Civil War Odyssey with Author B.J. Welborn

The Killing Field Where Corporal Welborn's Luck Ran Out

noreply@blogger.com (B.J. Welborn) — Mon, 30 May 2016 19:37:00 +0000

We are sadly human, and in our contemplation of the Civil War we see a dramatization of our humanity. —Robert Penn Warren

INTO THE WOODS: This faint path, marked by small
blocks of blue paint on bark, led me through the
1863 Battle of Payne's Farm, where my ancestor,
Lyndon M. Welborn, died. The fierce clash between
battle-hardened foes ignited the seven-day Mine Run
Campaign, in which nearly 2,000 soldiers died.

MEMORIAL DAY 2016
Lyndon McGee Welborn, a 23-year-old corporal of the First Regiment, Company B, North Carolina Troops, almost made it to the end of the Civil War. But his luck ran out in the afternoon of Nov. 27, 1863, during the Battle of Payne's Farm on a remote field north of Richmond. Since volunteering to fight for the Confederacy in May 1861, right after his home state seceded, my ancestor had survived in a continuous cauldron of hardship and violence. Even a leg wound that hospitalized him hadn't kept the Randolph County farm boy down.


Union troops cross the Rapidan River At Germana Ford during the Mine Run Campaign, Virginia, 1863. Lithograph courtesy U.S. Library of Congress online.

As I have done with each of the four sons who wrote home to their father Joseph Welborn during the war, I set out to locate the exact places where Lyndon, William, David and Robert penned their dozen or so letters. Lyndon was the fourth son in a family of 10 children, and the only son to volunteer for duty — against father Joseph's wishes. The Confederacy drafted the other three sons. (See Archives at right.) Lyndon proudly became an infantryman, a private, CSA, at age 20. His First Regiment of N.C. troops, reconstituted several times as its members perished, were active from the war's first shots, to Gettysburg and other major battles, to the last skirmishes at Appomattox Court House. Private Lyndon was Joseph's only son to die in the war, so I made the place where he fell the last I visited.

The killing field where Lyndon's life ended wasn't easy to find. He didn't die on a famous nearby battlefield: Chancellorsville, Spotsylvania, the Wilderness, all well-marked and celebrated, although the daylong Battle of Payne's Farm — an unexpected encounter that ignited the oft-overlooked Mine Run Campaign — took place in the same roiled real estate between the enemy capitals of Washington and Richmond.


A display at the Chancellorville Battlefield Visitor Center explains the importance of the central Virginia area where the Battle of Payne's Farm took place, as well as many other skirmishes and battles. These include Spotsylvania Courthouse and the Wilderness.

One hundred fifty three years, later, thanks to a dedicated group of Civil War historians having preserved and marked it, I was able to locate the battlefield where Lyndon died. But first, I tried to find Raccoon Ford, where Union troops crossed the Rapidan River, a tributary of the Rappahannock River before the battle. Both rivers flow between the federal and Confederate capitals. Their waters geographically and symbolically separated the enemy armies.

Despite an hour looking for it, I had no luck finding the steep, primitive Raccoon Ford.

"In a word, it's obscure," said Britt Brewer, on duty at nearby Chancellorville Visitor Center when I asked him about the river crossing. "You've got lots more famous crossings all along the Rappahannock and Rapidan rivers: Germana Ford, Kelly's Ford, Elly's Ford." Union soldiers' traversing of these fords and others along the rivers preceded the famous Virginia battles we read about in history books. Brewer added that Raccoon Ford today is inaccessible.

The Civil War Trust placed this
marker along Virginia Hwy. 611,
marking the 1.5-mile walking
trail through the Payne's Farm
Battlefield. The trail is part of a
635-acre historic preserve.

To get to Payne's Farm, I needed to find the crossroads town of Locust Grove, 73 miles northwest of Richmond. On a bright autumn day, I headed north from US 20 along Virginia Highway 611, still largely an agricultural area, until I spotted the historic Zoar Baptist Church on the left. The church parking lot provided a few spaces for battlefield visitors.

At the site, I followed a woodland path, marked by blue paint on trees, as dying leaves mourned overhead. The path took me past 11 markers that told of the frenzied fight of late fall 1863, when an isolated column of Army of the Potomac troops forded the Rapidan. At daybreak, they marched up the narrow Racoon Ford Road, amid rolling pastures and fields ringed by thick woods.

The Union troops collided with a contingent of seasoned Confederate fighters, less than half the number of their adversaries that day. Corporal Welborn was among them. As usual, Federal troops were advancing


This plaque marks the site of the hospital where Lyndon Welborn recuperated after a left thigh wound sustained at the Battle of Chancellorsville. Government buildings today dominate the area along a busy street in Raleigh, N.C.

to overtake the Confederate capital ("On to Richmond!") and Confederates were ready to fight like hell to keep them at bay ("Give it to 'em, boys!")

Though the odds of victory weren't good for Lyndon and his fellow fighters that day, they had become accustomed to uncertainty during three years of conflict. From the final letter the recently promoted corporal wrote home to father Joseph:

May 24^th 1863

Raleigh NC

Dear father,

My health is very good yet and my wound is doing fine… If they would just let me know what I have to do I could content myself here I have got a pair of crutches and can go all about over the grove… if I knew I had to stay here (Pettigrew Hospital) untill my wound gets well….I am going to quit thinking anything like a furlough and make myself satisfied with where they put me…

Your affectionate son

L.M. Welborn

Where the Confederate military put him was squarely back in Virginia. (To see Lyndon's other letters home, go to the LETTERS page.)

The cold, rainy day at Payne's Farm descended into tentative attacks and counterattacks. Late in the afternoon, the Confederates, under division command of Gen. Edward Johnson, once again sounded "the peculiar rebel yell," and charged. According to firsthand accounts, Lyndon's First Regiment became the most heavily engaged of the day.

The Zoar Baptist Church was started
in 1805 and moved to its current
site near Payne's Farm in 1884.


View of entrance to the walking trail through the battlefield from the Zoar Church parking lot.

As the regiment charged, they likely heard the expected exhortation from their leader, Capt. Thomas Boone: Hurrah for North Carolina! Give it to 'em, boys! Gunfire continued until darkness and lack of ammunition ended the battle. Neither side could claim victory. Fifty Confederate men sustained wounds. Five lay dead. Lyndon was among them, forever young.

Of the Mine Run campaign's 1,952 estimated casualties, 1,272 were Federals; 680 were Confederates.

The inconclusive fighting that followed at Mine Run, a north-south creek, marked the end of winter fighting in the Civil War's Eastern Theater. The Army of the Potomac, under the command of Gen. George G. Meade, seeing his hope of expanding the victory at Gettysburg dashed, set up winter quarters at Brandy Station, Va. Meade had concluded that the Confederate defense line was too strong to continue an advance, a decision that undermined his military career.


This stone marks Lyndon McGee Welborn's grave in rural Randolph County, N.C.

Robert E. Lee's army also retired in the area. The general's hope of repeating the Confederate triumph at Chancellorsville was dashed. Lee was quoted as saying, " I am too old to command this army. We never should have permitted those people to get away." From the Shenandoah Valley in western Virginia to the outskirts of Washington, one enormous military encampment faced an unusually harsh winter marked by grim deprivation.

***
American history doesn't regard the Confederate cause as noble. That is as it should be. Yet, I have read of many noble characteristics in the southern ranks, and I know that rebel actions often exuded noble intentions. When Lyndon volunteered to fight in the spring 1861, riding a wave of youthful bravado with a legion of friends and kin, he set out on his own personal path to glory. I think he believed in a high-minded nature of the North Carolina cause.

As he almost innocently stumbled along that chosen path, which became more and more tortured as weary years of fighting passed, he never veered from his pledge to stick to his decision to fight for the Confederacy. Lyndon remained loyal to his tribe of North Carolinians who had eaten together, slept together, fought together, survived together and mourned their dead together for the better part of the war. Lyndon became a man of his word, a noble thing indeed.

From Lyndon' first letter home after volunteering:

acquia creek Virginia

aug 19 1861

Dear Father

i received a letter from you this morning and was very much pleased to here from you

i had not herd in some time...

... i dont think that we wil have any fighting to do….. that is our reg(iment) we (volunteers) are for the war we wil be reserved the twelve months Volunteers wil hav to fight until their time is out i think peace will be made before that time Pa

I looked over them chapters (in the Bible) you told me to read but if we are doing wrong we cant help it now…… but if my capt. or col. was to tel us to go home all that did not want to fight for their country i would not go after i undertok it i wil go throu with it if i live but as you are dis satisfied i wish i had never undertook it

you was pittying me but if i was dissatisfied and had a hard time you would not be to blame

... I must quit writing and go at some thing else give my best respects to all my folks and friends I will write when i can you kno that i am a bad hand to write a letter but this is a good way to learn

Farewell for thy time Write soon as you can

From your son Lyndon

As I left the battlefield and recrossed Highway 611 for a final glance at the killing field where Lyndon died, a weariness settled over me, the same emotional weight I've felt walking so many other Civil War battlefields. I heard the faint whiz of pick-ups and cars busy at the day's tasks, but mostly I heard the oaks lonely whisper of long-ago loss, long-ago waste of precious life.

After Lyndon's death at Payne's Farm, Joseph brought his son's body home to the farm in Randolph County. Joseph buried Lyndon in the family cemetery, where already rested Lyndon's mother, Parthena, who died when Lyndon was a child. In time, the other Welborn brothers who fought in the Civil War, as well as their families, were buried in the Bell-Welborn cemetery at a shady edge of a peaceful cornfield.

###

SOURCES: http://www.sonofthesouth.net/leefoundation/civil-war/1864/january/mine-run.htm: http://en.wikipedia.org ; A Roster of the North Carolina Troops, 1861-1866; /wiki/Battle_of_Mine_Run;http://www.bit.ly/minerun http://www.bit.ly/minerunmap; http://www.bit.ly/cwtrailsv; cschemmer@freelancestar.comhttp://newhopebapt.org/; National Park Service @ http://www.nps.gov/frsp/mine.htm; From http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Mine_Run_Campaign, Kati Sengal. National Park Service @ http://www.nps.gov/frsp/mine.htm. Payne's Farm Trial at http://www.hmdb.org/marker.asp?marker=43170 The Southern Historical Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill; N.C. Archives, Raleigh, N.C. All photos, unless otherwise noted, were taken and copyrighted by B.J. Welborn.

Edge Of Obscurity: Tracking The Ailing Confederate

noreply@blogger.com (B.J. Welborn) — Wed, 31 Dec 2014 23:09:00 +0000

Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever. – Napoleon Bonaparte

This 1912 photo shows two extant

wards of Winder Hospital that operated
during the Civil War. Courtesy, Civil
War Richmond, mdgorman.com.

In December 1864, my ancestor, William Lane Welborn, recuperated from some illness in Winder Hospital, sprawled across Richmond's west end. From the Confederate capital, he penned a letter to his father Joseph, a widowed North Carolina farmer. Joseph had seen three other sons march off to war. One son had died in battle a year before William wrote home:

December 14^th 64

Ritchmond VA

Dear Father

I write you a few lines to let you no how I am I think I am a

The original letter William Welborn
wrote to his father from Winder
Hospital in December 1864. For
full letter, go to LETTERS page.

giting wel I hope these few lines may

find you al well I received your letter to day and was glad to hear (from) you I am triing to git in the navy awhylt I do not no whether I will git in or not The doctor said he would secont me before the board . . .

I want you to send me a letter just as soon as you git this letter with out delay and tell me how to direct a letter to David Welborn (William's younger brother) I do not how to direct a letter to him if I did I would start one to him today

give me the directions and give to him mine so he can rite to me tell him to rite to me as soon as he can for if I am sent to new command the timing is not with me so I will haf to write first if I get transferred I have moved from where I was

Direct your leters to the 17^th ward secont division winder hospital Richmond V.A. . . .

This 1864 photo shows wounded
soldiers passing time at a hospital in
Fredericksburg, Va. Men suffered
hardship and boredom while recovering.
Soldiers at Winder Hospital often
gambled, using clothing or meal tickets
as chips. More on PHOTOS page.
Photo: James Gardner, War Photo &
Exhibition, Hartford, CT.

Wm L Welborn

The fate of William, the third of Joseph's 10 children, seemed uncertain. During the Civil War, twice as many men suffered inglorious deaths from disease, especially diarrhea, as combat.

For hospitalized soldiers, life took on the grim aspects of a prison camp. Both the invalid and the imprisoned languished in misery, loneliness and boredom, as did Private Welborn, a 34-year-old wagon maker drafted five months before he wrote his letter.

. . . I have nothin of interest to rite to you more than they are a fiting (fighting) all around here and it is harde times here, a worse acoming I fear we git a little bred and a little beef twice a day we are a bout half starved here I do not think there is any chance to git home a tal my pen is so bad I can not wriet with it so I must quit

Wm. L. Welborn

As I have done with other Civil War ancestors (see archives), I set out to find the place where William wrote his letter. I wanted to find where Winder Hospital sprawled across Richmond's West End more than 150 years ago. Winder reigned as the biggest among the 50 hospitals in Richmond’s beehive-busy 2.4 square miles. It probably was the Confederacy 's largest. Surely I would find something, I convinced myself. But navigating the maze of one-way streets in modern-day Richmond ended up being a frustrating trek into obscurity.

If any vestige of Winder remains today, it's one of history's mysteries. The only present-day sign I found of the hospital was literally a sign reading "Winder St."

THEN AND NOW

This street sign marks where Winder
Hospital stood in Richmond. I set out
recently to find if anything from the
Civil War complex remains.

Construction on Winder began when war broke out in 1861. It stood at "the west terminus of Cary Street" along the north bank of the James River. The complex spread over old farming fields next to a pond/reservoir, now within Robert Byrd Park. The self-sustaining

William made this sworn statement
in 1918 to help younger brother,
David, get a pension. Both
brothers landed in Richmond
hospitals simultaneously in the war
and visited. Document, N.C. Archives.
For David's story, see July 2011 blog.

community comprised 125 acres of farmland for growing supplies and about 100 buildings. These included offices, surgery rooms, storerooms, fire stations, library, kitchens, dining halls, bath houses, and myriad framed, one-story, 60 by 30-foot wards. Each ward had three doors on two sides. A single wood stove warmed each ward. "Negro" attendants (free and enslaved) kept the hospital buzzing.

Houses in the neighborhood where
Winder Hospital stood resemble the
hospital's 1860s wards. It's unclear if
any of the renovated wards survive.

In military fashion, Camp Winder’s commander, Gen. John Henry Winder, laid out the vast hospital complex in five divisions, later expanded to six divisions plus a tent section. Each division housed warriors from designated states. Although William wrote from a ward in the Second Division, historic records show that section initially housed soldiers from Tennessee and Kentucky, with N.C. soldiers assigned to Third Division wards. But as the war limped into its last bloody years, four of the five hospital divisions served N.C. soldiers. (North Carolina, late to secede, ended up sending the most troops of any state to fight during the war. Records show the state at one point gave the hospital $15,000 to aid native convalescents.)

***

Sign at entrance of park located today
on former Winder Hospital grounds. A
patient's memoir states the hospital
bakery stood west of the "Reservoir of
the Richmond water-works."

After hours of searching, armed only with some internet information, a map and chutzpah, I asked kind strangers for directions. Finally I located the neighborhood where Winder operated. Today, rows of townhouses and modest homes with well-kept lawns line a tight grid of narrow streets at the former site. A high-rise, residential care facility and public specialty school dominate the area.

Local historians suspect that several of the brick houses along Powhatan Street, once within the historic Winder grounds, are renovated hospital wards. I wanted to see them.

William Welborn's
grave, located in the
Bell/Welborn burial
ground in Randolph
County N.C. Joseph
Welborn also lies
in the 200-year-old,
state-protected site.

"Any idea which houses were part of the hospital?" I asked a couple out for a Sunday afternoon stroll. I explained that a large Confederate hospital occupied the neighborhood during the Civil War.

"What?...Here?" the man said, shaking his head in disbelief. Today mostly African Americans live in this part of Richmond, itself 51percent African American. The idea that rebel soldiers recuperated here seemed incredulous to the man. "I never heard of a Confederate hospital here," he said, scanning the houses behind him.

For answers about any Civil War wards-turned-residences, I turned to Robert Krick, historian at Richmond Battlefield Park. Krick emailed this information to me:

The 90-foot Confederate pyramid
dominates historic Hollywood
Cemetery, east of the site of
Winder Hospital. Such famous
southern leaders as JEB Stuart
and George Picket — and 18,000
Confederates — are buried in the
vast cemetery. Some who died
at Winder probably lie here, too.
Union soldiers destroyed cemetery
records when Richmond fell in 1865.

"In my opinion there are at least two original buildings still standing, now converted into homes, and possibly two others, for a maximum of four. They don't look all that much like the (historic) photographs, which accounts for the uncertainty."

Anything palpable about the Confederacy's biggest hospital apparently has slipped into obscurity. This surprised me. With so much Civil War history embedded in Richmond's psyche and landscape, the prize of Union fighters whose capital, Washington, was a mere 100 miles to the north, the fact that there wasn't so much as a historical marker amazed me. (One of Richmond's largest hospitals, Chimborazo,* however, is a celebrated part of Richmond Battlefield Park.)

As the war ended in 1865, federals took over Winder Hospital. Later, Richmond used hospital facilities to house its citizens impoverished by years of fighting. William survived his illness and the war, as did David Welborn and another younger brother, Robert. William died on Oct. 10, 1929, after marrying twice but having no children.

Records of N.C. Troops show the ailing William was present and accounted for in the Confederate army through January 1865. I do not know if he returned to the battlefield, suffered another illness or sustained a wound. I do know that he returned home to Randolph County at some point and is buried there. His gravestone, near father Joseph's, a wife and his brothers, makes no mention of his Civil War record.

My ancestor's record, as well as the location of the hospital where he recuperated, languishes among the ranks of history's invisibles.

This map shows the concentration
of Civil War battles around Richmond,
as Union forces tried repeatedly to take
the city and Confederate soldiers
continually dug in to defend it.

Today, as America hotly renews the cultural and political wars over how students should learn our nation's story, political agendas continue to pick winners and losers — deciding what we should enshrine and what we should forget — as we have done since our nation's inception.

As for me, I want to know America's history as it truly unfolded, haloes and horrors, the glorious and the obscure, alike.

###
SOURCES: www.m.dgorman.com/winder_hospital.htm; Memoir of William A. Curtis, 2^nd N. C. Cavalry. Civil War Collection, Tennessee State Library & Archives; Virginia Historical Inventory; http://www.mdgorman.com/Hospitals/winder_hospital.htm; North Carolina Archives, Raleigh, N.C.; Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Horwitz, Tony, "The Civil War's Hidden Legacy." Smithsonian magazine. Dec. 2014. North Carolina Troops, 1861-1865, A Roster, Warrenton, N.C. New History of the Civil War, American Heritage, Barnes and Noble, 1996. U.S. Civil War Photographs online at http://www.usa-civil-war.com/Hollywood/hollywood.html.Battlefield markers, online at www.civilwar.org/aboutus/news/news-releases/2011-news/. All photos unless otherwise noted, taken and copyrighted by B.J. Welborn.

* For more about Chimborazo, check out my book, AMERICA'S BEST HISTORIC SITES, Chicago Review Press, 1998. Though out-of-print, you can find it online or go to the National Park Service website.

Finding Sherman Amid The Lions And Tigers And Bears

noreply@blogger.com (B.J. Welborn) — Sat, 15 Feb 2014 16:01:00 +0000

This life-size rendition of Gen.
William T. Sherman and a Union
soldier stands along the south side
of the Congaree River in Columbia.
Sherman peers at the new S.C. capitol,
under construction in February 1865.
Photo Barry Ahrendt.

We find traces of the American Civil War in strange places, so it should come as no surprise that a tantalizing reminder of Sherman's raid on Columbia in February 1865 lies hidden amid the lions and tigers and bears at a zoo just west of the South Carolina capital.

Walk along the Woodlands Path through tall hardwoods and thick underbrush in a corner of the Riverbanks Zoo and Garden's 170 acres, and you'll find what locals call "Sherman's Rock." The ledge of granite on a bluff overlooking the Saluda River marks the spot where Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman and some of his 65,000 men encamped after marching farther into the Carolinas. Legend has it that the famous general spent the night under the shelter of this granite slab.

Legend has it that General Sherman
slept under this granite ledge, known
as "Sherman's Rock" before his troops
invaded Columbia, S.C., in 1865.

Now we know that Civil War generals generally didn't sleep under rocks. They took up quarters in houses, as Sherman had done many times on his March To The Sea. That winter night outside Columbia 150 years ago, he probably slept in a nearby dwelling that Union troops later burned down. Still, "Uncle Billy's" bigger-than-life reputation as a solder's soldier — just one of the guys — keeps the legend of "Sherman's Rock" alive.

A while back, I took a bus tour of sites related to Sherman's march on Columbia, known around South Carolina as "The Darkest Days." Our tour guide, Tom Elmore, a bearded man in a gray flannel shirt, told our group how "the most hated Yankee general" strategized on the bluff along the Saluda River before invading the nearly defenseless capital of the hated state that had started it all.

The highly lauded Riverbanks Zoo
near Columbia protects nearly 2,000
animals, many rare and endangered. It
also safeguards a few historic gems.

"Sherman had it in for Columbia," he told our enthusiastic group of history buffs, adding that "It really shocked the entire South to see Sherman outside Columbia."

Indeed, only a few months before, Sherman had mused, "The whole army is burning with insatiable desire to wreak vengeance upon South Carolina. I almost tremble at her fate, but she deserves all that seems in store for her."

The bluff where Sherman's men encamped rose near a former prisoner-of-war camp, "Camp Sorghum." (The bus tour also stopped at the POW site at an intersection near downtown Columbia .) The starving Union officers imprisoned in the camp dubbed it Camp Sorghum after the type of molassas Confederates served them.

Union General Sherman

Wrote Sherman in his memoir: "On the night of the 16th I camped near an old prison bivouac opposite Columbia, known to our prisoners of war as 'Camp Sorghum,' where remained the mud-hovels and holes in the ground which our prisoners had made to shelter themselves from the winter's cold and the summer's heat."

"They were very, very ticked off by what they saw," Elmore told our Civil War tourists. Elmore said that Camp Sorghum still held about 200 prisoners when Sherman came to town, although up to 1,400 Federal officers had once been imprisoned in the open field.

In 1865, the Camp Sorghum site had no trees, in sharp contrast to the area today. The trees had been harvested for use. Likewise the bluff now inside the Riverbanks Zoo complex where Sherman's men encamped. Another contrast: When Sherman allegedly slept under his eponymous rock, one of the worlds largest textile mills, the Saluda Manufacturing Co., chartered in 1834, stood nearby on the bluff. (See photo below.) Today, all that remains of the mill are sections of its granite foundation, camouflaged by weeds, grasses and vines.

A portion of the 1834 Saluda
mill ruins at Riverbanks Zoo.
In 1855, a new owner renamed
the four-story factory The
Columbia Cotton Mill.

This sign tells visitors to the Riverbanks Zoo and Garden about
the cotton mill that operated along the Saluda River when Sherman
readied to raid Columbia, S.C. in 1865. Eighty looms and a thousand
women manufactured goods for the Confederate effort
during the American Civil War.

Zoo visitors can observe this ruin
of the destroyed Saluda River bridge
from the current pedestrian bridge.

To access the mill ruins and Sherman's Rock, our tour group (and myself on a later visit), crossed a narrow, pedestrian/tram bridge over the Saluda. The modern bridge stands where a covered bridge traversed the frolicking river waters during most of the Civil War years. Confederates burned down that bridge to impede the Union troops' advance to Columbia. But the Federals laid a pontoon bridge at the site, and by mid-afternoon on Feb. 16, 1865, the soldiers crossed the river under the protection of Union sharp-shooters on the top floor of the Columbia Cotton Mill.

Today, you can see four granite abutments of the old Saluda bridge that Confederates burned in an effort to halt Sherman's army.

Columbia after Sherman's descent on the South Carolina
capital in February 1865. This photo facing Main Street
was taken from the site where the nearly destroyed state
capitol stood. (See previous blogs for more about this.)
Photo, Library of Congress.

On the morning of February 17, 1865, Sherman observed that his troops had reached the Broad River, where they had also built another pontoon bridge and were preparing to advance into the heart of Columbia. (For clarification, three rivers converge in Columbia: the Broad, the Saluda and the Congaree. Confederates burned the bridges across those rivers, trying to stop Sherman's advance.)

During The Darkest Days of Sherman's campaign against South Carolina, Columbia's 20,000 residents suffered. Homes, businesses and buildings were plundered. In the end, two-thirds of the city's 124 blocks and nearly 500 buildings were destroyed, mostly by fire. Who started the fires and whether they were deliberate or accidental remains one of history's hot controversies.

Whether or not Sherman actually snoozed under a rock at the Riverbanks Zoo also sparks debate. As for me, Sherman's Rock makes a good story and a great destination for a hike through the woods at one of America's most interesting zoos.

SOURCES: Sherman, William T., Memoirs of General William T. Sherman (1865). Da Capo Paperback, 1984. New York; Battle For Columbia, Lexington (SC) County Chronicle, 2008; All photos, unless noted, were taken by B.J. Welborn. For more photos, go to PHOTOS page.

Part 2: Battlefields, Myths Of Lesser People, And My Rosetta

noreply@blogger.com (B.J. Welborn) — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 18:25:00 +0000

America’s history is an ongoing civil war.

— Chris Matthews, TV Commentator

In my last blog, I said I'd introduce you to Rosetta, an African-American maid who worked in my childhood home in North Carolina during the 1960s. Rosetta's story, I think, helps illustrate the historical disconnect between American ideals of equality and our carefully cultivated myths of lesser people that began with the first European explorers on New World soil.

President Abraham Lincoln presents his
Emancipation Proclamation to his cabinet in this
1864 painting by artist Francis Bicknell Carpenter.
Lincoln's history-making order freed
African Americans enslaved in the rebellious
(Confederate) states, where ironically, the federal
government's power wasn't recognized. Photo, Wikipedia.

If we read our nation’s story as a metaphorical civil war, the chapter about America’s actual Civil War epitomizes the fight. That fight took a sharp turn with President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 and viscerally continued through the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. (That's when my family hired Rosetta as a maid.) Myths of lesser people persist today in our nation's political, cultural and religious arenas.

In my book-in-progress about the Civil War and its legacy, Dear Father I Am Sorry To Tell You, I write about Rosetta against the background of the war in which African Americans sought recognition as soldiers on battlefields misty with prejudice, and newly freed slaves sought a place in a nation built on democratic principles. Even Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, often characterized as great a liberator as Lincoln, didn't know how to deal with the problems of freed slaves. (More on this later.)

The original Emancipation Proclamation

in President Lincoln’s handwriting.

Photo courtesy National Archives

and Records Administration

In my last blog, I explored the Civil War as one chapter of America’s ongoing story, often focusing on the war's legacy. While the Civil War ended slavery for African Americans (though slavery continues today in America, especially in the sex trade), the war did not end the myths of lesser people. They flourish today, in our nation's politics, culture and religion. I plan to further explore this topic and welcome your input.

Meanwhile, I introduce you to my Rosetta.

From Dear Father I Am Sorry To Tell You:

From the time I was born until I went to college, a long line of African-American women worked in our home. Some people in our town called these women housekeepers or domestics. In my middle-class neighborhood, we called them maids.

Most of our maids were industrious, upright and kind, but a few were none of these things. They screamed at us kids and hit us when our parents weren’t around. Beatrice once took my father’s belt and whipped the daylights out of my brother as he rolled on the ground begging for mercy. Annette told us lies, including where babies came from. Ethel ignored dust, stole our allowances and helped herself to the brandy my father hid in a kitchen cabinet for New Year’s Eve.

Our maids usually were young to middle-aged, but one maid, Rosetta, was bent, wrinkled and gray haired when she came to work for us in the1960s. Rosetta would have been well past retirement age, if retirement had been a possibility.

The neighborhood kids called Mr. and Mrs. Johnson, who lived across from us on Carr Street, “Mister Alsey” and Miz Faye.” We addressed Mr. and Mrs. Thomas, who lived a block up General Lee Avenue from us, as “Mister Tommy” and “Miz Julia.” We called Rosetta simply “Rosa.” I never knew her last name.

HISTORICAL DISCONNECT: This photo of the author, center,
her two sisters and one of our many "maids," whose name I don't
remember, was taken circa 1952 in my small-town,
N.C., home. My parents, who both worked full-time,
often six days a week,routinely left us in the care
of African-American employees. I've often contemplated
how working parents in my neighborhood, in a
disconnect between the American ideal of equality
and the reality of making economic ends meet, turned over
their most precious gifts — their children —
to the care of under-paid strangers, whom most
whites in my town regarded as lesser people.
Many maids came and went in our home as I grew up.

Most every day when I got home from junior high, Rosa already had cleaned the house – except for the kids’ rooms, which were our responsibilities - and taken the wash from the clothesline. She had a pan of hot bread pudding plumped with raisins waiting for us because it was my favorite. The smell of those bread puddings surrounded me in perfume of grace as soon as I walked through the door.

When I did something to anger my parents, Rosa defended me. Her sorghum words flowed over big, yellowed teeth that stuck out from her top lip, reminding me of the cowcatcher on a Durham and Southern locomotive.

“She didn’t mean no harm, Miz Lucille,” she’d say. “She didn’t mean no harm, Mista Ed.”

Of all the maids who came and went at our house, I liked Rosa best. She did things for me that others had no time to do.

Most of the mothers in my neighborhood worked as teachers, hair stylists, secretaries, bank tellers, nurses and bookkeepers. My Mother labored six days a week as

a self-taught bookkeeper in my father’s wholesale grocery business and other enterprises around town. When Rosetta became our maid, my mother was toiling relentless hours in her small clothing store, Lucille’s Shop, “For The Woman Who Cares.”

In my Southern small-town existence, I didn’t experience the magnolia women of ease depicted in Hollywood films and ill-informed sentimentality. What I saw was mothers trying to bring home the bacon, achieve independence and gain a little dignity. I saw black women doing white women’s household tasks, including the traditional work of child rearing, all for weekly wages of twenty bucks under the table.

Once I asked Mother why she paid Rosa only twenty dollars a week when she did so much.

“That’s what everybody pays,” she pointedly answered. “If I paid more, all the maids would demand more. They talk to each other. Our neighbors would never speak to me again.”

I’d often find Rosa bent over the ironing board in a corner of our kitchen, an electric fan making her homemade dress billow about her scrawny body. She’d sprinkle our garments with water from a Coca Cola bottle, then engineer the hot iron over them as sweat beads snaked from her head-kerchief down her face. Sweat slid past her thick bifocals and dropped from the tip of her nose. Rosa transformed our dirty laundry into crisp piles of cleanliness easily tucked into closets and drawers.

Sometimes, Rosa applied rags soaked in Clorox to whiten our enamel kitchen sinks until they shimmered. For supper she’d fry chicken or pork chops with gravy, boil green beans from our "lower forty" in ham-meat, and bake biscuits light as balloons.

After Rosa had washed our supper dishes and cleaned the kitchen floor with the dishpan water, she’d perch her bird-like self on a high stool and wait for my mother to drive her home. Rosa would sit on that stool with her back straight, her legs crossed at the ankles, her hands neatly folded across the pocketbook in her lap.
My mother didn’t live by a watch. Rosa always waited a long time to go home.

Misty Battlefields, Myths Of Lesser People, And My Rosetta

noreply@blogger.com (B.J. Welborn) — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 19:47:00 +0000

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

— George Bernard Shaw, Irish playwright

54th Massachusetts Colored Regiment re-enactors
pose at a Civil War event I attended not long ago. The real
unit suffered heavy casualties in the war under the leadership

of Col. Robert Gould Shaw of Boston. The 54th was
featured in the 1989 movie, "Glory." For more
information, go to PHOTOS page.

America's narrative — including the terrible chapter about the Civil War — has unfolded in an echo chamber of plots, characters and themes. The theme of racism, or the view that some among us are lesser people, has sounded throughout our nation's history since the first explorers landed on New World soil and continues today.

Columbus subjugated the natives; some natives joined whites — and some blacks — in slave ownership. The earliest settlers and the nation's forefathers ensured that slavery survived, ignoring the irony that men who fought for their own freedom from England might own, buy and sell slaves.

Thomas Jefferson, despite his eloquent defense of liberty and equality, possessed, exploited and allowed his slaves to face harsh punishments to ensure his elite, planter lifestyle. He didn’t free them when he died, as did George Washington.

"The Spirit of Freedom"memorial in Washington, D.C.,
honors African Americans who fought for the
Union during the Civil War. The memorial stands
near the African American Civil War Museum.

In the Civil War, even with its relentless need for warm bodies, North and South, the cultivated myths of lesser people couldn't be set aside. At first, anyway. In 1862, black military units formed in Kansas, South Carolina and Louisiana for the Union cause. After the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, when ending slavery became a goal of the war, the Union began recruiting African Americans into the United States Colored Troops, amid great controversy.

Though many Union leaders fought to keep African Americans out of the Federal military, ex-slaves and freed blacks joined the fighting ranks, sharpening the cutting edge for ending America's expensive and explosive institution of slavery. The notion of treating all people as equal in America continued a circuitous and painful path.

The chart below chronicles the growth of African-American numbers in the U.S. military, beginning with the Revolutionary War. The percentage has

grown steadily throughout the nation's history. Four times the number of blacks fought for the British as for the Patriot cause. The British offered freedom to slaves if they abandoned their masters and helped suppress the push for American independence. Delivery on that promise proved spotty.

Through the centuries, the battlefield — whether land, sea or air — has provided African Americans a proving ground for manhood. The rigors of war offered a time and place to exhibit the personal traits of courage, competence and cleverness that Americans traditionally honor as measures of worth. Yet, even when great character was proven, the American ideal of equality often succumbed to the reality of seeing some people as less worthy. The mist of short-term memory and lack of historical literacy can obscure African Americans battlefield triumphs today.

Early in 1865, toward the end of the Civil War, the Confederate Congress approved a bill allowing slaves to become legitimate soldiers. Until then, African Americans had been hired out by their masters to fight or were impressed to work in support services for the rebel cause. That spring, the Confederacy moved to train and arm African American troops, but less than 50 men actually were recruited. *

Buffalo Soldiers of the 25th Infantry Regiment, U.S.

Army, 1890. Photo, courtesy Wikipedia.

An estimated 200,000 African-American men fought in the Union army. Up to 90,000 African Americans served the Confederacy in some capacity, usually in back-breaking tasks to support troops. Exact numbers remain controversial among scholars and lay historians alike. Misconceptions continue.

“Growing up in California, I was told many more blacks fought for the Confederacy instead of the Union,” Marvin Greer, a young re-enactor told me at a Civil War battle event recently. Greer, then a student at Morehouse College, said he began studying the war seriously after seeing the 1989 movie, “Glory.”

“I’ve been able to dispel some myths,” he said.

When the Civil War ended in 1865, federal soldiers went West to fight another version of lesser people in the American Indian Wars. This despite the fact the U.S. Senate passed the freedom-expanding Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution on April 8, 1864. The amendment outlawed slavery. Some soldiers, including George Armstrong Custer, saw the new battlefields as a place to prove their mettle and move up the military ranks. General Custer made his legendary last stand fighting the Lakota (Sioux) at the Battle of Little Big Horn in Montana.

I collected autographs of surviving

Tuskegee Airmen, who were honored

at an air show in Camden, S.C. Find more

about the WWII aces on PHOTOS page.

The U.S. Army units assigned to round up American Indians on the western frontier and move them to reservations included the all-black "Buffalo Soldiers." These troops were members of the U.S. 10th Cavalry Regiment, formed in 1866 in Fort Leavenworth, Kan. The units' nickname possibly originated with American Indians, who likened the soldiers' hair to that of the buffalo. Other theories say black troops earned the moniker because they fought as ferociously as cornered bison.

The nickname stuck to all four regiments of the "Negro Cavalry." Eighteen Buffalo Soldiers were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. The units remained active until 1951, participating in six more wars, including World War II.

It's worth noting here that American Indian tribes often subjugated prisoners of war into slavery. When the Civil War erupted, up to 7 percent of the Cherokee of North Carolina owned African-American slaves. Many Cherokees fought for the Confederacy. About 5 percent of Southern whites owned slaves at the time.

Beyond "Glory," Hollywood also captured the trials and triumphs of blacks in the U.S. military in "Red Tails." The 2012 movie tells the story of the nearly 1,000 Tuskegee Airmen who participated in the great World War II "experiment" to allow "Negros" to fly airplanes in war. Before 1940, African Americans were barred from flying in the military. Civil rights groups pushed for a black squadron, which was based in Tuskegee, Ala.

In 1941, the airmen began training in hand-me-down airplanes at a remote airfield near the Tuskegee Institute, founded by famous Afrian-American educator Booker T. Washington. (More about my visit to Tuskegee on the PHOTOS page.)

A group of Tuskegee Airmen, 1943,
at their training field in Tuskegee,
Ala. Photo courtesy Wikipedia.

"The program was designed for us to fail,"said LeRoy Bowman, 90, a Tuskegee Airman in an interview this year with a Columbia, S.C., newspaper. Bowman and other Airmen from the state that triggered the Civil War were being honored for their WWII service. "They had no intentions of us succeeding." (Bowman's autograph appears in the above photo at top of the right column.)

This representation of a slave boat
packed with bodies is part of the
African American History Memorial
on the lawn of the S.C. State House
in Columbia. The memorial was built in
2001 as part of a compromise to remove the
Confederate battle flag from atop the
capitol and fly it in front of the building.

But succeed they did. The Tuskegee Airmen flew at least 15 combat sorties and 170 bomber escort missions. Airmen earned 96 Distinguished Flying Crosses, 14 Bronze Stars, one Silver Star, and eight Purple Hearts. In 2006, President George Bush presented the Congressional Gold Medal Award to 300 surviving Tuskegee Airmen, including Bowman. Sixty-six Tuskegee pilots died in action before the program was deactivated in 1946 at war's end.

Despite profound progress in race relations in the United States,
change in persistent perceptions remain, caught in the echo chambers of history. Read more in my next blog.
###

COMING SOON: Part 2 of "Misty Battlefields, Myths Of Lesser People, And My Rosetta."
Join me in exploring the historical disconnect of our American ideal of equality from our intractable myths of lesser people. I'll introduce you to Rosetta, one of many African-American "maids" who worked from early morning to late evening in my childhood home in North Carolina.

From my book-in-progress, Dear Father I Am Sorry To Tell You, about the Civil War and its legacy:

Our maids usually were young to middle-aged, but one maid, Rosetta, was bent, wrinkled and gray haired when she came to work for us in the mid-1960s. Rosetta would have been well past retirement age, if retirement had been a possibility.

For more, go to PREVIEWS page.

###

* In spring 1865, free blacks of New Orleans formed a regiment of "Native Guards" for the Louisiana militia.
** U.S. Department of Defense, November 2012

SOURCES: McPherson, James M. The American Heritage New History of The Civil War. Barnes and Noble, New York. 2005. XXX, “XX,” Smithsonian magazine, November 2012. “American Experience,” PBS. Online at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/alaska-WWII. Bernstein, R.B. “Thomas Jefferson.” Oxford University Press, 2003. U.S. Department of Defense. Civil War Homepage online at http://www.civil-war.net/searchstates.asp?searchstates=Total; African American Civil War Memorial and Museum online at http://afroamcivilwar.org. Tindall, George and Shi, David, AMERICA, A Narrative History. Norton and Co., New York, 1996. Flanagan, Anne-Katherine. "They Had No Intentions Of Us Succeeding," The State newspaper, Columbia, S.C. Oct. 9, 2012.

‘Lonely And Bereft' Soldier Burnishes Confederate Gold Legend

noreply@blogger.com (B.J. Welborn) — Sat, 28 Jul 2012 18:08:00 +0000

Robert Welborn Pickens’ 15 minutes of fame came at age 98, in November 1945. Pickens, who confided to relatives he was "lonely and bereft" after the death of his wife of 65 years, told a local newspaper that as an 18-year-old Confederate soldier in 1865, he had guarded a train car carrying wooden kegs filled with the now-legendary "Confederate Gold."

Col. Robert Welborn Pickens
at age 98. He claimed that as a
young soldier, he guarded the
legendary Confederate Gold.

The legend goes that as Richmond fell to Union forces at the end of the Civil War, fleeing rebel soldiers smuggled the last of the Confederate treasury South. Tales of a huge sum of money — from $100,000 to millions of dollars — clandestinely traveled by rail to a secret place, where Confederate supporters buried it "until the South shall rise again."

My ancestor’s story might have been over the rainbow, but tales of Confederate gold smuggled out of Richmond as it fell have survived 150 years. One version of the story claims the treasury — much of it from France, which supported the Confederate cause — traveled to western North Carolina, where it was buried in a remote area or was hidden in a mansion or a church.

S.C. Map pinpoints location of

Anderson, where my ancestor

said the remains of the Confederate

treasury were hidden in a train car.

Confederate President Jeff Davis passed

through the state en route to Georgia.

Other stories allege the gold was transported to various places in Georgia and South Carolina. Another version of “The Legend Of Confederate Gold” purports political scoundrels or highway robbers made off with the booty. Folklore also suggests rebel soldiers buried it near Charlotte, N.C., where Confederate States of America President Jeff Davis briefly stayed as he fled Richmond after Lee’s surrender. Some claim the treasury ended up in South Georgia, where Union forces captured Davis on May 10, 1865.

What happened to the treasury, if it in fact existed by spring 1865, still stokes tall tales and wild pursuit of the gold’s hiding place today. But according to Col. Robert Welborn Pickens of Upstate South Carolina, the Confederate gold indeed was real. He said he saw the kegs of gold himself in Anderson, S.C., near his rural home in Pickens County.

“Insofar as known, Col. Pickens is the only man alive who actually saw kegs of gold belonging to the Confederate Treasury,” the Anderson Daily Mail declared in an article dated Nov. 22, 1945.

From research, I've learned that as a teen, Pickens enlisted in Co. G of the 2nd Battalion of the State Reserve of South Carolina in 1865. By then, the state relied on old men and boys to fight the enemy on its home soil as its most able soldiers fought in Virginia — or had already died in battle.

The article about the old Civil War
soldier from a 1945 edition of
The Anderson (S.C.) Daily Mail

Pickens also told of the Confederate gold in a 1947 letter to my Great Aunt Kate. I uncovered this letter and several others from Pickens, as well as the newspaper article, while researching my book-in-progress about the Civil War and its legacy, Dear Father I Am Sorry To Tell You.

Col. Pickens said Confederate guards had moved the gold-laden train car to a rail siding in Anderson, S.C. The town served as a major stop on the old Greenville and Columbia Railroad, part of an interstate rail network, on the night he watched over it. Of course, Pickens, father of five and widowed for 12 years, also claimed in his letter that his ancestry went back to “Noah Pickens,” the biblical figure whom God “picked” to build an ark and save the “Pickings” of the ancient world from flooding.

Pickens' headstone rests in a historic
cemetery near Easley, S.C. The stone
reads: R Welborn Pickens; Enlisted
Co. G. 2 Battllion, State Reserve
of S.C.; Last Confederate State
Veteran from Upper So. Carolina.

“According to sacred history,” the old soldier wrote, “all the great men of Bible time were ‘Pickings,’ picked out for great things. Little by little, people changed the name spelling to ‘Pickens.’" Col. Pickens told my Great Aunt Kate that friends put the “Colonel” before his name as a matter of tradition and respect.

Pickens died on Feb. 19, 1948, at age 100, not long after his interview with the Daily Mail. In his newspaper interview, Pickens said he began plowing the fields of his Upstate farm at age 9 and plowed until age 91. In his letter that survives in my family papers he said old age and widowhood had left him “lonely and bereft.” He enclosed in the letter a poem he wrote in memory of his late wife Kate. Titled “Lonely and Bereft,” Col. Pickens dedicated his paean “In Memory of my beloved wife with whome (sic) I lived sixty five years.”

Here’s the cover of the old Confederate soldier’s poem, in his own handwriting. For the complete poem, go to the LETTERS page. For more, go to PHOTOS page.

The cover of my ancestral cousin Robert Welborn Pickens' poem "Lonely and Bereft."
The old Confederate soldier penned the poem on notebook paper not long before he died in 1948.
You'll find Pickens' complete poem on the LETTERS page.

Reading the lonely and bereft soldier's poem, I wonder if Col. Pickens, his head in a cloud of nostalgia as he awaited death, hoped to become a legend himself. Maybe we all spin legends when life — and history — prove too hard to bear.

###

SOURCES: Various internet sites, including http://www.amazon.com/Confederate-Gold-Treasure-Bill-Westhead/dp/0759668523/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1342125476&sr=1-1&keywords=Confederate+Gold; Cadia Barbee Welborn Papers, Southern Historical Collection, UNC at Chapel Hill; Edgar, Walter. “South Carolina: A History. University of South Carolina Press, 1998. Page 283. Find A Grave, thanks to Herb Parham III.

The War Between The States Of Mind: Romantics Vs. Realists

noreply@blogger.com (B.J. Welborn) — Mon, 28 May 2012 17:25:00 +0000

The Confederate battle flag flies near
my Columbia, S.C., home. Do Civil
War romanticists live here?

Why does the Civil War ignite emotional explosives 150 years later? I've come up with an answer. In times of trouble, Americans historically divide into two ideological camps. On one side of the feud: the romantics. When it comes to the Civil War, they’re intoxicated by principles, crusading and heroism, or at least their version of it. You’ll find these romantics dressed in period clothing at battle re-enactments, some impersonating heroes whose glory has shrunk to paragraphs in textbooks.

I know this type well. My late father, a Revolutionary War re-enactor, was one. I loved his view of life.

On the other side: the realists, beguiled by pragmatism, compromise and anti-heroism, or at least their version of it. I know this type, too. I’m the quintessential realist. My father and I carried on lively discussions about religion, history and politics around the dinner table. Dad humored me, despite his objections written plainly on his face. We ate dessert with more understanding and higher regard for each other’s views.

Romancing the war: Re-enactors
face off in the Civil War "battle" I
attended at Tunnel Hill, Ga.

Just as our forefathers clashed when they hammered out the Constitution, today’s ideological armies continue our War Between The States of Mind that the Constitution, the epitome of compromise, made possible. I’m grateful my Dad compromised and granted his "hard-headed" daughter free agency on life's important matters.

From my book-in-progress, Dear Father I Am Sorry To Tell You, about the Civil War and its legacy:

My father, Ed, 2nd from left, and
his "Revolutionary" comrades, 1972.
Photo, The Dunn (N.C.) Dispatch

In time, our backyard warehouse became too crowded for Dad's broken, boyhood bicycle. Dad parked it outside, where it kept company with a woodpile, a two-toned Desoto with foot-high tail fins and a 1961 baby-blue Chrysler. In this winged chariot, Dad traveled the Southeast as a salesman for a ladies coat and suit firm out of Kansas City. That job ended in heartache and another heart attack. Old oil stoves, an iron grain scale, thirty years worth of magazines and barrels of sorghum salvaged from his life as a wholesale grocer huddled under the warehouse eaves until after my father died.

The pumpkin-colored bicycle became Exhibit A in Dad’s series of life lessons: Damn fools are everywhere. You’re not safe even on the sidewalk. Never go barefoot. Park under a streetlight. Exercise. Eat every kind of food, in moderation. Vote for the least-dangerous son-of-a-bitch. Lock the doors and check ‘em twice. Pick the ends off bananas. Don’t fall for no kook.

I asked Dad how I’d know a kook if I met one.

Experiencing "war."

“You’ll know,” he said. I would laugh.

“Tell me what you mean by a kook or I might fall for one.”

“You’ll know.”

I suspected Dad’s definition of kook included Yankees, along with the usual suspects: Communists, “pointy-headed intellectuals,” drunks, bureaucrats, “Hollywood nuts,” atheists, “money monkeys,” liberals and journalists. I failed to pry specifics from him. I went about life a free agent, subject to signing on with a kook.

Years after my father died at age fifty-nine, I married a Jersey boy. He was real smart, but as far as I could tell, he wasn’t a pointy-headed intellectual, and being a journalist, he for sure wasn’t a money monkey, or Hollywood nut.

The standoff between romantics, who by nature assume their own infallibility, and realists, whose views must evolve to keep their sanity, goes way back in my family, as I suspect it does in most tribes. When North Carolina joined the Confederacy in 1861, my ancestral cousin, Lyndon Magee Welborn, a young romantic, quickly signed up to fight, despite his father Joseph’s realistic objections to secession and war. And, more proof of his romantic nature, Lyndon apparently volunteered after big brother Elijah broke up his courtship. (See March 2011 blog in Archives.)

Why did Elijah break up Lyndon’s courtship? Did Lyndon fall for a kook?

As proof that the still Civil War rends our nation into either the romantic or realists camps, check out these contemporary labels for the war:

Spectators at Tunnel Hill

The Unpleasantness: How romantic can a Charleston tour guide get?

War of Northern Aggression: How romantic can neo-Confederates get?

War of Southern Rebellion: Pro-Union writers’ realism on steroids

War For Southern Independence/War of Secession: Romantic conformation theorizing that states’ rights rule. Forever.

War For The Union: Uber abolitionists’ romantic excuse to fight

America’s Second Revolution: Eternal fave of historians in the realism camp

And consider the two most common names:

The reality of the American Civil War.
Photo, Library of Congress.

War Between The States: Fashionable in the post-war South, the name romantically justifies the war’s causes and consequences to fit a historical comfort zone. Although the curmudgeon writer in me thinks it should be The War Among The States, since 36 states battled, I get it. A line in the sand split Americans into two economic, cultural and to some extent religious sides. The states sank into unresolved hostilities rooted in Colonial America. This dangerous “you’re-either-for-us-or-against-us” mentality dogs America to this day.

Scene at a Civil War hospital.
Photo, Library of Congress.

The Civil War: The oldest, most common name used by Abe Lincoln, Generals Grant and Lee, Jefferson Davis, academics, mass media, reference books and the National Park Service. Since the dictionary defines civil war as “a war between opposing groups of citizens of the same country" this moniker seems the most realistic and least caustic.

I’m convinced any label but “Civil War” reflects a revisionist view of history that often manifests as crusading intolerance and refusal to politically compromise. But there is no purity of mind. My father could rattle off Civil War facts, but what he loved was the heroism of the warrior who beat the odds and stood up for principle. His mindset reflected the romance of the underdog American patriot and later the Confederate. It's an American thing. I get it.

War's harsh reality marched into
Charleston, S.C., cradle of the rebellion,
150 years ago. Photo, Library of Congress.

When my father died, his fellow Revolutionary soldiers gave him a military funeral complete with drums, bugle and presentation of the colors to my mother. On that clear October day, I remember thinking, “Dad would have loved this.” A romantic end for a true romantic.

Maybe when all is said and done, it’s not what happened in the Civil War but how you feel about what happened. But if we're to learn from history, we must replace conflict and contrariness with consideration and compromise.

So says the realist, in a most romantic way.

SOURCES: Isaacson, Walter, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life. Simon & Schuster, 2003. "Naming The American Civil War," Wikipedia. Barry, John M., "God, Government and Roger Williams' Big Idea." Smithsonian magazine. January 2012.

* Unless otherwise noted, all photos were taken by B.J. Welborn and are copyrighted.

A Prison Of A Different Kind: Robert's Story Continued

noreply@blogger.com (B.J. Welborn) — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 14:41:00 +0000

Reality becomes a prison for those who can’t get out of it.

— Joyce Cary, Anglo-Irish novelist

A monument at Andersonville National
Historic Site in rural Georgia depicts
the suffering Civil War POWs faced.
Photo, Eastern National Park and
Monument Association.

Gruesome statistics only hint at the shocking suffering and hellish deaths prisoners of war endured during the American Civil War. Nearly 30,000 men among the 194,000 imprisoned Federals and 26,000 soldiers of the 215,000 captured Confederates died by war’s end. It's estimated that 56,000 men perished in prison camps, usually hastily built and open to the elements.

At Camp Douglas in Chicago, nearly 18 Confederate warriors succumbed to hunger, deprivation and disease each day. In rural Georgia’s infamous Andersonville Prison, about 100 Union soldiers died daily by 1864, nearly 13,000 total. Prison conditions North and South were equally horrendous, as documented in letters, dairies and photos.

I can understand a soldier’s preference for heroic death on the battlefield over the possibility of tormented death in prison.

My ancestor, Robert McFarland Welborn, bewildered, wistful and sick, gave an interesting if somewhat mundane glimpse of life at a Confederate prison in northeastern North Carolina in a letter to his father. Robert, recently drafted at age 17 into the N.C. Junior Reserves, wrote from Camp Weldon, where his unit was stationed, in the summer of 1864:

Aug the 5th 1864

My Dear Father

I take the opportunity this morning to write you a few lines to let you know that I am well and harty and i hope thes few lines will find you well

…

They have got two of our boys in the guard house here and have had them ther a month

there was a yankee broke out of the guard house and the guard shot two balls through him and killed him dead on the spot

there was two boys got into a dispute and they got to fighting and one of them stabed the other in the shulder but did not hurt him overly bad

…

This period photo
captures the horrors
of Civil War prisoners
at Andersonville
prison camp. Photo,
Library of Congress.

The routine — and common — opening line of Robert’s report on everyday soldiering life belies his true circumstances at Camp Weldon, where he had little to eat and suffered an illness that soon would hospitalize him. But Robert continues his business-as-usual tone in describing the violence and death in the prison yard. Had Robert already experienced so much of war’s hardness that he had become hardened? Or were these musings the simple observations of an overwhelmed farm boy. Or both?

More of Robert’s letter, hand-written on a notepad, lacking punctuation and full of misspellings:

we are formed into a regment Armistead* is our colonel Broadfoot is lieu col Lineberry captain … and if the war lasts and they don’t get us kilt you may have my hat

One side of the letter my ancestral
cousin, Robert McFarland Welborn, 17,
wrote to his father Joseph in 1864.
For full letter, go to LETTERS page.

the doctor says he will send me to camp holms (Holmes in Raleigh, N.C.) befor long to be examined again he says I am not any count in service and i think he is about haf right

i am going to try to get off every day but i think it will be a hard chore if i get to go to Camp Holms i think i will get off or signed to light duty but i do not want to go to hospital duty for it is as hard as regular ….. but they get to sleep in the house and get better rations than what we get

i was at the election yesterday and at Weldon got word was that Govner Vance** got most of the vote that was given

i bring my letter to a close write as soon and tell me the news and tell me how corn looking and whether you got your (illegible word) out or not

tell all the boys….. that was 17 when I left home (they) had better come Oh if they knowed when they was best off

no more at present but another day

your son R M Welborn

Between the pedestrian lines of everyday news, Robert lamented the sorry reality of his soldiering life, a life he apparently dreamed of escaping ("I'm going to try to get off") but couldn’t, at least then. While researching my Civil War book-in-progress, Dear Father I Am Sorry To Tell You, I'v uncovered three military documents that hint Robert’s situation in fact did later change.

Copy of Robert M.
Welborn's application
for pension in 1918. For more
on Robert, see previous blogs.

Document 1: Robert’s handwritten resignation, dated May 18, 1864; Document 2, dated July 13, 1864, confirming Robert was “transferred to hospital;” and, Document 3, dated Aug. 10, 1864, alleging Robert had “deserted.”

Desertion usually meant being absent without leave for more than 30 days. I don’t know if Robert actually deserted the Confederate ranks, as did thousands toward war’s end, when defeat seemed inevitable and families at home suffered enormously. Deserters especially spiked among men from the area of North Carolina that Robert called home, the substantially pro-Union, anti-secession Randolph County, N.C. (See previous blogs.)

Haphazard record-keeping could explain the change from “Absent, transferred to hospital,” to “Deserted Camp Weldon Aug. 10th”. What I know for sure is that on July 18, 1918, more than 50 years later, North Carolina granted Robert his request for a soldier’s pension.

Robert stated in his pension application that he is the owner of a house and lot assessed at $500.00 but that he can’t make a living or support himself as there is not sufficient land for farming.

I’m left wondering if the boy soldier, who personified the ordinary guy caught in the extraordinary human disaster of the Civil War, ever really escaped his prison.

###

* Col. Frank S. Armistead, a West Pointer and brother of Gen. Lewis A. Armistead, who died at Gettysburg; Lt. Co. Charles W. Broadfoot; and, Capt. W.S. Lineberry

** Zebulon Vance, a Confederate colonel, was reelected as North Carolina’s 43^rd governor in 1864.

SOURCES: The American Heritage New History of the Civil War, Barnes and Noble, New York. 1996. Jorgensen, Kathryn. “Historian Persists In Efforts To Correct Record, Honor Deceased”, Civil War News. December 2010. Online at http://www.civilwarnews.com/archive/articles/2010/dec/correctrecord-121002.html; Cadia Barbee Welborn Papers, Southern Historical Collection, UNC at Chapel Hill; Bollinger, J. Mark, and Landrum, Brneda G., “The Story of Andersonville Prison and American Prisoners of War,” Andersonville National Historic Site. 1987. Marin, Rick, “The Infamous Stockade,” Newsweek. March 4, 1996. North Carolina State Archives.

Unraveling The Story Of A Soldier With An Attitude, And Young

noreply@blogger.com (B.J. Welborn) — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 18:48:00 +0000

Following a convoluted paper trail, I’ve learned more about one ancestral Confederate cousin than I know about most of my living blood relatives. From various Civil War military documents I know, among other things, that Private Robert McFarland Welborn:

- Stood 5 feet 10 inches and had dark hair and blue eyes;

- Mustered into the 1st Regiment, Co. F, of the N.C. Junior Reserves on May 30, 1864;

One side of the original letter that my ancestor, Robert
McFarland Welborn, wrote to his father Joseph
in late summer 1864 from Halifax County, N.C. A
family member punched the holes in the letter, written
in pencil on a folded sheet of paper. For entire letter,
go to LETTERS page.

- Had passed his 17th birthday by just 25 days when the Confederacy drafted him;

- Left his father’s Randolph County farm in May 1864 for duty at Camp Holmes near Raleigh;

- Served in east-central N.C.’s Camp Weldon, home of Wayside Hospital #9 and a prison.

And from a letter home, I know Robert:

- Suffered an illness in the summer of 1864 that sidelined him from service;

- Had attitude.

Of course Robert had attitude. He was the youngest of widower Joseph Welborn’s 10 children and was only five months old when his mother Parthena died. I think it's possible, under the controversial "birth order" theory that youngest siblings learn exceptional competition skills to get attention and resources, Robert probably was a scrapper.

Here's what teenager Robert wrote to his father from Camp Weldon:

Aug the 5^th 1864

My Dear Father

. . . if the war lasts and they don’t get us kilt you may have my hat if we ever go into battle with them it will not last long i heard several of the boys say they would kill (them) as quick as they wuld a sheep-killing dog and I would not stand back much . . .

Robert’s bring-it-on attitude likely made up for many losses. In 1863, his older brother, Lyndon — the protagonist of my book-in-progress, Dear Father I Am Sorry To Tell You — died in battle while defending Richmond, the Confederate capital. Then the Confederacy drafted two other reluctant brothers, even as father Joseph objected to secession and the war.

North Carolina map shows location
of the town of Weldon in Halifax County,
home to a Confederate fort, a prison
and a hospital during the Civil War.

Robert probably realized that by late 1864, the Confederacy was running out of steam and just about everything else it would take to win. Federal forces were scoring key victories in the Western Theater, things were souring in the Eastern Theater, and Sherman was about to tighten a noose around the South after taking Atlanta.

But just how much could Robert see of the war’s big picture from his outpost in a Halifax County, N.C., near the border with Virginia, where battles raged? Was his youthful bravado an effort to survive by believing something was possible despite evidence to the contrary? Seems to me that sentiment fortified Confederate fighters right up to the end.

In his book, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Dr. Stephen Covey asserts that to be successful, a person must begin something with the final outcome in mind. We must visualize what we can’t yet see, then follow our mental vision with physical creation. With an optimistic outlook, a person maximizes his ability to get through adversity.

So it was with Confederate warriors still hanging in the fight to the end, I imagine. So it was with Robert, despite illness, debt, hunger and homesickness. More from his letter, written in pencil on a folded sheet of paper, full misspellings and lacking punctuation:

View today of the Civil War cemetery
near the site of Camp Weldon in
northeastern North Carolina. Photo,
N.C. Division United Daughters
of the Confederacy, Chapter 22.

. . . i have got my resicnation (resignation) and I do not hav any thing to do our doctor relived (relieved) me from duty i have not done any duty sinse I resinad (resigned)

the doctor says he will send me to camp holms (Camp Holmes in Raleigh, N.C.) befor long to be examined again he says i am not any count in service and i think he is about haf right

we get one pint of corn meal and it is not sifted and hardly ground the grains is cracked we often find whole grains we git some kind of a houn (hound*) meat a day i am in debt $17 and know hopes of drawing any money to pay it

i would like to be at home to eat beans and rosten ears (roasted ears of corn) i am going to try to get off every day but i think it will be a hard chore

your son R M Welborn

Despite personal hardship and the Confederacy's long-shot chance of victory, it seems Robert still imagined giving the Yanks a whoopen'. Maybe a spoonful of optimism helped him survive the war.

Robert applied for a soldier's pension in July 1918 and died seven years later on Aug. 16, 1925, at age 76. He was buried in the family cemetery in Randolph County, N.C., near his father Joseph and his fallen older brother, Lyndon.

###

* NOTE: I take Robert's reference to "houn meat" to mean the meat of deer or other animals tracked down by bloodhounds as food for the soldiers. The Confederacy also used bloodhounds to help guard prisoners. If you can enlighten me about Robert's reference to "houn meat," please go to the COMMENTS page and post a message.

SOURCES: North Carolina State Archives; Weymouth T. Jordan, Jr. and Louis H. Manarin,"North Carolina Troops, 1861-1865, A Roster," 1985; U.S. Census; Cadia Barbee Welborn Papers, Southern Historical Collection, UNC at Chapel Hill; Welborn family genealogical documents

COMING SOON: Private Robert McFarland Welborn's account of an incident at Camp Weldon prison. See PREVIEWS page.

Courage, Claustrophobia And The Confederate Sub Hunley

noreply@blogger.com (B.J. Welborn) — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 20:02:00 +0000

Courage is doing what you're afraid to do. There can be no courage unless you're scared. — Edward V. Rickenbacker, American WWI Fighting Ace*

A cutaway of a life-size model
of the Confederate sub Hunley
at the S.C. State Museum shows
the claustrophobic conditions
under which the vessel's eight-man
crew worked in 1864.

When I saw the sailor bent over the crankshaft in the CSS Hunley model, I thought drums were beating in some far reach of the museum. Then I realized my heart was pounding in my ears. A wave of claustrophobia crashed over me.

I edged closer to a cutaway in the iron skin of a replica of the Confederate sub to inspect the life-size mannequin. He sat on a narrow bench inside the sub’s cramped belly, bent over a long crankshaft. When the sub's crewmen, elbow to elbow, turned the crankshaft on a winter's night in 1864, a single rear propeller pushed the lethal “torpedo fish” through the black waters of Charleston Harbor.

By candlelight they toiled, a crude arrangement of pipes and bellows periodically substituting fresh air for stale air when the sub neared the surface. A line of silver dollar-sized portholes marked the sub's stealthy progress toward the Federal blockader Housatonic.

The famous oil painting of the
Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley
by Conrad Wise Chapman, 1863.
Photo, National Underwater
and Marine Agency.

The Hunley's crew, no doubt, fought fear. Already, 22 men had perished while testing the 40-foot-long, 4.5-foot-tall, arms-length-wide Confederate submarine, a fact that compelled the Confederacy to demand that only volunteers could board the Hunley for its deadly assignment nearly 150 years ago. Yet, eight men went down the hatch and entombed themselves in the iron fish’s bowels for something they believed in, right or wrong.

Stonewall Hilton of Friends of the
Hunley shows the size of portholes
on the Confederate submarine,
depicted in a recent drawing.
For more, see PHOTOS page.

I revisited the life-sized model of the Hunley recently at the South Carolina State Museum in Columbia, where Stonewall "Stoney" Hilton was lecturing to mark the Civil War sesquicentennial. Hilton, a former Navy petty officer, volunteers with the organization Friends of the Hunley. The group supports scientists, archaeologists and historians who work to unravel the iron sub’s mystery at a laboratory and museum in Charleston.

Hilton told the group gathered one Saturday that the museum's Hunley model, a bit shorter and wider than the real artifact now being studied, reflected a famous oil painting by Conrad Wise Chapman rendered in 1863. The resurrection of the real thing in August 2000, five years after its discovery on the ocean floor in 1995, set a few things straight. Hilton said that in addition to the model size being incorrect, the sub's "spar torpedo" actually was attached to the bottom of the vessel's nose (see drawing at left) instead of the top.

Hilton said that when a team of marine archeologists raised the Hunley from the ocean floor and the crewmembers’ remains were discovered still at their posts, we learned that the men’s heights ranged from 5 feet 6 inches to 6 feet even. That means the tallest sailor probably had no choice but continually to hunch over the crankshaft when the sub departed the shores of the first state to secede from the Union.

The resurrected H.L. Hunley
gets kid-glove treatment at the
specially built Warren Lasch
Conservation Center in Charleston.

Hours later, the Hunley blasted 300 years of submarine history by becoming the first manned submersible combat vessel to sink an “enemy” ship. Never mind “the enemy” was the United States of America.

***

It happened on the night of Feb. 17, 1864. The Hunley swam through moonlit waters off Sullivan’s Island to its target, 4 miles off shore. The crew rammed the sub's bow into the wooden hull of the Housatonic, depositing the spar torpedo loaded with 130 pounds of gunpowder. The crew quickly reversed the crankshaft, unfurling 100 feet of cord attached to the bomb. As the cord stretched taut, the torpedo exploded, blowing away the Housatonic’s stern.

Within three minutes, the 16-gun sloop-of-war sank. No one, Union or Confederate, died in the explosion. The Hunley dove deep, awash in victory. Yet, the sub's crew never made it back to shore. The heroes’ welcome awaiting them never took place. For more than 140 years, the submarine rested on its starboard side at a 45-degree angle, beneath 30 feet of water. As years passed, three feet of silt and ever-growing myths engulfed the Civil War sub.

View of the propeller
on the Hunley model.

Since its 2000 resurrection, Hunley researchers ensured the sub remained at the same angle as it rested on the ocean floor in a specially designed tank of freshwater at the Warren Lasch Conservation Center, built largely with public funds. Last summer, scientists completed a slow rotation to expose the Hunley’s underbelly in their search to answer the question, “How did the crew die?”

“We’d love to know that,” Hilton said.

Studies of crew members' remains have confirmed they did not perish in the torpedo explosion. At rescue, their bodies still sat at their posts, indicating they died without panic. Leading theories suggest suffocation.

What if the Hunley had returned to shore? I asked Hilton after his presentation.

“The Confederacy would have ordered 10 more subs,” Hilton said with a shrug and a smile. “And people in Boston might be whistling ‘Dixie’ today.”

In 2004, the Hunley crew finally received its heroes' welcome. Thousands of people attended a memorial service and burial for them in Charleston. In the last Confederate burial, horse-drawn caissons accompanied by a procession in period dress took the eight men to a final resting place in Charleston’s Magnolia Cemetery, next to the others who lost their lives testing the submarine.

Like many attending the Charleston ceremonies, I see the Hunley as an icon to the abundance of courage, inventiveness, and strength of Americans during the Civil War. But I wish Southerners would stop posing the question, “What if?" This prolongs the historical claustrophobia already surrounding The Lost Cause and keeps old wounds from healing. We should honor courage, but we need to take a hard look at the cultural claustrophobia worshiping fallen heroes can keep alive.

###

REST IN PEACE: Lt. George E. Dixon, Hunley commander; Arnold Becker; Corp. J. F. Carlsen; Frank Collins; _ Lumpkin; _ Miller; James A. Wicks and Joseph Ridgaway. Hunley designer and namesake, Horace L. Hunley, died in a test run of the submarine.

* Edward Vernon Rickenbacker (Oct. 8, 1890 – July 27, 1973), an American fighter ace in World War I, was awarded the Medal of Honor and numerous other citations for courage. He also won fame as a race car driver, automotive designer, military consultant, pioneer in air transportation and as the longtime chief of Eastern Air Lines.

COMING SOON: More on my Confederate ancestors. See PREVIEWS page.

Bull Run Redux: Washington Wars and The End Of Innocence

noreply@blogger.com (B.J. Welborn) — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 16:45:00 +0000

In July 1861, newly minted Confederate forces clustered around Manassas Junction, 25 miles southwest of Washington, near a snaky little river known as Bull Run. Under public pressure, untested Union troops took them on. At the end of the momentous, two-day clash of amateurs in the First Battle of Bull Run, the Federals fled in defeat; the Confederates puffed up with victory; and the nation realized that Civil War would not be brief, brilliant or bloodless. It was an end of innocence.

And so it was, all over again in the steamy July of 2011, after the unbearable political bloodletting over raising the debt ceiling. The U.S. Congress, held hostage by a rebellious minority under the guise of virtue and principle, took the entire country to the precipice of disaster. If we had any illusion that politicians would work out differences on the economy without leading America close to debt default, more joblessness and market chaos, the July battle marked our end of innocence.

Woodcut of First Battle
of Bull Run, also called
the First Battle of Manassas.
Library of Congress.

At the heart of it? South Carolina, of course. Again. Seems the anointed leaders of the state can’t help but cling to their historic role of fomenting rebellion, as it was 150 years ago when the Palmetto State became the first state to secede from the Union, ensuring a protracted war that would claim more than 620,000 lives and bring the South to its knees for decades.

All five South Carolina Republicans in the U.S. House defended their belief that the federal budget must be eviscerated while they refused to raise taxes to support growing needs of an expanding, aging population. The S.C. Five continued their fight for tax breaks for the super-rich, apparently in line with the way of life they protect for themselves and envision as The American Dream for others.

In this summer's War In Washington, South Carolina made its mark as the state with the only solid front of GOP representatives refusing to compromise, even at the eleventh hour, despite mounting fears around the country.

A television station in Columbia, South Carolina's capital, reported: “The five Republicans in South Carolina's congressional delegation collectively are taking credit for pushing House Speaker John Boehner to take a more conservative approach to finding a debt deal.”

And so, we regular folks, so fed up with Congress that only 14 percent of us approved of the representative body by the end of July, faced a figurative First Battle of Bull Run. I do not mean to trivialize the suffering and sacrifice that occurred on the battlefield near Manassas, where casualties approached 9,000, but as I research the American Civil War for a book I am writing, I can’t ignore comparisons between how America stumbled into a largely unexpected, long, and devastating war against itself 150 years ago and what’s happening today.

Congress, in its desperation to reach agreement, has set the scene for a second, possibly more destructive, battle over the budget deficit and a dangerous conflict among the haves and the have-nots, the old and the young, and opposing ideas of what America and democracy mean.

Republican Leadership in the U.S.
House of Representatives in July
2011. AP Photo.

As anti-government "South Carolinization" seeps across America, we must realize that many of our elected leaders could again march us into disaster if we fall under their Pied Piper spell. In the war of words roiling Washington — similar to the antebellum brinkmanship between supporters of a slave-labor, plantation economy and supporters of a free-labor, capitalist economy —a minority of recalcitrant leaders again are framing The American Dream as an undemocratic, trickle-down-happiness economic model.

In the pre-Civil War era, New England’s religious, literary and social leaders spearheaded America’s passionate anti-slavery movement. In the Deep South, a planter elite piloted an aggressive defense of slavery. The South’s social, economic and political leaders asserted that the region’s agrarian, semi-feudal economic and social systems depended on slavery. Fire-eating extremes pitched region against region.

In a letter dated August 24, 1855, Lincoln wrote to a Southern acquaintance: “The slave-breeders and slave-traders, are a small, odious and detested class among you; and yet in politics, they dictate the course of all of you, and are as completely your masters as you are the master of your own negroes."

The let-them-eat-cake attitude toward everybody but the rich that South Carolina's representatives and their tea party ilk uphold, shouldn't dupe the middle class into abandoning our own self interests (read Medicare and myriad other programs). In 2011, it's not region against region as it was in the Civil War, but ideology against ideology. Most Americans stand to lose in this war.

Now that the dust has cleared on the Washington battlefield in the summer of 2011, shouldn't we tell our elected officials that enough is enough? Or are we ready for a Second Battle of Bull Run — same war, same location, same outcome?

SOURCE: The AMERICAN HERITAGE New History of The Civil War, edited by James M. McPherson. 1996

Beyond Words: Handwriting Analysis of Civil War Letter

noreply@blogger.com (B.J. Welborn) — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 13:55:00 +0000

Civil War history became personal for me when I found war-era letters from Southern ancestors handed down in my family. Eager to know more, and possibly under the influence of one too many television crime shows, I decided to analyze the handwriting in the letters. I've recently been blogging about David Lindsay Welborn,whom the Confederacy assigned in 1864 to an ironclad gunboat protecting Richmond, so I tackled his letters first.

Portion of a letter home from my Civil War

ancestor David L. Welborn. A family

member later punched the holes to store

the 1864 letter in a notebook. For the
entire letter, go to LETTERS page.

Although I'm a rank amateur graphologist, I tried my hand at one of David's letters to his father, Joseph Welborn, of Randolph County, North Carolina. I consulted a handwriting analysis book* that’s been on my library shelf for years, and discovered a rudimentary personality profile that mere words on paper could never reveal.

But first, I assembled known facts about my farmboy ancestor. I knew from reading the unsuccessful petition to the local conscription board that David had filed in July 1864, that he had blue eyes, black hair, fair complexion, is 5 ft. (illegible) inches, was born in Randolph, is a farmer and was raised up to the business. The petition also told me that David, at age 20, had joined the 63rd Regiment of the North Carolina Militia. David wrote at least two letters to his father soon after he was assigned to the CSS Fredericksburg patrolling the James River just south of the Confederate capital.

David opened his brief letter, written in a schoolboy's hand on paper apparently torn from a small notebook, with this salutation: “This is from your son D.L. Welborn.” The greeting struck me as peculiar. Surely Joseph recalled he had a child with the initials “D.L.,” but by October 1864, Joseph had three sons fighting in the war. (A fourth son, Lyndon, died in battle in November 1863.) And David, whose mother died when he was barely four years old, probably felt lost among widow Joseph’s brood of ten children. Hence, David's reminder to open his letter.

Back page of a second
letter from David Welborn
of the N.C. Militia, 63rd
Regiment, to his father

So much for the facts; time to consult the handwriting analysis book. I concluded that David, young and free of accumulated emotional baggage, was:

- Emotionally even-keeled and not depressed, not yet anyway. David’s writing follows the lines of the paper. A moody person’s words would undulate up and down, regardless of the lines.

- Extroverted and needing to be in the middle of things. David centered his large script on the paper, indicating his social outgoingness. As for his need to be at the center of the action, this plea had already made that point: Pleas right as soon as you get this tell me all the news that is going on.

- Open-minded, as illustrated by the open spaces between words, and up front with his feelings, shown by the script's slant toward the right. Of course, I had picked up on these traits somewhat when I read: I have a hard time I got here yesterday mornin and hav been sic ever sins night and day

- Adventurous (writing doesn’t hug the left margin), but unorganized (haphazard grouping of words), and uncertain about the future (writing doesn’t hug the right margins), but duh!

- Unreliable, as evidenced by the uneven pressure David exerted on letters and his uneven spacing between words; and,

- Honest, with nothing to hide (no crossed out letters or “cover strokes” over letters).

The nearly 150-year-old letter David penned aboard the Fredericksburg tells more about him than what he wrote. By studying how he wrote his letters, I learned something of who he was. And, though I never met David, because I could read beyond the words in his letters, I liked him.

I plan to scrutinize the other Civil War letters handed down in my family for clues to my ancestors' personalities. If you are lucky enough to have old family letters or documents in your possession, why don’t you get your hands on a handwriting analysis guide, do some sleuthing, and open a personal window to America's past.

As Emerson said, “There is properly no history, only biography.”

###

* The guide I consulted was “Handwriting Analysis: Putting It To Work for You,” by graphologist Andrea McNichol with Jeffrey A. Nelson. Contemporary Books, Inc., 1991.

An Unmarked Watery Grave Hints At Precious Truth

noreply@blogger.com (B.J. Welborn) — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 18:40:00 +0000

If Mr. Krick hadn’t informed me, “The remains of the James River Squadron, including the CSS Fredericksburg, are not marked in any way,” my half-mile trek up the riverbank might have proved disappointing, but he had added, "Their location is indeed visible from the observation platform at Fort Drewry, on Drewry’s Bluff.”

View from top of Drewry's Bluff.
The corpse of David Welborn's
ironclad likely is buried in the
pictured section of the James River.

A cacophony of birds, insects and traffic on nearby Interstate 95 rang in my ears as I peered ninety feet down from Drewry’s Bluff, where the James River veers sharply east after flowing ten miles south from Richmond, the old Confederate capital. Following instructions from Robert E.L. Krick, historian at Richmond National Battlefield Park, I peered a hundred yards downstream toward the opposite shore.

Despite all the bad information I’d uncovered about the ironclad gunboat that my Confederate ancestor, David Lindsay Welborn, was assigned to only months before the Civil War’s end, there it was, the unmarked watery grave of the CSS Fredericksburg, at least according to Mr. Krick.

Not long before the Frederickburg's demise, David wrote to his father, Joseph Welborn of Randolph County, North Carolina, of his new position in the Confederate navy. (See July 6 blog in ARCHIVES.)

Richmond, Va Oct 30 1864

Dear Father

I will try to right you a few lines to let you know where I am eight miles below Richmond on the Fredricksburg Stemer That is an iron clad gun boat We have six long guns on this boat

I have a hard time I got here yesterday mornin and hav been sic ever sins night and day and am not well but I am told that cannons are moving hear every day

I would give the world to be home but can’t be thair I thought that I would work in the navy yarde but they put me on the boat. . . and my. . . the lice

Historic photo of Confederate
battery at Fort Drewry atop
Drewry's Bluff along James River.

I get planty to eate sutch as it is they have cald me on deck now so no more

From you son D.L. Welborn

This nearly 150-year-old, handwritten letter, which came to me in handed-down family papers, provided a compass toward precious truth. In my research of the Civil War for my book-in-progress, Dear Father I Am Sorry To Tell You, I’ve found “truth” varies according to source. Some reports declare the scattered remains of the CSS Fredericksburg, which the Confederates blew up (along with the CSS Virginia) during the frantic evacuation of Richmond in April 1865, have not been located.

The battery at Drewry's Bluff today.
For more, go to PHOTOSl page.

Other reports claim the gunboat's wreckage was raised decades ago. Even the exact date of its scuttling varies. (Some reports say the remains of the CSS Virginia, also assigned to patrol the James River in defense of Richmond, lie near the wreckage of the Fredericksburg.)

One lesson I’ve absorbed during my decades of exploring and research for my history/travel books is that a never-ending war rages among scholars, educators and historians about nearly every detail of American history. Two things I’ve concluded: 1) You’ve got to believe the best sources, or cobble together facts from reliable sources to get at precious truth; and, 2) No one alive today lived during the Civil War. So, we’re all looking at historic accounts that might not be reliable in the first place, or we're imbuing reliable accounts with personal spin. There’s a lot of room for prejudice, misinterpretation and error.

As far as facts about the CSS Fredericksburg, I’m sticking with Mr. Krick, who further said, “I believe that the wreck, if it is there, is protected from the periodic channel dredging by being so close to the shore.”

This is the kind of history I appreciate, the “to-the-best-of-my-hard-earned-knowledge” type of statement, one that claims no hold on elusive truth. But the difficulties of tracking history didn't dilute the excitement I felt standing atop Drewry’s Bluff one summer day, amid what’s left of the Confederacy’s Fort Darling. I had found another palpable link to my past.

COMING SOON: More on David and his trials aboard the gunboat.

I Visit Richmond To Learn About David And The Gunboat

noreply@blogger.com (B.J. Welborn) — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 20:38:00 +0000

To learn about David Lindsay Welborn, my ancestor whom the Confederacy drafted in the summer of 1864, I visited Richmond, Virginia. David, at age twenty, ended up on an ironclad gunship, the CSS Fredericksburg, a tough, junior addition to the James River Squadron. The fleet patrolled the river that flowed partially around the Confederate capital, a mere one hundred seven miles from Washington.

"The Rebel Iron-Clad Fleet...In
The James River, 1865." Line engraving
from Harper's Weekly; CSS Fredericksburg
at right. Photo, U.S. Naval Historical Center.

Tredegar Ironworks in Richmond made the 1,000 pounds of iron plating for the Fredericksburg, which was assembled in the local navy yard and launched in June 1864. I wanted to visit Tredegar, and I also wanted to locate the spot in the James River where the shattered Fredericksburg today lies buried beneath six to fifteen feet of mud. The gunship’s own crew blew her up on April 3, 1865, during the evacuation of Richmond, to ensure Union troops didn’t seize or pillage her.

But first, let me tell you what I’ve learned about David while researching my book-in-progress, Dear Father, I Am Sorry To Tell You.

Model of the CSS Fredericksburg
at visitor center of Richmond Battlefield
National Park located in the former
Tredegar Iron Works along the James River.

In February 1864, the Confederacy, now desperate and worn down, adopted a third conscription law, expanding the draft age limits to include males from seventeen to fifty. The draft ensnared David, ninth child of Joseph Welborn’s ten children. He enlisted as a private in 63rd North Carolina Militia, B Company, of Randolph County.

The family, reeling from the recent death of David’s older brother, Lyndon, as he defended Richmond, struggled to save the family farm. Grief and hardship forced them to wage their own battle to keep David out of the draft and on the farm. Two years earlier, David and his widowed father, a prominent Randolph County farmer, had paid a substitute to serve in the army in David's stead if he were called to serve. The Confederacy had adopted a second draft law expanding the draft eligibility, a development noted by David's older brother, Lyndon, of the First North Carolina Troops, in a letter home in 1862.

Petersburg, Va

May AD 31st 62

Dear Sister

. . . ask David what age that man was that he hired to take his place in the war

if he was between 18-35 he (David) will have to go yet in his place if called on but I hope he was not subject to that. . .

So write Soon to your effectionate Brother

Lyndon

My research into the Civil War and
my Confederate ancestors now takes me
from Warrenton, N.C., to Richmond.

By the summer of 1864, the Confederacy had cracked down on the practice of buying draft substitutes. David and Joseph regrouped. David petitioned The Confederate States of America Bureau of Conscription, 7th North Carolina Congressional District, which included Randolph County, for release from the draft.

April 11, 1864

State of North Carolina

To his Excellency, Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States:

David L. Welbourn, of Randolph County, by petition, respectfully showeth unto your Excellency, that he is a private of Bedlick Co. Capt: Chilcutt, 63 Reg. N.C. Militia, has blue eyes, black hair, fair complexion, is 5 ft. (illegible) inches, was born in Randolph, is a farmer and was raised up to the business; that his father is 73 years old and infirm and cannot labor; that his father owns 346 acres of land and has the use of 104 acres during his life on Muddy Bank which are productive lands; that his father has two daughters and a small child, and a son aged 16 years, who has lost the use of his right arm which is stiff and with which he cannot labor at all; that he also has an old negro, aged 90 years, who is intirely helples; that the only person upon whom they are dependant is your petitioner; that it is said the aged father owns no other slaves and as consequence of his scarcity of laborers cannot employ any one to work his farm if your petitioner is carried off into its service. . .

I found a handwritten copy of David’s petition to Confederate President Jefferson Davis among family papers. The justice of the peace who penned the three-page document probably pressed a ruler or some straight object onto the pale blue paper to produce row upon row of smudged inked words.

James Deitz, the court officer who wielded the pen, apparently was a member of Randolph County’s draft board. Whether the reasons stated in the petition to the board were true (yes, with the Confederacy drafting all able men, laborers were scarce, and the 90-year-old slave — probably Harry — wasn’t much help); partly true (yes, sixteen-year-old son Robert might have been able to work, stiff arm or not); or embellished to present a more compelling case, I can only guess. David's petition made a compelling case.

. . . that in consequence of the helplessness of said family your petitioner hired a substitute and placed him in his service and has been since engaged in working for the said family; that he has wheat sowed and has compacts to raise as much oats and corn as the land can cultivate; that he raises hay and he has a fine prospect for a large quantity of pork if he can be left at home to raise corn. . .

Then David and Joseph made an offer they hoped the Confederacy couldn’t refuse.

. . . with which to fatten it that he will bind himself to furnish the government with 500 lbs pork at such price as the Confederate appraisers shall fix; that he will employ his skill, means and labor diligently and exclusively in the production of grains, hay, fodder and pork and other produce, the surplus of which he is willing to sell to the government and the families of soldiers at such prices as the aforesaid officers shall fix; that if he is not left upon the said farms to raise grains and take care of the said helpless and crippled and infirm family that they will come to absolute want and suffering; that he had a brother who went into the service at the very commencement of the war and died lately in the service, was killed in an engagement with the enemy; that your petitioner is 20 years old and is a true and loyal citizen: For these reasons and on the grounds of public necessity, equity and justice, your petitioner most respectfully prays your Excellency to exccept or detail the said David L. Welborn, your petitioner, to remain on the said farm and take care of and support the said dependent family and for such others and further relief as to your Excellency shall seem meet and as in duty bound your petitioner will ever pray.

April, 1864 James Dietz J.P.

D.L. Welborn (signature)

State of North Carolina,

Randolph County

Personally appeard before the subscriber an acting Justice of the Peace in and for said county, J. W. Steed, Allen Lamb, David Coltrane and B.F. Hoover, four respectable citizens of said county who being duly sworn, depose and say that they are well acquainted with the aforesaid David L. Welborn; that the facts set out in his petition are true and correct.

Sworn and subscribed

Before me this 11th day April, 1864

J. H. Horvat J.P.

David fought the draft in an above-board manner, although hundreds draft-dodgers and deserters from the Randolph County area, a hotbed of pro-Union violence, chose to hide in the hills and wait out the war. David, however, ended up serving a lost cause — as did three of his brothers — in conditions worse than a fugitive life in the hills. Many considered assignment to a gunship patrolling the James River among the Confederacy's harshest.

SOURCES: Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; National Underwater and Marine Agency, The Encyclopedia Virginia

Coming Soon: “they put me on the boat…and my….the lice…”

No New Tricks On The Mean Streets of War

noreply@blogger.com (B.J. Welborn) — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 14:02:00 +0000

During the last years of the Vietnam War, I worked as a greenhorn reporter in Fayetteville, North Carolina. About seven months was all I could stand in the home of Fort Bragg (named for Confederate General Braxton Bragg), one of the U.S. Army’s largest bases and a jumping off point for two hundred thousand soldiers headed to Southeast Asia.

The Virginia State Capitol
during the Civil War. Photo
Virginia Historical Society.

It was the early 1970s. On any given night — or broad daylight for that matter – young men roamed Hay Street, “Fayettenam’s” main drag, seeking alcohol, drugs and women. They found all in abundance, just as Civil War soldiers found them on the mean streets of Washington, D.C.; Memphis, Tennessee; and Richmond, Virginia, in the early 1860s.

I can imagine the scene along Richmond’s Broad Street in 1862 because I worked along Fayetteville’s notorious Hay Street in 1972, soon after President Nixon authorized a massive bombing campaign against North Vietnam. During both wars, people compared the Southern cities to the wicked biblical city, Sodom. From what I know, the comparisons seem justified. Hay Street in the early seventies out-sleazed Boston's Combat Zone and New Orleans' Bourbon Street combined.

The author as a young reporter, right,
about to experience a PR ride aboard
a reconnaissance helicopter at Fort
Bragg in 1972. Photo, U.S. Army.

Working in Fayetteville, I’d sometimes stand on the curb in front of The Fayetteville Observer where I worked, located downtown then, waiting to cross Hay Street to grab lunch at a storefront diner. There I stood, Bambi, with a polyester miniskirt up to here and brown hair down to there, within a stone’s throw of the railroad station where prostitutes gathered every morning to ply their trade.

“Hey, how much you charge for all of us, baby?” The question usually came from a GI among a carload of grinning GIs cruising Hay Street.

On the sidewalks, shotgun-carrying cops roamed among stoned soldiers and sleazy men wearing purple fedoras and long coats, impervious to sandy-soiled Fayetteville’s infamous heat. With a little prompting, one of these street capitalists might open his coat to reveal gold watches, bags of heroin and pills, vials and syringes pinned to the lining.

"What for you today?" he'd ask.

Near-naked women danced in the windows of a bar that once was a clothing store. Loud, throbbing music beckoned boys into smoky, beer-humid joints where any women patronizing the trough could strip on a tabletop in exchange for greenbacks, a drink or the next hit.

Routinely, sirens screamed from a “Vomit Comet,” one of many shuttle vans between the army base and Hay Street. MPs jumped from the Comet to harvest the near-lifeless bodies that managed to crawl out of the bars and prop against streetlights. The MPs wordlessly threw the bodies into the van; the driver revved the engine and they continued their rounds.

In the 1860s, as the Civil War ramped up, Richmond’s population exploded from about 38,000 people to possibly triple that. An estimated 10,000 to 15,000 troops, fighting fear and frustration, waited in camps for fighting orders, as did Confederate ancestors, whom I'm writing about in my book-in-progress, Dear Father I Am Sorry To Tell You. The Confederate capital harbored hundreds of brothels, saloons, gambling halls, speculators, criminals of all stripe and women of the night. The women trolled the grounds of the state capitol, modeled after an ancient Roman temple, offering their bodies.

Farm boys, some separated for the first time from parents, wives, sweethearts and ministers, dared to dance with the devil. They paid with sexually transmitted diseases, injuries sustained in fights and industrial-strength guilt. Enemies attacked the soldiers before they ever entered a combat zone.

Hay Street, Fayetteville, N.C.'s
upscale main drag today

Virginia’s capital today (see PHOTOS page) stands among my favorite destinations, not only for its rich history from our nation’s earliest days, but for its fine old homes, its trendy eateries and shops in the Shockoe Bottom district along the James River, bustling universities, Civil War parks and landmarks, and Edgar Allen Poe’s neighborhood.

Fayetteville years ago revitalized its downtown and repaired its military-gone-wrong image. The red brick Rubik's cube that once housed the Fayetteville Observer is gone, replaced by the Airborne and Special Operations Museum . Honky-tonks and seedy hotels have given way to coffee emporiums and al fresco dining along a brick esplanade. Civil War sites have been revived 150 years after Union General Sherman left his mark.

When I visited Fayetteville recently to research the Civil War for my book (and visit my sister, who lives nearby), I marveled at how the city has erased vestiges of Hay Street's Vietnam War days while emphasizing its Civil War days at nearby parks and museums, just as Richmond has done.

But my memory of "Fayettenam" and my study of Virginia’s Sodom-of-Yore reminded me there are no new tricks on the mean streets of war. They span history, they endure, and there's always a ransom to be paid.

###

NOTE: The Virginia State Capitol Visitor Center is hosting an exhibition presented by the Library of Virginia titled "The Struggle to Decide: Virginia's Secession Crisis," from December 13, 2010 to October 29, 2011. For information, go to Virginia State Capitol.

SOURCES: Virginia Historical Society; Confederate White House, Richmond, Virginia

Brown Flour Soup, Sauerkraut And Humble Pie

noreply@blogger.com (B.J. Welborn) — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 20:37:00 +0000

A little recipe book I bought at some historic site has sat on my kitchen shelf for years. Now that I’m researching the Civil War and my Confederate ancestors for a book, I decided it was time to cook an 1860s supper. I consulted the Blue & Grey Cookery: Authentic Recipes from The Civil War Years and determined a menu: brown flour soup, pork with sauerkraut, “rosten ears” of corn and blackberry mush.

What I hadn’t planned to eat was humble pie*, but by the time I finished cooking a so-called "war supper," I had to consume it for dessert. My story goes like this:

Let’s start with the brown flour soup. This first course sounded like what a deprived soldier might have eaten. I browned some flour in a melted “piece of butter,” added water and an egg, then seasoned with salt and pepper. I offered a bowl to my husband Barry.

“It tastes like food, I guess,” he said hesitantly after sampling the oatmeal-like porridge. “Guess if you didn’t have anything else to eat …”

I dumped it down the In-Sink-Erator™.

Simply discarding unpalatable food was a luxury my ancestors couldn't afford. I've been blogging for six months now about four ancestral brothers from Randolph County, North Carolina, who fought for the Confederacy and their father, Joseph Welborn, who opposed secession. Among the war-era letters from them in my possession is one from David Lindsay Welborn. David, the ninth child among ten children, wrote to Joseph soon after he was assigned to an ironclad gunship patrolling the James River near Richmond, Virginia, in 1864.

Dear Father

. . . i get a plenty to eate sutch as it is . . .

A portion of a letter
from David L. Welborn, 1864.
A descendant punched holes
in the letter to place it in a notebook.

On to the main dish: pork and sauerkraut. I had vetoed “hog maw,” which consisted of vegetables, sausage and seasonings stuffed into a pig’s stomach. I excused my lack of chutzpah and chose to serve pork tenderloin that I bought at Publix. I smothered the tenderloin with canned, “barrel cured” sauerkraut and popped it into the oven. Barry went to the deck and threw two ears of corn onto the gas-fired grill.

The Civil War cookbook stated that sauerkraut took center stage on soldiers’ menus because it staved off the troublesome disease, scurvy. Authentic sauerkraut consisted of shredded and pounded cabbage, covered with salt and layered between damp cloths in an earthen crock. It took weeks to cure. I thought how lucky my ancestor Robert McFarland Welborn, drafted at seventeen into the North Carolina Junior Reserves, would have been to have sauerkraut with his pork maw.

17 August 1864

Dear Father

. . . we get one pint of corn meal and it not sifted and hardly ground the grains is cracked we often find whole grains we get one bit of hard meat a day . . . i would like to be at home to eat beans and soft meat. . .
Your son R.M. Welborn

To end our Civil War meal, I whipped up blackberry mush. I chose this dish for sentimental reasons; blackberries grew wild in the backyard of my childhood home. The recipe called for boiling the berries in water then adding sugar and vanilla. But gosh darnit, wouldn’t a Pillsbury pastry crust and vanilla ice cream make it just perfect?

After supper I felt sated and smug, and then, guilty. I had utterly failed at preparing an authentic Civil War meal.

December 1864 Ritchmond

Dear father

. . . it is harde times here and worse acoming I fear we git a little bred and a little beaf twice a day we ar a bout half starved here. . .

As I reread the letter from ancestor William Lane Welborn, written during the last gasps of a crumbling Confederacy, shame exacerbated my guilt. Here I was in our well-equipped kitchen with a brimming pantry and an delicacy-filled grocery store a mile away, yet I, fair and balanced purveyor of truth, feigned hardship to indulge a whim.

I owed my ancestors — and all the Civil War veterans who fought, whether in blue or gray — an apology. Pass the humble pie.

* “Humble pie” has come to mean a figurative serving of humiliation, usually in the form of a forced submission, apology or retraction. The expression derives from umble pie, which was a pie filled with liver, heart and other offal from a cow, deer or boar. The popularity of umble pie among 15th and 16th-century commoners in Britain gave rise to the expression "eating humble pie.”

Fossils, Luddites And Rednecks: Denials About Slavery And War

noreply@blogger.com (B.J. Welborn) — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 14:58:00 +0000

Continued from last week: Most modern Southerners, with the exception of fossils, Luddites and rednecks, find slavery so repulsive that we pretend the institution couldn’t possibly have been the cause of secession and the Civil War. Facts, however, tell a different story.

Background: I visited Warrenton, N.C., where my ancestral cousin, Lyndon M. Welborn, trained for the Confederate army, to learn more about my family’s Civil War experience. In Warrenton and in later research, I uncovered information about why men fought for the Confederacy. Personal reasons varied, but slavery kept surfacing as a main cause.

Richard Furman, 1755-1825,

was a prominent minister and president

of America's first Baptist convention.

Furman University in Greenville, S.C.,
took its name from him.

When South Carolina broke from the Union, delegates to the Secession Convention in Charleston attached a “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union” to its 1860 Ordinance of Secession. Three other states also attached a list of reasons for secession to their ordinances: Georgia, Mississippi and Texas.

South Carolina’s declaration stated that a reason to dissolve its compact with the Union was because non-slave holding states were violating a national agreement (the retooled Fugitive Slave Act of 1850) to return runaway slaves. South Carolina secessionists alleged northern states were violating the Fourth Amendment to the

Constitution. The Fourth Amendment stated “No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due."

South Carolina secessionists declared Northern states were “discharging from service” fugitive slaves; Northerners harbored runaways and helped them flee to freedom. South Carolina’s secession leaders, mostly members of the slave-owning planter class, pointed out that South Carolina slave owners had been paying taxes on their slave property, as required by the Union. Moreover, South Carolina was exercising a Constitutional right by seceding. South Carolina was a good Constitutional citizen.

Leading South Carolinians equated Lincoln with abolitionism. They declared abolitionism a terrifying threat to Southerners. Historian Walter Edgar, citing historic newspaper reports in his book South Carolina, A History, writes of the Reverend Richard Furman of Greenville, S.C. Reverend Furman told his congregation that Lincoln’s first election would mean “every negro in South Carolina and every other Southern State will be his own master; nay, more than that, will be the equal of every one of you.” Furman warned that abolitionist preachers would be willing to marry “your daughters to black husbands.”

Warren County's second courthouse was
standing when North Carolina troops gathered
there for a festive send-off in 1861. The first structure
burned down; this courthouse was built in the 1850s.

Edgar also writes about S.C. Congressman John D. Ashmore, who echoed Furman’s sentiments by proclaiming that electing Lincoln as President “equals abolitionist victory equals Africanization.”

North Carolina did not elaborate its terse Ordinance of Secession.

North Carolina’s African-American population today totals twenty-two percent, many still living in the east, where flat sandy land had allowed profitable plantations, in contrast to the state’s mountainous west. South Carolina today is more than thirty percent black. The black population lives mainly in the eastern “Lowcountry,” where huge plantations once thrived. North Carolina’s black population currently clusters in Warren County, now forty percent African-American, and in five surrounding counties with populations more than fifty percent black.

“I guess many people living here now are descendants of the slaves who worked the big plantations around here?” I asked Hunter as we walked to the library. Richard E. Hunter, Jr, Warren County's superior court clerk, reigned as keeper of Warrenton's historical flame.

“That’s right,” he said. “The sandy soil around here made perfect growing conditions for tobacco. And cotton.”

Hunter was right about the library’s riches. In a basement room dominated by a fine old conference table, I found shelves of musty books on North Carolina history. I mined nuggets of information about Lyndon and his regiment, as well as Lyndon’s three brothers who fought in the Civil War. I also found a long list of other ancestors who had fought, some who gave the last full measure for The Cause.

Millions of American families claim ancestors who fought in the Civil War, which took more American lives than all other wars in our nation’s history combined, ten percent of the nation’s population at the time. Nearly 40 percent of Southerners claim ancestors who fought for the Confederacy.

The books in the basement didn’t reveal reasons my forebears became Confederate fighters, but I am sure that when war erupted, ordinary men who were not abolitionists joined Federal ranks to preserve the Union, and regular men indifferent to slavery joined Confederate ranks, aiming to safeguard their way of life.

Later, I would learn that Lyndon volunteered for the Confederate army, against his father’s wishes, because of a matter of the heart. (See Archives, March 15) His brothers fought because the Confederacy drafted them. One brother, David, petitioned to avoid military service, but that action ended in devastating defeat.

Coming soon: The Story of David. See PREVIEWS page.

Slavery As A Cause Of War: Facts Shatter Romantic Notions

noreply@blogger.com (B.J. Welborn) — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 15:51:00 +0000

Continued from June 1: (Go to Archives at right of page to read last week’s blog.)

Background: To learn more about my ancestor, Lyndon McGee Welborn, who volunteered for the Confederate army right after North Carolina seceded, I visited Warrenton, N.C. In this picturesque town just below the Virginia border, Lyndon’s First Regiment of North Carolina Troops prepared for war. I talked with the Honorable Richard E. Hunter, Jr., Warren County’s superior court clerk and keeper of Warrenton’s historical flame. Hunter, spry and white-haired, invited me into his office.

Cherry Hill, built in 1858, was one
of Warren County's largest
antebellum plantations. Go to
http://cherryhillconcerts.com

County Clerk Hunter suggested I might find information about my ancestors at the Warren Public Library, which huddled beside the courthouse like a meek nephew bearing a strong family resemblance. Hunter said the library housed rare Civil War records. He volunteered to escort me. As we walked across the grassy rise, I asked why Warren County served as a launching point for North Carolina’s first regiments.

“The state’s largest tobacco plantations were here at the time,” Hunter answered. “We had some very wealthy people here in Warren County.”

I understood: Elite planters and slave-owning tobacco magnates called Warrenton home. In 1861, local planter Weldon Edwards served as president of the North Carolina Secession Convention.

The idea of huge, slave-driven plantations in my home state surprised me. Although nearly a third of North Carolina’s population was enslaved at the outbreak of the Civil War, most slave owners were farmers working mid-sized farms, as was my ancestor, Joseph Welborn, Lyndon’s father. They usually owned ten or fewer slaves. The state didn’t have the concentration of immense plantations that characterized Deep South states, including South Carolina.

Defending slavery wasn’t a top priority in moderately pro-Union North Carolina, and you’d be hard-pressed today to find a North Carolinian who admits his ancestors fought to defend slavery. Most swear their families never owned slaves, but how would they know? Not everyone had a relatives who revered the Daughters of the American Revolution and researched family history, as I did.

Warren County, N.C., at the Virginia
border, now has about 21,000 residents.

According to the 1860 U.S. Census, the last census to list slaves, Warren County had about ten and a half thousand slaves, more than twice the number of white residents in the county, a South Carolina-like statistic. In the mid-19th century, South Carolina had more slaves within its borders than free whites. Eight plantations in the state had more than five hundred slaves each; several had thousands. Seven plantations in Warren County listed more than one hundred slaves but only by a few digits.

By 1860, slaves made up one-eighth of the U.S. population, and slavery existed almost entirely as a Southern phenomenon. In 1783, Massachusetts became the first state to outlaw slavery with a judicial decision clarifying the state’s constitution. By 1804, all northern states had abolished slavery, though almost all of them had slave populations during the nation’s early years.

The biggest book I could find about the Civil War, a compendium edited by Pulitzer Prize winner James McPherson, claims that slavery was the issue that polarized 19th-century America and brought about civil war. The book asserts slavery poisoned any chance to address regional differences through a democratic process. Compromises between Northern free-soilers and Southern slave holders about slavery’s being permitted in new states acquired by the Louisiana Purchase and the war with Mexico poured gasoline onto hot coals.

“The antagonism between the sections came finally and tragically to express itself through the slavery issue,” the big Civil War book intoned.

I once thought statements like that were nonsense. Most modern Southerners, with the exception of fossils, Luddites and red necks, find slavery so repulsive that we pretend the institution couldn’t possibly have been a cause of secession and war. Facts, however, tell a different story.

Continued Next Week.

The Drums of War: A Book, A Beating, A Trial, A Terrorist

noreply@blogger.com (B.J. Welborn) — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 14:03:00 +0000

Harriet Beecher Stowe
wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin."

Beat! beat! drums! — blow! bugles! blow! Through the windows — through the doors — burst like a ruthless force. So wrote poet Walt Whitman as the Civil War consumed America. In the years leading up to war, four people beat the drums of war so loudly the entire nation listened: abolitionist best-selling author Harriet Beecher Stowe; Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina; Dred Scott, a slave who sued for his freedom; and America’s first home-grown terrorist, John Brown.

This quartet, by word or deed, hit regular folks in the gut, reduced complex issues to understandable terms, and helped galvanize opposing factions beyond reason and debate.

S.C. Congressman Preston
Brooks let his cane do the talking.

In the pre-Civil War era, New England’s religious, literary and social leaders spearheaded America’s passionate anti-slavery movement. In the Deep South, a planter elite piloted an aggressive defense of slavery, though often disguised as “a way of life,” or “states' rights.” The South’s social, economic and political leaders asserted that the region’s agrarian, semi-feudal economic and social systems depended on slavery. Fire-eating extremes pitched region against region.

Slavery tormented Lincoln’s nation; the North's fiery abolitionist movement and the South’s violent counter tactics swept the country toward war. Key events inflamed regional rage.

Dred Scott sued to win his
freedom in a non-slave state.

In 1852, author Harriet Beecher Stowe completed “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” a blockbuster novel that recounted the horrors of slavery. When President Lincoln met Stowe in 1862, he supposedly said, “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!”

In 1856, South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks viciously beat Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner to unconsciousness with Sumner’s own walking cane on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Brooks held that Sumner, leader of anti-slavery forces in Massachusetts, was beneath a gentlemanly challenge to a duel. Three days earlier, Sumner had made a fiery anti-slavery speech that offended pro-slavery southerners and Brooks’ family personally.

The badly injured Sumner, a Puritan descendant who favored equal civil rights for black Americans, couldn’t return to the Senate for three years. A battle between icons of two polar-opposite states ended a history of words-only fighting at the Capitol. The North lionized Sumner; the South worshiped Brooks.

John Brown raided the federal
arsenal at Harper's Ferry.

In 1857, the Supreme Court ruled that slave Dred Scott - and thus all slaves - had no right to U.S. citizenship. The ruling said Scott could not sue in Federal Court where he had sought remedy, and he must remain a slave even in a non-slave state. In 1859, John Brown and a group of men raided the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. His radical plan to steal weapons and lead a slave uprising solidified northern abolitionists, who praised his terrorist tactics, comparing him to Jesus. What a slap in the face of Bible-belt Southerners.

A book, a beating, a trial and a terrorist thumped the drums of war. Eventually, everyone heard.

Wrote Whitman: So strong you thump. O terrible drums – so loud you bugles blow.

TO BE CONTINUED NEXT WEEK. See PREVIEWS page.

A Never-Ending Treasure Hunt: How To Track War Ancestors

noreply@blogger.com (B.J. Welborn) — Wed, 25 May 2011 13:51:00 +0000

How do you track your Civil War ancestors? This question arose once again during a presentation I gave recently, so it’s time to blog the answer. First, let me say that tracking down Civil War ancestors is an ongoing process. One thing leads to another. Before you know it, you’re on a never-ending treasure hunt. Here are a few tips that might help:

A Soldier's Application for Pension
by my N.C. ancestor, David Welborn,
dated 1917. The Confederate veteran
was then 74 and disabled.

Dig through all that stuff great grandma or some other relative left behind. Read every letter, examine every document, and pore over every trinket. You might discover something awesome. My father left behind boxes of documents and artifacts that I regrettably waited forty years to examine. That's how I found a few authentic Civil War letters and priceless (to me anyway) genealogical information.

Ask questions of older relatives by phone, e-mail or in person. Attend family reunions. Stories and show-and-tell moments can abound.

Visit graveyards. Ancestors' headstones sometimes reveal where and when Civil War veterans died in battle, their regiments and companies, as well as other details.

Visit state archives and universities with large historical collections in states where your ancestors lived. I’ve spent many days combing through materials at the North Carolina State Archives in Raleigh and the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, among other places. Staffs are very helpful. I’ve not only found documents that belonged to my family, but hints of other documents to track down. (See application for Civil War pension above left. More on this in a later blog.) Remember Civil War records were written by hand and in haste, so names might be misspelled.

Go online. It’s amazing how many resources you can find on the Web to aid your hunt. Some are free; others have a price. The more specific the phrases you put in search engines, the more gratifying the results. I found copies of Civil War letters from ancestors through the online records of several universities. Even if you only find an index of documents, something might provide a map to treasure. You can order copies of some documents, usually for a small fee. I’ve done this many times.

Burn some rubber. I’ve done my highest-return sleuthing in little libraries at such out-of-the-way places as the basement of the Warren County Library in Warrenton, N.C., and the library stacks at Wilkes Community College in Wilkesboro, N.C. I’ve found ancestors’ war records, newspaper clips of interviews with ancestors, as well as family land deeds, wills and local census records. At Appomattox Courthouse National Historical Park in Virginia, I found a list of Confederates issued parole passes assuring safe passage home after Lee’s surrender to Grant. Several ancestors were on the list.

Finally, be persistent and follow up all leads; be prepared to invest time and money in your search; and, organize your documents, notes and written responses to questions in accessible files. I drew a family tree for easy reference. I also made a Civil War timeline with the dates my ancestors began military duty, the battles in which they participated, their deaths, their pension applications, their war injuries, and records of equipment issues. I update and expand the timeline regularly.

Despite many frustrations, my Civil War treasure hunting has yielded valuable and often surprising information and insights into my family, myself, the Civil War and the story of America. You’ll likely experience the same. Go for it.

Main Street in picturesque
Georgetown, South Carolina

NOTE: I gave my most recent Civil War presentation in coastal Georgetown, South Carolina. Never been? Well, put a trip to the historic seaport along Winyah Bay on your “To Do" list right now. The town offers quaint shops, unique restaurants and plenty of lovely, old buildings. See PHOTOS page.

A Mysterious Phone Caller Answers A Burning Question

noreply@blogger.com (B.J. Welborn) — Wed, 18 May 2011 15:18:00 +0000

“Are Southerners embarrassed by the Civil War?” When I posed this question in a recent blog, my friend Terry, a retired South Carolina newspaper editor, replied that the word “embarrassment” wasn’t the word “that describes most Southerners' feelings about the civil war. I think 'ambivalence' is a better descriptive.”

I thought Terry was right, until I received a mysterious phone call.

A slave market in ancient Rome. New York

Public Library. A body of laws and traditions

regulated auctions 2,000 years ago.

I was working at home one morning when the phone rang. An elderly gentleman introduced himself (though I can't recall his name) in a slow and mannerly drawl. He wanted to talk about my opinion piece that a local newspaper had published that day.

In the article, I argued that the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, which ended with 620,000 American deaths and the economic ruin of the South, presented a perfect opportunity to discuss the war’s causes. I said that slavery lay at the heart of all the reasons many Southerners currently cite: states’ rights, economic necessity or Northern aggression. I concluded that we couldn't ignore slavery as a cause of the war, if not the
cause. My mysterious phone caller did not agree. I can't remember his exact words, but the following reflects the essence of our conversation:

An 1856 wood engraving of a slave

auction in Richmond, Virginia.

Library of Congress Prints and

Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.

“I want to make three points,” the caller said. He apparently had carefully thought through the argument he was unfolding or had made it many times in the past.

“First, slavery didn’t exist only in America,” he said. “Slavery has existed throughout recorded history, even in ancient Mesopotamia. People aren’t as knowledgeable as they should be; they don’t know that.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “Slavery's been around since the dawn of man and slavery exists today. I guess we concern ourselves mostly with slavery in America, since slavery ended here fairly recently. And,” I added, “Our country was founded as the land of the free.”

My clearly educated caller fell silent. After more chit-chat about history, he said, “Second, slavery wasn’t the cause of the Civil War. We had to protect our constitutionally guaranteed states’ rights. The North tried to do away with our rights, so we had no choice but to fight. We believed in the Constitution; they apparently didn’t.”

I agreed the Founding Fathers made compromises to get the U.S. Constitution signed, so they left the poisonous issue of slavery for later generations to work out, but I wasn’t sure that war was the only answer.

My caller then made his third point, apparently saved as a slam-dunk finale.

“The attributes of some people leave them suited to be slaves,” he said. “They are inferior; they lack intelligence and ability."

"Do you mean African Americans?" I asked incredulously.

"You can see it today," he continued. "They can’t do well in school; they can’t hold good jobs; they can't take care of their families.”

I wanted to hang up, but I've always learned something when I listen, especially when listening was painful or infuriating, so I didn't. I responded with measured words that some of the smartest, most able people I know are African Americans, including the current President. In my rebuttal, I also pointed out that when the Romans enslaved a Greek, the Romans obviously valued the Greek's skills, education and intelligence by making him tutor children of the rich and powerful. I was trying to make the point that the Greeks were smart and able even if the Romans made them slaves.

The caller pushed on saying that if you look at how African Americans live today, with their poverty, their violence and their inability to make it in school..."some groups of people are suited to be slaves.”

I had the sinking feeling he had missed my point about the Romans and the Greeks. I could only respond, as firmly as possible without offending my earnest, genteel caller, that even it he were right – and I emphatically did not think so – that wouldn’t make slavery OK.

After more convoluted conversation, the man ended his call by saying, “Thank you for talking with me. You’ve been very generous with your information and your time.”

I wandered into the kitchen dazed and confused. I told my husband Barry about the strange call.

“But what was his point?” Barry asked.

“I honestly don’t know,” I answered. “I don’t know if he was lonely and just wanted to talk, or if he was trying to change my mind, or if he was wrestling with his own demons.”

Looking back on the phone call, I’m reminded of the maxim, Everybody’s got to look down on somebody. I think my gentleman caller had long ago concluded — just as the slave-owning, elite Southerners who clamored for Civil War had — that lesser people inhabit the world.

My friend Terry might be right that today’s Southerners feel ambivalent about the Civil War, but shouldn't some of us feel downright embarrassed? I now know the answer.

###

Coming: A Friday Evening In Georgetown. See PREVIEWS page.

A Blood-Stained Rocking Chair in Dearborn

noreply@blogger.com (B.J. Welborn) — Tue, 10 May 2011 21:36:00 +0000

More than a decade ago when I visited Ford’s Theater, where John Wilkes Booth shot President Lincoln on April 14, 1865, five days after Lee surrendered to Grant, I left with one disappointment. I could view only a replica of the rocking chair in which Lincoln sat when America’s sixteenth president was assassinated. The real chair resides in a museum in Dearborn, Michigan. Last week, I finally saw it.

The chair in which President
Abraham Lincoln sat when
John Wilkes Booth shot him.

The carved wood chair with faded, red textured upholstery, clearly stained by blood from Lincoln’s head wound, sits innocuously in a showcase situated among thousands of artifacts from American history in the Henry Ford Museum at Greenfield Village, just southwest of Detroit. (For more information, go to Greenfield Village.)

I visited “America’s Greatest History Attraction,” comprising an 80-acre village of outdoor exhibits; a cavernous, nine-acre museum of trains, planes, buses and cars; and an I-Max Theater with my youngest daughter. We had just attended her grad school graduation in Ann Arbor. While nearly everything in the museum's walk through U.S. history fascinated us, it was the authentic Lincoln chair, eerily housed near the limo in which President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, as well as the long, black car President Reagan was entering when John Hinckley shot him in 1981, that held our attention the longest.

For me, this was probably because I’ve been studying and blogging about the American Civil War during its 150th anniversary, and the assassination of the man who led the nation through its most tragic saga often occupies my thoughts. I also had seen myriad Lincoln sites from coast to coast as I have researched my history/travel books through the years. (See Feb. 22 blog Abraham Lincoln: Man In The Middle.)

Presidential Box at
Ford's Theater in
Washington, D.C.

Now my vision of the fateful night when Booth, a handsome, 26-year-old Shakespearean actor, shot Lincoln behind the left ear is complete. I can envision the President in the rocking chair, enjoying a production of Our American Cousin with his wife Mary Todd Lincoln and two guests. I see the balcony box that theater staffers had decorated in the little three-story, brick theater tucked away on 10th Street NW in Washington, D.C., with red-white-and blue bunting and a framed picture of George Washington.

During the popular play, Booth sneaked into the theater and waited behind a door to the presidential box, framed with gold curtains. As the audience laughed at an actor’s lines, Booth sprang toward Lincoln’s rocking chair and shot the president. The assassin then jumped from the box to the stage, catching his foot on the decorative bunting. He landed off-balance on the stage, breaking a small bone in his left leg. Still, he managed a clean escape by hobbling through a back stage door to a waiting horse and riding off. (See Currier and Ives representation of the assassination on PHOTOS page.)

Authorities surrounded Booth twelve days later as he hid in a barn in Virginia. Historians still debate whether Booth killed himself or one of his pursuers did so.

Lincoln died at 7:22 a.m. the next day in a back bedroom at the Petersen House, a nearby boarding house where doctors had administered to him throughout the night. In the basement museum at Ford's Theater, you can see the blood-stained pillow on which the dying Lincoln rested his head at the Petersen House, as well as his blood-stained top coat.

To view the bullet that killed Lincoln and fragments of his skull, go to the National Museum of Health and Medicine on the campus of Walter Reed Medical Center at 6900 Georgia Avenue in Washington. Also in the museum: a section of Booth's spinal column revealing the path of the bullet that killed him. For information, go to NMHM.

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Mark your calendar: Greenfield Village will host a Discovering the Civil War exhibit from May 21 through September 5, 2011. You can tour the building where Lincoln practiced law in Springfield, Ill., moved piece by piece to Dearborn, as were other large artifacts in the village.

Opening in February 2012, the new Center for Education and  Leadership at Ford’s Theater will explore the lasting effect Abraham Lincoln’s presidency has had on our country. For more information, go to Ford's Theater National Historic Site.

Almost Innocently Stumbling Into War

noreply@blogger.com (B.J. Welborn) — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 20:41:00 +0000

(The Civil War) is the story of a crime of monstrous inhumanity, into which almost innocently men stumbled. – Robert Penn Warren

From my book-in-progress, Dear Father I Am Sorry To Tell You

Interesting in joining my Cyber Focus Group? See information at end of blog.

If you tune out the cars, trucks and motorcycles that corrupt Warrenton’s tree-shaded Main Street today, and if you ignore the latte-serving coffee shops, gasoline stations and Wi-Fi hot spots that inhabit historic buildings, it seems little has changed in this picturesque municipality since the turbulent 1860s.

Present-day courthouse
in Warrenton, N.C.

Soon after the Civil War broke out, Warrenton, ten miles south of Virginia, became a hornet’s nest of activity. At nearby Fort Edwards, North Carolina’s first Confederate troops organized before marching north to banish the enemy from their homeland. In July 1861, my ancestral cousin Lyndon trained with his new regiment at a horse racetrack just outside of town. Two weeks later, the regiment was ordered to Richmond. To find out more, I set out for Warrenton.

I traveled I-85 through the Carolinas. Just below the Virginia border, I took Highway 158 east toward Warrenton. The asphalt ribbon meandered through forests of skinny loblolly pines, family farms with American flags waving from porches, and trailers scattered like weeds on manicured lawns. Abandoned tractors gawked from baking tobacco fields. I steered the Odyssey past the 1890 Browns Baptist Church near Boney Lambford Road, a housing development named Sherwood Forest, and a sign warning that cows might cross the road ahead. On the outskirts of town, the ubiquitous Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Highway took me to Warrenton’s historic business district.

Tiny Warrenton’s eight hundred residents want the world to know their town’s big history. Warrenton’s official website offers a virtual tour of fine old homes, quaint shops and notable churches. Tasteful brochures promote a downtown walking tour and a driving tour of the county.

Warren County took its name from a Massachusetts doctor killed during the American Revolution at the Battle of Bunker Hill. The area today is economically depressed, but in 1861 Warren County reigned as the richest county in North Carolina. It even owned its own railroad, which of course Sherman’s men destroyed.

I had no trouble finding a parking spot along Main Street. First stop: the Warren County Courthouse. The charming, red brick building, built in 1906, dominates downtown from a grassy hill shaded by oaks and adorned with a monument to Confederate soldiers, “Our Heroes.” The current courthouse replaced a courthouse built in the mid-1850s that burned down. The 1850s courthouse had replaced the town’s original frame courthouse, built in 1786. A fire also destroyed that courthouse.

Monument to Confederate
war dead at courthouse

At the clerk of court’s office at the end of a broad entrance hall, I asked a trio of ladies how I could learn of the town’s Civil War history. One woman ducked away and returned with the Honorable Richard E. Hunter, Jr., Warren County’s superior court clerk and keeper of Warrenton’s historical flame. Hunter, spry and white-haired, invited me into his office.

I asked Hunter if he could tell me anything about events at the courthouse in 1861. Hunter pointed to a framed photograph hanging on the back wall, one among many historic photos and documents. The 1850s courthouse in the photograph, Hunter explained, would have been standing when the state’s Civil War regiments gathered. The photo showed a brick building with four massive Corinthian columns on a wide portico. The two-story courthouse looked more like a temple built in ancient Greece than a courthouse erected in a 19^th-century, rural Southern state.

“So that’s what my ancestor saw when he came into town?” I asked, thrilled at my discovery.

“More than likely,” Hunter confirmed.

I stared at the photograph. I imagined Lyndon’s regiment gathered at the courthouse, a summer-sweet breeze whispering in their ears and women’s wails stirring their souls, as their chest-thumping commanders nudged their flock along the path of righteousness.

NOTE: I am posting this letter from my Confederate ancestor Lyndon McGee Welborn again, since this is where it appears in the book.

Warrenton NC

July 5, 61

Dear brother, (Robert)

i received your kind letter yesterday with much gladness i was going to write to you today if I had not got your letter this makes two I have gotten one a good while ago but I have not forgoten it you want me to tell you if we had any fighting to do yet we have not and I hope we will not have any to do i would like to see you all

we have got four Company in this Regiment we all marched up in town

yesterday and they give us a fine dinner we had beans and rosten (roasted corn) ears and everything that was good

Pa asked me one question I don’t think that I answered that was about our Company oficer Stokes is Promoted to Colonelship and has escepted (accepted) J.B. Gordon is our capton they have treted me very kindly so far

we have met with clever folks everywhere we have went yet and have seen the most pretty girls Yesterday the Court house was cramdfull of ladies our Colonel and all of our captons made speeches and the ladies on hering this they wept biterly we promisted them that they nead not fear the enamy for we would stop them if they don’t stop we don’t want to fight if we can shun it, but if we have it to (do) we will do what we can for them none of you need not fear the enamy becaus we will drive them back

We have ninety eight privates in our company it is the best company i hav seen I hav many friends in this company and would hate to leave them if I left them they would hav thought hard of me

i did not like to join the regulars without leting you Pa know it but all of them beged me to stay and I did not want to leave them after i had started if I had not joined i think that Frederick would have joined and I could not stay at home by my self I would be very well satisfied if Pa was but I don't feel that i am doing wright when i am doing anything against his will

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Want To Join My Cyber Focus Group?

As I write my creative nonfiction book about the Civil War legacy, tentatively titled Dear Father I’m Sorry To Tell You, I’m looking for people to participate in a cyber focus group. The online participants will read excerpts, and possibly whole chapters, from the book-in-progress.

After I select the focus group, I’ll post questions to get feedback about such issues as the book’s organization, narrative/plot and characters. Responses will help me rework passages and plot and craft the remainder of the book. And, I'll give credit where credit is due on my Facebook page.

If you’re interested in joining the group, please visit my Facebook page and complete the short Cyber Focus questionnaire for consideration. You’ll find it by visiting http://www.facebook.com/#!/CivilWarOdyssey?sk=app_201143516562748 or by clicking on the “Cyber Focus Group” button on my Facebook page.

I’m excited about this new adventure. I hope many of the 1,279 visitors that have checked out Civil War Odyssey with Author B.J. Welborn will join the conversation. I will select and notify the cyber focus group participants in the next few months.

It’s The Perfect Time To Debate Civil War’s Cause

noreply@blogger.com (B.J. Welborn) — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 13:55:00 +0000

Is it just “stirring the pot” to discuss the cause of the Civil War during its 150^th anniversary or does debating lead to a better understanding of history?

Depiction of Fort Sumter
in Charleston Harbor, S.C.

The chair of the South Carolina Civil War Sesquicentennial Advisory Board argues that we in South Carolina should not be debating the cause beyond what’s necessary for “genuine discussion.” Instead, writes Dr. Eric Emerson in The State newspaper in Columbia, S.C., we should “concentrate on those tangible links to the past that not only capture our attention, but also fire our imaginations (letters, visit to a slave cabin, or look at a battle flag and artifacts) that generate interest, curiosity and education.”

I couldn’t disagree more. Although I applaud the idea that we should use the sesquicentennial to connect to history by participating in the many wonderful events at hand and encourage “enlightened debate,” Dr. Emerson threw cold water on my enthusiasm by saying “At the center of the debate are the two competing claims for the war’s primary cause: slavery and states’ rights.”

Let me address Dr. Emerson’s last statement first: Really? We can only choose between slavery and states’ rights as the war’s cause? Setting aside the fact that these choices essentially are one and the same (since states’ rights meant the preservation of slavery), what about preserving the Union? That cause deserves at least passing comment.

Even here in South Carolina, many saw the U.S. Constitution as more than a gentleman’s agreement that could be freely joined and freely abandoned.

As for Dr. Emerson’s assertion that “the next four years should not be a referendum on the war’s causes…because if South Carolinians come to the end of the sesquicentennial with only an understanding of why the war began, then the commemoration has been a failure.” Really?

I counter that if the Civil War commemoration helps us understand why the war began and the state’s role in a war that cost 620,000 American lives and decades of hardship in the South, the sesquicentennial will have been a great success. Then we might get past our genteel Southern fear of controversy to examine, debate and reflect about America’s complex history.

We must seize the moment to scrutinize the Civil War legacy that paved the way for our state’s current “plantation politics” that continue to protect the “haves” and ignore the “have-nots,” as if they don’t count or remain three-fifths a person, as slaves were enumerated in the census of 1860. We must note that African Americans, mostly descendants of slaves, comprise nearly one-third of the state’s population; that nearly 13 percent of the people in the state live in poverty; and that only 55 percent of its youth graduate from high school on time. These statistics place South Carolina at the bottom of the barrel nationally when it comes to quality of life for many of its people.

Although debating the Civil War’s causes – and there are many beyond slavery and states’ rights – seems enigmatic, effacing, even embarrassing to many of us, that’s no reason to ignore it or squash sometimes heated discussion about it. The war’s 150^th anniversary presents the perfect time to study the Civil War’s true history, realize its sad legacy, heal our current wounds, and have South Carolina take its place in a more perfect Union.

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Find Dr. Emerson’s guest column in The State at EMERSON.

Do you think we should examine the cause of the Civil War during the war's sesquicentennial? Go to COMMENT to post your reply.

The Long Shadow of Fort Sumter

noreply@blogger.com (B.J. Welborn) — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 14:46:00 +0000

I didn't visit Fort Sumter until I was an adult, but I'd heard stories of the little-fort-that-could most of my life from my Dad, a Civil War buff. In 1961, the Civil War Centennial year, Dad apparently sneaked time from his job as a traveling salesman to attend commemoration events in Charleston, S.C., where this week a chock-full calendar of 150th anniversary activities has attracted thousands of visitors and the attention of the world.

My father, Ed Welborn, placed this commemorative
envelope in my hands in 1961, during the Civil War
Centennial. The postmark bears the words "First Day of
Issue." The envelope is signed by Ernest F. "Fritz" Hollings,
then the 106th governor of
South Carolina, and postmaster Roland F. Wooten.
Hollings later represented South Carolina in the U.S. Senate.

Fifty years ago, the war's centennial celebration unfolded against the turbulent backdrop of the Civil Rights movement. Commemoration events reflected the times; they were largely white only and had a decidedly pro-Confederate feel. This time, things clearly are different. (For more about the anniversary of the firing on Fort Sumter, go to www.civilwar.org.)

On a Friday evening back in '61, Dad returned to our small North Carolina town, surrounded by Civil War battlefields, smack in the path of Union General Sherman's march, and dotted with Confederate graves. (He usually left home on Monday mornings and returned from his sales travels on Fridays.) Into my little-girl hands, he placed a gray envelope he had purchased in Charleston. Dad bought the first day cover for my stamp collection, but I tucked the envelope away, discovering its hiding place only recently as I began research for my latest book.

I still remember Dad's stories of the Confederate forces that began shelling the Union-held Fort Sumter at 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861. For 34 hours, rebels hurled more than 3,000 artillery and mortar shells at the diminutive garrison. Union troops surrendered the fort on April 14; Confederate troops held it throughout the war. During the Union siege that began on April 7, 1863, the little fort endured another 44,000 projectiles, about 7 million pounds of ordnance. (For more, go to Fort Sumter Numbers.) Fort Sumter became a symbol of the Confederate defiance and Union resolve that stretched the Civil War to four grueling years.

The history-altering events that exploded at Fort Sumter 150 years ago cast a long shadow, still fueling debate, uncovering truths, and teaching lessons. At best, we should commemorate the Civil War anniversary not as just part of our history, but as a sobering reminder of its high cost.

As I do so, I'm also going to remember my father and the first day cover that never made it to my stamp album.

From my book-in-progress, Dear Father I Am Sorry To Tell You:

Many nights I’d find Dad studying his Civil War books at the fold-down desk-and-shelf unit he had never finished in his and Mamma’s bedroom. He sat in a folding chair, cigar smoke swirling around his horned rim glasses and settling into his dark, Brylcreemed hair. With a big magnifying glass, he examined the books’ battlefield maps, charts and tables. I dared not disturb him.

As a young man, being the oldest child, Dad quit college to help support his mother, brothers and sisters after his father, my grandfather George Grant Welborn, fell mysteriously ill. But Dad’s love of books and his curiosity about nearly everything didn’t fade. He thought his kids should learn about the Civil War, so he took us for picnics at nearby Averasboro and Bentonville battlegrounds, where Confederates fought Sherman’s troops.

After our picnic lunch, we’d roam the hallowed grounds looking for spent Minié balls and belt buckles and gaze reverently at fallen heroes’ graves. I bowed my head at the tombstones as instructed, but I didn’t understand Dad’s interest in war’s suffering and death. I didn’t get his fascination for Saturday afternoon wrestling on the television, either.

For more on my Fort Sumter visit, go to PHOTOS page.
RESOURCES: Washington, Wayne. “S.C. To Mark Start of Momentous, Tragic War," The State. Dec. 19, 2011.