Transcripts For CSPAN3 The 20240703

I have known our next speaker for quite some time. I remember probably decade or so ago sitting on a bus going from Gettysburg College to the shenandoah, talking about next projects, our i have no now next speaker for quite some time. Remember probably a decade or so ago sitting on a bus, going from Gettysburg College to the Shenandoah Valley talking about next projects. Our next speaker has been a great friend of me and the institute, and a great supporter of our journal of the Central Valley during the civil war era. So, it gives me great pleasure to introduce Brian Matthew jordan. Brian is associate professor of Civil War History and chair of the department of history at sam houston state university. Hes the author or editor of six books on the civil war era, including marching home, Union Veterans and their unending civil war, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history in 2016. His more than 100 reviews, articles, have appeared in scholarly journals, and in volumes and popular magazines. Without further ado, please join me in welcoming Brian Matthew jordan. Well, thank you so much, jonathan, for this kind introduction. Thank you for the invocation to participate in this wonderful conference today. Always a pleasure to be here, at shenandoah university, to support the work of the mccormick institute, the work that you do here. I just so admire what youre able to do to preserve the legacy of the Shenandoah Valley, to engage undergraduate students in historical research. Youre a real treasure. I have the unenviable task, of course, of addressing death and destruction, a melancholic topic after lunch. So, were going to do our best, here, this afternoon. Just two days after the battle of antietam. Photographer Alexander Gardner and his assistant, james gibson, captured one of the most arresting images, i think, of the civil war. A large federal burial party taking a much needed rest from its macabre toil on david r. Millers form. Their muskets stacked, some men lean on shovels and spades. One slings a pick over his shoulder. The foreground of the image is littered with splintered fence rails, human debris, lifeless bodies, very likely the that of the 124th pennsylvania volunteers, a fierce rebel musket she delivered from the westwood. Awaiting their soon to be excavated graves. If inspected with care, this stereo negative, 1 of 95 images collected on the battlefield that autumn, yields some tantalizing clues as to the emotional toll levied by the civil wars inevitable post battle era. Somber and solemn faces. The burial details surveys the health skate skip around them, which oscillates between awe and disbelief. All some soldiers, in the image, engage in conversation, one member of the crew points directly ahead, perhaps indicating the location of the next shallow trench, which rows of bodies will be heaped. Seated on the grounds, yet another man turns away from the carnage. Still, others had their brows in seeming discussed. Among civil war scholars, it has become axiomatic that these photographs, collected and displayed that october in a public exhibit, mounted Matthew Bradys new york city studio and gallery, were the first such images american dad on american battlefields. But much less appreciated and much more significant, i think, is another novelty of this slaughter at sharpsburg. For, prior to its victories at South Mountain and anteater, the army of the potomac had never rested upon arms on a battlefield rested from the enemy. The possession of these core of his corpsestrewn fields, inspired many soldiers first encounters with the grim reality of death on a massive scale. This afternoon, taking some cues from sensory history and from histories of material culture, i will attempt to examine how Union Soldiers, a few northern facilities, confronted the dead of anteater. As the sensory history adam mac has pointed out in a very different context, are historical narratives, too often, align the ways in which the past was immediately felt and experienced by ordinary historical actors. This is especially unfortunate, which continues for these raw feelings and emotions, shaped and informed historical memories, stimulated and promoted teacher action. Indeed, keenly aware that they were participating in history. Pains to assimilate their precise place in the war as a whole. Union soldiers spent the days and we, and months after antietam rummaging for meaning, living in the shadow of the dead. More in place for which, moreover, the assault that anteater made on their senses, persisted such a sustained exposure to the water main base realities, challenged and refined their ideas about the water main conduct and its meaning, confirming, for us, as historians, as students of this war, that events between battles and behind the lines did as much to shape the water main outcome as its combat. Wednesday, september 17th, 1862, of course, was the deadliest day of the civil war. 12 hours near foxburg, maryland, some 23,000 men were added to the water main ever lengthening register of killed, wounded, missing and captured. Divisions were thrashed in a simple cornfield, snared in the fingers of the west woods. Bloodied in an old sunken farmland. The army of the potomac marching on that date a clear victory, flushing robert e. Lees maryland, and ending his bid to bring the war north. Perhaps even into pennsylvania. Union soldiers, when it was all over, confronted a staggering spectacle on the antietam battlefield. The landscape was otherworldly , almost surreal. If phantoms from the spirit world could ever come forth to the welder mortals, one Union Brigade commander insisted, sure, it never was there time or place or site so seasonable. Men distrusted their eyes, as they surveyed the mangled bodies littering the field, the orders of burning animal flesh annexing their nostrils, the death moans of wounded men driving in their ears. War has its glories, one ohio and remarked, but it has 10,000 demons in these human tortures that make the eyeballs a, the heart bleed, the lips palsy, the brain, reel. Indeed, the sensory overload this soldier tantalizingly described for us exacted, often, a physical toll. Or for bernard f. Blakeslee, reported that many soldiers detailed to the burial parties from his regiment the newly formed 16th connecticut, became sick, owing to the nature of their work. 24yearold major rufus dawns of the 6 wisconsin, who had trickled down to the dacres town turnpike in the battles opening phase, attributed a severe attack of a sick headache to the late, terrible excitement and trying times of clearing the battlefield. We are in camp amid a dreadful stench of the halfburied thousands of men and horses on the battlefield, he protested. Towards the amount, he continued, even trembled in fright himself. Wet with perspiration. The elders of the battlefield were truly most offending. Some men explained that, while they did not mind seeing the dead bodies, the insufferable stench , their words quite another matter. You could imagine how it must improve the air to have bodies of men laying above the ground so long, then the dead horses and mules, explained one massachusetts tenant, a sardonic letter to his wife, sometimes it is just perfectly horrible. Still, another baystate volunteer objected that most everywhere, carrying polluted the air. One regimental surgeon feared that the rank error was breeding a pestilence in his unit, which have been fortunate to see no action in the fight. We must leave soon from this place, he echoed, or we should all die. Meteorological conditions only exacerbated the foul smells generated by that september. It was phenomenally hot. Temperatures were in the mid 70s climbing as high as 79 the afternoon after the battle. It served to only hasten the process of decomposition. In the humid evenings, the low dense mad fog located the battlefield, intensified the stench until it became, in the words of one man, almost unendurable. A veteran of the 108th new york recalled that it was thick enough that it could be cut into chunks. First lieutenant samuel fletcher, whose massachusetts unit suffered 54 losses, only 9 of the 62 men in his company emerged from their stance in the west woods. He commented that, for several days, he could taste the order of putrefying flesh. For that very reason, joseph ward and his comrades in the 106 pennsylvania were unable to eat. Even the foods he had with those foul odors that enveloped us, he objected, one had almost to dig ones nose into the ground to get a good breath. The sensory historian mark smith has observed this stench of the battlefield death constituted a very, very powerful form of meeting and memory making. Behavioral psychologists confirmed that olfaction has a unique connection to emotion and associative learning. Further, the anatomical overlap between memory and smell ensures that olfaction can tap and retrieve far older memories than other sensory systems. Put simply, the men would never forget, for the rest of their lives, antietams offensive aroma. Decades later, they could still describe it with precision. These responses are all the more striking, i think, when we consider the normative smell scape of the civil war generation. These were men accustomed to dead pigs in alleys, fecal matter in the streets, to an age before public sanitation. Norwood veterans forget what they had seen and heard, and antietams carnage made clear the seemingly limitless capacity for human destruction. And, catalog with great care the many lifelike poses in which they encountered the dead. With every rigid muscle strained in fierce agony, with hands folded peacefully on the bottom, still clutching their guns, hanging over a fence which they were climbing when the fatal shot hit its target. Oh, it is an awful site to go over the field after the excitement is over, one soldier remarked, especially after a battle such as last wednesdays. Turkey buzzards circled overhead, anxious for their cadavers feast. Clinging to life among the dead, the wounded lay in all directions. One soldier jotted down the curses and the prayers, the prettiest please for water, supplications for medical care that he overheard. Unable to translate the battles reading agony, linear prose, he decided to record something of its auditory elements instead. Decomposition was especially disconcerting, especially for mid 19th century americans, who looked, of course, to the physical body as an index of ones moral work and manliness. I have seen, stretched along in one straight line, ready for internment, at least 1000 blackened, bloated corpses, with blood and gas protruding from every orifice, one surgeon signed. Maggots holding high carnival over their heads with no small anxiety. George noise noted that the bodies of our late antagonists had turned so absolutely black that they could be easily mistaken for a regiment. The irony, of course, was not lost on him. So, the selfdescribed strong, hardened soldier confessed that, after antietam, he gazed upon as much horror as he could bear. Pennsylvanian James Forrest agreed. His 34th pennsylvania volunteer infantry, trapped across the field on september 18th, finding the dead putrefying in heaps, with he and his comrades, he said, having to turn their heads and shut their eyes. Oh, the young soldier remarked, it was sickening. Rather than turn away still other soldiers relied on rations of whiskey or alcohol to dole their senses and manage their grief. The bodies have become so offensive, one ohioan reported, men could only indirect by being staggeringly drunk. Wincing, turning away, guzzling whiskey. These responses reassured men in a contest of civilizations that they had not yet devolved into barbarism. While soldiers, no doubt, strove for the self possession military discipline demanded, they, nonetheless, feared growing desensitized to death and mass violence. Just weeks into his service, for example, one new yorker, regimental surgeon, wondered if he was already overexposed, if it was already too late. I pass over the putrefying bodies of the dead, he marveled, and feel as little unconcerned, as though they were 200 pigs. Whether i am, indeed, heart or hardened, whether familiarity ever so brief with such scenes tends to sear my bitter feelings, i know not, but i can tell you this. I slept as soundly last night in the open air as i ever did, almost under the same blanket with a dead man. As they wandered the field in a very real sense, the first real battlefield visitors, soldiers endeavored to make sense of the fights that northern newspapers, at least, cheered as a glorious victory. As the historian Carol Riordan has noted, as soldiers recollection of battle began in his personal memory, scattered snippets of what happened to me , such snippets, of course, with time, demanded context and meaning. Over time, veterans would fill in the many crucial gaps in their knowledge, remedy their dim understanding of a larger strategic or operational picture , consulting, and in many cases, appropriate memories from other survivors published accounts. These accounts, of course, in the immediate aftermath of the battle, were still years away. Most immediately, then, dead men lying on the battlefield helped to fill in gaps, helped to tell the tale of the battle. And in the days and weeks after antietam, soldiers would evaluate the position, condition, and distribution of antietams casualties. They attempted to piece together what the rush of adrenaline and their narrow vantage points in battle had denied them. Coherent narrative of the engagement in which they had participated the men took scrupulous note of which bodies have been riddled by musket tree, which had been torn by shots of shell. Heaps of rubble that mounted behind stonewalls betrayed the rebel armys appropriation of fence lies lines with the concentration of the dead, likewise, revealing whether or not the enemy had prevailed at a particular point on the battlefield. Not unlike civilians back home, civil war soldiers used the numbers of killed and wounded as reliable indices of the units courage or bravery in battle. Staggering losses trade stubborn stands. Wandering the fields, these soldiers spectators made their initial assessments about the contributions of particular outfits to the battles outcome. The morning after the battle of South Mountain, 3 days before antietam, major george h. Helped of the 30th ohio brimmed with pride as he surveys his field at foxs gap, choked with the dead north carolinians of sam garlands date well satisfied with our work yesterday, he wrote matteroffactly in his diary. Close inspection of the enemy dead confirms, of course, northern critiques of Southern Society as a fence and uncivilized, inviting reflection on what was at stake in the larger contest. Yankees insisted, not surprisingly, dead rebels bore the marks of their character, the marks of a slave holding society. And in turn, that of their treasonous rebellion. According to one commentator, they seemed, the rebels did, to have pertained in death something of the last attitudes of their combative life. Wondering along the enemy lines, a new york salon fixed his eyes on the corpse of a young lad not more than 15 years of age, whose long curls flowed over his shoulders. Though his thighs had been terribly mangled, he wore a heavenly smile, exposed teeths of remarkable beauty. This prompted him to suppose that the dead boy was probably the pride of some aristocratic family who had sent him willingly to the war to defend slavery. William chamberlain, a medical inspector for the United States sanitary commission, traveled to the battlefield to organize the delivery of muchneeded linens, blankets, bandages, and whiskey, noticed that decomposition was proceeding much more rapidly among the confederate dead than among hours. In congruity, he contributed this to the restricted use of salt and southern rations. For his part, george noise confessed that the site of the rebel that provoked pangs of sympathy. Even as he sanctimoniously crowed that the dead confederates had merely reaped what they had sewn. So ends the brief madness which sent him heather to fight against the government he only knew by its blessings, as he gazed upon the decomposing body of a young rebel officer, and in his view, those willing to fight for a ghastly cause, those who are willing to wear forever the nestled shirt of slavery, faded for such a grim end. Soldiers and other spectators but only surveyed the location and the condition of the dead, they also took painstaking time and effort to inventory the slain. Many historians, of course, have noted the statistical endeavors of civil war veterans like William Freeman fox, Thomas Leonard livermore, Frederick Henry dyer , assembled comprehensive, numbinglydetailed registers of the dead that are still foamed by scholars today. Numbers are our currency. What has les been fully appreciated, i think, is the wartime origins of these post more projects. The obsession with tallying the dead began as soon as the guns fell hot. Such counts could render incontrovertible an armys claim to battlefield victory. As the historian Patricia Klein call when observed in the mid 19th century, accounting was presumed to have pronounced knowledge, since county led to the most reliable and objective form of the fact that there was, the hard number. Quantification became especially important for antietams veterans, or the veterans of the maryland campaign. The failure to pursue lee and the army of Northern Virginia back into the old dominion, and a stubborn confederate revisionism conspired both to face the decisiveness of the battlefield victories scored by the army of the potomac in maryland. In passing over the battleground, which was now in our possession, one ohio soldier was sure to point out, it was actually evident the loss of rebels greatly exceeded our own. The aforementioned george held made a careful count of the dead at foxs gap. At one point, 17 of their dad were lined, touching one another, he wrote. Their loss in that fight was 51 of hours. Three days later, the buckeye soldier was no less fastidious at antietam, combing the field, opposite burnside bridge, then contested, and samuel wheelock, his 14th netiquette engaged the enemy at the sutton road, counted nearly 1000 dead bodies and rebels lined, still on buried in graves, in cornfields, on hillsides, and in trenches. The excitement of a battle comes in the day of it. The horrors of it felt two or three days after. In addition to these statistics, men collected tangible souvenirs. Battlefield relics made tactile. An event that many soldiers could only describe as ineffable. Trophytaking confirms the victors triumph over the enemy. The whole field of battle, littered with abandoned cannon, casings, rifles, swords, bayonets, dead animals, the dead of both armies and the troops, one commentator observed. And most burial parties were disposing of the human wreckage of the battle, other details were engaged in gathering all of this abandoned material. Company b of the 93rd new york, for instance, entailed to collect muskets discarded on the field. While not far away, the 14th connecticut replenished its supply, with sacks and blankets. Just as they had pondered the condition and arrangements of the dead, the men read and interpreted the physical detritus of the battle in the efforts to piece together a narrative of what had happened. Some of the regiments must have left in a great hurry, a massachusetts soldier, Joseph Collingwood surmise, for they left their knapsacks, clothing, gun stores, et cetera, in large quantities. Samuel fisk drew the same conclusion from the object strewn fields. Full regiments threw away overcoats and blankets, and anything that can comfort them. And so, with equipment, stores, ammunition, and everything else, not surprisingly, fields choked with the debris of war, invited much scavenging and plunder. Catalogs of northern sanitary fairs, and other wartime and postmore public exhibitions, of course, provide partial inventories of items that federal soldiers purloined from the dead bodies of their enemies. The north carolinians who died at South Mountain, the slats head of the mississippi private fell at antietam. A letter bearing confederate postage addressed to the captain of the 16th south carolina, rifles, cartridges, belt blades, bayonet sheets, soldiers also boasting of their bounties in letters to loved ones back home. Joseph calling, for example, picked up a great many relics, including an overcoat worn by a soldier killed in the battle. I got my chests, and im going over the battlefield, yet again, to get more, he vowed. In the weeks that followed, the massachusetts lieutenant, on at least two more occasions. In october, he sent home a button cut from a dead rebels coat, ensuring his wife, rebecca, she need not be afraid. Most of their officers are gentlemanly and intelligent, he cautioned, but i could never find one, yet, who could define what their rights were, except as abolitionists wanted to steal all of their enslaved persons. Before long, soldiers encountered civilian competition in their pursuit of relics. Very powerful evidence that many loyal northerners immediately apprehended the significance of the antietam battle. The battlefield of wednesday, one soldier reported, is trampled by a small army of curiosity seekers from the west, north, and east. A narrow road leading into sharpsburg, daily choked with carriages, delivering civilians and aid workers to the battlefield. Within a week, these civilians had pretty well cleared away all material evidence of the struggle, leaving only the few bodies that polluted the burial cruise to testify to the fight. Many of these civilians felt, no doubt, as charles w. Moehring explains, an urgent need to see actual history of battlefield in the troops. Of course, one of the more famous visitors to the field was the prose poet, all over Wendell Holmes senior, who boarded a marylandbound locomotive up on receipt of the news that his namesakes son, a captain of the 20th massachusetts, had been wounded. After a frenetic runthrough field hospitals, holmes finally located his son. So, he felt the almost magnetic feel of the battlefield. It was impossible for me to return to that massachusetts, he declared, without seeing that. Hiring a hack driver to convey him to sharpsburg, the boston intellectual refused to return north without a souvenir. I picked up a rebel canteen, and one of our own, he began. There was something repulsive about the trident and stained relics of that stale battlefield. It was like the table of some hideous , left unclear. One turned away disgusted from its broken fragments and muddy heel caps. Ultimately, the senior homes settled for a bullet or two, a button, grass played from a soldiers belt. Together with a letter, which i picked up, he explained, directed to richmond, virginia, seal, unbroken. The elder holmes was hardly alone in pondering the propriety of his relic hunting. Indeed, the war invited a fierce debate about what constituted appropriate conduct on a battlefield, yet strewn with wounded and dead bodies. Even as his own morbid curiosity delivered him to the field, one philadelphia spectator registered his indignation at the site of civilians wondering the shell plowed ground, providing discarded muskets and other souvenirs. I expressed to many of them my opinion of such conduct. Then who will steal, he argued, have no sense of shame. Two years later, even president lincoln found himself, unexpectedly, in the middle of this wartime debate about battlefield decorum. Democratic newspapers elected that while touring the battlefield with general mcclellan in fall of 1862, president had asked his close friend, then the u. S. Marshall, hal lehman, seated beside him in the ambulance that conducted the president ial party across the field, singing the menstrual tune picked a union butler, a pious mcclellan reportedly objected. I would prefer to hear that tim some other place in some other time. The story, of course, deployed in the middle of a president ial election year, reeked of raw political opportunism. But by september, it had gained enough traction in the National Press to merit a firm reply from the lincoln administration. Lehman conceded that he saying a little schoolboy song in the ambulance at the president s request, though he was clear that it was not at the battle site. The time was 16 days after the battle, lehman clarified. Not a dead body had been seen during the whole trip, nor a grave that had not been rained on since it had been made. Manufactured controversy soon faded, though not without revealing, i think, the anxiety that many northerners felt as they attempted to navigate this strange new world of life amongst death. Catching a collective breath, the army of the potomac fifth, in close box ready to the anteater battlefield, for the next six weeks, ensuring, again, that the sights and smells of antietam lingered. Some civilian curiosity seekers visited with encamped soldiers. The recollections of their encounters with the men, their interviews with the men, further underscore the human effects of confronting antietams carnage. Many of the veterans spoke of the scenes they saw at sharpsburg with actual shutters on sites. They cannot throw off the impression made by the masses of the wounded and dead. The wounded, often lying neglected and helpless under the dead. Sometimes, crushed to death by the wheels of our own artillery. Nor, it seems, could men of the 14th connecticut will away those scenes. The regiment conducted religious services on the sunday after the battle. Everyone wore a more sober face than i have ever before observed, Sergeant Benjamin hurst of rockville recalled. Eight massachusettsborn officer who fed his 12th corporate grade in the cornfield site, insisted that neither time nor change. Dan the remembrance of carnage too horrible to be real, yet too real to forget. A doleful trip of reports from the hospitals and hometowns where men recovered from their injuries continued to find, haunt, and stock men of the army throughout that fall, issuing a keen reminder that grief and trauma were anything but linear. Still, confronting the water main realities in this visceral way, i think its important to say, sent no great wave of disillusionment crashing through the ranks of the army of the potomac. In fact, much to the contrary, it seemed only to harden or renew that armys resolve. We see many historical sites, Joseph Collingwood remarked, but the battle must be fought, and victory must be ours. Rebellion must be put down at any price. Like collingwoods, Nathaniel Emerson bright was a once devoted mcclellan man, but now, however, he, too, rejected a war of conciliation. The dead of antietam, whose horrific sites could not have been permitted to have died in vain, a fate that seemed increasingly likely with each new day of inaction. Im exceedingly desirous that something great be done this fall campaign, he wrote, unless something is done soon during this fall and spring, there does not seem to be much prospect that the war will be closed during the lincoln administration. The latter does not take place, then, all seems clouded in darkness. Feeling that the army and potomac had failed to follow up on its stunning maryland victories, charles mcclinton of the 26th new york was even more exacting. Our pleasant plains, he wrote of the enlisted ranks, would admit to nothing less than the total annihilation of the entire rebel army, immediately followed by the collapse of that magnificent humbug, the socalled confederacy. This rural confrontation, the consequences of the rebellion field, i argue, a new, raw, indignation, that found operational and tactical articulation on the battlefield. Ultimately, then, antietams aftermath proved a very, very consequential moment in the life of the yetevolving army of the potomac. As other scholars have argued, experiences between battles and behind the lines did as much, if not more than combat to shape soldiers emerging understanding of the war. The war has been recast, frederick homestead about that november. The cost of war had not been fairly counted. The horror of war had not been fairly seen, but now, in a moment of disappointment, depression, mourning, the cost was pondered, and the full looked in the face. This is exactly what Alexander Gardner and james gibson captured on those wet plates. Equipped with this deeper and more capacious understanding of the war and its human consequences, rippled out in time and space, antietams veterans braced themselves anew for the months and years of bloody work that were yet ahead. Thank you so much. Happy to take your questions. Yes, maam. Do we have any documentation about disease in the burial parties . We dont have good of course no one has yet mined of those records to kind of quantify the disease in the burial parties, but im certain that that is there. I would recommend to you a very numbinglydetailed new book by Stephen Cowie called a upon the fields of sharpsburg, which gives that kind of first introduction to what effects of disease were on sharpsburg civilians. He doesnt go through the burial parties themselves, but he certainly documents how those diseases were communicated through the sharpsburg community, and all of the difficulties that they wrestled with for months after the battle. Yes, sir . Thank you for taking my question. So, in your research of the primary documents, such that you researched for this presentation, was there any sort of common emphasis on a battlefield location, in particular, that kind of captured the imagery from the accounts of the soldiers and other various primary documents that you examined . I was just curious. Hell thats a great question. And i think, you know, in surveying accounts from soldiers who were deployed all across the field, from the cornfield to westwoods to sunken lane, to the fields on the opposite side of the rohrbach bridge, there is just a remarkable consistency in the experience and the descriptions in wrestling with just the emotional toll of the battle. So, i see a lot of consistency. Theres not one particular area that stood out that way, but i think what was really unique about this is the six weeks that the army of the potomac is there, around that battlefield, it is so understudied. We so often narrate the war as this unbroken sequence of battles and campaigns, and we forget about those spaces in between, which is really where soldiers come to understand the war and their participation in it, right . In those crucial weeks. So, you know, his book is one great example of this. We have got a lot of recent work thats helping us to get those experiences between battles, and certainly, i think more work, that way, will help us tell a richer and more human story of the war. Yes, sir . Your argument at the conclusion of the talk about the sensory experience fueling something operational in terms of a redoubled, you know, intent to prevail, did that flow from, particularly, your research on antietam and the response to antietam, or had you been looking broadly at other battles and just found antietam as a really good example for showing how that dynamic, you know, occurred . Thats a great question. I hadnt been thinking about that question more broadly. Its something that leapt out from documents for the picu with to them. But i do think that this is a moment, a typical moment in the war, a Pivotal Moment for the army of the potomac, and typically, we narrate this part of the war as being very demoralizing. Right . Antietam is going to be going up in action, then fredericksburg, and, there, we hear of more accounts of this wave of the organization of crashes, and i just dont see it, right . A couple of things happen. Right . This is the first sustained encounter with the visceral realities of war. But two, this is also the moment when you get the copperhead democrats, and as these soldiers are more in place, especially after fredericksburg, the winter encampments on the north bank of the rappahannock river, theyre receiving news from home, and theyre learning about this mounting antimore opposition, and it clarifies for them exactly whats at stake in the war, and they began sending resolutions back home, hometown newspaper, saying, we want to stay out, fight this war through to a victorious conclusion. You know, the army of the potomac was notoriously politically fracture us, but these two experiences, i think the aftermath of antietam and the aftermath of fredericksburg, and the coincidence of these events, with growing antimore sentiments on the home front, i think, serve to promote an ironic security among the rank andfile that really comes to full flower in the summer of 1863 with the army of the potomac is a very, very different sort of fighting machine than it was in the early months of the war yes. In the back . So, the topic of this dissertation is interesting to me. I was wondering, during your research, did you happen to find any primary sources or documents pertaining to surviving soldiers after witnessing the amount of death at antietam go home and recount any stories or experiences with their spouses, parents, siblings, and their reaction to these stories . So, not directly in my work on this project, but i will say, in my previous book, marching home, one of the myths i attempt to get at in that book is this myth that civil war soldiers, immediately after the conflict, slipped into a period of hibernation, during which they turned rapidly from the war that alleges this was the argument from a very important 1987 book called a battle of courage. He said, soldiers turned rapidly from the war, refused to ride, speak, or think about it for at least 20 years after the conflict, then they kind of reemerged, tell romanticized stories around the jr campfires in the 1880s and 90s. What i found, in that book, and im sure, continuing this work, i would find similar things, that there was no real hibernation. Right . They did not turn rapidly from the war. In fact, they felt a great obligation, a great burden, to document, detailed history of what exactly they had seen and experienced. They had become, in many ways, as veterans do, the wards first historians. I have accounts in my previous books of men who come back with physical injuries, literally break through their physical pain immediately upon their return home to pin numbingly detailed battle, campaign, unit histories. Right . Marked battlefields, they draw the first maps, they collect the first future relic collections. Theyre not moving rapidly at all. Theyre attempting to share their stories with the northern public. Frankly, who does not want to listen to these stories. The carp about the newspaper editors magazine editors who delete their socalled harsh adjectives, and try to sanitize and sterilize the narrative of the war, a war that they thought was probably not more the nation wanted. That gap, i think, so terribly important in explaining the lingering trauma. Some of the veterans i have written about previously argued that they could work through the trauma they had seen and experienced in combat, but what they couldnt deal with was having losing control, losing authority over the narrative of their work and what it meant in the years of reconstruction. And i think theres still, yet, lr work for us to do to uncover that. Yes, sir . Curious about how the union . Yeah. How they handled the dead confederates as far as separating burials from dead Union Soldiers and dead confederates . So, there were some truths that happened immediately after south bound and antietam winter, where rebels were able to remove their debt. Although, certainly not all of them. Certainly, in the maryland campaign, the most notorious incidents related to dead rebels occurs up at fox point gap on South Mountain. Theres an ohio burial crew. A matter of some controversy. As to exactly how this happened, those bodies were pitched into an old farm well, 58 confederate bodies pitched into farmer daniel wise foxes gap well. Later recovered in 1874, moved to the hagerstown city cemetery, but you do have instances like this you can find all the way through the war of sort of differential treatment or even missed treatments of the rebel dead, and then certainly, on the other side, one reason we get the National Cemetery system immediately after the war are all of the accounts of former rebels pillaging and destroying union graves that are, of course, dotted all over the battlefields of the south, and there are so many acts of grave desecration, both delivered and otherwise, that the federal government decides we really need to collect all of these bodies into a network of national cemeteries. So, its not a rosy tail, really, or a righteous tail on either side, unfortunately. Yes, sir . A followup to that is how are the burial teams selected . With new jersey survivors, with a go out and look for their comrades in arms . This side of the field, you have that end of the field . So, they would be assigned, you know, based on their proximity, their location, you know, its not done by state. Its just kind of a lottery assignment, where you are on the burial detail, you know, and theyre combing these bodies. Certainly, i think theres a lot more work to be done on the burial crews, and certainly, one of the fascinating aspects, too, as we progress on in later years, then into the postmore period, where a lot of the bodies are repatriated into the new national cemeteries, a lot of those burial crews are African Americans. Right . Weve all probably seen that haunting photograph, burial party at cole harbor, which captures an allAfrican American burial crew in 1865 coming back to still remove the debris from the harbor. These are the first African American federal workers, the burial crews of the civil war, collecting bodies for the cemeteries. And African Americans felt a keen sense of obligation and ownership over the union did. There, too, i think is a major study that we need in civil war historiography, to look at that relationship between African Americans and their self perception as custodians of the union dead. Fascinating. Yeah . You described soldiers that i havent heard described when we talk about world war i, world war ii, vietnam. Have you ever contrasted and compared why, maybe, what you just said, they came home, they believed in what they did, wanted to fight the fight, did that help them in terms of what we see in ptsd today, you know, and what are your thoughts on that . That is a great question. I have not done that sort of comparative work. I do think, as jonathan mentioned earlier, his presentation, there are some historians that change over time, but there are some timeless human elements you can find in all of these conflicts, parallels you can find in all of these complex. So, ill say that. But i will say, at least on the union side, this is a very complicated homecoming, precisely because they understood so keenly what this war was about i subscribe, generally, to james mcphersons argument that civil war soldiers were ideologically motivated, that they understood keenly what was at stake in the contest, but i think the implication of that argument is that they understood that, in the betrayals of reconstruction. Right . The postwar politics they came back, they had to think, you know, they literally had to ask themselves in the spring and summer of 1865 if they really won the war after all, as they watched former confederates returned to the position of social and cultural power all across the south, they see race riots, from the south, instances of whites from assist terror, the redemption of southern states. I think all of this has a dramatic impact on their ability to make sense of their service. And its a reminder that union victory, for them, was not a subtle transparent statement of fact. Right . The end of the war was still so messy, and tentative, uncertain. After the war, theres fears of another rebellion that would make a rather skirmish of the first. So, this is, in part, why they feel so devoted to this project of telling the story of what the team has experienced, making clear that there was as douglas put it not a right or wrong side in the war. I think reconstruction only complicates, dramatically, their efforts to return to civilian life. And they i think this is really remarkable in the 19th century, this is an age that writes itself on small armed republican citizen soldiers who quickly went home, set aside all of their authority over political issues. Union veterans, i think, refused to do that. They lost the battle over the water main memory in their lifetime, but i think theyre winning in the long game. Hello. Yes, sir. Last question. The horror that the civilian population saw firsthand was the revelation of the pitchers, what have you, of the dead. Which do you think impacted their feelings about support or lack or not supported the war as much . Was it the dead themselves, or was it lincolns emancipation proclamation a few days later . Thats a good question. So, we do have some preliminary work, largely from political scientists who have studied kind of where antiwar opposition at the county level where thats coming from, and then correlating that with the casualty counts, and there is a correlation there, but i think its also important to point out that emancipation does divide the northern citizenry very, very dramatically. This is a population that has reached no consensus about emancipation. About emancipation this is a population that rallied the war to suppress a rebellion to reserve the union and certainly, emancipation is going to lead to a lot of divisions. You begin the here in the fall of 1862 and in the spring of 1863. It is antiemancipation, anti american rhetoric. I think both of those things play a role. We need to do a better job in communicating that the war was the north versus the north and the south versus the south. These are internally divided sections and that, too, complicates how veterans get back home. They returned to a society that is reached no consensus about the meaning of the war or their participation in it. Thank you so much. Weekends on cspan2 are an intellectual feast. Every saturday, American History tv documents america story. On sundays, booktv brings you the latest. Funding from these comes from these companies and more including charter communications