Category:

Horses in History: Traveller

6/27/2021

This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA

Horses served an important role in the Civil War, and suffered as greatly as the men beneath them. It has been estimated that 1.5 million horses and mules died in the Civil War. Five million pounds of dead horses was removed from the Gettysburg battlefield alone. But of all the horses that served in this period, none is as famous as Traveller.

Traveller, spelled as the British do, with two Ls, was an iron grey American Saddlebred with black points and a dark mane and tail. The 16-hand tall horse was sired by a race horse named Grey Eagle, who had won $20,000 in a Louisville, Kentucky stake race, and born in 1857 in Greenbrier County, in what is now West Virginia. His first owner named him “Jeff Davis,” after the Mississippi Senator and Mexican American War hero who eventually became the President of the Confederacy.

In 1861 the son of the original owner took the horse with him when he joined the legion of former Virginia governor Brig. Gen. Henry Wise. He sold the horse to Captain Joseph M. Broun, a quartermaster of Wise’s Legion’s 3rd Infantry. Broun renamed the horse “Greenbriar.” When Robert E. Lee arrived to advise Wise in late August 1861, he saw Broun’s horse and was immediately taken with him, calling the horse ‘my colt’ and saying he would need it before the war was over. Aware of the difference in their ranks, Broun offered to give the horse to Lee, who declined the offer. Broun then offered to sell Greenbriar to Lee for the same price he had himself paid for the horse. Lee added an extra $15 to cover the depreciating value of the Confederate dollar. Lee bought the horse in February 1862 and renamed him Traveller because of his ability to walk at a fast pace.

Although Traveller was not the only horse Lee rode from that time on, it was the one he rode and most and the one that became linked to him in the public’s eye. He was known for great endurance during long marches, and being unflappable in battle. He was not perfect, though. Lee’s youngest son, Robert E. Lee Jr later wrote that the horse fretted a lot, especially when in crowds if he wasn’t regularly exercised. At the Second Battle of Manassas he shied at enemy movements, rearing and throwing the General, who broke bones in both his hands during the fall.

After the war, Lee continued to keep the grey near him. He brought Traveller to Washington University when he became its president, and the pair were a common site on campus. Traveller became such a celebrity that his mane and tail thinned because students plucked the dark hairs as souvenirs. Locks of Lee’s hair and Traveller’s mane are still part of the collection at Arlington House, Lee’s former home on the grounds of Arlington National Cemetery.

When Lee died in October of 1870, Traveller was draped in black crepe walked, riderless, behind the funeral hearse. Less than a year later, Traveller stepped on a nail and contracted tetanus. He died June of 1871 and was buried along a creek adjoining Washington University’s campus near Lee Chapel.

But Traveller’s story didn’t end with his death. In 1875, Custis Lee, who had succeeded his father as President of the institution that was renamed Washington and Lee University after the General’s death, exhumed Traveller and sent his bones to Henry Augustus Ward, a University of Rochester faculty member who traveled the world acquiring a massive assortment of geological and zoological specimens and taxidermy samples for museums.

CLIPPED FROM The Times-Picayune New Orleans, Louisiana 15 Dec 1875, Wed

An undated image of Traveller’s skeleton on display in Lexington.

The skeleton was returned to Washington and Lee in 1907, and later moved to the basement of Lee Chapel. By the time his bones were reburied in front of the chapel in 1960, the bones had deteriorated and were covered with the penned signatures of visitors.

Jennifer Bohnhoff is a writer who lives in the mountains of central New Mexico. You can read about her on her website. You can read another story about a horse from history, Sergeant Reckless, an Army horse during the Korean war, here.

2 Comments

Peanut Pie

1/18/2021

0 Comments

The last slice of the latest peanut pie in our house.

The author and her sons at Devil's Den, Gettysburg

During the summer of 2000, my husband and I took our three sons on an historical vacation. Among the places visited were Williamsburg and Gettysburg, both places where we ate peanut pie in local taverns, so that the pie is associated in our minds with American history.

Many histories of peanuts say that they came to America in the 1700s, carried from Africa along with slaves. While that may be true, they are not originally from Africa. Peanuts seem to have originated in South America, in Peru. They were taken back to Africa by the Spanish before coming to North America.

Wherever they came from, I'm glad they made it into my family's repertoire. This recipe is adapted from the Chowning's Tavern Pie from historical Williamsburg.

Peanut Pie

For the Crust:

1 1/3 cup flour
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 C shortening

Cut shortening into flour and salt mixture until it resembles cornmeal in consistency, with some particles the size of small peas.

3 TBS ice water
1/2 TBS vinegar

Mix water and vinegar and sprinkle over the flour mixture, 1 TBS at a time, mixing until the dough clumps together. You may not use all the liquid.

Press together, then place on a floured piece of waxed paper or parchment. Roll out until it is larger than your pie place. Invert the paper over the pie plate to fit in. Flute edged.

For the Filling:

3 large eggs,
3/4 cup brown sugar
1 cup light corn syrup
3/4 tsp vanilla
1 1/2 TBS melted butter

1 cup peanuts (you may use salted or unsalted, but I prefer unsalted, roasted Virginia peanuts with the skins removed.)

Beat the eggs, brown sugar, corn syrup and vanilla together in a large bowl. Add the melted butter and peanuts. Pour into the pie shell and bake in a preheated oven at 350 until the filling is set in the center and the pastry is lightly browned, about 45 minutes.

Jennifer Bohnhoff is a writer and educator who lives high in the mountains of central New Mexico. She wrote about Gettysburg in her novel, The Bent Reed, which is available in ebook and paperback.

0 Comments

The Only Lancer Charge in the Civil War

6/1/2020

2 Comments

When Major General H. H. Sibley invaded New Mexico in 1862, he brought with him two companies of lancers.

Handsome and chivalrous heirs of medieval knights, the lancers were the darlings of the parade through San Antonio on the day the Army of New Mexico headed west. Bright red flags with white stars snapped from their lances. Lances had been common on Napoleonic battlefields, and were used by Mexican cavalry during the conflicts against the Texans in the 1830s and 1840s. The lances that these two companies carried were war trophies captured from the Mexicans during the Mexican American War thirteen years earlier

Colonel Thomas Green

On the day of the Battle for Valverde Ford, Colonel Thomas Green peered across the battlefield and saw uniforms that he couldn't identify. Knowing they weren't Union regulars, he guessed that these men on the Union extreme right were a company of inexperienced New Mexico Volunteers who would break and run from a lancer charge.

He turned to the commanders of his two lancer companies, Captains Willis Lang and Jerome McCown, and asked which would like to have the honor of the first charge.

Captain Willis Lafayette Lang

The first hand up belonged to the leader of the 5th Texas Cavalry Regiment's Company B. Captain Willis L. Lang was a rich, 31 year old who owned slaves that worked his plantation near Marlin in Falls County, Texas.

Lang quickly organized his men. Minutes later, he gave the signal and his company cantered forward, lowered their lances, and began galloping across the 300 yards that divided his men from the men in the unusual uniforms. The plan called for McCown's company to follow after the Union troops had broken, and the two lancer companies would chase the panicking Union men into the Rio Grande that stood at their back.

Captain Theodore Dodd

But Colonel Green was wrong. The men in the strange uniforms were not New Mexican Volunteers. They were Captain Theodore Dodd’s Independent Company of Colorado Volunteers. Dodd's men were a scrappy collection of miners and cowboys who were reputedly low on discipline but high on fighting spirit. They coolly waited until the lancers were within easy range, then fired a volley that unhorsed many of the riders. Their second volley finished the assault. More than half of Lang's men were either killed or wounded, and most of the horses lay dead on the field. Lang himself dragged himself back to the Confederate lines because he was too injured to walk.

Lang's charge was the only lancer charge of the American Civil War. The destruction of his company showed that modern firearms had rendered the ten-foot long weapons obsolete. McCown's men, and what remained of Lang's men threw their lances into a heap and burned them. They then rearmed themselves with pistols and shotguns and returned to the fight.

The day after the battle, Lang and the rest of the injured Confederate were carried north to the town of Socorro, where they had requisitioned a house and turned it into a hospital. A few days later, depressed and in great pain, he asked his colored servant for his revolver, with which he ended his suffering. Lang and the other Confederate dead were buried in a plot of land near the south end of town that has now become neglected and trash-strewn. The owners do not allow visitors.

This derelict field was once a Confederate Cemetery.

The Charge of Company B of the 5th Texas Cavalry Regiment at the Battle of Valverde Ford is included in Jennifer Bohnhoff's historical novel, Where Duty Calls, published by Kinkajou Press, a division of Artemesia Publishing in June 2022. The author is a former New Mexico history teacher who lives in the mountains of central New Mexico. You can read more about her and her writing here.

2 Comments

A Clear Creek Christmas

12/24/2018

5 Comments

Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12459168

The wind outside our little tent howled pitifully, sounding God-forsaken and destitute. I wasn’t fooled. Along with dry, sharp snow, that gale was throwing around plenty of gold dust. That’s why I’d laid down a claim among these desolate peaks. Rocky Mountains winds don’t howl so much as shout for joy. No land has been more God-blessed rich since God laid down manna in the wilderness. All a man has to do to prosper in this wilderness is listen with an attentive ear and open his eyes.

George Nelson, who held up the other side of our foursome, groaned. George is a big, meaty galoot, with broad hands that can rip apart rock and a back that can carry a hundred-weight without complaint. But he’s not big on brains. Without me, he’d have frozen, or starved, or been cheated out of his claim long ago.
Luther and Key slept between George and me , the four of us nesting like spoons in a drawer. It can be hard to sleep when one of us twitches in the throes of a nightmare or has the trots from some rancid bacon or undercooked potato, but sleeping like this keeps us from freezing. Out here, comfort is secondary to survival.

“Samuel? You awake?” George’s voice was somewhere between a whisper and a groan. I might not have heard it over the wind if I weren’t already listening for it.
“I am,” I answered. “Still an hour or such ‘til dawn. Need to roll over?” That’s what we did, turning as one when one side of us or the other got too cold. Right now I was facing out, my back warm against Key and the blankets tucked under my knees. George, with his back out, would be the first to feel the chill.

“I’m fine,” George said with a sigh that matched the wind and told me that he really wasn’t. “Just ruminating. This here’s Christmas Eve, ain’t it?”

“That it is,” I agreed. I let the conversation lie, waiting for George to tell me why that would matter in a place such as this, where the closest church is miles away, in Golden City.

“Samuel, what did your mother serve on Christmas when you were a child?”

Ah. So this wasn’t about going to church. The big baby was missing his mother and the comforts of holiday traditions. I salivated, thinking of the sumptuous meals of my childhood. “T’warn’t my mother made Christmas dinner. We’d all bundle up and take the sled to grandmother’s. Oh, Lordy, what a feast she prepared! She’d roast a turkey of uncommon size, and there’d mashed potatoes and turnips, and boiled onions, and dressed celery. And always mincemeat pie for dessert. How about you?”

“Roast pig, and applesauce, mashed sweet potatoes and pickles. And large pitchers of sweet cider,” George said. “My granny was there, too, but she was addled in the head by the time I come along. Couldn’t be trusted for anything beyond shelling peas.”

“Boiled goose with oyster sauce,” Luther pitched in. “And plum pudding when my Father hadn’t drunk away all the money.” I didn’t know Luther was awake until he spoke. Luther is thin as a rail, which is why he sleeps in the middle most nights. He’s all elbows and knees, and his words can be as sharp as his elbows. He didn’t often share much from his childhood, but what I’d heard was ugly and had turned him mean. But I understood Luther. If not for me, he would have been killed in a squabble over something of no account. My men need my leadership.

“You’re making my stomach pinch,” Key’s melodious voice chimed in irritably. “Go back to sleep, the lot of you.”

I chuckled. Key’s like a feisty little lap dog among a pack of mastiffs. He’s just a little slip of a lad, too young, even, to shave. When he sings, he sounds like a girl. Or, perhaps, an angel. But the thin arm he throws around me when we sleep is as strong as bailing wire. His manner can be just as steely. Key’s young, but he’s been through a lot that’s hardened him.

Key’s orphaned and alone in this world. He was working at a livery stable in Denver in exchange for one meal a day and the right to sleep in the hay. I happened past the stable and saw the stable owner, a man well known for his irascible nature, beating him him for being a lazy Irishman. Key’s name, I should tell you, is not really K-E-Y. It’s C-I-A-N, and it’s pronounced “key in.” It’s Irish, but I don’t hold that against him. I am of a liberal mind when it comes to foreigners. Especially those who work hard and take hardship without complaint.
The beating clearly hurt, but Key was determined not to give the man the satisfaction of tears. I decided then and there that Key was the sort of fellow I could use in my company. I offered him a position in my growing company, signing him on as cook and general errand boy.

“Since everyone’s awake, let’s roll over. Key, tell us about the Irish. What do they eat on Christmas?”

Key tensed, and I sympathized with him. His lineage sets him apart and marks him as a target for derision. But his accent itself marks him. “I canna speak for all the Irish. I left Ireland when I was but a wee lad. But mi Ma, she was a canny cook, and thrifty. She took whatever the other housewives passed by and made it a feast.”

“No special foods? On Christmas?” Luther’s voice cut sharply, derisively.
“We had special foods. Every Christmas Eve, we had oyster stew.”
“Oyster stew? I love oysters,“ George said. I smiled, glad that we’d just rolled over so that George wouldn’t drool on Luther.

“So do I,” Luther said earnestly.

“You’ve never had them as rich as mi Ma made.” Key’s voice quavered on the edge of tears.

Inspiration dawned on me as clear and bright as a prairie sunrise. “If I got a tin of oysters, could you make stew like your Ma used to make?” I asked.

Key belly-crawled halfway out of the blankets and rummaged through his rucksack until he pulled out a metal handle with a bull’s head and a wicked, curved knife at the end. The fact that I could see it made me realize that my dawning ideas weren’t the only dawn that had occurred. “Here’s me tin can opener!”

“And a fine one it is, too,” Luther said, grabbing it away and examining it closely.

“Stole it off an English tar in Boston Harbor,” Key said proudly.

“Oysters . . .” George gurgled dreamily.

“Oysters it is, then.” I threw back the blankets and pulled my feet into my shoes, pleased that I’d thought of how to make this holiday a good one for me and my men.

“And cream and butter. And a little bit of black pepper to crack over it!” Key shouted at my retreating back.

The tent was still deep in the shadow of a nearby ridge, but the peaks above and the valley below both gleamed golden in sunshine. I breathed in the cold, pine-tinged air and began the long trudge down to Golden City. As I passed into the sunshine the sparkle in the snow changed from silver to golden, but I knew that I’d already found my true goldmine: men who would follow me to the ends of the earth and back because I’d won their loyalty. With oysters.

5 Comments

Paddy Graydon's Scheme to Stop the confederacy

3/9/2017

0 Comments

The Library of Congress calls this "a jurilla." Paddy and the members of his spy company probably didn't look much better.

While enormous Union and Confederate Armies battled each other in the east, a relatively small Confederate Army was attempting to conquer the American Southwest. Their ultimate aim was the rich gold fields of Colorado and the deep harbors of California. Luckily for the Union, the American's had Paddy Graydon to destroy the Confederate's plans.

Paddy Graydon was a rough, hard drinking, disagreeable man who was quick with his fists and short on temper, but his recklessness has earned him a place in the Civil War lore of New Mexico.

Paddy, whose Christian name was James, came to the United States from Ireland in order to escape the Potato Famine. It was 1853, and he was just 21 years old. Like many indigent immigrants, he joined the Army. Paddy became a dragoon, or light mounted infantry. He was posted to the southwest, where he learned to speak Spanish and Apache. Graydon's deprived childhood prepared, the blue eyed, 5' 7" man for the hardships of life in the saddle fighting Indians, bandits, renegades, and claim jumpers in an area that stretched from Santa Fe to the Mexican border. He stayed in the service for five years, until 1858.

Graydon opened a saloon near Sonoita, Arizona when he was discharged from the Army, His patrons were well-known for their rough and violent ways, but even such a tough clientele didn't provide Graydon with the excitement he was used to. The tough Irishman continued to track horse thieves, rescue captives from the Indians, and guide army patrols in his spare time.

When Confederate General Henry H. Sibley threatened to invade New Mexico in 1861, Graydon offered his services to Colonel Edward Canby, the highest ranking Union officer in the state. He formed an independent company of spies, most of them recruited from his former saloon patrons. Graydon's spies were known for being undisciplined and dangerous. They refused to wear uniforms or participate in drills and parades. But they were very good at collecting information. Graydon and his men excelled at wandering into Confederate camps and gathering information while posing as rebel soldiers.

Graydon's most famous escapade happened on a bitterly cold night in February, 1862, on the night before the Battle of Valverde. Under cover of darkness, Graydon and several volunteers crossed the icy Rio Grande and snuck up on the Confederate encampment. When they neared the corral that held Sibley's pack train, Graydon lit the fuses on boxes of explosives mounted on two old mules, then shooed them towards the Confederate lines. Unfortunately for Graydon, the mules turned back. Graydon and his men ran for their lives, and the mules blew up too far away to cause the carnage he had planned. However, the explosion caused Confederate pack mules to stampede down to the Rio Grande, where Union troops rounded them up.

Because of Graydon's scheme, the Confederate Army lost over 100 animals. Without their mules, they had to abandon many of the supplies that they desperately needed if they were going to conquer New Mexico and the rich gold fields of Colorado and California that Jefferson Davis had hoped to use to finance his fledgling country.

Jennifer Bohnhoff taught New Mexico History to 7th grade students in Albuquerque and Edgewood. Paddy Graydon and his escapade with the mules shows up in Where Duty Calls, the first book in a trilogy of middle grade historical novels about the Civil War in New Mexico.

0 Comments

Grape and Canister

2/2/2017

2 Comments

One of the things that makes historical fiction difficult for middle grade readers is the vocabulary. Tweens and young teens are often perplexed by words that don't make any sense to them.

Take, for instance, grape. Once, while teaching about the Civil War, I had a 7th grader ask me what was so scary about having grapes shot at you. She honestly believed that cannoneers loaded their guns with the same kind of grapes that make their way into jelly and jam. While this would lead to a sticky situation, and perhaps some stained uniforms, it likely wouldn't lead to many fatalities.

By Geni - Photo by user:geni, GFDL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11925339

Grape, when referring to 18th and 19th Century war, is just a shortened form of the word grapeshot. Neither grape or grapeshot refer to shooting people with grapes. Rather, it refers to how small metal balls, or shot, were bundled together before being loaded into the gun. When the gun fired, the bag disintegrated and the shot spread out from the muzzle, much like shot from a shotgun.

My students understand this concept better when I ask if any of their parents are hunters. Usually they know the purpose of buck shot (for shooting deer) and birdshot (smaller pellets, for shooting pigeons.)

Students who are involved in track and field suddenly realized that the shot they put in shot put is related to grapeshot, especially when I haul out the one piece of grapeshot I own and we compare them with the team's shot.

Grapeshot was especially effective against amassed infantry movements, such as Pickett's Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg. But by the Civil War, grapeshot was already becoming a thing of the past, replaced by canister.

By Minnesota Historical Society [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Canister, which is sometimes known as case shot, involved small metal balls similar to the ones used in grapeshot. Instead of being encased in muslin, they were packed into a tin or brass container, the front of which blew out, scattering the balls into the oncoming enemy.

Canister is a word that is unfamiliar to many middle grade readers, because they are too young to know what a film canister is. They do, however, know what a can is, and can readily accept that can is short for canister.

Jennifer Bohnhoff teaches New Mexico History to 7th grade students in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her middle grade novel, The Bent Reed, is set at the Battle of Gettysburg. Her next novel, Valverde, is set in New Mexico during the Civil War and is due out this spring.

2 Comments

Real Characters

4/29/2016

3 Comments

Where Duty Calls, the Middle Grade Civil War Novel set in New Mexico Territory that I published through Kinkajou Press last summer, is populated with a mix of fictitious and real people. All of the important events and dates are historical, the information gleaned from diaries, newspapers, and secondary sources. If I could have found real people who were always in the middle of the action, I would have made them my main characters. Since I couldn’t, I created Jemmy and Raul. The small, personal scenes depicting their family life are entirely made up. But when my sources described a scene I wanted to include in my novel, I often added the writer of the account into my novel.

Some of the real people whose diaries, letters and sources I used proved to be real characters, with wonderful stories of their own. One of these is Frederick S. Wade, who left the teaching profession to enlist as a private in the Army of New Mexico, the force Major General Henry Hopkins Sibley organized in Texas for the purpose of taking New Mexico Territory for the Confederacy.

Frederick Wade in his later years

Wade’s obituary,in the June 27, 1925 edition of the San Antonio Express says that he was the one who told Abraham Lincoln that Texas would secede from the Union. Born in Ontario, Canada, Wade was raised in Illinois, then moved to Texas in 1857. In 1860, he was visiting his parents in Illinois when Lincoln asked him about Texan opinion. The obituary states that Lincoln tried to get Wade to tour Texas and urge it to remain with the Union. Wade declined, and Texas joined the Confederacy. Wade then joined the Confederate brigade being formed by Tom Green. He continued to serve under Green until he became a prisoner of war in 1862.

While in prison camp, Wade helped a friend escape. His friend had contracted smallpox and was in the hospital. One day, Wade found him sitting in a coffin with a white sheet around him. Wade sprinkled the man’s face and hands with flour, then sealed the coffin and made sure it was loaded on the top of the other coffins in the dead wagon. After the wagon had left the prison, the man raised the lid of the coffin and called “Come to judgement” in his spookiest voice. The frightened driver ran away yelling “Ghosties! Ghosties!” Wade’s friend then stole one of the horses and escaped to Canada. You can read this story, plus some other remembrances here.

Who needs to make up characters when people like this already exist?

Jennifer Bohnhoff is a former middle grade teacher. Where Duty Calls is the first book in a trilogy entitled Rebels Along the Rio Grande. Book 2, The Worst Enemy, will be published by Kinkajou Press, a division of Artemesia Publishing, in August, 2023.

3 Comments

The "What ifs" of History

1/27/2015

28 Comments

New York : Published by E. Anthony, 501 Broadway, [ca. 1846]

New York : E. Anthony [ca. 1846]

In February 1861 the lieutenant colonel in command of the 2nd U.S. Calvary Regiment stationed at Fort Mason, Texas received orders to report to General-in-Chief Winfield Scott in Washington D.C. for reassignment.

When the officer's stagecoach stopped over in San Antonio, he was accosted by three secessionist army commis-sioners. Texas sided with the south, but as there had been no formal declaration of war, the policy was to allow federal soldiers to march out of the state unimpeded.

The commissioners announced that the U.S. garrison at San Antonio had already left, and that the city was under Confederate control. The lieutenant colonel must declare himself in favor of the Confederacy, or the commissioners would detain him as a prisoner of war.

The officer drew himself to attention and proudly stated that he was not a Texan, but a Virginian, and that he would decide for himself which side to take. His brave comportment must have cowed the commissioners, because they chose not to press the issue. He continued his journey eastward.

When he arrived in Washington D.C., General Scott offered the man the top field-command position in the Union Army. The lieutenant colonel declined, choosing allegiance to his state over his country.

Had those commissioners in San Antonio imprisoned that lieutenant colonel, the Civil War would have been a very different. That lieutenant colonel was Robert E. Lee, and his decision to align himself with the south profoundly affected the course of American history.

What if Robert E. Lee had moldered in a Confederate POW Camp for the entire period of the Civil War?

Such 'what ifs' are the fodder of alternative histories, those works of fiction in which events play out differently than actually happened. In these novels, the South wins the war, or slaves revolt on their own and now fight both North and South, or Europe intercedes for one side or the other. The stream of history jumps its course and nothing is as we know it.

But not all 'what ifs' are in the realm of alternative history.

What if you woke one day to find an enemy army camped on your property?

What if your house became a field hospital for one side, then the other?

What if your crops were trampled, your animals slaughtered and your fields littered with bloated corpses?

These were some of the questions I asked myself when I was writing The Bent Reed, my historical novel set in Gettysburg.

I found the answers in journals, memoirs and newspaper articles from the period, and in secondary sources that quoted the personal remembrances of people who had lived through the battle. I then created a fictitious family plunked their farm down right where armies would collide. I made them suffer through many circumstances that had happened to real people. The stream of history stayed in its channel and ran its course, even if it flowed over rocks that I had imagined into place.

Historical novels help readers put themselves into the swirling events of history. By reading them, we begin to ask our own 'what ifs.'

What if I were present at the Battle of Gettysburg? How would I have reacted to the violence or its aftermath? What lessons can I learn from those who have gone before me?

The answers not only help us understand the past, but help us to proceed into the future.

28 Comments

The little Depot that witnessed history

12/16/2014

16 Comments

President Street Station, Baltimore

Last weekend I went to Baltimore for the Army Navy Game, a football game that has enough history to make it worth a blog post of its own.

As the taxi pulled up to my hotel on President Street, I was intrigued by this little building which was across the street. It was dwarfed by the high-rises surrounding it, and looked very out of place.

The building now houses the Baltimore Civil War Museum, a one room exhibit that is a mix of educational panels and curio cabinets filled with items - some identified and some not. But before it was a museum, this building was the President Street Station of the Philadelphia, Wilmington & Baltimore Railroad. Built in 1851, it was the first railroad station to have a barrel vault roof or incorporate a Howe truss, a support system more commonly used in bridge design.

But what really made this building special was not its architecture so much as the historical events that happened in it. The President Street Station was witness to a lot of Civil War history.

"Passage Through Baltimore" Adalbert J. Volck, 1863

On February 23, 1861 Abraham Lincoln came through Baltimore on his way to his innauguation.

Originally Lincoln had planned to stop and give a speech. However, warned by the Pinkerton Dectective Agency of an assassination plot, he slipped through town in the pre-dawn hours wearing a cap rather than his recognizable stove-pipe hat.

If Lincoln had chosen to brave the gangs of pro-secessionists who intended to prevent his safe passage to the capital, President-elect Lincoln might never have lived to become President.

lithograph by Samuel Rowse, 1850

Lincoln wasn't the only person to hide himself in the President Street Station. Henry "Box" Brown arranged to have himself packed into a wooden crate marked "direct express to Philadelphia," and thereby escaped north to freedom from slavery. Frederick Douglas also used the PW&B line to escape, leaping onto a train as it pulled away from the President Street Station, which remains a site on the National Park Service's National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom.

"Massachusetts militia passing through Baltimore," oil on Canvas (1861).

The event that the President Street Station is best remembered for happened two months after Lincoln's secretive trip through Baltimore.

Most people consider the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861 as the beginning of the Civil War, but the first blood was spilled on April 19, 1861, when the 6th Massachusetts Infantry, debarking at the President Street Station enroute to Washington D.C. were accosted by southern sympathizers who blocked their path and pelted the soliders with rocks and bricks. By the end of what became known at the Pratt Street Riots, four soldiers and nine civilians lay dead in the streets.

For a first hand account of the Pratt Street Riot, click here.

16 Comments

Resurrecting Ghosts

10/13/2014

3 Comments

Last week a teaching colleage and I visited several places of historical interest in New Mexico. Among them were Fort Craig, outside of which a Civil War battle happened, and Fort Selden, a fort used during the Indian Wars.

Time and disuse had ravaged both places, reducing them to fragments of shattered walls and long, low mounds that had once been ramparts. The adobe walls had melted back into the desert soils from which they had been formed.

We visited the one on a Thursday and the other on a Friday, and each time we had the run of the place to ourselves. The only sounds were the whistling of the wind over the broken stones, the chirp of crickets and the crunch of gravel beneath our feet. It was hard to believe that both sites had once bustled with life.

But it had been. I know this because I'd just recently finished reading Hampton Sides' Blood and Thunder, a biography of Kit Carson. One chapter told about Carson's time at Fort Craig, when he was serving as a Colonel in the First New Mexico Volunteer Infantry Regiment during the Civil War. Carson led his men against Confederate troops in the Battle of Valverde, which was fought just north of the fort. Sides includes in his narrative the tramp of drilling men, the neighing of horses, the cacaphony of parade bands, the thunder of artillery and the crackle of small arms. Mr. Sides breathed life into the scene. He made the Old West come alive again in my imagination.

As I stood among the dry and silent ruins, I remembered Sides' vivid descriptions. I considered how the parade grounds would have looked when the marching boots of seventeen companies of men kept the weeds at bay, how the air would have smelled when filled with the tang of horse dung and kitchen smoke and gunpowder.

Good history and good historical ficiton can breath life into events long past. It can resurrect people long dead and places that have mouIdered into dust. It can make that which has faded away become vivid again.

I don't know how much will be left of the old western forts in another decade or two. Perhaps there will be nothing for my grandchildren to see when they are old enough to care about what happened in New Mexico in the nineteenth century. But my hope is that those who follow will be able to resurrect the forts and the people who occupied them through the power of the written word.