Friday, February 25, 2011

A Message in a Bottle

In December, the media widely reported the fascinating story of a message in a bottle. For over one hundred years, the Museum of the Confederacy has owned a message in a small bottle that was donated in 1896 by Captain William A. Smith, the former assistant adjutant general to Major General John G. Walker’s Texas Division. In 2008, the bottle was carefully opened, and the message was extracted and found to be in a secret code known as a Vigenére cipher. Sent to Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton, the commander of the force at Vicksburg, Mississippi, the deciphered message reads:

“July 4th

Gen’l Pemberton, you can expect no help from this side of the river. Let Gen’l Johnston know, if possible, when you can attack the same point on the enemy’s line. Inform me also and I will endeavor to make a diversion. I have sent some caps. I subjoin despatch from Gen. Johnston.”

Probably originating with General Walker, the message is dated on the day that Vicksburg surrendered. Certainly one of the frustrations of the campaign from the Confederate perspective was the inability of trans-Mississippi Confederates (like Walker’s division) to offer any substantial aid to their comrades across the river in Vicksburg.

An excellent article about the message in the bottle was recently published in the Museum of the Confederacy’s Magazine (Winter 2011) and may be read by following the link.

Sunday, February 20, 2011

Illinois Soldiers at Arkansas Post

The 55th Illinois Volunteer Infantry was one of the storied units included in William F. Fox’s list of 300 fighting regiments. These soldiers from Illinois traveled extensively during the war, fighting across the South from Arkansas to North Carolina. The following is taken from Fox’s Regimental Losses in The American Civil War, 1861-1865 (1898).

“Thos. K. Smith's Brigade — Blair's Division--Fifteenth Corps.

1) Col. David Stuart; Brig.-Gen.

2)Col. Oscar Malmborg.

3) Col. Charles A. Andress.

companies.

killed and died of wounds.

died of disease, accidents, in Prison, &c.

Total Enrollment.

Officers.

Men.

Total.

Officers.

Men.

Total.

Field and Staff





1

1

13

Company

A

2

12

14


11

11

106


B

1

24

25


15

15

103


C

1

22

23


14

14

114


D


8

8


16

16

104


E

2

10

12


10

10

95


F

2

14

16

1

17

18

107


G


10

10


15

15

92


H

1

15

16

1

11

12

90


I


20

20


5

5

119


K


13

13


12

12

113

Totals

9

148

157

2

127

129

1,056

157 killed == 14.8 per cent.

Total of killed and wounded, 448.

battles.

K. & M. W.

battles.

K. & M. W.

Shiloh, Tenn.

86

Kenesaw, Ga., June 19, 1864

1

Russell's House, Tenn.

2

Kenesaw, Ga.,June 27, 1864

16

Chickasaw Bayou, Miss.

3

Atlanta, Ga., July 22, 1864

6

Arkansas Post, Ark

1

Ezra Chapel, Ga.

6

Vicksburg, Miss., May 19, 1863

7

Atlanta, Ga., August 3, 1864

4

Vicksburg, Miss., May 22, 1863

7

Jonesboro, Ga.

8

Vicksburg Trenches, Miss.

2

Siege of Atlanta, Ga.

4

Jackson, Miss. (On Picket, July 14, 1863

1

Bentonville, N. C.

1

Black River, Miss. (On Picket, August 14, 1863

1

Forage Train, N. C., March 27, 1865

1

Present, also, at Siege of Corinth; Shelby Depot, Tenn.; Champion's Hill; Missionary Ridge; Lovejoy's Station; March to the Sea; Fort McAllister; Savannah; Columbia; The Carolinas.

Notes.--Mustered in October 31, 1861, at Chicago, proceeding, December 9th, to St. Louis, where it remained a month, and then moved to Paducah, Ky. On March 8, 1862, the regiment embarked for Pittsburg Landing, where it was encamped when the Confederates made their attack at Shiloh, April 6th; it was then in Sherman's (5th) Division, Army of the Tennessee. Its casualties in that battle amounted to 51 killed, 197 wounded, and 27 missing; total, 275--out of 512 men in line. Lt.-Col. Malmborg commanded the regiment at Shiloh, Colonel Stuart being in command of the brigade. During the Vicksburg campaign, 1863, it was in Lightburn's (2d) Brigade, Blair's (2d) Division, Fifteenth Corps; in the Atlanta campaign, 1864, this division was commanded by General Morgan L. Smith; and, in the March to the Sea, by General Hazen. The regiment lost at Chickasaw Bayou, 2 killed and 4 wounded; at Vicksburg, First Assault, 4 killed and 22 wounded; at the Second Assault, 5 killed and 13 wounded; and, at the assault on Kenesaw Mountain, Ga, 14 killed and 33 wounded, Captain Augustine, who was in command, being among the killed. The total loss of the regiment on the Atlanta campaign was 36 killed, and 86 wounded; about half its number. There were 91 pairs of brothers in the regiment; of these men, 43 were killed in battle, and 15 died of disease. The Fifty-fifth followed closely the fortunes of General Sherman,--from Benton Barracks, St. Louis, where he was in charge, to the Grand Review at the close of the war. Its dead lie buried in nine different States; and it traveled, on foot and by transports, 11,965 miles, of which 3,240 were done on foot” (Fox, p. 369).

For further information about the regiment check out the following links:

Civil War Flags of Illinois

Illinois in the Civil War: a roster of the 55th Illinois Volunteer Infantry is available plus various other information

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Trans-Mississippi Magazine Articles

Recently, I received the latest issue (Volume 12, number 6) of North & South magazine and noticed that (happily!) there are two articles relating to the trans-Mississippi in it. “Interdicting The Mississippi: Colonel Colton Greene, CSA vs. The U. S. Navy” is written by noted naval authority Myron J. Smith, and it details a short and “largely unremembered…campaign from Chicot County, the southeastern-most county in Arkansas. Greene would blockade the great river for over a week and leave several tinclad captains reeling” (p. 33).

Mark K. Christ, an expert on the war in Arkansas, has penned “’The Federals Fought Like Devils’” about the battle of Pine Bluff on 25 October 1863.

Although there does not appear to be a working website for North & South, the magazine is usually easy to find on the newsstands of chain bookstores.

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

A Belated Valentine's Day Posting

Oops! I intended to post this yesterday…

As I cruised through the local Hallmark store the other day purchasing Valentine’s Day candy, it occurred to me that judging from the large display of cards, the prettily wrapped boxes of candy, and the array of knick-knacks for sale that this is certainly a significant Day in our society. It hasn’t always been that way…

Take, for example, a letter written by Harriet Perry to her soldier husband, Theophilus on 14 February 1864. Harriet penned the letter from near Marshall, Texas, and it was sent to Captain Perry, stationed with the 28th Texas Cavalry (dismounted) in Louisiana. Her letter was lengthy and a number of topics were discussed: clothing purchases, visits from friends, financial matters, neighborhood news, etc. In the midst of these newsy comments is this comment rather casually tucked in:

“…I shall send up the note the next time your Father goes. that will pay our Taxes which are to be paid soon[.] You must take this letter for a Valentine as it is written on St. Valentine’s Day—I did not think of it until I began to write—I received three letters from you while in Marshall [crossed out] written on the 18th 21st & 29th of Jan. I am very glad to hear you are getting on so well…” (Johansson, M. Jane, ed., Widows by the Thousand: The Civil War Correspondence of Theophilus and Harriet Perry, 1862-1864, Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000, p. 209).

This marks one of the few mentions of Valentine’s Day that I have seen in correspondence from the Civil War. If you have any examples, particularly relating to the trans-Mississippi, then please let me know.

Saturday, February 12, 2011

A Soldier's Lament

Men who served west of the Mississippi often felt overlooked and unappreciated. Recently, I have been reading Michael A. Mullins’ book, The Fremont Rifles: A History of the 37th Illinois Veteran Volunteer Infantry (Wilmington, NC: Broadfoot Publishing Co., 1990) that documents the activities of a unit that served mostly in the trans-Mississippi. Mr. Mullins included a quote from a letter written by Captain Eugene B. Payne in September 1862:

“’The fact is I was born for excitement and must have it. Oh, if I were only down in Virginia or Maryland, there I could get fat on excitement. True, I might get hit, yet I would not get killed no sooner than I would here, unless—unless it were my destiny. Alas, Alas, we western soldiers will be as little thought of after the war besides the Potomac heroes as our old grandmothers at home, yet…we have saved the American Republic west of the father of waters’” (Mullins, p. 131).

Saturday, February 5, 2011

A Question and Answer Session with Novelist Steve Yates


Steve Yates is assistant director / marketing director at the University Press of Mississippi in Jackson. His short stories have appeared in TriQuarterly, Southwest Review, Texas Review, and many other places. In Best American Short Stories 2010 one of his short fictions was included in the “Other Notable Stories of 2009.” Excerpts from his novel, Morkan’s Quarry (Moon City Press 2010) appeared in The Missouri Review, The Ontario Review, and The South Carolina Review. A novella length excerpt was a finalist in the Pirate’s Alley/Faulkner Society William Faulkner-Wisdom Novella Contest. For seventeen years, he has gratefully served the study of history in university press publishing.

Q. What led you to write a novel about the Civil War in the Ozarks region?

A. I spent so much time at Wilson’s Creek National Military Park growing up, back when the park office was just a trailer. The rangers answered every question from what had to have been a spooky, strange kid, answered me with patience and eagerness and encouragement. In the Boy Scouts, we built and restored countless trails out there and even cleared and repaired a family cemetery. In grade school we used portions of the park, including an old quarry, for environmental science field work. By the time I was in the creative writing program at University of Arkansas, I came to believe that there were two lodestones a writer born and reared in Springfield, Missouri, had to mine—the Civil War and the 1906 lynching. Avoid those and you could become just another capable writer of late Imperial suburban madness. Mine them and you have a chance to be a writer people might never forget.

Q. One of the main characters, Michael Morkan, owns a quarry in Springfield . I don’t believe I’ve ever read a book where the main character’s business was a quarry. Why did you select a quarry for Morkan’s business?

A. There is one forgotten old novel called The Quarry, set in a granite quarry in Vermont. Quarries and limestone ridges were my landscapes growing up. I don’t feel the pH balance of being spiritually on home ground until I see some moon-blue lime. The Galloway quarry was a roaring concern when I was a kid, and there was a cemetery just past the quarry. There my sister, Debbie, is buried, and in mourning my mother took me and then took my sisters and me often to the grave. The quarry, for me, became associated with grief, with evermore, with remembrance. Even as a teenager and young reporter, when my life felt haywire, I would park across from the quarry at night, and its foggy fracas calmed me. Later in graduate school, I spent my summers surveying and construction and concrete plant inspecting for the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department. We even surveyed an abandoned quarry, some of the most mortally dangerous work I likely will ever do. I can’t imagine avoiding writing about quarrymen, and think it passing strange that my people so rarely think of lime and the men who make it. I vouch that you have not passed a single day of your American life that lacked the aid of some product suffused with if not entirely made of limestone and its kilned offspring, lime.

Q. Your book has a flavor of authenticity about it. For example, you work in details about clothing, exchange rates, a medicine story pamphlet, Gratiot Prison, and the fight by invalids during the battle of Springfield . What background sources did you use? What were your favorite background sources?

A. A lifetime of them. My most treasured source is a blue and battered saddle-stitched pamphlet I have had since childhood, Robert Neumann’s An Illustrated History of the Civil War in Springfield, MO 1861-1865. Cherished, spattered, grimy, it went everywhere with me, and for the fiction writer it holds a thousand voices calling out from the ash of time—write me; let me live again! Later, I had the golden fortune of promoting books about the Ozarks as publicist at University of Arkansas Press. There I worked to market The White River Chronicles of S.C. Turnbo. The voice in Turnbo, to me, is the brainwave cadence of my Ozark ancestors, pure from the spring. I wanted the neighborhood narrator of Morkan’s Quarry to be as earthy, Anglo-Saxon, and humanely curious as Turnbo while being nearly as observant and intelligent as Henry Rowe Schoolcraft. I also marketed the superb edition of Schoolcraft’s journal that Milton D. Rafferty edited for Arkansas. I count it one of the tremendous privileges of my life that I was able to make better known the work of Lynn Morrow, James Keefe, and Milt Rafferty, and from them Schoolcraft and Turnbo.

Q. One of the strengths of your novel, in my opinion, is your depiction of how civilians were forced to make choices in regard to their loyalties. For example, Michael Morkan made a “choice” to provide gunpowder to the Confederate army early in the book and then paid for that by being imprisoned by Union authorities in Gratiot Prison. Why did you decide to focus on civilians in your book rather than military personnel?

A. The civilian story in the Ozarks is THE story. Michael Fellman taught us that in his monumental Inside War: The Guerilla Conflict in Missouri During the Civil War. And William Garrett Piston helps us focus on it in his indispensable The Battle of Wilson’s Creek: The Second Battle of the Civil War and the Men Who Fought It. The great fiction writers of the Ozarks who have treated the war—Donald Harington, Daniel Woodrell, Paulette Jiles—all obeyed Sir Walter Scott’s rule, follow the middling man or woman rather than the mighty generals and kings. And the fiction writers that I find centering and cleansing, my benchmarks—Isaac Babel, Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy, and above all my godfather, the Austro-Hungarian Joseph Roth—never created stories with powerful generals as protagonists. Bit-part or minor characters, or main characters who briefly, ineptly, or uncomfortably served in the military, sure. But never the main characters.

There is a set of American epic historical fiction which does focus on generals and mighty, heroic warriors. And I find those fictions stirring and engaging in the same way I find David’s “Napoleon Crossing the Alps” stirring and engaging while not being truthfully and emotionally a work of art. For something to become art, I want the human cry and love’s answer. I want Courbet’s “Mère Grégoire” and Goya’s “The Forge.” There’s a reason Velázquez put the dwarves in the foreground, eh? And I’m insanely ambitious. I would prefer writing and selling six hundred copies of something that one day, long after I am dust, comes to be considered a work of art, rather than writing something stirring and engaging that sells tens of thousands but is at day’s end a work that is not especially truthful to the ragged, pilgrim experience of life, that is forgotten upon my death if not well before supper time, and helps no one to empathy.

Um… don’t tell my wife that part about art and six hundred copies stuff, okay? She’ll leave me.

Q. A student comes to you and wants advice on what Civil War trans-Mississippi related research project or creative project they should tackle; what would you suggest?

A. Oh, there are so many. I desperately long for some historian to create a book called Civil War Springfield. And Fellman at a panel at OAH mentioned the carnivalesque quality of the Trans-Mississippi war, and pointed out the scene of Van Dorn’s army leaving the Boston Mountains for Pea Ridge. What a motley, tragic, insanely ambitious, carnival sight! That would make a great short story or novella, considering they walked into doom and carnage and confusion as great as that at the Battle of Inkerman! And someone besides Shelby Foote needs to write the story of a horseman in Sterling Price’s forlorn 1864 raid. Elmo Ingenthron’s Borderland Rebellion has hundreds of entry points for the writer. And S. C. Turnbo… like the Old Testament, so much human truth waits in those pages.

Q. Are you working on another novel now? If so, would you be willing to share some information about it?

A. I am, thank you. Portions of the sequel to Morkan’s Quarry, which I call The Teeth of the Souls, have twice appeared in the Missouri Review, and once in Kansas Quarterly/Arkansas Review. And one is forthcoming in March 2011 from Elder Mountain Review (follow http://blogs.missouristate.edu/eldermountain/ and you can get a copy if you like). The Teeth of the Souls will take some of the same characters and many new ones up to fateful 1906 in Springfield. It also lets me mine that wealth of history that my mother, a St. Louis German, an Evertz, engendered in me. So in the sequel, the hills of my father’s Irish, Scots-Irish, Brit and Indian meet the cold, rich urbanity, steely intellect, and stormy emotions of my dear mother’s German Catholic side. While all characters are a creation of the author’s imagination, without history, without family as the ore, and without God inspiring, how could one ever attempt making art?

Steve’s excellent novel may be ordered from the following or from a bookseller near you:

Moon City Press

Amazon.com

Friday, February 4, 2011

Morkan's Quarry by Steve Yates

In December, Steve Yates contacted me and asked if I would have an interest in receiving a free copy of his novel, Morkan’s Quarry (Springfield, MO: Moon City Press, 2010). Knowing that the novel was set in the Ozarks region during the Civil War, I readily agreed. In the interest of full disclosure, Steve did not pressure me, make any demands, or otherwise twist my arm to make any mention of his novel on this blog. I am often hesitant to read Civil War novels….they seem to fall into one of several categories (sometimes there is overlap between the categories):

+they are romantic novels full of moonbeams, plantation houses, hoop skirts, and handsome but roguish gentlemen;

+they contain a whole host of evil and exceptionally violent psychopaths;

+they are grossly inaccurate; or

+the characters (particularly the historical ones) are like cardboard cut-outs

I could go on…

Often I do not enjoy reading Civil War novels for the reasons listed above, but Morkan’s Quarry by Steve Yates is interesting, enjoyable, realistic, and moving. I read novels regularly, and this is one of the most memorable that I’ve read in a long time.

After reading the book, I contacted Steve and asked him if he would participate in a question and answer session for this blog. He cheerfully agreed, and the next posting will be the question and answer session with Steve Yates.