Tag Archives: Civil War

by | September 14, 2015 · 1:07 pm

Passage to India

Benjamin Covington Grider; Edwin Barter's letter

Benjamin Covington Grider; Edwin Barter’s letter

The acquaintance of Edwin Barter and Colonel Benjamin Covington Grider of Bowling Green dated back to the first year of the Civil War, during Grider’s command of the Union’s 9th Kentucky Infantry.  When Grider next heard from him, Barter had left his home in England to pursue the cotton and coffee trade in India.

In an August, 1865 letter from Madras Province, Barter observed that America had finally turned a page.  “The war for Southern rights is well nigh over, and ‘subjugation’ ‘Coercion’ and ‘precipitation’ are words buried,” he declared.  Now it was time to “count the cost” of “3/4 century’s folly and vice.”  Barter had heard that a local judge was out to get Robert E. Lee, but couldn’t imagine Americans being vindictive toward the Confederate general.

Once in India, however, Barter struck a more mercenary tone toward its brown-skinned inhabitants.  Regarding them with an air of superiority common to many in the West, he likened them to primitives who “draw water from the well and cook their simple food after the same style as their ancestors who lived before Britain was known to the Romans.”  He scorned the natives at length as mendacious, lacking in “go-a-headativeness,” and seemingly immune to attempts to introduce them to the benefits of Christianity and European civilization.  India, he remarked, has “180 million of inhabitants who are governed by 3 or 4 hundred thousand Britains [sic] who exile themselves for a certain number of years, never, or very seldom indeed, permanently settling in the Country, but ever looking forward to the day when they will have pocketed enough to turn their faces towards home.”  Barter described his own prospects as good, but agreed that he was not “at home.”  “How long residence?” he asked tersely–wondering, perhaps, about the political costs awaiting Britain in three-quarters of a century.

Edwin Barter’s letter to Benjamin Grider is part of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives collections of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.  Click here to access a finding aid.  For more of our collections, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | May 26, 2015 · 6:00 pm

Memorial Civil War Sheet Music

U. S. Park Ranger explains that this is the true grave of the boy honored by the song.

U. S. Park Ranger explains that this is the true grave of the boy honored by the song, Memorial Day 2015.

By Associate Professor Sue Lynn McDaniel, Library Special Collections

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to visit the Shiloh National Cemetery located on the Shiloh Battlefield within our national park. Our ranger took us to the grave of the young boy commemorated in a rare piece of sheet music which we hold in Library Special Collections. The title is “The Drummer Boy of Shiloh.”  She told us that immediately following the Civil War, another boy was mistakenly named as the soldier about whom the song had been written and he did not correct the general public, but instead enjoyed the publicity. The lyrics tell that the drummer boy died on the battlefield.  Later, historians researching Shiloh identified J. D. Holmes to be its true soldier hero.

WKU’s Library Special Collections has over one hundred war songs in its 4228 pieces of sheet music.  In our collection of Civil War ballads, WKU has nine titles by Will S. Hays of Louisville, Kentucky, including “The Drummer Boy of Shiloh.”  Although a Unionist who was publishing titles like “The Union forever, for me!” and “Sherman and his gallant boys in blue” through a Louisville publishing house during the Civil War, Hays wrote many lyrics between 1861 and 1865 which stirred the heart strings of Yankees and Rebels.  A good example is “I am dying, Mother, dying.”  During the two day battle of Shiloh, Tennessee, more Americans died in combat than the total of all wars to that date.  It was the first of many Civil War battles with unthinkable numbers of casualties.

J. D. Holmes, the Drummer Boy of Shiloh

J. D. Holmes, the Drummer Boy of Shiloh

This beautiful ballad, dedicated to Miss Annie Cannon of Louisville, reads:

“On Shiloh’s dark and bloody ground, The dead and wounded lay;  Amongst them was a drummer boy, Who beat the drum that day.  A wounded soldier held him up His drum was by his side; He clasp’d his hands,  then rais’d his eyes, And prayed before he died.

Look down upon the battle field, ‘Oh, Thou our Heavenly Friend!  Have mercy on our sinful souls!’ The soldier’s cried ‘Amen!’ For gathered ’round a little group, Each brave man knelt and cried; They listened to the drummer boy, Who prayed before he died.

‘Oh, mother,” said the dying boy, ‘Look down from heavn on me, Receive me to thy fond embrace — Oh, take me home to thee.  I’ve loved my country as my God; To serve them both I’ve tried.’ He smiled, shook hands — death seized the boy Who prayed before he died.

Each solder wept, then, like a child —

Kentuckian Will S. Hays wrote numerous Civil War songs.

Kentuckian Will S. Hays wrote numerous Civil War songs.

Stout hearts were they, and brave; The flag his winding — sheet — God’s Book The key unto his grave.  They wrote upon a simple board These words; ‘This is a guide To thoses who’d mourn the drummer boy Who prayed before he died.’

Ye angels ’round the Throne of Grace, Look down upon the braves, Who fought and died on Shiloh’s plain, Now slumb’ring in their graves!  How many homes made desolate — How many hearts have sighed — How many, like that drummer boy Who prayer before they died!

Our sheet music collection includes more than 118 pieces of music published by composer & lyricist William Shakespeare Hays; many of them from Louisville, Kentucky publishing companies.  To learn more about historic sheet music at WKU, please visit kencat.wku.edu

 

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by | March 4, 2015 · 2:40 pm

A Stormy Inauguration

Lyrics sung to the tune "Yankee Doodle" alluded to the pre-inauguration plot against Lincoln (SC 2264)

Lyrics sung to the tune “Yankee Doodle” alluded to the pre-inauguration plot against Lincoln (SC 2264)

Prior to 1937, Inauguration Day for U.S. presidents was March 4.  On that day in 1861, there was great excitement, but also grave uncertainty.  Abraham Lincoln took office at a time of national crisis, with the South in the midst of secession and Lincoln himself the recent subject of a rumored assassination plot.  Soon after his swearing-in, tensions only escalated with the attack on Fort Sumter and the secession of Virginia in April.

Collections in the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives holdings of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections afford a glimpse at the mixed emotions the new president elicited from Americans.  In August, a letter to Barren County, Kentucky merchant Wade Veluzat from a Lincoln voter denied that either he or his candidate were abolitionists.  “But,” he wrote, “if the people of the South will make war on us because we vote for whom we please for President, then let it come.”  In September, a defiant secessionist in Russellville, Kentucky took up the challenge in a letter sent to Ohio.  “We are not afraid of the Lincoln Negro Party, we say whip us if you can.”

Four years later, Lincoln’s first-term record drew a similarly wide range of comment.  As we have previously seen, Bevie Cain of Breckinridge County had nothing but scorn for supporters of the President’s “wicked unwise rule.”  She dared a Unionist friend to “just tell me one item of good that his reign has accomplished or will accomplish.”  An Indiana man was on the other side of the fence, finding Lincoln to be, in fact, insufficiently radical.  He expected, nevertheless, to vote for the reelection of “old Abe,” observing presciently that he “is a good honest man, and has already said and done enough to make his name famous among the friends of universal Liberty everywhere and for all time.”

Click on the links to access finding aids for these collections.  For more on Lincoln, presidents and presidential inaugurations, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | January 23, 2014 · 2:45 pm

“Who is living and dead”

Nancy Wier's letter in search of family, 1865

Nancy Wier’s letter in search of family, 1865

It was the plaintive appeal of a woman displaced by war.  In 1865, Nancy Wier wrote from Webster County, Kentucky to the postmaster at Danville, Virginia.  A native of the area, Nancy had lost touch with her family after the outbreak of hostilities.  Her husband, a Confederate soldier, had been imprisoned at Camp Douglas, Illinois, where he died of smallpox.  Left with four children, Nancy had been teaching school but “my troubles are very great,” she explained to the postmaster.  “I wish to know who of my relatives and friends are living,” she wrote, naming her sisters, her “old father” and her brothers, who she hoped might come and “spend the last of their days with me.”

Fortunately, three years later Nancy had not only reestablished contact with her siblings, she had remarried and her children had begun lives of their own.  Nevertheless, her mother’s radar was intact.  “I can never get weaned from my children,” she wrote a sister.  “Bettie lives 18 miles from me Sarah five Virginia two and a half William ten he often comes to see me they come as often as they can.”  Equally strong was her desire to maintain contact with those lost to her during the war.  She agreed with her brother that even “if we never can see each other we must try to keep up correspondence.”  Having found out “who is living and dead,” she was determined not to loosen the ties again.

Nancy Wier’s letters and those of other family members are part of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives collections of WKU’s Special Collections Library.  Click here and here to access finding aids.  For more collections, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | October 17, 2013 · 7:45 pm

A Thinking Man Laments

Jason Wiltse and his diary

Jason Wiltse and his diary

“Another Christmas Day has come. . . .  One year ago today we were at Bowling Green Kentucky and at picket duty,” noted Jason Wiltse in his diary on December 25, 1863.  A corporal with the 23rd Michigan Infantry, 20-year-old Wiltse had spent the past year on a tour of duty that took him through Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee.  On his long marches, he observed the weather, local geography, timber, crops, road conditions, and the fortunes of his fellow soldiers as they endured heat, cold and dust, and skirmished with the Confederates.

Crossing from Clinton County, Kentucky into Tennessee, Wiltse found himself marching through the Cumberland Mountains over rough roads before arriving at Jamestown, “mostly desolate & forsaken.”  Approaching London, Tennessee, his company “commenced drawing rations of green corn, 3 ears per day for a man.”  But he wrote with satisfaction in September that “East Tennessee, long considered impenetrable by any considerable force, has been penetrated by a large army, with wagon trains and artillery, and the country is now in our possession and the loyal inhabitants relieved of the tyranny of a desperate enemy.”

The enemy, of course, was not quite vanquished, and in November 1863, Wiltse wrote, “we halted to give them battle” at Campbell’s Station.  Enduring a “murderous fire,” he and his men “lay flat upon the ground for a long time,” the attack “sending some of our comrades to eternity”: one shot through the shoulder “and probably through the heart,” another through the cheek, and another wounded in the left knee, requiring an amputation the next day.  They withdrew from the field “obliged to leave the dead unburied, though not unmourned.”  Wiltse found the battle “a terrible example of the mad passions of man,” a sight to “make a thinking man lament more deeply, if possible, the terrible condition of a once happy country.”

Corporal Jason Wiltse’s diary, recently donated to the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives section of WKU’s Special Collections Library, is available to interested researchers.  Click here to access a finding aid.  For more Civil War collections, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | October 2, 2013 · 1:03 pm

The Economics of War

Henry McLean's commutation money receipt, 1864

Henry McLean’s commutation money receipt, 1864

“A rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight” was the often-heard complaint of military draftees during the Vietnam War.  But the cry was also raised during the Civil War, after the Enrollment Act, passed in March 1863, established a quota system for drafting men into the Union Army from each Congressional district.

The most unpopular parts of this unpopular law were its exemptions, and in particular the provisions allowing draftees to procure a substitute, or simply to avoid service by paying the government a $300 fee.  The logic behind “commutation” money was that it would not only raise funds for the war effort but keep the cost of hiring a substitute below what it cost to exempt oneself entirely.  Still, the fee (equivalent to about $5,500 today) was no small sum for the farmers, laborers and clerks who found themselves called to war.

Nevertheless, when Henry J. McLean was drafted on May 13, 1864, he quickly paid over his $300 at Owensboro, Kentucky and was issued a receipt which, according to section 13 of the Enrollment Act, discharged him from further liability under the draft.  He might have considered himself lucky, for in July the federal government eliminated the commutation fee option, effectively removing the ceiling on the price of a substitute to serve in a draftee’s place.

Henry J. McLean’s commutation money receipt is part of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives collections of WKU’s Special Collections Library.  Click here to access a finding aid.  For other collections relating to compulsory military service, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | August 16, 2013 · 1:05 pm

A Summer of Anxiety

On May 20, 1861, the Commonwealth of Kentucky officially declared itself neutral in the growing Civil War.  Neutral?  In the words of “Aunt Jane,” the fictional elderly storyteller created decades later by Bowling Green author Eliza Calvert Hall, “You might as well put two game-roosters in the same pen and tell ’em not to fight as to start up a war between the North and the South and tell Kentucky to keep out of it.”

Robert Rodes and his warning letter

Robert Rodes and his warning letter

Indeed, by August 1861, with armies on both sides recruiting volunteers, Kentucky’s neutrality was in danger of collapse.  In Bowling Green, lawyer and Union supporter Robert Rodes (1824-1913) wrote two letters to his colleague, Joseph Rogers Underwood, then serving in the state legislature, setting out his fears of invasion.  “We are growing a little feverish here just now,” he admitted.  He was particularly agitated over the news of thousands of Southern troops camped just across the Tennessee state line.  Were they to acquire sufficient arms, he insisted to a skeptical Underwood, “you would see my predictions verified to the letter and all the territory south of Green River, in the Confederate power before the end of a week.”  Enemy occupation, he reminded Underwood, would result in “the necessary scattering of families; foraging of scouts & quartering of troops will follow and we will be at the mercy of one of the most merciless & audacious Rebellions on Record.”

A few days later, Rodes believed that the threat was serious enough to justify bringing Federal troops into the region to pre-empt a rebel attack.  The time for negotiation and petty arguing about “who first violated Kys Neutrality” was past.  Rodes saw infrastructure–roads, bridges, railroads–in peril, but he also saw a “moral danger” in the form of economic opportunism.  Demoralized by their government’s inaction, some Unionists had become content to buy up cattle and provisions, smuggle contraband, and sell their services to the Confederates.  Soon, Rodes warned, “we will find ourselves. . . seized, held & bound by an army of traitors.”  Four days after he wrote this letter, Confederate troops arrived to begin a five-month occupation of Bowling Green.

Robert Rodes’s letters are part of the Rodes Collection in the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives section of WKU’s Special Collections Library.  Click here to access a finding aid.  For other collections relating to the Rodes and Underwood families, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | August 30, 2012 · 2:17 pm

Waiting to Cross

Vincent Trago's letter

Vincent Trago’s letter

As Union troops neared Bowling Green in the wake of the Confederate withdrawal in February 1862, they found that the departing enemy had destroyed foot and railroad bridges leading over the Barren River into the town.  Camped on the north side, waiting for their turn either to ford the river or cross on makeshift bridges, some of the soldiers took time to write a line home.  Among several such letters in the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives section of WKU’s Special Collections Library is one from Vincent T. Trago, a 24-year-old corporal serving with the 15th Ohio Infantry.

Unbowed by the rigors of military life, Trago assured his correspondent that “I am well as usual [and] can eat my share of rations yet.”  During the 20-mile march to Bowling Green he had avoided the fate of some of his comrades, whose “feet got verry sore so that they took off their boots and went bare footed for 6 or 7 miles.”  Local reception of the marching men also cheered Trago.  The “Kentucky girls were fix up in their Sunday best and were standing by the road side smiling and looking as pleasant as they could,” he wrote, and their African-American counterparts seemed equally delighted with the passing soldiers.  The only sour note had come from within the ranks, where some of the men had shot off their pistols and committed other breaches of discipline, and been ordered to carry rails as punishment.

A finding aid and typescript of Vincent Trago’s letter can be downloaded here.  For more of our Civil War collections, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | November 10, 2011 · 10:31 pm

Lincoln and Secession

lincoln_20

In conjunction with the Lincoln: the Constitution and the Civil War traveling exhibition hosted in the Kentucky Museum, Dr. Glenn LaFantansie, WKU’s Richard Frockt Family Professor of Civil War History, gave a talk on “Lincoln and Secession” at the museum’s Western Room on the evening of November 9, 2011. His talk drew a large crowd and triggered a lively discussion among the audience.

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by | September 22, 2011 · 9:34 am

150 Years Ago Today

Remnants of the Civil War fort on WKU's campus, about 1907

Remnants of the Civil War fort on WKU’s campus, about 1907

On September 22, 1861, William Howard wrote a letter to his family in Caldwell County.  A private in the 3rd Kentucky Infantry, Howard was with the first wave of Confederate troops who arrived in Bowling Green four days earlier from Camp Boone, Tennessee to begin a five-month occupation of the city.  “We are encamped at Bolen Green in Ky. Warren Co.,” he reported, and thanked his family for the socks he had received just prior to departing from Camp Boone.

Of Bowling Green, Howard wrote that “Union men here are as thick as dog hair”; nevertheless, he pronounced himself ready for a fight against the “Lincolnites.”  Over the next few months, he vividly depicted the trials of camp life for the ordinary soldier.  Like many of his comrades, Howard grew tired and ill as he helped to build fortifications in cold, rainy weather, and he watched as the “heep of sickness in camp” took its toll.  Early in November, he reported that deaths in his brigade were averaging about one per day, with 38 dead since their arrival.  The Yankees never showed up for battle, but in January 1862 Howard still believed that there would “be a big fight in Ky” before too long, “and then peace.”

When he wrote on September 22, Howard was apprehensive about the future, telling his family that “its extremely doubtful about us ever meeting again.”  He was right.  He died in Mississippi on February 12, 1863.

The letters of William B. Howard are part of the collections of WKU’s Special Collections Library.  Click here to download a finding aid.  For more on our extensive Civil War collections, click here or search TopScholar and KenCat.

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