Welcome, everyone. Thanks so much for joining us today in, believe it or not, our 12th episode of the Clements Bookworm. I am Angela Oonk, Director of Development at the Clements Library. Today's meeting is being recorded to share later. So, you will receive an email with the recording and the resources mentioned during today's broadcast. Just want to give you a quick tutorial. Everybody's finding the Chat function and that's great. Continue to chime in. We very much enjoy the camaraderie of having that available. If you select "All Panelists and Attendees," that would be great so that everyone can see it. You'll see that the conversation goes by very quickly. Because of that, we ask you if you have questions for the panelists, please add those to the Q&A section. In there you can put your questions, you can check out what other questions people have submitted, and, if you click the little thumbs up, that upvotes the question and will send it to the top. Also, if you have comments, answers, additional questions, click the Comment and go ahead and add to that question as well. My colleagues Anne Bennington-Helber and Tracy Payovich will be helping out monitoring the Chat, answering your questions, and posting links. In addition, you may want to look at some of the settings on your screen. I can only control so much about what it is that you see, but you're welcome to use side-by-side mode, and that will put the slides beside the panelists. There's also the option to change between Speaker View and Gallery so that you can see just to the person who's speaking or see a little thumbnail of everyone. So, play around with those settings a little bit to make sure that you are seeing it in the way that you most like. This program is brought to you by the William L. Clements Library located on the campus of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The Clements Library enables the discovery, learning, and teaching of American history through the collection, conservation, digitization, and availability of primary sources on paper. For those of you who've been with us a while, you know that we conceived of this program as we were brainstorming some of the things that we like to do in person that the Clements Library. One of those things is tea time with the researchers every day at 10 AM. I know Jean has recently participated in tea time. Do you have any thoughts about what tea time at the Clements is like? Oh yeah, it was wonderful. I was lucky enough to be there with two other long-term fellows, Dave and Hugh. It was a really great chance for the three of us plus whomever else was there that day to chat with the staff, maybe ask a question about something we had seen. And then, I was there in the fall, so there were, frequently, donuts. That was a great addition. Yeah. The ten o'clock pick me up for sure, right? I'm going to be introducing our panelists more fully in a couple of moments. We'll be discussing experiences during the Civil War today. But before we get to our panelists, I do want to close the opening poll. So, if you haven't had a chance to participate yet, click on your answers very quickly. We were discussing a little bit beforehand what our favorite places to read are. We definitely have a nice selection on here. I'm going to go ahead and click end polling, share results. If you didn't get a chance to participate, go ahead and put your answer in the Chat function. It looks like "favorite chair" came out on top, which was the case among the panelists as well, but [ ]. couch, and bed follow closely behind. Who doesn't love to read on vacation? And so, thanks so much everybody for participating in that poll. All right, let's close that, and we'll move on to our first panelist of the day. I'm happy to welcome Sander Shapiro. Sander is a longtime Clements Library Associate and received his medical degree from the University of Michigan. He is Professor Emeritus of Medicine from the University of Wisconsin. Sander, what are you talking about today? I'm going to talk about something that sort of happened to me a long, long time ago. You'll see where I'm going in just a minute. I should say, as far as favorite places, one of my concerns when I was in Ann Arbor was finding favorite places to study. That's how I got interested in the Clements Library. Later on, I moved to New York City as a house officer and had little time for anything like this, except that one day I was walking up Third Avenue, walked into a used bookshop and was directed to the history section. In that section, I found a book entitled A Diary of George Templeton Strong, Vol. 3. Volume 3 involved the years 1860 to 1865, which made them very interesting to me because I was trying to learn something of the Civil War. And I bought it - it didn't cost much at a used bookstore - and proceeded to read the entries in that for each day in the year 100 years before the day I was reading. Angela, maybe we have a picture of the diary that we could put up? We do. There you go. This diary was started by Strong when he was 15 years old, and he continued entering into it for 40 years. So there were four volume in all eventually. They covered over 2000 pages. The part about the Civil War is probably the most famous and most fascinating. It prompted Ken Burns to use some of it during the making of his Civil War documentary. So, who was George Templeton Strong? Well, he was born on Franklin Street in Manhattan in 1820, born to a lawyer. He went to Columbia Prep School, graduated from Columbia College, then read for the law in his father's law firm. He eventually married and moved way up town to 21st Street. And those of you who know the numbering system in Manhattan would think of that as almost downtown now. And he lived on 21st Street for about 30 years. The man was, what he would consider, a gentleman. That meant he was born to the right people, he had sufficient funds to live in a certain manner, and he had a education befitting the title of gentleman. But he was more than that. He apparently became a very good lawyer, a very good organizer of activities, and must have been very well-liked because he was invited to be on a number of boards and councils and so forth. For instance, he became a member of the New York Club, a very prestigious thing. He was one of the originators of the Union League Club, which at that time was set up to support the Civil War. He was invited to start a law school associated with Columbia College and, in fact, set up the Columbia Law School with an association of a number of other people. He was interesting because he had all these associations and all this knowledge of things other than just the law. For instance, in his diary he mentions that he did microscopy sessions. Apparently the microscope was a fairly new instrument to most people in that time. He would have friends over to his house, and they would examined under a microscope worms and leaves and other things. He also was fairly widely read. Darwin's book, On the Origin of Species, came out in 1858. And in 1860, he mentions in the diary having read it. And while he was a vestryman at Trinity Church on Wall Street, he still was able in his mind to accept, at least partially, the thesis that Darwin was propounding. So, he was fairly well rounded. When he started his diary, he was only 15 years old, but by the time he was 30, he was quite an opinionated person and let these opinions show up, I presume, not in public but only in his diary. If he had laid out some of his thoughts to the public, I don't think he would have had the immense law practice that he did have. He was an amateur musician, and he became the president of the New York Philharmonic Association. He liked opera, and he liked to go to scientific lectures. So, he was quite a remarkable person, I think. Because of all these different interests, he had a wide range of friends and associates. For instance, he mentions in 1860 having General Winfield Scott to dinner and asking about what would happen if there were ever a war between states. Of course, later on that war came about. It's interesting in his diary to see his change of attitude about a lot of things including the people involved in the war. He didn't like the Irish very much, and Italians were no better. He found that people who worked with their hands were rather dull. All this comes out in the diary and, again, I presume not anywhere else. Well, when he began getting into the politics of the time, his opinions were equally strong. For instance, he thought it altogether proper that John Brown be hanged. And he was an anti-abolitionists in the 1850s. But when the war started, he changed a great deal. The first thing that made him change, I think, was seeing the way people in New York, even, related to the ex-slaves who had escaped and were in the city, not all of them very receptive to having them. He thought about who we would vote for in 1860 and thought he would probably vote for Douglass. But then, when the Democratic Convention sort of fell apart, you began to look at Lincoln as a possible candidate that he could vote; although, he says in the diary at one point, I don't see how being a rail splitter prepared anybody for being president of a country. He did though vote for Lincoln and gradually moved from an anti-abolitionists attitude towards being during the war an abolitionist, such that, he was very pleased at the 13th Amendment when it came out. He, during the war, early in the war, recognized that the hospitals set up around Washington DC for the injured were very well-equipped, excuse me, very poorly equipped, and needed a great deal of support. The army medical organization was apparently not very good at the time. And so, he and bunch of others formed a group called the US Sanitary Commission. This group became countrywide over the next four years. It was involved in stocking the hospitals with equipment, with medicines, with food. And he made many trips with the person he recognized and got to become the first head of it. That was Frederick Law Olmsted, who had to ask for permission to leave his work on Central Park in order to be the head of the Sanitary Commission. This just was just another example of his organizing ability. He also organized, at about the same time, the Law School of Columbia, allowing Columbia College to now claim themselves as a university because it was giving an advanced degree. During this four-year, five-year period many of his comments are just about every day activities. For instance, in July 13th of 1863, the Draft Riots began. He walked over to Fifth Avenue. I was shocked to find that they taken on a racial content and mentions with great abhorrence and disgust the fact that they burned down, what was called then, the Negro Orphan House, which was on Fifth Avenue. So, he was involved in the activities of the city, the activities of the country, and was a voluminous writer, and wrote very well of all this in the diary. He came to a really appreciate Lincoln and wrote upon Lincoln's death very sorrowfully and very favorably of Lincoln. The one thing that's a little bit curious, at least to me, is that, while he was a very good writer and in his diaries often wrote comments and criticisms of new books that had come out or other things of this sort, he had read the second inaugural and didn't think much of it. (He) thought it would go the way of Buchanan's inaugural and others. So in all, I just found this man absolutely fascinating and, while he certainly had prejudice and quirks, I think, someone who I could really admire. I would recommend all of the four volumes to you, but especially that one that covers 1860 to 1865. Thank you, Sander. It's not often that a book makes such an impression on us that we remember it for 50 years. I'm glad to hear more about it and, I mean, the the fact that he documents so much of both what is going on and what he's thinking is really interesting. All right, so I just want to remind people that you can put questions in the Q&A section, and we'll answer those at the end of the presentations. I'm happy now to introduce our second panelist of the day, Jean Franzino. Jean was our 2019 Norton Strange Townshend Fellow and a scholar of disability and health in 19th century US literature and culture. Dr. Franzino earned her PhD in English language and literature from the University of Virginia and has taught at Macalester College and Beloit College. She is a 2020-21 NEH Post-doctoral Fellow at Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library. And today, she is us from Prague. Welcome, Jean. Thank you, Angela. I'm going to share with you today some thoughts about how the Civil War shaped Americans' understandings of disability. I'll be bringing in some materials from the Clements and some other sources. So as we know, the Civil War produced just an unprecedented number of injured and ill bodies. Americans were particularly struck by the sight of so many veterans with amputations. There's a quote by doctor and poet, Oliver Wendell Holmes, in an 1863 Atlantic article that, I think, really captures this state of affairs well. Holmes writes, "It is not two years since the sight of a person who had lost one of his lower limbs was an infrequent occurrence. Now, alas, there are few among us who have not a cripple among our friends, if not in our own families." I've been looking at how Civil War popular culture bears the marks of a nation really attempting to come to terms with this new level of visible physical disability. During and in the early post-war years, a number of illustrations and poems and songs and narratives will take as their subject the soldier's empty sleeve. On the one hand, many of these sources celebrated the empty sleeve as I'm moving symbol of the veteran's bravery and sacrifice. In the 1866 engraving that you can see here, a Union soldier, who was missing his right arm, sits in what appears to be his home with the child on his lap. As historian, Megan Nelson, who has presented here on the Bookworm, has noted, "Putting this veteran in a domestic space with a child seems to affirm his virility and his position within the family." This image suggests that the amputee veteran can and should be reintegrated into community life with his masculine role intact. Conversely, however, the empty sleeve could serve as a sight of ridicule. A February 1865 cartoon in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper titled "Result of Appointing a Veteran as Postmaster," reacted to recent legislation that was establishing a veteran's preference for civil appointments. Here the postmaster is un-pictured except for his prosthetic hook. He's de-individualized and he's cast as a potential threat to the susceptible and unprotected female customer, calling into question his fitness for this government post. These two contrasting images are part of really a broader pattern of contradictions in the representation of Civil War injury. They suggest that Americans are really conflicted about what to make of disability at this historical juncture. Scholars have long studied the medical history of the Civil War. There's a really exciting body of recent work that's also considering the social impact of Civil War disability. By that, I mean how Americans understood, represented, and treated disability and how the organization of society affected disabled veterans' experience. And here I'd like to offer a recommendation, a recent book by historian Sarah Handley-Cousins, who's also dealing with these topics, and the book is called "Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North." You can see it here, and I think there should be a link appearing in the Chat bar. Okay, so the Clements Library has a range of sources that treat Civil War disability. For example, in a recent blogpost for the Clements I wrote about one such set of these materials. This is Civil War mendicant texts, or texts written by disabled soldiers for their economic support. I think we'll link to this blogpost as well. Today, however, I'm going to speak just for a few minutes about a separate collection at the Clements. And it's one that feels particularly relevant at the moment because it brings in the topic of race. This collection is the papers of Samuel Ferguson Jayne. Jayne studied medicine at Harvard until 1864, when he left school to volunteer as a relief agent with the US Sanitary Commission. That's the commission that Sander just mentioned in his remarks. Jayne, who was a white man, worked at the hospital for Black soldiers in City Point, Virginia. His letters are written to his fiancé and cousin, Charlotte. His writings provide insight into a white aid worker's views of both race and disability as he grapples with the hospital scenes around him. I think they can help us see, at this sort of individual level, some of the stereotypes that were circulating at the time. While cultural depictions of Civil War amputees, as we've seen, were very contradictory with regard to the white soldier, they were especially so with regard to African-Americans. All right, so in an August 4th, 1864, letter following the Battle of the Crater at Petersburg, Virginia, Jayne writes at length of the bravery of the Black troops. In one particularly telling moment, Jayne writes, "The severe wounds which 800 or 900 of them show, tell that they did not run like sheep. I have found many who fought hand-to-hand with the rebels as their wounds are those made by the butts of muskets or clubs." Though in saying that their wounds tell that they did not run like sheep. Jayne here is echoing, but he's refuting, a frequently circulated opinion among white Americans that Black soldiers would prove to be cowardly or disorganized in battle. Such views were echoing racist antebellum assertions of people of African descent as an inherently lesser developed race, so, the same sorts of arguments that were used to justify slavery. In suggesting that the Black soldiers' injuries prove their manhood, Jayne's comments prefigure an editorial cartoon that would appear in Harper's Weekly, the most widely read periodical of the era, the following year. This is an unattributed cartoon. It's called "A Man Knows a Man." It features a white and a Black veteran, each one missing his left leg, standing face-to-face and engaged in this sort of vigorous handshake. The quotation reads, "Give me your hand, comrade! We have each lost a LEG for a good cause; but, thank God, we never lost HEART." In this image, as an Jayne's comments, the Black veterans' battle injuries are called upon as proof of his manhood and his humanity. In other letters, Jayne sends to his fiancé sketches done by a friend whom he refers to as Roberts. One such sketch features a Black soldier with arm recently amputated. This was that earlier image if we can hop back to it. Okay, great. So the caption reads, "For this are we doctors?" I find this image somewhat ambiguous as it contains some of the physical features common to racial caricatures such as the wide eyes. However, overall, it appears to me to be an earnest image that takes seriously the role of carrying for wounded Black soldiers. In fact, in the July 12th letter, Jayne laments Union doctors' lack of care for Black troops and praises the Sanitary Commission's interventions. He writes, "We have had to almost fight the doctors to get them to treat the colored men decently and to find them proper attention. When we came here, most of the men were without beds. Now we have them upon, not only beds, but every man has also an iron bedstead entirely covered by mosquito netting." However, despite all these statements in an August 19th letter, Jayne falls back on the idea that formerly enslaved people make less good soldiers than whites. Charlotte had apparently asked him whether he could not get a contraband as a substitute if he were drafted. Contrabands were the military's name for formerly enslaved people who had escaped to Union lines and were claimed by the army. So Jayne replies, "In the first place in all modesty, they do not make as good soldiers as the whites. And at the present crisis of affairs, from all that I can learn from observation and report, one white man, even as insignificant as myself, is equal to two negroes for war purposes." At yet another moment, Jayne complains that so-called contrabands are difficult to care for in the hospital because they're so "childish." So here, Jayne seems to have forgotten his assertion from a mere two weeks earlier that black soldiers injuries proved their bravery and competence. In summary, Jayne's letters are rife with such contradictory sentiments. They reveal both the extent to which the Black soldiers' war injuries could be marshalled as proof of equal manhood as well as the commonplace racism that continued to plague medical encounters with Black troops. So the letters help us, in other words, to consider some of the complicated intersections of race and disability in the Civil War moment. Thank you so much, Jean. That was really thought-provoking, and I'm sure we'll have lots of questions for you. Reminder, everybody. If you do have questions, add those to the Q&A section. All right. I'm happy to introduce Jim Davis to you now. Jim is an avid lecture attendee and Professor Emeritus of History from Illinois College. Jim studied history and geography at Wayne State and earned his PhD from the University of Michigan and is a scholar in the American frontier and has a special interest in the Civil War. Jim, what are you sharing with us today? Angela, thank you so much and thanks to our fine fellow panelists for their insightful and fine presentations. Today, I'm going to address a memoir that was written. I would start off by simply stating that if history is a pack of tricks that the dead play on us, they play the especially well through memoirs. Memoirs are very slippery sources of evidence for anyone to work with. Memoirs often attack enemies, especially dead enemies. They often defend the memoirist, and they often puff up the person writing the memoir. They are flawed by imperfect memory and selective memory. And they're also flawed by the fact that you know how the event turns out. The memoir that I'm dealing with is a memoir written by Leander Stillwell, an 18-year-old soldier from Western Illinois, from Otterville. And he joins the 61st Illinois Volunteer Infantry in February of 1862. He is a person who wrote a memoir beginning in 1916. It was published in the year 1920. He avoids most of the problems associated with memoirs. His source for his memoir, sources, I should say, include many letters that he wrote home to his family, and his family kept those letters. He also kept a diary during much of the Civil War. He relies on that diary. He relies on primary sources from other places: contemporary sources and secondary sources. He also brings in the thoughts of people - like Sherman and Grant and Lincoln - to add to his memoir. He also walked the battlefields that he'd fought on. He walked some of them immediately after the battle, as was the case with Shiloh. Or he went back to many of them decades later. So he gained an understanding of what went on by doing that. He's very self-aware of his own limitations. He time and time again will say of a given battle, he will say, "Well, I saw only a small portion of it. And the portion I saw was covered by smoke and I didn't see much of that." So he's very aware of his limitations. He knows he's 18 years old, and he also knows that prior to entering the army, he had never traveled more than 50 miles from home. So, the army experience and the war experience are very great experiences in his life. He gives as a motive for his writing his son, one of his sons, Jeremiah, who asked him to write. I have found in reading perhaps 150 or 200 diaries that memoirist are often eager to indicate how they came about creating the memoir. It's often a relative, a son or daughter. It's often a comrade. Sometimes these former Union soldiers joined the GAR, the Grand Army of the Republic, and they gave papers at the post. Many times soldiers, veterans, will say, "I gave several papers at this post, my post, of the GAR and my fellow comrades there encouraged me to write a diary." So, some diaries came about that way. Others joined MOLLUS, US Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States, which was limited to officers and much the same thing happened there. Stillwell's motive for joining the army, I think, was shared by many others. Actually, there were several motives. First and foremost was his desire to save the country, save the Union. He was greatly bothered by the fact that the South had attacked at Fort Sumter and was waging war against the country. And so he joined in part to save the Union. Also, he knew, as many other young men knew at the time, that the war was going to be a summer frolic. It would be over in two or three months. You better get in into the war quickly before it's over to get your share of glory and honor and come home a hero. And so, he joins for that reason, the summer frolic reason. In addition, I think he does want to simply get out of Otterville and the neighborhood there in western Illinois. It's very remote. It's cut by ravines. And as I mentioned, he had never been more than 50 miles away from home. So it's a chance to get out and do something with other young men and travel and shoot things up and burned things down and have a grand time and be back in time by the end of summer to receive all kinds of honors as heroes. Also, he states a couple of times that the idea of staying at home did not appeal to him because he saw stay-at- homes as cowards. In one instance, he is interested in a young lady, has been interested in this girl since primary school, and he wants to marry her. Well, lo and behold, wouldn't you know it, a stay-at-home marries her instead. This crushes him, and he wrote in his memoir that that man was certainly a coward for staying home and for snatching away his girlfriend and marrying her. Stillwell served in what was called the Western Theater, the theatre between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. He also served in the Trans- Mississippi Theater. He served basically from northern Missouri all the way down to Vicksburg and from Little Rock, Arkansas, all the way over to central Tennessee. He marched a great deal. He, for the first time in his life, rode on steamboats. He was vastly impressed by the technology of steamboats. He took long rides on trains. Sometimes he was up on top of the box cars, as these trains went in a rickety way, down the tracks, and the box cars were swaying. It was exciting up there. It was especially exciting when bushwackers would fire from thickets and try to pick off the Union soldiers riding on the tops of boxcars. But he knew, as I think everyone knew at that time, that early in the war that bad things would not happen to you. They might happen to other people, but not to you. Well, that notion was quickly dispelled at Shiloh. And he, Stillwell, experiences the first comrade killed within a matter of two or three feet from him. Both are behind trees trying to not get shot and trying to get off some shots. And lo and behold, this comrade apparently looked around the tree to see what was there and took a shot in the head and died immediately. Stillwell is vastly impressed by that: war is no longer a frolic. Stillwell had to learn, as many, many soldiers did, all kinds of things to survive in the army. Little things like how did ditch a tent so that, when it rains, your tent won't get flooded. He learned how to ditch a tent. He also learned how to shoot differently. Back at home in Illinois, as was true of many, many young men, he enjoyed hunting, and evidently he was a good shot. He mentioned how he had to be a good shot because you ammunition, gunpowder and bullets, were so expensive that you couldn't waste a shot. Well, in his first battle, he is trying to get an aimed shot off. He wants to shoot a particular Confederate evidently. His lieutenant as five feet behind him, jumping up and down with excitement shouting, to Stillwell, "Shoot! Shoot!" And Stillwell doesn't want to. He doesn't want to waste ammunition. He quickly learns, no, you shoot. You don't shoot it at people necessarily rather you shoot at that line of a cloud of gunpowder smoke across the field. You shoot at that thing. You also learn to shoot low. Many, many Civil War soldiers knew, when they entered battle, that they were up against a green enemy regiment, an enemy regiment that had not been in battle before, because the enemy regiment would open fire on them. And what would happen? Twigs and branches and leaves would shower down on them. And when that happened, the Union soldiers looked at each other and were happy that they were up against a green unit. So, soldiers learn to shoot and Stillwell was among them. Stillwell also learned such things as how to stay healthy, how to keep clean, how to wash, how to cook properly. He does get sick and at one point nearly dies in Arkansas. He is treated with quinine. Evidently he has malaria and perhaps other things. He does survive. Many, many others, of course as we know, died during the Civil War from sickness. Stillwell, much like Strong, had some definite ideas about people. I think he found the Irish to be rather interesting and at times amusing. He came to like the Germans, came to respect the Germans. He quotes them with the Germanic accent, English accent, and their Germanic ways. He regards them as pretty good soldiers and good people. He evidently likes to be around Germans. He has mixed feelings about Blacks. He uses the n-word on more than one occasion. He has some sympathy toward Blacks and their plight in the South. He, as true of many, many other Northerners, saw slavery for the first time when they entered the South as part of the army. He also learned such things as the fact that officers early in the war sometimes address their enlisted men as "gentlemen", but very quickly that changed to "soldiers." Officers early in the war often encouraged soldiers to do a good job because of their state back home wanted them to. That faded by 1863 or 1964. Officers began to referred to the nation and not the state because the state associated with the Confederacy, the term "state." Also, Stillwell and others underwent a transition during the war of a political nature. Most of his regiment is really strongly Democratic in 1862, as was nearly all of downstate Illinois which Lincoln lost twice during the Civil War in both electrons, lost most of the counties in all of downstate Illinois. So, these are Democrats. And almost certainly they voted, those who could vote, voted for Douglass, and probably for McClellan. Some of them voted for McClellan. But late in the war, many of them become ardent Republicans. Even though many of these people have strong ties with the South, with places like Kentucky and Tennessee and Virginia and North Carolina, many of these Northerners, as they fight in the South, want to inflict on the South, what is called, a "hard war," meaning they will burn down mills. They will burn down everything of any value to the South by 1864. And this is a hard war. I think, this is rather impressionistic on my part, but I think that Western soldiers out in the Western Theater began to inflict on the South a hard war before the soldiers in the East and the Army of the Potomac and the army of the James and other Eastern armies. Stillwell learned other things. He learns that he should stay away from alcohol. He tries whiskey and it doesn't work. He doesn't take to it, and he sees a lot of other soldiers who do not handle alcohol well. The journey into the South brought Stillwell into contact with a lot of flora and fauna of all kinds of things. He sees Spanish moss. He's vastly impressed by the beauty of the South. He sees alligators. They shoot alligators for the fun of it. I know of some soldiers from Connecticut in Louisiana who went out and shot alligators and then barbecued them. Stillwell evidently didn't do that, but he sees all kinds of things in the South that are very interesting to him. He comes to realize early on in the war that war does consist of a lot of fog and friction. Things go wrong immediately. Plans break down with the first contact with the enemy or before that. And there is friction, meaning that things simply don't go as they should. In addition to this, Stillwell is very interested in the technology that he encounters, everything from weapons, to the steamboats, to the trains, to the bridges that he crosses, to tunnels that he goes through. And he's very interested in some of the monumental buildings that he sees in the South. All in all, Stillwell is very grateful for his army experience. Time and again, he writes that the army experience for him was the best school that he could have had. I think he probably had perhaps eight years of schooling, perhaps not that much. He sees the world; he gains confidence. One of the greatest things that happened to Stillwell happened just a matter of a couple of weeks after he entered the army. He was made corporal. Why he was made carpet, I don't know, but he must have displayed some talent that caused officers to help him to become corporal. And later, he writes in his memoirs that this honor was the greatest honor he had ever received in his life. Later on, he becomes a judge. He's elected in Kansas to a judgeship For 24 years he serves in the Kansas legislature and receives all kinds of honors, but none is so great as being chosen corporal. It reminds me of Abraham Lincoln's comment pretty late in his life that his greatest honor was being elected captain of the Illinois Militia as they went off to try to find Blackhawk's band in the so-called Black Hawk War. Lincoln was greatly honored by that, and Stillwell is greatly honored by the fact that he was made corporal. I should add, too, that he takes great pride in serving in the Western armies under Grant and under Sherman. The Western soldiers regarded themselves as better soldiers than Eastern soldiers. They claimed to have marched farther and faster than Eastern soldiers. They claimed to have deserted less frequently. There was less copperhead sentiment in Western soldiers according to Stillwell. I'm not sure that's the case. But, Stillwell looked upon the East with a great deal of suspicion and downright, I think, disgust at times. Sander, you mentioned New York and the politics there. I don't know if Stillwell knew of Mayor Fernando Wood, but he would have regarded Mayor Fernando Wood with great disdain because Wood wanted to have New York City secede from the state of New York and join in the South. Stillwell would have been appalled by those actions and those thoughts. Stillwell's pride in Western armies, I think, is very widely shared among Western veterans. They never knew defeat even at Chickamauga which was a kind of a defeat, a huge battle. They never knew that kind of defeat that Eastern armies suffered, and they make a great deal of that. So all in all, Stillwell's experiences in the war changed him, changed a lot of men from the 61st Illinois Volunteers. And all in all, it prepared them for life later on. I should add, too, that in 1864 he and many others veteranized, meaning they rejoined the army. They'd served their years. They could have not rejoined; he did. The veteran volunteers, the so-called VV's, really, I think, were the people who probably saved the Union. Perhaps there were a 140,000 of them. that cadre of very experienced soldiers did a great deal to win the war by 1865. Thank you very much. Wow, these are interesting perspectives, and it's great to hear more about them. Just to reminder, everybody, if you have questions, put them in the Q&A section. I am going to do just a couple of housekeeping announcements and then we'll move on to the question and answer time. So let's see, we have coming up for our upcoming Bookworms in June, we'll have a reader panel next week on the Revolutionary War with Art Acton and Tom Wagner. And then on the 26th Jayne Ptolemy will lead a conversation with our fellow Scott Heerman. On July 3rd, we'll take a holiday so there'll be no Bookworm that day. Returning on July 10th with "The Social Life of Maps" with Martin Bruckner and Mary Pedley. As a reminder, once you are registered, you don't have to re-register. You'll receive a weekly reminder about the Bookworm. You can choose to join us live, which of course we love. If not, you'll still receive the e-mail after the episode with the recording and the resources. And let's see. You can also view previous recordings if you miss them on our website. We can provide a link for that as well. As you know, many of you know, we started this Bookworm as a way to get together during the stay-at-home order in Michigan. Your participation and enthusiasm in the Bookworm, quite frankly, has overwhelmed us. We're really so happy to have such a wonderful group of people joining us every week and for our volunteers who prepare their remarks and come on and share with us. Thank you, everybody, for taking that time. If you already support the Clements financially, which I know many of you do, thank you so much for that vote of confidence in our mission. If you would like to make a gift, we'll provide a link in the Chat box. As you know during this time, as we rethink how we study and how we interact with each other, there is great need, of course, for additional funds for digitization and online learning. So, your support in those efforts is really appreciated. In addition, we also know that some of you indicated an interest in sponsoring Bookworm episodes. Now that we have a schedule for the summer, we're ready to have you choose an episode. I'll be reaching out, or if you're interested, you're welcome to respond one of my emails or contact me at angmo@umich.edu. All right. Are we ready for some Q&A? Let's see what we have. Doug is asking, "Have Strong's diaries been transcribed and printed?" The diaries were kept by the family for the first 50 years after his death. Strong died in 1875, but later on they became known to a few people, especially one of the law partners in the continuing firm. Just as an aside, the law firm that Strong joined and that his father founded continues to this very day. One in the law partners mentioned that there was this diary and that the family might be seduced into allowing it out. He mentioned it to the president of Columbia College, Columbia University at that time. Because of Strong's association, he was urged to bring it out and show it to people. The president of the university at that time name is, I'm sorry, I can't remember. But in any case, he went to a member of the History Department there, Allan Nevins, who was a prodigious historian, and showed it to him. Nevins with another man named Thomas undertook to be editors of this book, four volume book, that Macmillan then put out in 1952. All right, great. Thank you. So as much fun as it is to wade through the handwriting, not necessary. Tom is asking, "Many Civil War units were state and local militia under control of state officials. Did this create a problem for central commanders?" The regiments that were raised in the states were raised by the states. That's true. They were raised under the auspices of the governor and other officials of the state. Once they were formed however, they were, in a sense, federalized. They were made part of the of the Federal army. They are sometimes called Federal troops for that reason. By the eve of the Civil War, 1860, many states, I would say, most states, especially in the North, had militias that were pretty marginal. They often did not have good weapons. They trained infrequently. And Muster Day for them in the summer was often a time to drink a great deal and fight with neighboring companies and have fistfights and see who who could beat whom on Muster Day. So the militias were really in pretty sad shape on the eve of the Civil War. So, when soldiers joined, they formed regiments. The formation of the regiments is a very interesting way. It reflected American democracy at this time and the idea that ordinary soldiers, ordinary people, should be able to choose a lot, including many of the junior officers. And so, these regiments are formed by the states, then they're turned over to the Federal government. Thank you. Tom is also asking, "In addition to the Black soldiers, did different ethnic nationalities fight together as separate units?" The Irish did. There were German regiments. There were Scottish regiments. There was a fairly large number of regiments that were formed around ethnic groups. Yes. just being clear, "Did Mr. Strong or Mr. Stillwell have any respect for their opponents' leaders even though their points of view were so different?" Well, for Strong he had a very caustic wit. And as far as he was concerned, Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, Braxton Bragg, all of these people were traitors, simple out and out traitors. Although at the end of the war after Lincoln's death and Johnson's lack of or limited legal attack upon these people. he came to accept this as perhaps the best way to get the South back into the Union and accept it as part of the Union. I think Stillwell had some mixed feelings. His father was born in North Carolina in Cherokee Indian country, grew up there. He has sentiment, ties to the South. He recognizes that as many soldiers from the lower North did. On the other hand, he is fiercely patriotic and is very determined to help save the Union. I don't know that he uses the word traitor in describing any Southerner, but he has kind of a disdainful view of some of them. On the other hand, he does respect the Southern soldier who fights against him. He has deep respect for ordinary Southern soldiers. Thank you. Thanks so much. Doug is asking if Jean could say a bit more about the contents of the book, Righting the Injured Body. Yeah, sure. Thank you. That was a blog post I wrote based on my research at the Clements. One thing I looked at was the so-called "mendicant texts" - that's a nicer word than begging, right? - so texts produced by disabled Civil War soldiers for their economic support. The Clements houses one, for example, by a New Jersey veteran who has internal injuries, another by a Maine veteran who becomes blind from his injuries, and so on. I found these just really interesting because, on the one hand, these soldiers are using the medium of writing to try to change their audience's perceptions a bit about what it means to have a disability in this post-war moment. So, those nice images of the empty sleeve as a sign of valor and sacrifice don't tell you anything about how that disabled soldier is going to eat, right? Many of them will point out their pension payments aren't sufficient. It's really difficult to reintegrate economically into the post-war society. But also, they're still trying to gain the kind of correct response from their readers, so they can't go too far in their criticism. Many are also quite patriotic even if they've just launched a critique of the US. You can tell that sometimes they're being a little bit safe in how they frame things. I just find it a really fascinating genre of disability life writing that shows, I think, both the possibilities but also the constraints of writing for sharing that disabled experience. Thank you. Tom is asking, "Do you think residents of Eastern cities were less supportive of the Civil War than those who lived in the countryside?" I really don't know, but I will say that there was in 1864 real concern that New York might go Democratic in the election. Seymour, the governor, was a Democrat at that time. So, I think there was certainly in the city, as well as out state, a lot of Democratic feeling. As to whether it was more than the feelings in the countryside, I simply don't know. I think certainly the perception was that the average Easterner was not as committed to the cause of the Union as a Western soldiers. Abraham Lincoln lost New York both times, 1860 and 1864, and many Western soldiers quote statistics at the time, and then later on, concerning desertion and concerning crimes committed by soldiers. They rather gleefully point out that these high rates of desertion and high rates of crimes were committed by Eastern soldiers. I gave a paper at the Organization of American Historians over a year ago, and in that paper I think I documented some of these harsh sentiments that Western soldiers had of the East. They do support them by some statistics concerning desertions and other indications of lack of support for the war. Thank you. Is that paper available to the public? I don't know. I didn't make it available, but I suppose I could. I could conjure it up, I'm sure, and send it out as I presented it. And it's not a finished paper, but I couldn't make it available, I think. Yes. I just wondered. It sounds interesting. It's something that certainly came up today. "Were better and more prosthetics the result of the many amputees during the war?" Yeah, the war definitely spurred an increase in artificial limb production, in part, because for the first time the US government said that every soldier who lost a limb in the service would be entitled to an artificial limb. So now it becomes lucrative for manufacturers. There were certainly improvements from the older, more standard model of a peg leg. So you now have an ankle with lateral motion meant to mimic what your ankle does when you walk. The limb manuals by manufacturers really tout this is an incredible advance. Many soldiers were not happy with the artificial limbs still. In one set of papers I've looked at at the College of Physicians in Philadelphia, there's a survey of artificial limb users among disabled Civil War veterans. And they ask, "Oh, what was your favorite artificial limb that you have tried?" And this veteran says, my old bone and flesh leg. He wasn't happy with any of them. There were certainly improvements, but there seems to be sort of a gap in the representation of those improvements and what people really felt on the ground. Interesting. Sander, do you have, as a doctor, when you read about these injuries and the amputees, do you have a different perspective on that when you read those things? Not really because of my special area medical interest. I did ask Jean and I'll ask her to comment again about it. So many of these amputations were done by holding a man down, giving them some liquor, and then rapidly removing the limb. I wondered and have wondered a lot why ether, which had been discovered in 1846, and chloroform, which the British had developed in the 1850s, wasn't more readily available at the front. You have asked me this, and I still don't have a great answer for you. My understanding is that those anesthetics were to some degree available, that the common image of a soldier just biting on a bullet isn't entirely accurate, that they were sometimes using anesthetics available to them. I'm not sure about particular numbers, or maybe why it wasn't more frequently used. If anyone has a thought they want to post in the Chat, that would be welcome. Yeah. It's interesting to wonder if there's something about those images of people, like you said, biting on bullets and being strong and brave, if it's just become part of our collective memory, even if it's not true. And one thing people do talk about is the mini ball, this new particular kind of bullet, that would shatter your flesh and your bone upon impact. That is partly why it became so necessary to just amputate rather than trying to conserve the limb as they might have in a previous moment or in another setting. The new kind of killing technologies led to some new medical urgencies. Thank you. Tom is wondering, "Were people who died of injuries of disease in the Civil War viewed differently than those who were killed directly?" Yeah. I think that, in all of these representations, a person either wounded, which is what I focus more on, or killed in battle makes for an easier symbol to rally around than the many people who were facing bodies wasted by disease. The Sarah Handley-Cousins book that I referenced deals a lot with this question as well. The amputee was the most visible symbol of Civil War injury. In fact, many more soldiers were ill or died of disease, but that didn't have quite the same cultural cache. So, there're some hierarchies within this category of the Civil War dead or the Civil War disabled. Thank you. Do we know, Jean, Cathy's asking, "Did the Freedmen's Bureau provide assistance to Black disabled veterans?" That's an excellent question that I do not know the answer to. There's some interesting work done on Black veterans and the extra difficulties they faced in their pension claims just due to racist assumptions of pension examiners. Pension examiners, for example, were tasked with determining that the disabled veterans injuries weren't exacerbated, I love this quote, "by irregular or vicious habits," but the government doesn't define this anywhere. So, that phrase is subject to the interpretation of the examining physician. And so, there's been some good work done on how racist assumptions might come into play and make things more difficult for Black disabled veterans. That's a great question and I would have to look that up, as well, about whether the Freedmen's Bureau provided assistance for those kinds of things. Angela? Yes. I'm struck, too, by the number of soldiers who died from accidents during the war. Even Stillwell records how a soldier near him fired his musket and Stillwell had powder burns on his face from the firing of the musket. It was so close. He was, of course, bothered by that. I'm also impressed by what appears to be a large number of soldiers, at least from the Midwest, who drown. They fall into a stream, and they can't swim. They fall off a boat, and they sink, and they're never seen again. On one occasion, according to Stillwell, Governor Yates, Richard Yates of Illinois, came down to be with the Illinois soldiers, and the governor of Wisconsin came down to be with a Wisconsin regiment to just kind of encourage them. Lo and behold, the governor of Wisconsin, as he's stepping from one boat to another, missteps and falls into the river and dies, or he's drowned, They find him later, and they identify him. But, here's a governor who evidently can't swim. A lot of possible pitfalls. Oh, yes. And soldiers, train wrecks killed many; friendly fire, especially in the early months of the war. Units would fire on their own fellow units and cause casualties that way. Soldiers learned during the war to try to avoid being targets. Officers, for example, often removed their apelets from their shoulders, and they got rid of their swords. A man waving a sword around on a battlefield becomes a target. Some officers would not ride horses near battlefields, again, because sharpshooters would try to pick off the people on horseback because they were officers. You're reminding me, I'll just say briefly, another one of these mendicant texts that I saw. housed at that the American Antiquarian Society. It's by a David Tanner. He says he was injured at Antietam. When I've looked at his pension file, he was kicked by a horse in an accident in camp and ended up having to have his leg amputated. But he clearly had a sense that that's not going to make the good story that people want to hear. So yeah, you know, battle is a very dangerous place that could give you all sorts of injuries, but I think only particular kinds are valued. Thank you. Before we finish up, I know, we had such a good discussion when we first met. Do any of you want to ask each other questions? I'd like to prompt Jean for a minute. You have talked about how the amputee behaved in subsequent life to maintain themselves. Jean, can you tell the story of Dan Sickles? You know, I don't know so much about Dan Sickles because he's a more famous person, and I've been looking at these more anonymous guys writing their stories. So, I don't know, maybe I'll pass that back to you, Sander. Jim, you know it. I know some of it, Sander. I don't know it in great detail, but he's severely wounded twice. He loses a leg, I believe, at Gettysburg? Yeah. An arm or part of an arm later on. He, as many wounded soldiers did, he took all kinds of pain killers, and his thinking was probably clouded by that fact. If I'm not mistaken, before the war he had the dubious distinction of being the first person acquitted of murder, was it, by reason of insanity? Am I correct in that, Sander? You are. That's a fascinating story in and of itself. Yes, he was an older first-married, and his wife took up with Francis Scott Key's son in Washington. Francis Scott Key's son was the Federal Attorney there. He shot and killed Key, And his, and it was called a "dream team" of lawyers at the time. got him off on temporary insanity. Sickles very nearly loses the Battle of Gettysburg on the second day by pushing his corps too far out into the peach field and wheat field. The Union cause could've been ended at that point had the Confederates won the to Battle of Gettysburg. Sander, I wanted to ask you about Strong. You mentioned his dislike of Irish and others. In the mid-1850s did he become a part of the so-called Know-Nothing Movement, the American Party in 1856? Did he flirt with that element of American society: anti-Irish, anti-Catholic? No, I think he was a Whig, pretty much in the establishment [ ]. But getting back to Sickles, let me just mention what I was trying to prompt you on. He had the foresight to take his leg off the battlefield and pickle it. And then, he would go around the country after the war giving talks on the battle and the peach orchard and demonstrating his loss of a limb by holding up this pickled leg. I think that some Clements photographs of reunions included Sickles, if a staff person could find that for you. Jean, about 45 or 50 years ago I was on the fourth floor of the National Archives, and Michael [ ] at that point headed the part of the archives that dealt with a Civil War medicine and the photographs of the horribly wounded soldiers. I was greatly impressed by these photographs that showed these men who survived getting hit in horrible ways. And these photographs would show them, for example, with out any lower jaw or with other parts missing. Do you know if those photographs have been compiled and published and made available to the public? So, you're referring to the Army Medical Museum photographs. What is now called the National Museum of Health and Medicine houses those. I have seen a Flickr feed that shows a lot of those photographs. If you google "National Museum of Health and Medicine" and probably "disabled Civil War soldiers", you should be able to find a lot of those. Yeah, they are very striking. Thank you. So William Marvel says that the bones of Sickles's leg are supposedly still in the hands of the Smithsonian. Yeah, it's fascinating that he thought to preserve his leg, and then it's become a thing. That may well be. I met Bill Marvel in the Clements, I think, in the late '80s or early '90s. He was in town doing some prolonged research on one of his books. We had a good conversation, I think, during the ten o'clock time and then at other times, I was so impressed when I researched in the Clements over the years. It may have been '05 or '10. Okay, much later. But in any case, I was very impressed by the mandatory ten o'clock break where people would gather and discuss their works. I met so many people that way. The only other library that I know who has that wonderful custom is the Huntington out in California. I remember researching in the Huntington and, all at once, the time came up and you had to go out and sit on the patio, the delightful patio, and talk with fellow historians about what we were doing. And I love that. I met Jacobs, I forget his first name, Wilbur Jacobs?, anyway, a western historian and historian of the frontier, and so we exchanged thoughts at that point. Thanks for mentioning that. I love those connections. Oh, yeah. Bill is saying they let you keep working there now, which is true at the Clements too. We don't make you leave. It's the treats. Exactly. We bribe you with treats. Thank you, everybody. Thanks so much. Thanks all of the attendees. It's been wonderful to have you. Thanks for your good questions and comments. And thanks, Jean and Sander and Jim. It's been so great. Thanks for the invitation. Yes. Thank you very much. Thank you all. And I love that, in this virtual format, we can bring people together from all over. You all are good example of that. So thanks, everybody. Have a great weekend, and hopefully you'll join us again next week. Bye, everybody. Bye.
2020 June 12, Bookworm #12 – Civil War Experiences
From kmtant May 26th, 2021
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In this episode of the Bookworm, panelists discuss books and primary resources supporting the study of soldiers’ experiences during the American Civil War. Books and resources discussed in the program are listed at: https://conta.cc/3hgiUiW.
The Clements Bookworm is a webinar series in which panelists and featured guests discuss history topics. Inspired by the traditional Clements Library researcher tea time, we invite you to pull up a chair at our [virtual] table.
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