Black Women After the Civil War: African American Women in Postbellum America

By Maggie MacLean 9-14-16

After the Civil War, African American women were promised a new life of freedom with the same rights provided to other American citizens. But the newly freed women in the South had little or no money, limited or no education and little access to it, and racism impacted every area of their lives. The transition from enslavement to freedom was a difficult and frightening one for most black women who emerged from enslavement knowing "that what they got wasn't what they wanted; it wasn't freedom, really."

The Civil War promised freedom to African American women, but as the Confederate Army and slaveowners fleeing from Union troops often took their male slaves with them. The women and children were left behind. Even after the Emancipation Proclamation freed African Americans in rebel states in 1863 and the Thirteenth Amendment emancipated all slaves wherever they were, the nation was still unprepared to deal with the question of full citizenship for its newly freed black population.

Freedmen's Bureau
The Bureau assisted African Americans in finding jobs, land, a home, and an education, as well as obtaining clothing, food, water, and health care. It distributed 15 million rations to blacks and set up a system by which planters could borrow rations to feed freedmen they employed. Its efforts were quickly consumed with the plight of former slaves and the objective of establishing emancipation in the face of strong opposition.

In 1865, Republican congressmen founded the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, better known as the Freedmen's Bureau, to avert mass starvation and suffering of freedwomen and men. The immense social crisis that made the bureau necessary came as a direct result of the Union Army's physical destruction of the South.

The Freedmen’s Bureau, which had offices in 15 Southern states and the District of Columbia, operated from 1865 to 1872 to help manage the aftermath of the Civil War and the freeing of slaves.

Southern blacks now faced the difficulty Northern blacks had confronted for decades - that of a free people surrounded by hostile whites. Freedman Houston Hartsfield Holloway wrote:

"For we colored people did not know how to be free and the white people did not know how to have a free colored person about them."

The Reconstruction implemented by Congress, which lasted from 1866 to 1877, tried to find ways for whites and blacks to live together in a free society, but people in the South saw Reconstruction as a humiliating imposition.

With the protection of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, however, African Americans enjoyed a period when they were allowed to vote, participate in politics, purchase the land of their former owners, and seek their own employment. Opponents of this progress, however, soon rallied against the former slaves and eroded the gains for which many had shed their blood.

Nicodemus, Kansas
After the Civil War there was a general exodus of blacks from the South. Some emancipated slaves quickly fled from the neighborhood of their owners, while others became wage laborers for them. Benjamin Singleton led an exodus of African Americans from various points in the South to Kansas. Six blacks and two whites ncorporated the Nicodemus Town Company in Kansas in 1877 - the oldest of about twenty towns established predominately for blacks in the West.

Nicodemus, Kansas is located on the plains in the northwest corner of Kansas. The six founders, all from Lexington, Kentucky, named the town Nicodemus after a legendary African slave prince who had purchased his freedom. They envisioned Nicodemus as a place where its settlers would have both political freedom and economic opportunity.

Northern teachers, many of whom were white women, volunteered to provide education and training for the newly freed population. In time, schools from the elementary level through college provided a variety of opportunities, from the rudiments of reading and writing and various types of basic vocational training to classics, arts, and theology.

By 1886 Nicodemus had become a prosperous community surrounded by farms owned by blacks. The town had two newspapers, the Nicodemus Enterprise and Nicodemus Western Cyclone. There was also a drugstore, a bank, schoolhouse, three churches, and a general store, the first two story building in the town.

Kate Drumgoold
Multiple sources estimate that she was born in 1858 or 1859 near Petersburg, Virginia. While Drumgoold was still young, her mother was sold to allow her owner to pay a poor white man to go to the Civil War in his place. Drumgoold's mother left a husband, one son, and 17 daughters behind. Kate later wrote:

We did not know that she was sold until she was gone; and the saddest thought was to me to know which way she had gone and I used to go outside and look up to see if there was anything that would direct me.

When Kate's mother returned to her family after Emancipation, she found her husband remarried, her daughters scattered, and her only son, who had fought for the Confederacy, was now missing.

Kate and her mother reunited as much of the family as possible and moved to Brooklyn, New York, where Kate worked as a domestic, battled significant illnesses, and worked toward obtaining an education, which she considered essential to the advancement of African Americans. Her plans to attend school had to be put aside for a few years after she contracted smallpox, but she never wavered in her determination.

"For every time that I saw the newspaper there was some one of our race in the far South getting killed for trying to teach and I made up my mind that I would die to see my people taught."

Kate Drumgoold left Brooklyn and went to Wayland Seminary school in Washington DC and later returned. In 1878 she left again and went to Harpers Ferry for four years at school. She returned again to Brooklyn and began teaching in 1886, fulfilling her dream of teaching African Americans. Her mother passed away on February 28, 1894, but Kate continued to teach for eleven more years until her health began to fail.

On January 20, 1897 a severe illness of some sort struck Kate Drumgoold, and she was forced to quit teaching in March of 1897. Her autobiography ended abruptly soon after, as she prayed for the strength to finish her work.

Mattie J. Jackson
Mattie Jane Jackson was born in January 1847 in St. Louis, Missouri, the daughter of Westley Jackson and Ellen Turner. Despite being enslaved by different owners, her parents had three children together: Sarah Ann, Mattie Jane, and Esther J. After the birth of his youngest daughter, Westley Jackson escaped slavery through the Underground Railroad. He settled in Chicago, Illinois and became a minister, but he died before the Civil War.

Mattie Jane Jackson (1847-1910) is known for her 1866 autobiography, The Story of Mattie J. Jackson: Her Parentage, Experience of Eighteen Years in Slavery, Incidents During the War, Her Escape from Slavery: A True Story (1866). Excerpt from that book:

"Two years after my father’s departure, my mother, with her two children, my sister and myself, attempted to make her escape. After traveling two days we reached Illinois. We slept in the woods at night. I believe my mother had food to supply us but fasted herself. But the advertisement had reached there before us, and loafers were already in search of us, and as soon as we were discovered on the brink of the river one of the spies made enquiries respecting her suspicious appearance. She was aware that she was arrested, consequently she gave a true account of herself - that she was in search of her husband. We were then destitute of any articles of clothing excepting our wearing apparel. Mother had become so weary that she was compelled to leave our package of clothing on the way. We were taken back to St. Louis and committed to prison and remained there one week, after which they put us in Linch's trader's yard, where we remained about four weeks. We were then sold to William Lewis."

Six years later, Ellen Turner met and married George Brown and together they had two sons. Brown escaped to Canada around 1855. Turner tried several times to join her husband, but was repeatedly caught and beaten. Brown returned to the United States, changed his name to John G. Thompson, and became a barber in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

Her owner grew tired of Turner's constant attempts to escape; he sold her and her children to the captain of a Mississippi River steamboat. When Ellen met Sam Adams and made preparations to marry, the steamboat captain kidnapped the family and sent them to Louisville, Kentucky, where they were sold to different owners.

With the help of the Underground Railroad, Mattie escaped to Indianapolis, Indiana, where her mother and brother reached her several months later. At the end of the American Civil War, Mattie and her mother and brother traveled back to St. Louis, where Turner married Sam Adams.

Shortly after the end of the war, Mattie Jackson's stepfather, who had earlier changed his name to John G. Thompson, located the family and invited Jackson and her half-brother to join him and his wife, Dr. Lucy Susan (Prophet) Schuyler Thompson, a botanical physician and antislavery activist. Mattie was nineteen when she brought her eleven-year-old half-brother to Lawrence, Massachusetts to live with his father and stepmother, Lucy Susan Prophet Schuyler Thompson, who had recently lost her only child, a Civil War soldier.

In 1866, Mattie related her life experiences as a slave to her stepmother who went by the title Dr. L.S. Thompson. also published The Story of Mattie J. Jackson to raise money for Mattie's education. Evidence shows she finished her education and moved back to St. Louis, with her mother Ellen and her third husband, Sam Adams.

In 1869, Mattie married William Reed Dyer, a native of Warrenton, Missouri, a Union Army veteran who was employed as a porter on steamboats traveling up and down the Mississippi River. They eventually moved into their own home in the city of St. Louis. Out of their eight children, four sons and a daughter reached maturity. Of their nine children, five would live to maturity. After Ellen Turner Adams' death in May 1893, the Dyers moved to Dardenne Prairie, Missouri, about thirty-five miles from St. Louis, where they lived for the rest of their lives.

SOURCES
Docsouth: Mattie J. Jackson
Wikipedia: Mattie J. Jackson
BlackPast.org: Nicodemus, Kansas
Library of Congress: African American Odyssey
A Slave Girl's Story. Being an Autobiography of Kate Drumgoold
NWHM: Claiming Their Citizenship: African American Women, 1624-2009: The Civil War and Reconstruction Period

Image 1: A freed family on a plantation gathered for a photograph

Image 2: Image: Mustered Out. Little Rock, Arkansas, April 20, 1865. Published in Harper's Weekly, May 19, 1866.
Alfred Waud's drawing captures the exuberance of the African American women and children as the U. S. Colored Troops returned home at the end of the Civil War.

From: civilwarwomenblog.com

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Documentary Production Update

Great production progress has been made on the "Civil War Medicine" documentary trailer.

We recorded all of the voiceovers at Philadelphia Post; some live in the studio; some remote. The actors were from Pennsylvania, Delaware, Oregon and Wisconsin. They all did a great job. Musicians recorded piano, fiddle, banjo and drums live.

The unusual historical images you will see onscreen were provided by many excellent American museums, libraries, National Parks--the list is quite long! These are a few shots of the  Philly Post studio where we recorded. Stay tuned for the trailer's release before Labor Day!

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Black Soldiers, Blue Uniforms – Blood On The Snow

By John Walker, 6-3-16

Confederate survivors of the Battle of Franklin shivered in their thinly held lines outside Nashville as the Black soldiers made their advance.

As the exhausted Confederate survivors of the Battle of Franklin shivered in their thinly held lines outside Nashville, Union General George H. Thomas prepared to launch a devastating, if much delayed, frontal assault.

Although several overzealous Union Army field commanders organized African Americans into ad hoc militia units early in 1862 and several black regiments were mustered into service later that year, it wasn’t until after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation took effect on January 1, 1863, that the federal government began actively recruiting and enlisting black soldiers and sailors.

Emancipation as a Military Strategy
In late 1862, after battlefield reverses slowed white enlistments to a trickle, Lincoln was convinced that emancipation and enlistment of blacks were crucial to winning the war. He initiated one of his most controversial and revolutionary policy directives: slaves in areas still in rebellion would be liberated, free blacks in the North and occupied South would be enlisted, and, eventually, blacks in loyal slave-holding and border states would be enlisted as well. All would serve exclusively under white officers.

The president was treading on extremely sensitive ground—widespread racial discrimination was rampant in the North, and many senior Army officers and large numbers of their men strongly opposed the idea of blacks in uniform. Even after Lincoln made it clear that he expected his generals to comply with his new enlistment policies, Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, overall commander in the vast western theater, blatantly hindered recruiting efforts there. Like many Union officers, Sherman was willing to utilize blacks in menial positions such as laborers, teamsters, railroad guards, and cooks, but he steadfastly refused to deploy black regiments alongside white units.

Free blacks in the North had thronged to enlistment offices after the war began but were turned away. Federal law made it illegal for them to serve in the army or in state militias. In May 1861, Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler, commander at Fortress Monroe, Louisiana, declared escaped slaves “contraband of war” and refused to return them to their owners, instead putting them to work in support roles. Lincoln let Butler’s policy stand. Three months later, Congress passed the First Confiscation Act, which was designed, in effect, to deprive the Confederacy of its huge black labor force.

When Butler assumed command of Union forces in Louisiana, he faced an imminent attack and appealed to blacks to join his forces. The first units of Butler’s “Corps d’Afrique” were two 500-man regiments—the 1st Louisiana Native Guards, free blacks with black officers and a white commander, and the 3rd Louisiana Native Guards, former slaves with an all-white officer corps. Butler’s acceptance of the 1st Regiment with its black officers intact was unprecedented.

The men who joined the 1st Regiment were the elite of New Orleans black society: doctors, craftsmen, educators, and landowners, some of whom owned slaves themselves. Their ancestors had fought alongside Andrew Jackson against the British. Now, with their city occupied, and after first offering their services to the Confederacy, they joined Butler. On September 27, 1862, he mustered in the 1st Louisiana Native Guards, the first unit of black soldiers officially accepted into the U.S. Army. Butler would be replaced by Maj. Gen. Nathaniel Banks later that year; Banks strongly opposed the idea of black officers and relegated the Guards to garrison duty while he began purging the units of their black officers by any means he could devise.

Confederate survivors of the Battle of Franklin shivered in their thinly held lines outside Nashville as the Black soldiers made their advance.

In 1862, U.S. Senator Jim Lane resigned to accept a commission as a brigadier general and recruiter in his home state of Kansas. Without waiting for authorization, he raised a regiment of blacks, cavalierly assuming that the War Department would approve. Ordered twice to abandon the project, he refused. In January 1863 Lane’s stubbornness paid off when Federal authorities, who had by now passed the Second Confiscation Act and the Militia Act authorizing the president to employ blacks as he deemed necessary, accepted his units into service.

Performance in Battle
The performance of black soldiers in three battles over a two-month period in 1863 erased any lingering doubts as to their worthiness for combat roles and hastened a massive surge in recruitment and enlistment of African Americans. In late May, the 1st and 3rd Louisiana Native Guards advanced as part of Banks’s XIX Corps on the Confederate bastion at Port Hudson, Louisiana. On May 27, they launched an ill-advised frontal assault against the fortified works. Against overwhelming odds, the two regiments mounted several heroic but futile attacks. Their ranks shredded by sustained artillery and musket fire, the black regiments withdrew after suffering horrendous casualties.

Two weeks later, three regiments of raw, virtually untrained blacks, most of whom were runaway slaves who had been laboring in the fields of Mississippi and Louisiana a few weeks earlier, distinguished themselves in the defense of Union positions at Milliken’s Bend, Louisiana. Attacked by a numerically superior Confederate force, the blacks fought back ferociously; the battle escalated into a savage hand-to-hand melee that turned into one of the bloodiest small engagements of the war. The three regiments, one of which was issued outmoded muskets just the day before the attack, fought the Confederates but suffered appalling casualties.

On July 18, a state regiment of black volunteers, the 54th Massachusetts, led a Union assault on Battery Wagner in South Carolina, another heavily fortified Rebel outpost. Although the attack failed and the 54th suffered heavy losses, the unit’s bravery in the face of terrible odds was unquestioned.

The conduct of the black soldiers on three separate battlefields did much to change racial stereotypes rampant in the North. People who had ridiculed the idea of putting blacks in uniform now endorsed it. Eight months after Fort Wagner, the 20th U.S. Colored Infantry, raised entirely within the state of New York, paraded through New York City and was cheered by whites and blacks alike. It had been only eight months since the infamous draft riots there.

Fighting for their Freedom
By August 1863, 14 regiments of U.S. Colored Troops (USCT) were in the field. The surge in enlistments helped fill the ranks of depleted Union units. By the critical summer of 1864, more than 100,000 blacks were under arms. Unfortunately, the blacks who flocked to the uniform had to deal with limited opportunities for advancement to the officer corps, inadequate training, substandard equipment, lower pay, and inferior medical care. About one in five blacks died from disease, compared with one in 12 whites.

Almost 180,000 African Americans served in the Union Army by war’s end, a little over half coming from the 11 seceded states; 7,122 whites served as officers in USCT units. Black units fought in 449 engagements. On December 15-16, 1864, two black brigades took part in the decisive battle of Nashville, which effectively ended the war in the western theater and was the only major Union victory in which colored units participated.

What had begun as a war to preserve the Union was transformed, in large part owing to military expediency, into a war for black liberation. African American men joined the Union ranks to escape slavery, destroy the Confederacy, prove their loyalty to the United States, and pursue their dreams of freedom and citizenship for themselves and future generations of black Americans.

From: warfarehistorynetwork.com

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Terrible Virus, Fascinating History In "Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus" by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy

By NPR Staff, 7-19-12

Here's your vocabulary word for the week: zoonosis. It describes an infection that is transmitted between species. For example, the disease that the husband and wife team of Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy have written about in their new book, "Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus".

Wasik is a journalist; his wife is a veterinarian, so the rabies virus seems like a natural topic for conversation. "Veterinarians spend a lot of time thinking about rabies, even though in this country, we hardly ever see it," Murphy tells NPR's Robert Siegel. "So I've been bringing home stories about rabies from my education and from my reading for a long long time."

Murphy's stories about rabies intrigued her husband. "I started to think about all the cultural resonances of that and even just of the word 'rabid,' " Wasik says. "So we realized that it would be fun for us to work on a book together about it."

Rabies is a terrible virus, causing immense suffering before it kills. "It's a really awful way to go," Wasik says, "but if you take a step back, you sort of have to admire it because it is one of those pathogens that actually compels the host to spread it."

The virus attacks the limbic system, which Murphy describes as the seat of anger, fear and desire. "The rabies virus creates a pretty effective rabies-spreading machine," she says, as maddened, infected animals bite and spread the disease through their saliva.

That idea of the infected bite that spreads madness and death is at the heart of many great modern horror narratives: Wasik says tales of vampires, werewolves and even zombies have some rabies in their DNA.

Rabies also, chillingly, blurs the line between human and animal. "I feel like that is the reason why we've always feared rabies more than is necessarily warranted by the number of people that it kills," he says. "The very disease itself is like a transfer of an animal essence to a human being ... the fear and the biting ... it is an animal aggression, transferred to us."

But rabies is rarely seen in this country; Murphy didn't see a rabid dog in person until she traveled to Indonesia during an outbreak. There were limited measures in place to control the spread of rabies; mostly, people shot the sick dogs. "Despite the large-scale culling efforts, the virus continued to spread around the island and many people died, so it's good that eventually the government came around to vaccination," she says.

That vaccine was originally developed by the French scientist Louis Pasteur in the 19th century; in fact, it was the first modern vaccine developed in the laboratory. Pasteur's work becomes even more remarkable when you consider the fact that he didn't really know what was causing rabies; he called the infectious agent a virus, but at the time, no one had ever seen a virus.

"I think that was Pasteur's great achievement," Murphy says, "that he adhered so fervently to the belief that for any infectious disease, there will be an infectious organism behind it ... that even when he couldn't see it under the microscope, he still went after it."

From: npr.org

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Production Update: We're Doing Research at The Library Company of Philadelphia

By Carole Adrienne

We've been selecting more images for the documentary series and trailer at one of my favorite research facilities.

The Library Company of Philadelphia, founded in 1731 by Benjamin Franklin, is an independent research library concentrating on American society and culture from the 17th through the 19th centuries. Free and open to the public, the Library Company houses an extensive non-circulating collection of rare books, manuscripts, broadsides, ephemera, prints, photographs, and works of art.
This place is heaven for the serious researcher. The staff is brilliant and enthusiastic, the facility is comfortable, beautiful and accessible.

I always let them know what we're looking for when making an appointment, and they never disappoint! There are always exquisite treasures laid out on the tables when we arrive.

Check them out at librarycompany.org

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How a Government Worker Discovered Clara Barton’s Missing Soldiers Office

By Matt Blitz, 11-13-15

On the day before Thanksgiving 1996, General Services Administration carpenter Richard Lyons was conducting a final review of a decrepit building at 437 Seventh Street, Northwest, that had recently fallen into government possession and was now set for demolition. Coming in from the cold rain, he entered the dusty old building alone. On the first floor (which was once a shoe store), he checked for infrastructure damage, trash, and whether anybody had made it their temporary home. Then, he moved to the second floor and did a similar sweep. He moved to third floor. “There were no lights… it was dark,” Lyons tells Washingtonian, “Then, I heard this noise, but saw nothing.” Lyons heard a noise again, so he walked back and forth, stopping at the window. “I was at the window and it felt like somebody tapped me on the shoulder… when I turned around, I spotted an envelope between the ceiling and the wall.”

He got out a ladder and reached for it. The envelope was addressed to a “Edward Shaw, Washington City.” Curious, he pulled himself through a small hole leading to the attic. That’s where he found an assortment of artifacts—utensils, clothing, Civil War-era newspapers, a bayonet and one small sign written in gold and black lettering. It read “Missing Soldiers. Office. 3rd. Story. Room 9. Miss Clara Barton.”

The sign Lyons found. Photograph courtesy the National Museum of Civil War Medicine.
Clara Barton was born into a military and abolitionist-leaning Massachusetts family in 1821. Her father was a militia captain and founder of the community’s Universalist church, one that held progressive views on abolition. At 18, she began her professional career as a teacher in Oxford, Massachusetts. In 1854, she moved to Washington to become a recording clerk at the United States Patent Office. She was so impressive, both in her skills and confidence, that she was paid the same salary as her male co-workers, which was nearly unheard of at the time. Unfortunately, the job only lasted three years: When Democrat James Buchanan became president, the vocal Republican and abolitionist was let go. When Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860, she got hired again, but to the position of copyist—not nearly as prestigious or well-paying a job. When war broke out in 1861, Barton volunteered at the Washington Infirmary. As the conflict dragged on, more brutal than many had anticipated, Barton made her way to the front lines, determined to help those fighting for the cause she believed in.

Barton wasn’t a trained nurse, but her ability to organize supplies, help, and treatment was immensely needed during a war that injured and maimed thousands. She became a welcome and morale-boosting sight whenever she showed up at a Union hospital. Frequently written about in newspapers across the country, Barton became a well-known figure to Americans. Due to this and her proximity to soldiers, Barton received scores of letters from families asking whether their loved ones were alive or dead, and if dead where they were buried. Unable to answer every letter, she hired several assistants and ordered stationery. She named her new mobile venture “The Office of Correspondence with the Friends of the Missing Men of the United States Army.”

In late 1864, with the war finally winding down, Barton moved back to the nation’s capital to gather supplies. It was at this time that Edward Shaw, a friend and co-worker from the patent office, offered Barton a chance to move into his boarding house at 488 1/2 7th Street—437 7th Street today. She took him up on it and also convinced him to rent her half of the third floor for an office. Clara Barton’s Missing Soldiers Office was born.

Over a period of about four years, Barton and her staff handled over 60,000 pieces of correspondence, helping to give peace of mind to a country scarred by war. She placed ads in newspapers, wrote letters to her military contacts, and urged soldiers to tell her about final resting places of their fellow comrades. She went on to establish the American Red Cross 12 years later.
After his discovery, Richard Lyons became so infatuated with Barton and the Missing Soldiers Office story that he spent a year researching and reading everything he could. “I would go home, walk the dog, then go to the Library of Congress and stayed there until closing time every night,” says Lyons. With the help of the National Park Service, the GSA, and the National Museum of Civil War Medicine in Frederick, many of the found artifacts have been archived–including a blouse with a hole in its sleeve.

“While doing research, I read that (Barton) was at Antietam giving soldiers water,” Lyons says. “She wrote in her diary that a bullet went through her sleeve and hit a soldier in the head, killing him … under that she wrote, ‘I never bothered to mend it.'” Lyons believes it’s the same blouse–“Why else would a hole like that be in a sleeve?” he says.

Today, the National Museum of Civil War Medicine operates the DC building’s first and third floor as a museum and monument to the achievements, heroism, and willpower of Clara Barton. Lyons still volunteers there on occasion, giving tours and telling people about the historic trove he found. When asked if he thought, perhaps, it was the spirit of Clara Barton that lightly tapped him on the shoulder that cold, rainy November night nearly two decades ago, Lyons responds,“I don’t know what it was, but it felt real to me.”

From: washingtonian.com

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Field Hospital Flag Exhibited in Atlanta Aided Stretcher-Bearers, Witnessed War's Horrors

By Phil Gast, 5-23-16

(Photographs courtesy of Atlanta History Center)

Before he became a renowned landscape and marine painter, Harrison Bird Brown created signs and banners. During the Civil War, his business in Portland, Maine, produced a U.S. Army field hospital flag that had a distinctive yellow background and contrasting green “H” for hospital (style specified in January 1864 Army regulations). One of Brown’s flags is among only a dozen such banners believed to have survived the Civil War.

Gordon Jones
The flag was donated last year to the Atlanta History Center, where it is displayed near the “Agonies of the Wounded” case at the center’s “Turning Point: The American Civil War” permanent exhibition. The Picket asked AHC senior military historian Gordon Jones about the donation from John and Joyce Shmale of Mahomet, Ill. (Jones first wrote about the gift in Civil War News). His responses have been edited.

Q. Any clue in which theater it was used?

A. None. It was made in Maine, so you have to think Eastern Theater, but you never know.

Q. Why did the Schmales (who each have worked in the medical field) donate it specifically to the AHC? Have they done so previously?

A. No, this was their first donation to us, but not their first donation to a museum. They were looking for a good home, not to sell it, and decided on the AHC due to a recommendation from their appraiser. On our end, we were thrilled beyond words. The DuBoses (an Atlanta father and son who amassed thousands of items) collected for 35 years and never found one – and this is not something you find every day, or something you can just buy from the antique store. We probably would have never had one had it not been for this donation. And it really helps our interpretation of medical treatment during the Civil War, which we cover in “Turning Point,” and is included on all the tours, especially for school groups.

Q. On the conservation of the 63-by-46-inch wool bunting flag by Kate R. Daniels, how much was involved in it? What shape was the flag beforehand?

A. The flag was in good shape beforehand and needed very little cleaning. The main thing Kate did was prepare the mount: a backboard to which is attached layers of soft cotton batting covered by plain-cotton cloth, then she lightly stitched the flag to the cloth. Then we had a local framer who prepares the frame – powder-coat aluminum frame with U/V-protected plexiglass front and cleats on the back for securing to the wall. This frame has to be precisely matched to the measurements of the backboard (everything has to be custom-made). The idea is that once the mount is placed in the frame, the flag is “sandwiched” securely between the cotton cloth and the plex front, preventing it from sliding around, stretching fibers, etc. It’s the safest way to treat a flat textile item like this. And, of course, we wanted the flag on display as soon as possible.

Q. Any general thoughts on the flag's significance? Why are they so rare?

A. It’s like a lot of other Civil War artifacts: That which was most common shall be least common. In other words, what was ordinary back then was not considered worthy of saving and was discarded, hence making it incredibly rare today. That is why enlisted soldier’s uniforms are so much rarer than fancy officer’s uniforms. Our artifact storage area is filled with wedding dresses and tuxedos. but no blue jeans – that sort of thing.

Q. Did a yellow or red field hospital flag prove effective in deterring enemy fire on the sites?

A. It was probably not about deterring enemy fire as much as being recognizable to one’s own stretcher-bearers in the smoke and confusion of battle. The field hospitals should have been far enough from the front lines to avoid direct fire, but they had to be easy to find in order to bring in the wounded quickly. The same type of flags, but larger, were used to designate buildings used as more permanent hospitals in towns and cities -- so again, to make sure everybody knew this was a medical facility. It was a way of making medical care more timely and efficient. If you recall how unprepared and overwhelmed the medical services on both sides were early in the war – hence the terrible suffering of the wounded -- you know why this was so important. (About 30,000 emergency amputations were conducted by U.S. Army surgeons during the war.)

From: civil-war-picket.blogspot.com

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Quirky Places: Last Casualty of the Civil War

By Ryan Whirty

That and other stories haunt the Alexandria National Cemetery

In March 1864, a 21-year-old man from Jay County, Ind. – the small town of Portland, to be specific – enlisted in the United States Army and was assigned to the 34th Indiana Regiment, also known as the Morton Rifles, Company B. That’s how young John Jefferson Williams, a blacksmith by trade, began his service in the Civil War.

Now, nearly a century and a half later, that Indiana boy rests under the ground in Pineville, one of thousands of Union troops buried at Alexandria National Cemetery. Williams holds the distinction of being the last soldier killed in the War Between the States.
So how did a youthful Hoosier end up interred in the Pelican State, roughly 850 miles from his home in Indiana? Why is Williams’ final resting place located in an 8.2-acre national cemetery in Pineville, in section B, grave 797, under a simple white headstone nestled in a grassy field with hundreds of other similar cemetery plots?

After transferring through several sections of the Union Army, the 34th Indiana served with distinction under Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in the crucial Vicksburg campaign. The Morton Rifles were then ordered to help in the defense of New Orleans.
From there, the 34th was assigned to the Department of Texas and shipped to Brownsville, Texas, in May 1865.

There, they joined a small Union force that also consisted of two regiments of famed Buffalo Soldiers, black troops who volunteered to defend the Union.

It was then, on May 13, that the 34th Indiana took part in the Battle of Palmito Ranch (alternately called Palmetto Ranch), the final skirmish of the Civil War. The clash near Brownsville came more than a month after Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House in Virginia. The Palmito Ranch skirmish occurred despite an earlier agreement between both sides to cease hostilities in south Texas.

The clash ended with a Confederate victory, and according to Jeffrey W. Hunt’s The Last Battle of the Civil War: Palmetto Ranch, the 34th Indiana suffered most of the Union casualties. Out of the 114 Union soldiers lost during the battle, 76 of them came from the Hoosier regiment.

That unfortunately included John J. Williams, who was mortally wounded by a Confederate bullet during the skirmish. According to Hunt, Williams’ body was left on the battlefield, where Confederate soldiers, in dire need of essentials, took his shoes, socks, pants and hat. The $45 in Williams’ pocket was recovered by Union troops and made its way back to his widow in Indiana.
The last soldier of either side to die in the Civil War was then buried with thousands of his comrades in a national cemetery in Brownsville, Texas, near Fort Brown.

However, the Army eventually abandoned the fort in 1909, forcing the disinterment and relocation of about 3,800 Union officers and soldiers – including John J. Williams from Portland, Ind. – from the Mexican War, the Civil War and a yellow fever epidemic in the mid-1880s.

The July 19, 1911, edition of The Beaumont Journal announced on its front page that the Union bodies began their journey the day before. The disinterment and removal contract was given to N.E. Rendall, who submitted a successful bid to the Federal government. The remains were shipped to Pineville. The moved bodies were reinterred over a period of several months. That included Williams, whose eternal claim to fame as the final man killed in the bloody War Between the States remains intact.

Williams and thousands of peers now rest in Pineville. In 1867, the town became the home of Alexandria National Cemetery.

The cemetery currently holds the bodies of more than 10,000 veterans. In addition to Williams and other casualties of the Union’s invasion of Texas, Alexandria contains the final resting places of numerous Buffalo soldiers, as well as casualties of the Civil War’s Red River campaign.

While Williams is perhaps the most prominent transfer from the closed Brownsville cemetery, there are also many soldiers who, in death, have no names – one grave at Pineville includes the remains of more than 1,500 unknown soldiers transferred from Texas.

Many elements of Alexandria National Cemetery’s infrastructure – such as the utility building, main gate, rostrum and the one-story Colonial Revival superintendent’s lodge – date back to 1930s. The cemetery’s brick perimeter wall was erected in 1878.

Within that wall rests the remains of John Jefferson Williams, a man barely into his 20s, the last soldier killed in the Civil War, a casualty of the Battle of Palmito Ranch.

From: myneworleans.com

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