Hey everyone, I am terribly sorry for not posting for the last couple of weeks, but I have been quite busy with other things, and also had my mother visiting me in North Dakota. I have also been back home in Illinois since July 1, but my parent’s internet is ancient dial-up, and has been acting up, which has made posting quite difficult. I am excited about the coming weeks, however, as I will be completing several projects that have occupied much of my time. I will also be completing a few book reviews, so there should be some new and interesting content coming up. Fellow writer Billy Whyte has also been busy, serving as assistant editor for an ABC-Clio encyclopedia dealing with Civil War naval topics (good luck with it, Billy). In any event, I am having an enjoyable time being home and my dad and I are going to the All-Star Fan Fest in St. Louis on Monday (tickets to Home Run Derby and the All-Star Game are a bit out of my price range). I will be back in North Dakota next Friday night, so I should have something a few days after that. Until then, thanks for your support and understanding, have a great weekend, and I hope you all watch the All-Star Game on Tuesday (Go NL!).

Nanzig, Thomas P., Ed. The Badax Tigers:  From Shiloh to the Surrender with the 18th Wisconsin Volunteers. New York:  Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002. ISBN:  0-7425-6019-8  384 pp. $22.95

This book is an insightful look into a company within a Wisconsin Infantry regiment, from its origins, to the end of the war. Editor Thomas Nanzig provided wonderful research into Company C, 18th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry (known as the Badax Tigers), basing it around primary sources from letters and newspaper accounts on the regiment that bring the life of the common soldiers to the forefront.

The book begins by discussing the beginnings of the Tigers in camp of instruction in Milwaukee. This is especially of interest to myself, as my thesis dealt with the subject in Illinois. I even used it in a draft chapter of the thesis that was not included in the final version. It then chronciles the company’s participation in several major engagements in the Western Theater of the war, including Corinth, Vicksburg, and Atlanta, including the end of the war.

The book centers around the letters of Private Thomas Jefferson Davis to his wife throughout the war and is supplemented by newspaper articles and reports on the regiment as well as letters written by other soldiers in the company intended for publication. Nanzig does an excellent job of combining these rich sources into a coherent story of one Federal unit during the war. This book reads like many other histories, but has the benefit of narrower focus, where the individual soldiers are able to come alive more, as they are examined against the company of roughly one hundred instead of the regiment of one thousand.

There are a couple other great things about this book in addition to the rich source material. Nanzig provided readers good analysis of the material. Further, he included several sections after the bibliography, including statistics for the regiment and Company C, an organizational chart of the 18th Wisconsin, and a roster for Company C. These provide important information for better understanding of the source material in the text.

In addition, Nanzig relies on good sources outside of the soldiers’ materials. These include works by Allan Nevins, James McPherson, as well as early works by Stephen Ambrose and the reports of the Wisconsin adjutant general during the war, which are vital to studying soldiers. These materials provide a strong scholarly background for this work.

Overall, this is an insightful work into a Wisconsin infantry unit and provides a wonderful look into the lives of common Union soldiers. It is easy to read and well-edited. Scholars and general audiences alike will find value in this work. Scholars should examine this for their own research into Civil War soldiers and should consider using this in classes on the war, as students will find it accessible and compelling. General readers will enjoy an intimate connection to the boys in blue, as they (the soldiers) write to loved ones back home, and reporters tell the story of the Badax Tigers. The Badax Tigers should be on the shelf of every library that includes Civil War material.

I learned today from one of my professors that David Herbert Donald, one of the premiere scholars of the Civil War and Lincoln passed away on May 17 at 88 (I later found the date of death via Google). One of his better known works was his 1995 biography of Abraham Lincoln entitled Lincoln. I had the distinct privilege of meeting Dr. Donald several years ago when I was attending Illinois College. We honored him with an honorary degree at convocation and he was at a reception at the college president’s home, where I met him. He struck me as a gentle and kind man, passionate about his subject and even took time to sign a copy of Lincoln that I had purchased for my dad as an anniversary gift, which will one day become a treasured part of my library. He was a truly gifted scholar and will be greatly missed, but I am sure that he is having quite the conversation with Abe Lincoln now.

Today was Memorial Day and I hope that you all remembered the charge by Gen. John A. Logan, past Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, in his General Order creating Memorial Day. I apologize for not getting this out earlier, but I was first at American Legion Post 157 in East Grand Forks, where I am Commander of the Sons of the American Legion Squadron, observing the Memorial Day ceremony, which was forced indoors due to weather, and then, I was assisting my aunt with some work at her home. Since it is Memorial Day for another 30 minutes, I would like to remind you all of the order creating it, especially being a member of Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War (SUVCW). Here is Logan’s Order:

General Order
No. 11

Headquarters, Grand Army of the Republic
Washington, D.C., May 5, 1868

I. The 30th day of May, 1868, is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet churchyard in the land. In this observance no form or ceremony is prescribed, but posts and comrades will in their own way arrange such fitting services and testimonials of respect as circumstances may permit.

We are organized, comrades, as our regulations tell us, for the purpose, among other things, “of preserving and strengthening those kind and fraternal feelings which have bound together the soldiers, sailors, and marines who united to suppress the late rebellion.” What can aid more to assure this result than by cherishing tenderly the memory of our heroic dead, who made their breasts a barricade between our country and its foe? Their soldier lives were the reveille of freedom to a race in chains, and their death a tattoo of rebellious tyranny in arms. We should guard their graves with sacred vigilance. All that the consecrated wealth and taste of the Nation can add to their adornment and security is but a fitting tribute to the memory of her slain defenders. Let no wanton foot tread rudely on such hallowed grounds. Let pleasant paths invite the coming and going of reverent visitors and found mourners. Let no vandalism of avarice or neglect, no ravages of time, testify to the present or to the coming generations that we have forgotten, as a people, the cost of free and undivided republic.

If other eyes grow dull and other hands slack, and other hearts cold in the solemn trust, ours shall keep it well as long as the light and warmth of life remain in us.

Let us, then, at the time appointed, gather around their sacred remains and garland the passionless mounds above them with choicest flowers of springtime; let us raise above them the dear old flag they saved from dishonor; let us in this solemn presence renew our pledges to aid and assist those whom they have left among us as sacred charges upon the Nation’s gratitude,–the soldier’s and sailor’s widow and orphan.

II. It is the purpose of the Commander-in-Chief to inaugurate this observance with the hope it will be kept up from year to year, while a survivor of the war remains to honor the memory of his departed comrades. He earnestly desires the public press to call attention to this Order, and lend its friendly aid in bringing it to the notice of comrades in all parts of the country in time for simultaneous compliance therewith.

III. Department commanders will use every effort to make this order effective.

By command of:
JOHN A. LOGAN,
Commander-in-Chief.

N. P. CHIPMAN,
Adjutant-General.

Logan’s Order courtesy of the SUVCW website.

Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the hero of Little Round Top during the Battle of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania July 2, 1863, said in his 1884 Memorial Day Address,[1] “We wish to be remembered. Willing to die, we are not willing to be forgotten.” How the American Civil War is remembered has changed over time and locale. Where the American Civil War is remembered and by whom, is also a determinant of how it is remembered. What is forgotten over time and locale is equally important as to what is remembered. The memories of the war needed to serve a purpose, especially for the people who lost the war, that would connect them not only with their past but with their future as citizens of the post-bellum United States. One of the earliest shapers of the memories of the Civil War was the Southern historian, Edward A. Pollard.

Pollard, one of the people of the Confederate States of America therefore re-wrote their history to justify their past, and to create a place for the Southern people in the re-united States to reconcile their conflicting memories in a “slaveless,” northern-dominated union. Rather than seeing themselves as defending slavery and the extension of slavery, the Southerners sought to believe that they were defending state’s rights, preserving Southern culture and civilization, and protecting private property. The secessionists claimed that they only wanted to respect the founding fathers’ vision of an American union of Sovereign States; their Southern virtue was destroyed by Northern might.

Pollard viewed their actions as defensive, and regrettably necessary to repulse unwarranted northern aggression; to shield the African Americans in their care from rebellious and immoral influences. Antebellum Southerners claimed that they cherished the child-like innocence of the African Americans, and had a paternal desire to maintain their good social order. As one their spokesmen, the Southern historian Pollard and his works would at first defend slavery as morally good and then later the Confederacy itself as a necessary move to defend the south, its way of life, and their peculiar institution of slavery.

However, Pollard represents one of the better known examples of the reconstruction of a rebel’s antebellum views to a post-bellum unionism. He was born in the “Old South” on his family’s plantation in Virginia, February 27, 1832. He grew up on family plantations and was educated at the University of Virginia. He prospected for gold in California but gave it up to write for newspapers. While he was employed in the early 1850s in newspaper work, his assignments had him traveling in eastern Asia. Pollard returned to the American East in 1856 and he toured the South Atlantic states. He wrote and published articles about the benign life of Southern plantations.  Contrasting the life of the slave in the “Old South,” to the miserable life of slaves in the “Orient,” Pollard declared that American slaves were fortunate to live in Southern civilization rather than the “Orient.” He defended American slavery as benign and paternalistic.

His best known antebellum work was, Black Diamonds Gathered in the Darkey Homes of the South, extolling the humanitarian aspects of slavery in the south. The book also discussed the common schemes of Southern planters to colonize south of America. Pollard’s proclaimed that Central and South America could be a new American Empire of slavery for the United States, given that expanding slavery into the western territories was problematical due to the American abolitionists, “… the destiny of Southern civilization is to be consummated in a glory brighter even than that of old, the glory of an empire, controlling the commerce of the world, impregnable in its position , and represent in its internal structure the most harmonious of all the systems of modern civilization.”[2] He argued that slavery elevated the African Americans, not degraded them. Pollard’s vision of a glorious Southern empire based on chattel slavery, reflected the Southerners’ comprehension of their peculiar institution, which they were prepared to protect by “withdrawing” from the union.

During the secession of the Southern states in 1861, Pollard was in Washington serving as a clerk for the House Judiciary Committee. During the secession he left Washington for Maryland, where his brother H. Rives Pollard, was the news editor of the Baltimore Sun. With the outbreak of hostilities (First Battle of Manassas) between the north and the south, the Pollard brothers moved to Richmond, Virginia, and joined the staff of the Southern Rights newspaper, the Examiner. Edward A. Pollard shared editorial duties with his brother and the senior editor, (a friend of Edgar A. Poe), John Moncure Daniel. Edward A. Pollard, nonetheless found time to continue his chronicles of the war.

Pollard attempted to write the history of the war as it occurred. The Southern History of the War was prepared in annual volumes as the war progressed. However, his work was interrupted in 1864. He planned to travel to Great Britain on behalf of the Confederate States of  America. He was captured by the Union when the blockade runner (ship) he was on attempted to run the Union blockade of Richmond, Virginia on its way to Great Britain. He was temporarily imprisoned in New York, as a prisoner of the United States and then taken south to spend the last part of the war in custody at Fortress Monroe, Virginia. When he was paroled and released in a prisoner exchange in January 1865, he rejoined the Richmond, Virginia Examiner staff, and continued his work on the Southern History of the War. After the final volume of the Southern History of the War was published in 1865, Pollard decided to write a new Southern history of the war of the Confederates. His efforts culminated in his 752 page book, The Lost Cause; a New Southern History of the War of the Confederates.

The Lost Cause, according to the author, was the loss of Southern civilization, the ameliorating rule of white slave owners, and the excision of slavery from the United States. According to Pollard in his 1866 book, the war did not decide the issues of, “negro suffrage, State Rights or Southern Politics.”[3] The war was lost, but the ideals of the slave holders were still a part of Southern culture and politics. Pollard said that the “accident” of defeat did not tarnish the “heroic record of the Confederacy.” He looked for the armed conflict to resume in the near future. Pollard exhorted his Confederate readers at the end of his books to remember their Confederate heritage. He anticipated the failure of emancipation and the restoration of African American servitude, because it was their “natural” condition. The racist opposition in the North to civil rights for the African Americans would help bring about the failure of emancipation, according to Pollard.[4] His views as a popular author reflected the opinions of his Southern readers. Some of his Southern fans found it difficult to give up the master/slave mentality and they (whites) continued to think of themselves as masters after the war.

A letter from a Mississippi planter October 22, 1865, to his state legislators warned of the dangers of the black union soldiers stationed in Panola, Mississippi, talking to the local freedmen and telling them “stories” about their rights. In his letter the planter E. G. Baker, writes that he wants the black union soldiers removed. He writes that he finds it very strange that freedmen would listen to the soldiers. “Strange to say the negroes believe such stories in spite of facts to the contrary told them by their masters (sic) employers.”[5] The ex-slave holder’s memory of recent events slips as he writes. It is an understandable slip considering that the whites had been the masters of the African Americans for many generations.

During the later years of reconstruction Pollard wrote another book about the “Lost Cause” called, The Lost Cause Regained. In the introduction to his new book he explains the title by stating that “… the true cause fought for in the late war has not been “lost” war immeasurably or irrevocably, but is yet in a condition to be regained by the South on ultimate issues of the political contest.”[6] His new work attempts to reinterpret the transition of the Old South (representative of the Confederacy) to the New South (of the restored Union), by explaining that the true battle had not been for slavery or its expansion, but rather for white supremacy and constitutional limitations. “As long as white men governed by limited powers they could reassure themselves that the essence of their “Lost Cause”  still remained with them.”[7]

Many of Pollard’s readers in the South welcome the “redefining” of the popular memory of the “late war.” They did not lose the war because their ideals were false or indefensible. The war was lost by the accident of the North’s overwhelming numbers of materiel and men. According to Pollard, the issue of slavery and state’s rights was a misunderstanding on the part of the North. The North did not understand that the South was fighting for the supremacy of the white race, and along with it the preservation of the political traditions of the country.[8] Pollard wrote that the “Negro” race was considered inferior to all other races of men. “It is from this inferiority that we deduce all the benefits of slavery in the past. The fact is important as a historical vindication of the past. It is also important as a supreme instruction for the future.” He then proceeds to reshape the Southern memory of the war as a war of defense against the dangers of the inferior race unbound by uncaring abolitionists. Pollard asks what this inferior race would be able to do without the guidance of the white people who cared for them. The issue of “Negro” suffrage is another example of re-shaping the public memory of the war.

Pollard points out that the people of the North show extreme “sensitiveness” on the issue of entertaining the “Negro” as an equal at the polls. He uses the reluctance of Northern politicians to grant suffrage to African Americans, to castigate the white Northern politicians as scalawags and hypocrites. In 1865, Negro suffrage was voted down in Connecticut, Colorado, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. In 1867 a joint resolution was passed by the Legislature of Ohio to propose an amendment to the state constitution, striking the word “white” from the franchise law of the state. It was rejected by a majority of over 50,000 voters when a popular vote was taken. Similar results occurred in Minnesota and Kansas that year, rejecting the franchise for “people of color.”[9] Freeing the slaves by the Northerners obviously was not the same as granting the freedmen social equality in northern American society. This did not really surprise Pollard who held a dim view of the North. His description from his earlier work, The Lost Cause concerning Northern society was as blunt as it was judgmental.

Pollard, like many Southern gentlemen of the times, found the culture of the North to be coarse and materialistic, charactierized by individual acquisitiveness. Northerners, he wrote, were “a people corrupted by a gross material prosperity …” Their ruling elite was “a coarse ostentation aristocracy that smelt of the trade …” Their animating force was an “unremitting hunt after selfish aggrandizement,” often disguised by self-righteous pretenses. The capitalist elite, out of envy for the Southern gentry that was its natural superior, had launched the campaign of aggression against Southern institutions. According to Pollard, North and South were incompatible societies.[10] In spite of his disdain for the North he did eventually undergo a conversion from a proslavery Southern nationalist world view, to a supporter of the Unionist and free-labor paradigm.

He remained a bitter opponent of the Radical Republic Reconstruction politics. According to historian Jack P. Maddex Jr.,[11] Pollard actually “reconstructed” the tradition of the Old South to fit post-bellum definitions of American loyalty. Like many other Southerners, Pollard wanted to participate in local and eventually national politics. Where his stance of Southern nationalism had kept him from identifying with conservative unionists, the lure of local politics had him publishing articles extolling the American Union in patriotic terms that excluded his former secessionism. The reconstruction of the Southern memory of the Civil War continued with the reconstruction of its favorite Southern historian. He wrote a series of articles that showed the direction of his change.

In The Living Politicians of To-day (sic) Pollard denounced the Republican Party’s leaders. He lauded however, President Johnson, Secretary of State William Seward, and Democratic congressman “Gentleman” George H. Pendleton of Ohio who was a noted anti-war Democrat. As he continued his series, Pollard started to refer to secession as a “violent and revolutionary measure.” The fact that his new writings contradicted his old writings did not seem to faze him. In the space of a few years, he said that his thinking had matured. Along with his new maturity, shared with many citizens of the South, were his alterations of history. In another surprising change, Pollard wrote that John C. Calhoun, the great Southern Rights statesman, had been a “sound Union man” who had never believed in the right of secession.[12] President Lincoln was extolled for his intentions of a “generous restoration of rights” to the Southern states after the war. President Johnson was praised for his reconstruction policy, including freeing the slaves and the repudiation of Confederate public debts. African American suffrage however, was still another issue.

Most Republican leaders, he thought, advocated “Negro” suffrage only as a means to perpetuate their party’s “despotism.” Only “Negro” suffrage could keep the Republican Party in power. Pollard argued in The Lost Cause Regained that the original opposition (the Civil War) to the Republican Party of Lincoln was for white supremacy and constitutional limits. Slavery was not the reason for the South’s secession and Civil War. The Republican Party was now showing its “true colors” with their “black” rule and military despotism. “The new cause,” he wrote, was “the true question of the war revived,” and it consisted of “the supremacy of the white race” and “the protection of our ancient fabrics of government.”[13] The myth of the South only fighting for States Rights and Independence was now established in Southern memory. The new cause, according to Pollard was the supremacy of the white race.

Historians must make judgments about the people they choose to research. Historians, as professionals, have a responsibility to be honest, fair, objective and unbiased. In order to avoid propagandizing, it is important to verify all the relevant facts that the historian uses in interpreting history. Pollard did not live up to the responsibilities of being an historian. His distortions of the ex-slaves and the African Americans in general were racists and appealed to many Southerners.

Southerners, following the reasoning of Pollard, should base their rationale for white supremacy on the claim that African Americans are intellectually inferior because of their race. This was a way of thinking that former slave holders could sympathize with and embrace as a logical rationale. The Unionist Democrats, Pollard wrote, had laid the true foundation for post-bellum conservative policies. He now preferred them to the Confederate sympathizers in the North, and he took their slogan of 1864, “The Union as it was,” as his own slogan for the 1868 election. Their kind of Unionism, not “the Lost Cause,” was the source of his policy of white supremacy and constitutional limitations.[14]

The issue of white supremacy was becoming an issue in national politics with Reconstruction an extensively debated policy in the North and the South. The Democrat presidential nominee, New York Governor Horatio Seymour, ran an openly racist election with the campaign slogan, “This is a white man’s country, let white men rule.” Racism failed to sway the voters, and General Ulysses S. Grant was elected President of the United States with a landslide victory for the Republican Party. The “Lost Cause” was continuing to lose in national politics, even in the South.

According to historian David W. Blight, the “Lost Cause” bred dissenters. The scalawags, ex-Confederates who joined the Republican Party during Reconstruction, were the first dissenters from “Lost Cause” ideology. The much maligned James Longstreet of Georgia, former colonel and legendary partisan cavalry leader in Virginia John S. Mosby, political leaders such as James W. Hunnicut in Virginia, James Lusk Alcorn of Mississippi, Amos T. Ackerman of Georgia, and Thomas Settle Jr. of North Carolina, and many others embraced new economic development and acted with a spirit of unionism to resist the “Lost Cause” mythology.[15]

While it was assumed that the battles of conflicting ideology, racial and racist politics, and the memories of why the United States fought a Civil War, would continue to be a source of contention and distrust, there were some people willing to work together to overcome these differences. Some white Southerners eventually formed a biracial, political alliance in Virginia to strengthen their party by taking advantage of the many African American voters, to contend with the conservative Democrats. They were called “Readjusters” and wanted to repudiate at least part of the state debt, incurred before the war to finance railroads, canals, and other public works. Conservative Democrats, known as “Funders”, wanted to take money from the education budget to pay down the state debt.

The “Readjusters” promised to readjust the state debt and wanted a public investment in the expansion of schooling, and economic development that would serve ordinary black and white people in their lives.[16] It was an alliance party with a short period of history that ended about 1883. After the “Readjuster” Party lost power, Virginia’s Democrat Party ruled Virginia’s politics for the next 80 years. Another prominent American, Frederick Douglass was also concerned with the issue of how the Civil War was to be remembered, particularly in an emerging culture of reconciliation.

Douglass was concerned about the new myths of “failed” emancipation, reconstruction and freedom resulting in African American barbarism. In a speech in 1888 Douglas said, “It (the theory of black degeneration) has gone forth to the North. It has crossed the ocean. It has gone to Europe, and it has gone as far as the wings of the press, and the power of speech can carry it.”[17] The memory of the Civil War as espoused by Pollard, of a bipartisan patriotic legend with white supremacy and constitutional limitations was not the memory that Douglass wanted passed on to future generations of Americans. The culture of reconciliation however, continued to encompass the white consciousness of remembrance.

By the 50^th anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg in 1913, reconciliation and the commemoration of a “glorious fight” in which everyone was declared by the speakers as “right,” was celebrated by over 53,000 white veterans in their blue or gray uniforms. By the rules of the Pennsylvania Commission, African American GAR members with honorable discharge papers were eligible to participate in the battle’s commemoration. There is no evidence, according to Civil War historian Blight that any African Americans participated in the reunion as veterans.[18] There was however an “army” of African Americans, who labored to set up the miles of tents in the tent city, distribute mess kits and blankets, dig latrines, build kitchens, and install the electrical facilities for the 50^th reunion. The irony of it would not have been lost on Douglass, or Pollard, had they been able to witness the encampment celebration.

Typical of the encampment theme of reconciliation, was the reenactment of Pickett’s Charge on July 3, 1913, when the members of the Philadelphia Brigade Association  and the Pickett’s Division Association, clasped hands across the stone wall they had fought over fifty years earlier. It was reported as an emotional event that sealed the reconciliation of the North and South, and of the American union. The memory of the occasion for the veterans and spectators was recorded by the press photographers. The photographs of this celebrated event were published in most newspapers in the United States.

The black newspapers were wary of the celebration at Gettysburg during this time of increased lynchings, and deepening segregation.  President Wilson’s recent forced segregation of federal workers and facilities in Washington, because of the increased number of southern workers that came in with the Wilson administration, rankled. “We are wondering,” declared the Baltimore Afro-American Ledger, a major Maryland newspaper, “whether Mr. Lincoln had the slightest idea in his mind that the time would ever come when the people of this country would come to the conclusion that by the ‘People,’ he meant only white people.”[19] White supremacy joined arms with Reconciliation in the Civil War remembrances during the fiftieth Gettysburg reunion in 1913.

The burden of those memories, and their oppressive results would eventually be ameliorated however, with the unheralded birth of the future civil rights activist, Rosa Louise McCauley in 1913. Born fifty years after the battle of Gettysburg, as the 42 year old Rosa Parks she would say “no” in 1955 to Montgomery, Alabama bus driver James Blake’s demand that she relinquish her seat to a white man. She was also saying “no” to Pollard and his twisted reconstruction of the nation’s historical memories of the Civil War.

[2] Edward A. Polland. Black Diamonds Gathered in the Darkey Homes of the South, (New York: Pudney & Russell, Publishers 1859), 108.

[3] Edward A. Pollard. The Lost Cause; a New Southern History of the War of the Confederates. (New York: E. B. Treat & Co, 1866), 752.

[4] Pollard, The Lost Cause, 729.

[5] Ira Berlin et al., Free At Last, (New York: The New Press), 520.

[6] Edward A. Pollard. The Lost Cause Regained, (New York: G.W. Carleton & Co., 1868), 13.

[7] Jack P. Maddex Jr., The Reconstruction of Edward A. Pollard, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press 1974), 84.

[8] Pollard. The Lost Cause Regained, 13.

[9] Pollard. The Lost Cause Regained, 133.

[10] Pollard. The Lost Cause, 49 – 52.

[11] Maddex. The Reconstruction of Pollard, 45.

[12] Edward A. Pollard. “Personal Recollections of John C. Calhoun.” New York Citizen, 9 May 1868, p. 2.

[13] Pollard, The Lost Cause Regained, 102, 106-7, 154.

[14] Pollard, The Lost Cause Regained, 207.

[15] David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: the Civil War in American Memory, (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2002), 293.

[16] Blight, Race and Reunion, 293.

[17] Blight, Race and Reunion, 317.

[18] Blight, Race and Reunion, 385.

[19] Blight, Race and Reunion, 390.

Bibliography

Berlin, Ira, Barbara J. Fields, Steven F. Miller, et al. eds. Free At Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War. New York: The New Press, 1992.

Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: the Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2002.

Maddex Jr, Jack P. The Reconstruction of Edward A. Pollard: A Rebel’s Conversion to Postbellum Unionism. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina, 1974.

Pollard, Edward A. The Lost Cause; a New Southern History of the War of the Confederates. New York: E. B. Treat & Co, 1866.

Pollard, Edward A. The Lost Cause Regained. New York: G. W. Carleton & Co, 1868.

Pollard, Edward A. “Personal Recollections of John C. Calhoun.” New York Citizen, 9 May 1868.

Today is the second anniversary of the creation of this site and what a couple of years it has been. It wasn’t too long ago that this site was just learning to walk and soon it’ll be ready for school, err, oh wait, this is not a baby (sorry, I could not resist putting something goofy in, especially with a lack of sleep from finishing papers), but I do have quite a bit to be proud of with this little site. In two years, we have gone from just me writing to a dedicated group of folks who all love history and sharing it with you. We have neared 50,000 hits and have gained a bit more of a following. I would like to thank everyone for their support over these last couple of years both in contributing and just visiting. In the coming weeks, I will be posting some new material, mainly book reviews, but also I will be outlining some goals I have for this site in the coming year. Thanks again and Happy Birthday to Civil War History.

Sorry for not posting lately, but I have been extremely busy finishing assignments for classes, which take priority over updating the blog. I will let you all know that I will be posting a paper that I am working on for my Material Culture class exploring Civil War uniforms and equipment, so keep checking back, as I should have it up in a week or so.

The Society of  Civil War Historians is calling for papers for their conference June 17 -19, 2010 in Richmond, Virginia.

http://scwh.la.psu.edu/call_for_papers.html

Deadline for paper proposals is September 15, 2009.

Today, while countless Americans engaged in Tax Day tea party protests dominated the news coverage, we can not forget that on this day in 1865, the nation faced the death of Abraham Lincoln. It is fitting that the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War (SUVCW) will be honoring Lincoln by continuing its annual Lincoln Tomb Ceremony on April 18 in Springfield, Illinois. The event includes a parade, lunch, and a ceremony to commemorate the founding of the Grand Army of the Republic in nearby Petersburg. I hope that you will take a moment to reflect upon Lincoln’s contribution to our nation and will read up on him to familiarize yourself with his life and legacy.

Today marks the anniversary of the day that John Wilkes Booth changed American history forever. Until April 14, 1865, no American president had been assassinated and only two had died in office (William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor). However, that April evening in 1865, Lincoln and his wife were enjoying the play Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theater in DC, when John Wilkes Booth entered the President’s box and fired his derringer, lodging the ball in Lincoln’s head. Today is a sad anniversary for our nation, as we lost one of our greatest leaders before we should have. Much speculation reigns today about the course of Reconstruction and post-war America had Lincoln finished his second term. I would argue that had Lincoln not been shot, the nation would have endured a much gentler Reconstruction and relations between the North and South would have been more positive in the late nineteenth century. Imagine the post-Presidential life that Lincoln could have enjoyed. Would he have toured the world delivering addresses, or returned to the life of an attorney in Springfield? Rest in peace Mr. Lincoln.