Speedyleeway Research Month continued
with the final days at the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College.
Sunday opened with Keith Bohannon
discussing Federal General William T. Sherman and his campaign for Atlanta. Bohannon
highlighted the differences between Sherman and the Confederate commanders he
faced, Joseph Johnston and John B. Hood. Bohannon explained that Sherman had
the support of his military superiors and his civilian superior, which Johnston
did not. Hood had the support of the Confederate civilian leadership but he
really faced an impossible situation.
Bohannon threw out a fact that your
loyal blogger did not know, that the set from the film The Wizard of Oz was burned during the filming of Gone with the Wind.
Emmanuel Dabney delivered a terrific
address about the US Colored Troops at the Battle of the Crater. Union soldiers
dug a mine under the Confederate lines with the idea of using a massive
explosion underground to open up a gap in the Confed defenses. Dabney talked
about the terrible massacre during that engagement and said white US soldiers
killed their African American comrades when it became obvious the attack was a
failure.
Your favorite blogger talked to Dabney
later on during the day. He’s a great young guy and he’s very passionate about
history.
Next came a series of breakout
sessions and yours truly took in Jonathan Noyalas’ outstanding presentation
about the Battle of Cedar Creek in one of the really snazzy classrooms at the
College. The net result of this battle was the end of Jubal Early’s campaign in
the Shenandoah Valley. Noyalas took us through this event very nicely.
Then it was back to the main meeting
room for Crystal Feimster’s address about the rape and mutiny at Fort Jackson,
Louisiana. The event, as detailed by Feimster, was particularly ugly. Federal
officers raped a group of African American women who worked in the camp
laundry. Six of the guilty officers were dismissed from the Army but President
Lincoln revoked the dismissals and the officers returned to the same regiment
they’d been dismissed from.
K. Stephen Prince discussed The Burnt District: Southern Ruins and the
Problem of Reconstruction. Photographs of the ruined cities in the South,
Prince told us, generated a great deal of intellectual commentating in the
immediate post- war period. We now term the discussions of the period Ruin Talk. Northerners saw the ruins of
the South as 1) visions of the guilty South, 2) the end of what the South had
been before the war and 3) the South reborn. The ruins of the South were
frequently compared with the ruins of Pompeii, according to Prince, but Ruin
Talk ended at the end of 1865.
Prince’s address gave your loyal
blogger the idea that there is a strong similarity between the still images of
post-Civil War Southern United States and the newsreel visions of Japan after
the Second World War. In both cases, photography brought home the brutality of
armed conflict. Cultural and economic changes were demanded by the winners in
both instances. We could argue about which rehab project worked best.
Barton A. Myers gave us a great talk, Controlling the Chaos: The Guerrilla Wars of
1864. There were guerrilla fighters in every Confederate state, according
to Myers, but the Confederate States government enacted a law making it legal.
But the groups probably hurt the Confederate war effort more than they helped.
Guerrillas hurt Confederate command and control of the war effort for one thing
and Myers added that many of the darkest hours of the war involved guerrilla
forces.
Susannah Ural talked about the
incidents where the Texans fighting under John B. Hood refused to go into
attack until Robert E. Lee, who seemed intent upon personally leading them from
the front, got out of the way. The Texas Brigade was, by 1864, among the best
fighting units on either side of the war and Lee frequently counted on them to
perform the most difficult tasks.
One of the great opportunities offered
by the CWI is the dine-in program where members of the Institute faculty have
dinner with a small number of attendees. This year, yours truly and a few
others had dinner with Ural. We discussed portions of Ural’s book, Don’t Hurry Me Down to Hades and what
reactions we had to the selections. It was interesting to share ideas in such a
comfortable setting with a cross section of CWI attendees and one of the
leading researchers and authors in the Civil War field.
Two tours were part of the CWI
experience for this attendee. Brooks Simpson led a group of us to the
Wilderness and Spotsylvania battlefields. Both locations have excellent
remnants of Civil War trenches. Yours truly had never before visited either
location. It was interesting to see the tangled woods of the Wilderness and
realize that the area was equally difficult to pass through at the time of the
battle. It was exciting for this writer to stand in the Mule Shoe salient of
the Spotsylvania battlefield.
Simpson
is an outstanding professor and author. It became obvious that he is also a
terrific tour guide. Your loyal blogger is now reading his book, Let Us Have Peace about U.S. Grant
during the period immediately before and after the end of the war.
The
second tour was at the Culp’s Hill positions at Gettysburg. This tour was
conducted by Jennifer Murray and Murray did an excellent job. It was the first
time your loyal blogger began to understand the fighting on that key hill.
Civil War historians ignore Culp’s Hill, for reasons that make little or no
sense, despite the fact that it was the key to the Union defense for all three
days of the fighting.
This
was a terrific conference. The only bad thing is waiting for 360 more days for
the next edition of the conference.
Thanks for reading
and Happy Research Month!
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