Reflections

What did it all mean?  After countless cannons, insect bites, hush puppies and miles, we reached the road home.  We spent a month immersed in American history and culture, from Pre-Columbian to late-Obama.  We met memorable people: the Texas Highway Patrol Officer, the only liberal in Texas, the cake angel, several state park employees.  They were all very friendly and helpful and were fascinated by Jeremy's English accent.

The Civil War was a watershed event in American History.  Someone profoundly observed that the war made us a nation.  It changed the phrase "the United States are . . ." to "the United States is . . .".  We saw the problems of the Revolutionary war and 13 colonies each working for it's own purposes.  We read about the fundamental issue between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson: should the U.S. have a strong central government or be a loose confederation of semi-autonomous states? And other narratives such as the Lost Cause, Emancipation and Reconstruction and even WW II and Vietnam crept in and American History became a patchwork quilt.

We are two aging baby-boomer pacifists that love history. War is human history and I don't see a contradiction.  History is Rembrandt as well as William T. Sherman.

Casualities in the Civil War totaled 620,000.  About 400,000 deaths were due to disease.  Bad water and poor sanitation were largely responsible.

Technology had advanced far ahead of battlefield tactics.  The rifled musket and cannon were far more accurate than smoothbore weapons.  But soldiers were still ordered to make shoulder to shoulder frontal charges against established positions.

Trench warfare was something new in the Civil War and would be used again in WW I almost 50 years later.

Finally, I want to remember my Great-grandfather Peter Jordahl.  Peter grew up in Lake Park, Minnesota and according to family legend, ran away from home to join the army.  I don't know any dates but he did join the 10th Minnesota Volunteer Infantry Regiment.  He apparently was a musician, a drummer-boy.  The 10th Minnesota first saw action in Dakota Territory and then headed south and were involved in the battles in Tupelo, Mississippi, Nashville, Tennessee and Mobile, Alabama.  The image below is Peter in uniform.

Civil War Chronology, briefly

The only practical way to tour Civil War sites is geograpically, not in order of the battles.  Here is a very brief summary of the sites that we visited in chronological order.

1861:  Ft. Sumter, April 12
            1st Manassas, July 12

1862:  Shiloh, April 6-7
            2nd Manassas, August 29-30
            Antietam, September 17

1863:  Vicksburg, May 18-July 3
            Gettysburg, July 1-3
            Chickamauga, September 19-20
            Chattanooga, November 23-25

1864:  Petersburg, siege begins June 9

1865:  Petersburg siege ends April 2
           Appomattox, April 8-9
           Ford's Theater, Wash. D.C., Lincoln shot, April 14

Shiloh/Corinth

Shiloh is our last visit.  The battle took place over two days, April 6-7, 1862.  It also, like Chickamauga, is the prelude to another battle, in this case Corinth, Mississippi. Both were Union victories and were part of the amazing string of victories put together by General U.S. Grant.  President Lincoln was very much paying attention to Grant's success because he desperately needed a general in Virginia that would fight. Grant was setting the stage for Vicksburg by defeating every Confederate force in western Tennessee.

Shiloh is another very chaotic battle that surged back and forth over the course of two days.  On the 6th, Grant's army was surprised by the rebel attack and pushed to the north end of the battlefield.  Day one was clearly a Confederate victory.  Day two Grant attacked early and surprised the Confederates and pushed them far to the south and they then withdrew to Corinth and conceded the battle.   The Battle of Corinth would come in October, 1862. The carnage was horrible: 23,476 casualities. Much worse than Manassas/Bull Run.

The battle took it's name from the Shiloh Methodist Church.  Shiloh, ironically, a place mentioned in the Bible, means "place of peace".

The Bloody Pond, named for obvious reasons.

A real surprise!  In the middle of Shiloh Battlefield is Shiloh Indian Mounds National Historic Landmark.  There are some dozen Cahokia mounds dating from about 1300 AD.  The mounds were ceremonial and atop each one sat a small temple.

The Tennessee River from one of the Cahokia mounds.

Chickamauga/Chattanooga

In the last three weeks we have seen the major battlefields of the Civil War.  Some battles are easier to understand because the armies entrench or they fight from more or less stable lines.  Vicksburg and Gettysburg would be two examples.  Chickamauga was a battle that is harder to get a feel for because it surged back and forth without many stable landmarks.

I titled this post Chickamauga/Chattanooga because they were really the same battle but two months apart, in September and November, 1863.  Chickamauga was a decisive Confederate victory but did not force the Union to cede control of the river and rail center of Chattanooga.  However, Union General Rosecrans made such a mess of things that he was relieved and General Grant put in charge of the army outside of Chattanooga.  He re-established supply lines, got his men fed and rested and began planning for the final battle.

The Confedrates held Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain and those two were Grant's objective.  Union forces took both areas and so took Tennessee and the western Confederacy out of the war. More importantly, General Sherman now had a base to supply his drive to Atlanta and eventually, to Savannah.

A great view point on Lookout Mountain but a poor artillery position - fire the cannon and it would roll off the rocks and toward the camera.

Chattanooga from Lookout Mt.

A very nice KOA campground all decorated for Halloween.  The top picture must be the ghost of a rebel soldier looking for some M&Ms.

Appomattox

I was really looking forward to this stop but I didn't really know what to expect.  We weren't done with battle sites but here we were at the end, where the surrender took place.  Appomattox turned out to be a place of incredible peace and reverence.  There are two villages: the less famous one is Appomattox Crossing.  Appomattox Courthouse is the site of Lee and Grant's last battle and Lee's difficult decision to surrender.  The village has been beautifully restored to it's 1865 appearance.  We had probably our best Park Service interpretive tour here from a volunteer.  He slowly and deliberately laid out the last five days of the war.  We sat on the porch of the Clover Hill Tavern and I could "see" General Grant arriving straight from the battlefield, muddy and slightly disheveled.  General Lee had arrived earlier on his horse Traveler in a brand new dress uniform, dignified in defeat.  The end arrived on April 9, four years almost to the day after the first cannon shot at Ft. Sumter.

The McLean House where the surrender took place.  In 1862, Wilmer McLean had owned a house near the Virginia village of Manassas.  His house was in the middle of the first Battle of Manassas.  He packed up his family and belongings and moved to a place which he thought was as far from the war as possible.  On April 8, 1865, he volunteered his parlor to be used for the meeting between Grant and Lee.

 Wilmer McLean's parlor with the actual furniture from the surrender.  Lee sat at the nearer marble topped table and Grant at the smaller table.  Some Unionists wanted the South to be punished but Lincoln had given Grant clear orders that the South was to be given generous terms in order to speed the reconciliation and healing.

The Appomattox Courthouse.  This is now the museum and visitor center.

We drove a portion of Skyline Drive in Shenendoah National Park.  Below us is the Shenendoah Valley and river.

Harper's Ferry

Harper's Ferry is most famous for the John Brown raid on the Federal Armory in 1859.  John Brown was a fervent abolitionist starting in the days of the division of Kansas and Nebraska into a slave and free state.  His aim in Harper's Ferry was to capture the armory, starting an uprising of slaves throughout the south.  His plan failed, he was arrested and sentenced to death.  This all happened in Virginia, in the part of the state that would soon become West Virginia.  Strangely, until his execution, he was allowed free access to the press and he used that forum to preach his abolitionist message.  His raid, like the Nate Turner Rebellion in 1834, absolutely terrified the people of the south.

The old gun factories are gone but what is left is a beautifully restored 1850's village at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers.

The building in the back is called John Brown's Fort.  It's where he and his co-conspirators took refuge until they were arrested.  It has been moved several times. The marker in the foreground is the original location but about 20 feet higher due to the railroad grade.

  Harper's Ferry

Our wonderful hosts for three nights of baseball, great food and stimulating conversation.  They live near Shepherdstown, West Virginia.  John is a film maker for the National Park Service and Monica is a fourth grade teacher in Shepherdstown.  I met them in 1988 at a training program in South Carolina when we were all on our way to various Peace Corps assignments.  I went to Belize and they went to Honduras.

The Potomac River from the back of John and Monica's property
 

Gettysburg

I'm only four days behind on this blog but I will catch up.  We have had very dodgy or non-existent WiFi, often open networks with no security and small bandwidth.  We also are often lost and looking for campgrounds and battlefields so we have less time to write.

The Battle of Gettysburg was Lee's second invasion of the north, this time as far as south central Pennsylvania.  The battle happened over the first three days of July, 1863.  Historians now agree that Gettysburg was not the turning point of the war but it was important because it was a serious defeat for the Confederacy and one of the few mistakes that Robert E. Lee made in the war.

Lee's first mistake was probably that he fought there at all.  Conferderate General Longstreet told Lee he thought that that was a poor choice for a battle.  The second mistake was that he let the Army of the Potomac led by General Meade choose the ground for mthe battle.  Naturally, Union forces positioned themselves on the hills and ridges.  His last and greatest mistake was Pickett's Charge.

This was the site of Pickett's Charge on July 3, 1863.  Union regiments were behind the rocks in the foreground.  Confedrate General Pickett was ordered to begin his advance from the tree line in the distance, Seminary Ridge.  Lee thought there was a weak spot in the Union line here but Meade had for once out-smarted Lee and had reinforced the his line.  Pickett's men marched into withering cannon and musket fire and his regiments were destroyed.  It was one of the most senseless actions in the entire war.

The Devil's Den on Little Roundtop.  This the far south end of the nearly four mile long Union front.

The monument to the First Minnesota Volunteer Regiment.  At a critical moment on July 2, 1863, they were ordered to rush to fill a gap in the line.  They suffered almost 80% casualities but gave their commanders precious time to bring in reinforcements. I remeber seeing aphoto of this statue in my 6th grade history.  At the end of the third day of Gettyburg, killed, wounded and missing for the Union and Confederacy totaled 52,000.