The Civil War Podcast

This Yahoo user has created a series of lists that serve as a dictionary for Civil War lingo.  As you’d expect, there’s some fun to be found in here.

Multiform. A ragged uniform. A sarcastic term used by tattered Confederate soldiers.

News walkers. Soldiers who, on their own initiative, carried news from campfire to campfire.

Stray. A Union soldiers’ tongue-in-cheek term for a domestic hog or fowl that they had stolen.

via Civil War Lingo, Part 3: More Words and Phrases – Yahoo! Voices – voices.yahoo.com.

After 150 years, historians are taking a second look at the estimated death count of the war.  A new thesis, based upon census data, suggests a significant boost in the numbers.

The true death toll was probably about 750,000 – 20 percent higher than the traditionally quoted figure of 620,000 – and might have been as high as 850,000, according to J. David Hacker of New York’s Binghamton University…

Hacker’s conclusions, published in the December issue of the journal Civil War History, are “already gaining acceptance from scholars,” the New York Times reported today.

The journal called the article “among the most consequential pieces” it has ever published, and Columbia historian Eric Foner told the Times the study “further elevates the significance of the Civil War” and “helps you understand, particularly in the South with a much smaller population, what a devastating experience this was.”

via Civil War deaths much higher, analysis concludes.

NPR puts a name to an unknown soldier. This is a fascinating piece of modern detective work.

Now that we had the regiment, the next step was to visit the New York soldiers index, where a search in the National Parks Service Soldier and Sailors Database turned up four possibilities with the right initials: Thomas Abbott, Thomas Adams, Thomas Ardies and Thomas Austin.

Our next stop was visiting Vonnie Zullo, a professional researcher who does a great deal of her work at the National Archives in Washington.

At the Archives, we pull the pension files and military service records of our four soldiers — all with the first name “Thomas,” and the last initial “A.” Very quickly, Zullo rules out two of the possible candidates: Adams and Austin.

“One never actually reported to his unit,” she says. “And the other soldier was in a band — and he was 35 years old and much larger.”

And then there were two…

Unknown No More: Identifying A Civil War Soldier : NPR.

I’m so excited to see this Adalbert Volck exhibition, which I mentioned in a previous update.  The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, of all papers, has this excellent biography of the man. (But, surprisingly, none of his cartoons.)

Volck lived nearly 50 years after the war’s end, dying in Baltimore in 1912. In a letter to the Library of Congress, which had acquired some of his etchings, Volck said a few years before his death that his “greatest regret ever was to have aimed ridicule at the great and good Lincoln.”

His remorse isn’t surprising. By the turn of the 20th century, the passions of the war years had cooled. Lincoln had become a symbol of national unity — the man who saved the Union. And many preferred to forget the unsettling role of race and slavery in bringing on the conflict and in the Reconstruction years that followed.

via Cartoonist for Confederacy made mockery of the Union – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

This one’s rather macabre, so if you have a sensitive constitution, don’t click through to the picture that accompanies the article.

Shortly after the battle of Antietam, a farmer plowing his field dug up a dismembered arm.  For some reason, he and the doctor he consulted about it decided to pickle it rather than bury it, and it wound up in the collection of a private museum.

Wunderlich said he hopes to have a Smithsonian Institution forensic anthropologist examine the arm for clues about the owner’s diet and origin.

Battlefield Superintendent Susan Trail said the arm can’t be displayed at the Antietam visitor center because the National Park Service generally forbids displaying human remains. But she said the medical museum could display it at the Pry House, a field hospital site that the museum runs on the battlefield.

This imagery reminded me of a passage from Sam Watkins’ Co. Aytch, where he describes a very human reaction that led to many mangled and dead boys:

I saw another man try to stop one of those balls that was just rolling along on the ground. He put his foot out to stop the ball but the ball did not stop, but, instead, carried the man’s leg off with it. He no doubt today walks on a cork-leg, and is tax collector of the county in which he lives. I saw a thoughtless boy trying to catch one in his hands as it bounced along. He caught it, but the next moment his spirit had gone to meet its God.

via Md. Civil War medical museum aims to exhibit severed arm thought to be from Antietam battle – The Washington Post.

One of the many Civil War commemorations around Washington, DC, are a series of statues to the heroes of the war: Grant, Sherman, Farragut, McPherson and… Albert Pike?

Who the heck is Albert Pike? In all my years of study, I’ve never found a reason to remember that name.  A quick glance at his Wikipedia page shows us he was a pro-slavery former Know-Nothing who became a Confederate brigadier (not even a major) general, and whose wartime service was so spotty he resigned even before the war got started.

That takes care of the who, but doesn’t cover the why; Why would such a now-forgotten military figure receive such a huge honour?  Masonic influence must go a long way.  There’s no other reason I can cite for this otherwise forgettable Confederate occupying a pedestal in a city where pedestals are highly contested territory.

Albert Pike (December 29, 1809–April 2, 1891) was an attorney, Confederate officer, writer, and Freemason. Pike is the only Confederate military officer or figure to be honored with an outdoor statue in Washington, D.C.

via Albert Pike – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

I’m currently reading a John Brown biography, and am deep in the heart of the Bleeding Kansas chapters.  It’s interesting to note that, for all the violence and emotion of the pro- and anti-slavery factions, there were many moderate Kansas who tried desperately to keep these radicals in check.

This story, of an escaped slave torn from her life as a free woman, illustrates the delicacy with which the moderates of Ohio treated the situation of enforcing the hated Fugitive Slave Act.  They did their best to repress the irrepressible conflict that was erupting all around them.

The news of Bagby’s arrest raced across the country. It was as if the South had stabbed the North in the heart; Bagby was snatched from a bastion of freedom by the evil slave oligarchy. Northerners now knew that slaveowners would indeed reach into any town in any state and grab any African-American they chose. No one was safe from slavery’s odious grasp.

In the days before Bagby’s trial, the street outside her jail nearly erupted into violence several times as free blacks gathered. Others pleaded for calm. The United States in early 1861 was in a tenuous position, with some states having seceded and others mulling the possibility. Many hoped that there was still a way to reunite the country. But a violent rescue of Bagby would further inflame the South and make disunion inevitable.

Sara Lucy Bagby: Last African-American Forced Back Into Slavery Under The Fugitive Slave Act & A Harbinger Of The Civil War | usariseup.

For those who haven’t yet heard the tumultuous story of Lincoln’s corpse, here’s some macabre reading for you.  Possibly the inspiration for Weekend at Bernie’s? I’m not sure.

I’m curious as to the provenance of the illustration that accompanies the article: It was a well known fact that all but one glass negative of Lincoln’s body, bier and coffin were destroyed by Stanton, and I’ve heard nothing of heretofore unknown negatives being uncovered.  This photo looks remarkably authentic.  I’ve written in, but have no response yet from the author, so if anyone can enlighten me, please leave a comment!

Abraham Lincoln was one of the most celebrated and mysterious presidents in the in U.S. (maybe this is why he made such an excellent vampire hunter.) His assassination sent a nation into mourning, and was followed by a two week funeral tour by train car. But Lincoln’s body did not find rest at the end of this procession. Everyone from thieves to politicians tried to take control of the corpse — even decades after it was finally buried.

Here is the macabre tale of the journeys taken by Lincoln’s corpse over the decades before 1901, when at last it came to rest in a ten foot block made of cement and steel.

via The Adventures of Abraham Lincoln’s Corpse.

The Lincoln Museum in Springfield is deep in debt and feuding internally. A shame that this is happening during the sesquicentennial celebrations.  Here’s hoping they can get their act together and their debt paid off, and get on with being an informative and entertaining center of history.

Just seven years old, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum is on its third executive director. Attendance is down and money is tight.

The institution is not accredited, and American Association of Museums in 2010 found shortcomings ranging from an inadequate disaster preparedness plan to a governance structure with potentials for conflicts of interest. There is tension between the institution and its private fundraising foundation. Not even Lincoln’s iconic stovepipe hat is a given.

via A museum divided.

The National Park System has created a new Civil War portal, with a map tool that allows you to create a route for sesquicentennial holidaying.  It seems promising, but in my opinion needs some refinement.  Independent sites are available, but major and minor sites are given equal stature, so it’s difficult to zoom in on, say, Virginia, and gauge which of the hundreds of homes and museums are worth seeing.

The most impressive feature that Litterst shared during a lightning-fast demonstration was the site’s “Plan Your Visit” tool, which includes more than 1,700 Civil War sites around the country, including more than 100 national parks with lore from the War Between the States. In seconds, this interactive mapping gizmo enables user to build itineraries linking National Park Service spots with state and privately Civil War-themed historic sites and museums. The tool provides maps, driving distances, turn-by-turn directions, site descriptions, and links to more information about each place…

Once you’ve built your itinerary, you can print it, tweet it, post it to Facebook, or share it via a variety of other web and social-media sites.

via Cool Trip Planner is Part of NPS Civil War 150 Site – Past Is Prologue.