, and an indifferent homefront. I once did blame the deserters, but time shows more plainly that the corruption of some of our chief officials i can blame no man for leaving this rotten old polk and crew who manage. All things considered, he should have deserted. He threatened to do so, but he did not do it. Why he didnt do it is the big question i am interested in. To be able to understand that, we need to stay in his shoes. I kept them in what kept them in the ranks was the grind. The day of being a soldier. The hardships, the work. Ultimately, that is what he found deep meaning in. Was this poor comrade was illiterate, he was supporting a wife that had five kids in minnesota. It is for some to have large families to support, to be kept out of their pay for six months more at a time. And to keep receiving letters from home begging for money to buy bread and meat for their starving little one. This man i speak of is one of those unfortunates. He cannot read writing, and always brings me his letters to read to him. Many i have read that would bring tears from stone. Such is war. Cruel, heartless, bloody war that starves the innocent and enriches the guilty. Was it difficult for boeing to emphasize with his comrade . Camps Walking Around nearly barefoot, his shoes and socks were in tatters, and his hands were freezing. The empty pockets are important when you understand why more men had to deserve. You had to have money and resources. Once you leave the army, you have thrown your family on the brink of restitution. One reason why he was hardpressed for funds, he liked to gamble a lot. He had a little issue with that. At times, his situation is stabilized. It stabilized enough that he did not leave. Pushed this other telling moment that occurred after fredericksburg. An incident he had with a drunken comrade. He was a sergeant at this time and ordered a man to move firewood in camp. The man had too much to drink and refused. He hit the man with one blow over the head and wrote to his family, nearly crushed his skull. When the man came to, he said here is a 40 pound log, you are going to march around camp with it. At the end of a letter, he said i think he got off easy at the end of the letter, he said i think he got off easy. This confrontation was so powerful in his mind, because he enlistmentpon his and how much he has changed. He wrote it is a time that seems like a dream through which i have passed. Whilel never forget it life shall be mine. I was one of the greenest specimens that has ever been in the army. No selfreliance, new nothing of the ways of the world. Perfect know nothing. He admitted it. His schoolmaster, the army, had not been tender, but he could appreciate how the army had transformed soldiers into professionals. It is wonderful to see what a change will take place in a mans disposition. Not ly you did obviously he did not leave the army, he fought all the way to the summer of 1864, when his enlistment ended and he returned to new york. This move towards professionalization cannot be separated from the idea of union. Theannot be separated from fact that this was a man that was deeply racist, but believed emancipation was necessary. Thatme to believe africanamerican soldiers were to be respected and admired, especially because he knew if you get captured by the army of northern virginia, or any Confederate Army, you are a unctad. If you are a black soldier, you are not going to make it as a pow. Trench, northve carolinians alexander keever stared across a barren swath of land between opposing union and confederate line of petersburg. The day rarely passed when he of not spot squads confederates running towards the enemy without rifles, and zip in the air, begging to be taken prisoner. If site caused him to wonder theyre safe escape was not a sign of above. Yet, the north curling in remained confused about the the north carolinians remained confused about the course of the conflict. Was everyone being persecuted for individual or was the south facing gods wrath alone . Soldiers struggled to find consistent answers to these questions. The vast majority looked to the heavens were guidance, including him, who found comfort in resigning themselves to providence. It is better for a man to trust in the lord then run a risk to desert. There was a man who left the Company Last Week and he was was he may be shot. You can hear the conflicting voices in his head as to how she how he should act. He knowledge that was the Confederate Military that was the Supreme Authority in determining whether a deserter would live or die. To a social intimate, it must have been clear. Struggle carolinian to disembowel the confederacy, even with desertion. It was a logical choice for thousands of these people. What appears obvious to us was obvious to him. . Hy did he hesitate desertion for them was never a simple matter of national allegiance, nor a question about what was practical. To him, to desert was to call into question his entire moral and ethical universe. The step is difficult for any meant to do because on the front lines, gods ways were indecipherable. He wasnt confused about why he should desert, he had a long list of grievances against the confederacy. It was having an enemy to the front, and a firing squad to the rear, that kept him fixed. He knew that military service was killing him by degrees. He wrote to his wife the youth and mother sent to me, now i have to go on russia rations, i dread it. By the end of february 65, he was desperate. He began mapping out his escape from the army, telling his wife to expect him by springtime. Later, after studying the situation with comrades, he decided the risk of running was too great. Remaining in the army was the best chances of survival. Deserting, as he explained to his wife, unexpectedly turned into self isolation. And tooo far to walk dangerous, also. If i go home, i cannot stay there unless i would hide out. That would be worse than to stay here. If the officers found me, they would send me back and i would be shot to death. That would be worse than for me to stay here. His reasons for remaining in the ranks sounds pragmatic and devoid of abstractions. Had he not forgotten that his chances of surviving in the army bleak . Tipping the scales against desertion is careful. This care package arrived and it had food, clothing, other necessities. He wrote his wife back that he was going to try to wait it out, at least until he used up his care package that he got. Imagine his wife may have been so frustrated. What had been what couldve been if he had and on the care package. Now it appears he is set, he is going to wait it out. The front. From he seemingly reached his final decision. Only god could deliver him safely from the army. Providences ways are two mysterious. For him to serve his will. Lordhope and trust in the that this cruel war will soon end. And send soon we will get home to see our beloved families. I do not know how to wait any longer, but i will have to wait until it pleases the lord for me to be left from this cruel yoke of bondage. If it is his will, i will come home and see you all one more time. If it is his will for me to die here, it is all right for me. The statement of submission has a sense of finality to it, a resolution to accept whatever may come. Decided helater, he was his own master and his destiny resided in his hands, not gods. With four other men, he slept slipped behind confederates, ran by no mans land, then he reached the union lines, surrendered, and went all the way up to washington, d. C. Is a pow. He spent a few months there, took the oath of allegiance, became a u. S. Citizen, and return to north carolina. His crisis of allegiance to the confederacy called into question whether gods relationship to the people was knowable, or if matters were situational and open to revision. The war did not trigger a crisis in faith in keever, he discovered that they could not afford to rely on god absolutely and unconditionally if you hope to survive in the ranks. Alexander keever was a providential private test private test. John foster in the one 55th pennsylvania, looked to the 1864 Spring Campaign with trepidation. Down, hewas breaking had not recovered from his gettysburg wound, which he released on july 2. His captain was not sympathetic to his situation. Coming, promotion expecting it every day. Said you are going to have to carry a musket, carry your cartridge box with ammunition. He was more than disappointed. Superior was persecuting him. He expressed that to his wife. Shame in positive giving me a gun to carry. If we go on a hard march and i cannot carry the gun and keep up, i will throw it away. 20, and it me over will not be troubled with one for that amount. At the end of the letter, he predicted i will not go into an engagement if i can possibly avoid it. One day before the fighting erupted in the wilderness on may 5, he reconfirmed his promise that he would finish vanished once the fighting erupted. In all probability, there will be a battle near here, but im going to try and keep out of it if there is any possible chance. The next day, he was with his regiment advancing towards saunders field, the confederates were on the high ground. How far he accompanied that say,ce is not possible to but the march aggravated his injured leg. He lost the ranks without authorization, he joined a wagon train, making his way back to fredericksburg. He was probably arrested, he wiggled out of it with another captain from his unit. Pass, itsome kind of was not fully authorized. He got on a train headed up to washington, d. C. Once he got to washington, d. C. , he checked into a boarding house, he didnt go to a hospital. He feared that he would be sent right back down to his regiment. This boarding house he rented , it was other officers startling to me in terms of how we understand desertion. Receive themen privilege of rank. You also see how many men probably fled from battle on both sides. It is on the record that they had deserted. Of thehad to stay clear marshall. He could do it because he had a little bit of pocket change. To be able to pay his room and board. He stayed hunkered down in that room. He told his wife his letters are some he told his wife, his letters are some of the most fascinating and graphic i have read. The intimacy he expressed is shocking. Open with his wife about what he intended to do while in washington. I am going to play lieutenant as long as i can. I dont care what the consequences are. They can more than shoot me, but they cant call me eight ske a skedaddler. I dont know what i will do yet, or be made to do. When he was in his room, he started to get the newspapers coming in, reports from the fighting. He was trying to piece it together to figure out the fate of his comrades. He was able to figure out that his regiment had suffered serious losses, roughly 125 men. 1 5 of the regiment. Those staggering losses confirmed in his mind that he made the right decision. The isolation of the boarding house started to get to him. He didnt believe he could ever get back into the ranks. I am going to get out of service if possible. I cannot stand it out on the front any longer. He wrote that on may 13, the next day an aboutface. To anaged to get himself distribution camp. He tried to get out of the army once more. He said the only reason i didnt get a medical release was because i didnt know any of the doctors. He gets back to his regiment, foster refuses to speak to him. His captain refuses to speak to him. He didnt understand. He had just abandoned his comrades in this bloody campaign. His case as a deserter is paradoxical. A man with Strong Political convictions for the fight that he abandoned. He had also built a stellar combat record. He believed in the union cause. He had no toleration for antiwar, he wrote his wife about the Copperhead Movement and peace meetings in his community. He said i am sorry to hear those peace meetings in old armstrong. They are nothing but mean, cowardly, and esther lee. If there was only a few shoulders soldiers about there, i imagine the meeting with terminate in a manner not altogether acceptable to them. When he abandoned his regiment in the wilderness, he never saw himself as being unprincipled or selfserving. Circumstances had changed. Necessity, he rejiggered his sense of duty without regards to any abstractions. Only to the reality as he perceived to it in the moment. In the end, these three demonstrate that adhering to a strict code of conduct proved unsustainable in the field. The shock of war, the daily grind of trying to survive had framed it worked them. Volunteers are supposed to be dutiful, were disobedient, moral, or disloyal, break, or cowardly. , and power soldiers to shape themselves to the ground conditions of war, and the ideas themselves could also been. These examples also point to the fluidity of loyalty. Loyalty is often the product of events. That is evident in my final example, the story of an illiterate north carolinian. Veteran ofmbat chancellorsville. At the battle of gettysburg he had his brother charlie die in his arms. He always despised the war for its inhumanity, but his brothers death put him to the brink of desertion. Im going to read you his letters. These are the letters he spoke to a comrade, a comrade who was barely literate himself. There is a great website called. Rivate voices of mene full of letters speaking about the war, facetoface conversations. He spoke to a comrade back in virginia, august of 1863. He said charlie got killed and suffered a great deal. He lived night and day after he was wounded. There, seen hard times but we dont get enough here. We dontw now now, as to myself, i did enough. I dont want anything to eat hardly. I have almost i am almost sick all the time and have crazy. Ive never wanted to come home so bad in my life, but i cannot come at this time. If we go down south, i will try to come home. But i want to come home so bad. When the army unraveled, the physical circumstances of lees command breaking down enabled him and 11 other comrades to take on august 20, their muskets, and they fled to north carolina. That is when he acted out of pragmatic considerations. Revealing a sense of duty that was also shared by the famous Union Soldier and future Supreme Court Justice Oliver wendell on homes. He told his parents about his concept of duty on june 7, 1864. I am now a man. I have been coming to the conclusion for the last six months that my duty has changed. I can do a disagreeable thing or face a great danger when i know it is a duty. Me. In doubt, it demoralizes now i think duty to society has ceased for me. Right torned the decide for myself how i can best do my duty to myself, to the choose, tod if you god. Oliver Wendell Holmes and john futch cannot have been more different. In other words and actions resided a pragmatic philosophy grounded in situational thinking, adaptability, and elevated individual consciousness as the arbitrator of duty. This was the Common Thread at how soldiers thought. He did not create a common experience in what they thought or how they acted. So drink assumed an individualized soldiering assumed an individualized role. It is the soldier actions and thoughts and convoluted in ways. We are able to ask three men how did you cope with the physical strength and emotional pressures of having to survive in the ranks . True veterans would stand up and i did my whole duty as far as i knew it or it thank you. [applause] we dont have a lot of time for questions, but we can talk more after. The soldier from north carolina, was he executed . And 11 other soldiers were captured in scottsville, virginia, along the james river. They shot a gunbattle before, charge. T the officer in they were sent to richmond and spent a few days in castle thunder, then shipped back to the camps around montpelier. There were executed, that execution got tremendous press throughout the confederacy. A big part of my book is to try to understand how these men as deserters, and when they were executed, how that was depicted to the public. They are given no names, there is no individuality, you have no sense he was a combat veteran, he lost his brother, no clue that he was starving in his camps. Course, nothing about the home front in which he had a wife and child who were on the brink of destitution. She sent him a number of letters pleading for him to return. The portrayal of futch is so powerful. How that is received is the terms of that confederate. Evenany, they understood deserters left, the press portrayed them as common criminals, demonized them. They made the point that with these men had done, they brought dishonor and shame not just to themselves, but to their families for generations to come. The mythology of soldiers doing their duty is so powerful and immersed. I am wondering if you have found evidence in this book, and in other places, of soldiers being isre that the mythology something they can use and exploit to their vantage . Their advantage . They tried to use it to their advantage, but it creates a separation with the home front. On one hand, they are frustrated with people back home that they do not have an appreciation of what is really happening at the front. They are frustrated at the press, which has been a punching bag today, they believe these accounts that they are too romantic and fantasize war. At the same time, this sense of duty they want to major the people back home for the , thestand and recognize soldiers at the end of the day and these accounts a firm how they really want to be seen as bold soldier burrows, they want to be men always looking to the front. They increasingly do feel a sense of alienation from the home front. It has a profound impact on how i think about the relationship between civilians and soldiers. Your point is a good one. The other thing i would say is to also understand that these men were ambivalent. Was ambivalence recognition that there were other potential courses of action. For someone like Charles Bowen, who limited the war. At thetter he writes time from minnesota is so powerful that this is the very same man who volunteered at great risk to take some kind of repeating rifle and sneaked up and fault line position used cracker boxes filled with sand and was an assassin. He spent the afternoon taking out confederate cannon years. Many complimented it for his marksmanship and he wrote that he did his duty. The very same man who swung across the river and spent time with alabama soldiers and admired them. Contradictory consciousness. We need to get away from is that a romantic war. It is a contradictory, like all of us. Knows how many things i have done that are not in alignment. I say one thing and do another, we all do that. In history, and how we approach the common soldier, this extraction of quotes, this cherry picking is so sterile. It doesnt give people in the moment. That is what i search for looking at the past. Thats what we try to do with these men, captured their thinking and thoughts through the flow of time. Wonderful, thank you so much. My question is can we pull it together . These soldiers reflecting society at home to conclude something however tentatively about american nationalism, confederate nationalism, you talk about pragmatic philosophy. That is hinting at something that what is said about the nation as a whole. Studied, thatave is not the way they frame and understand their world. That is not how they project it. It is a big these are the big political questions that interest us. They tell us a great deal about the demise of the confederacy, the success of the union army. The questions we have used our often leading to artificial this something artificial. The bottom line is ideology and our interest in it, and these incredibly rich letters that convey these ideas and are powerful, they meant something to these men. We have become ideological determinists in studying the Civil War Soldiers. The totality of their experiences. Lifted look at the irvine movements environments. The relationships with household. You cannot figure the divide between the homefront and the army, because there wasnt a front line. When you take all that together, you have to take something that is sterile and not the world they inhabited. A world that helps us make sense of these issues. One of the things we relish in is the letters home from soldiers. We wish we had more letters to the soldiers from home. About the lot pragmatism and flexibility. From the letters from home to the soldiers. This sense of flexibility and pragmatism you see in the soldiers . Without a doubt. Probably more so, especially these households, like the futch household, you have a household in crisis. You can understand that these women making these pleas for their husbands to come back, mission of not be understood within the framework of nationalism. They are not calling for the union, that it is a question of survival. You have to be sensitive to class differences. Futch and his situation is unique and specific to north carolina, his impoverished state. Soldiers who other are more rooted or connected into a slaveholding society, whose families are not exposed to the invading armies, whose households are relatively functioning. Their perception of the war, and demands they placed on soldiers in the ranks. I had a soldier from indiana who was patriotic. During the course of the work, to see the sacrifice and death of his comrades, it led him to believe the only people who can truly understand his experience, who are committed to the cause, they were his comrades. He wrote to his wife and said the men who died in his regiment were buried by their friends. He felt that way because his wife showed almost no interest in the war. There was copperhead sentiment down there. You start to see that she was living the life in which the warhead and touched her. She was intent she wasnt hardships, but she still had renovations reservations about the war. Pressuress and her are nothing like the pressures that martha futch felt in asking john to come home. Thank you so much. [applause] thank you all so much for joining us today for the American Civil War museums annual symposium. Please join me in thanking all of our speakers for their outstanding presentations. [applause] i would also like to give special thanks to the American Civil War museum staff, including our colleagues and staff members, and the president of our foundation. Center for their ongoing support, as well as the library of virginia for providing stellar facilities and staff support. For more information about membership, contributions, donations, to this and other programs, visit our website at www. Acwm. Org. Today, weatching encourage you to join us this summer in july. Teacherffering two institutes to help you in your classroom with this topic. Again, thank you all so much for coming, have a wonderful afternoon. [applause] that concludes todays live coverage from the library of virginia with the American Civil War museum symposium. You can watch all of todays coverage by visiting our website cspan. Org history. Thank you for watching American History tv on cspan3. Ann thompson talks about her book, blood in the water the attica prison uprising of 1971 and its legacy. Atticaalls events at the facility in upstate new york in 1971. After four days, state officials took back control of the facility. 39 hostages and prisoners were killed. This was recorded at the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College in 2016. It is one hour and five minutes. 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