Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

Glynn Young

An Atlas and a Map of the Civil War

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I like maps. In fact, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t like maps. While they were (and are) abstract in their own way, they also make what they depict manageable and understandable. They also help you find your way to places you’ve never been. When I use a map, I study it, commit major roads and streets to memory, and then go.

And then there’s history.

I may be one of the few people who get excited to receive a Civil War atlas as a Christmas present. But I did, and I was.

And it wasn’t only an atlas.

The Atlas of the Civil War is, as its name implies, a collection of maps. But it’s also a National Geographic publication, which means your get far more than the maps and chunks of text about them. It’s written by author Stephen Hyslop, who’s published among other historical works, National Geographic’s Eyewitness to the Civil War. It’s edited by Neil Kagan, who’s firm specializes in illustrated books. And it includes an introduction by Civil War historian Harris Andrews.

You get maps of the states, secession, and the battles, but you also get stories about military personalities, civilians, regions, campaigns, and more. The atlas also provides insights into the terrain of various battles and how geography so often played a role. The book also reproduces maps that were drawn at the time, so you can see what the army commanders had laid out in their planning meetings or had drawn to accompany battle reports. And, this being National Geographic, the book contains reproductions of paintings old and new of battles and locations. 

A drawing of the Battle of the Wilderness

One battle I’ve been particularly interested in is The Wilderness in Virginia, fought from May 5 to May 6 in 1864. The name invokes the idea of forest, but this was more of hundreds of acres of trees, some forest, and a whole lot of scrub land. (Military historian Gordon Rhea is considered to have written one of the best accounts of the battle, if you’re interested.) The battle was important for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that it was the first battle confrontation between the Confederacy’s Robert E. Lee and newly appointed commander of all federal armies Ulysses S. Grant. The atlas shows how the battle fit in the overall context of the 1864 Virginia campaign, photographs and drawings, the order of battle, and maps.

This section also includes a page entitled “The Burning Woods.” The weather had been dry to the extreme, and gunfire during the battle had the unfortunate effect of setting blazes. Many soldiers were trapped by the fires and burned to death. The page has a photograph of nine Union soldiers, the only survivors of the 86 men of the 57th Massachusetts Company I. To see the photo by itself would lead you to believe it’s just a group of soldiers. But it represents the devastating toll of the Battle of the Wilderness.

The atlas is lavish; it’s filled with drawings, photographs, artwork and (of course) maps; and it helps to center your understanding of the war and the individual battles. Yes, it could be a coffee table book, but it’s a coffee table book that you can refer to and use over and over again.

This gift (from my wife) was paired with a National Geographic wall map, “Battlefields of the Civil War.” One side depicts the entire expanse of the war. The other provides closeups of the major campaigns and battle zones. The print is small, but you can spend a lot of time absorbing the geography of the Civil War.

I’ve already spent hours poring over both the atlas and the wall map. Both provide an understanding of what happened across American geography, mostly but not entirely in the South. And the atlas also suggests just how horrible that conflict was.

A Little of the Story of Wilhelmina Ostermann

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She wasn’t famous. She didn’t do anything that would make historians sit up and take notice. But there is a story attached to Wilhemina Ostermann. 

She was born on Dec. 5, 1833, somewhere in Germany. We know who her parents were – Johann Ostermann and Lucie Hoffman Ostermann – but that’s about all we know. We can presume, but it’s only a presumption, that she had siblings. In the 1850s, Wilhelmina (and likely her parents) came to the United States, part of the second great wave of German immigrants to America in the 19th century. German immigrants had come to Louisiana since the 1720s (New Orleans was founded in 1718), many settling in what was called the “German Coast,” a few miles west of the city. Today, the small town of Des Allemands testifies to that early German presence – the name is French for “The Germans.”

The Ostermann’s settled in New Orleans, which had a large German immigrant population. In fact, before the Civil War, it’s estimated that 12 percent of the New Orleans population was immigrants from Germany. It was a lively, thriving culture, with beer halls and breweries, literary societies, and German-language newspapers.

In 1858, 24-year-old Wilhelmina married Peter Dietrich Bosch in New Orleans, where they made their home. He was 15 years her senior, and all we know about his was that he was born in Germany and likely came to New Orleans in the first wave of 19th century German immigrations, which lasted form the 1820s and 1840s.  (The third and final wave was in the 1880s to 1890s.)

Wilhelmina and Peter had six children, born between 1861 and 1879, three of whom survived until adulthood. One of those who survived was a daughter, named Wilhelmina after her mother. She was born Oct. 7, 1861, some six months into the Civil War and six months before Union Admiral David Farragut sailed up the Mississippi River and captured the city in April, 1862.

German cavalry who enlisted with the Union forces, at Jackson Barracks, New Orleans about 1864.

It’s not known which side Wilhelmina and Peter supported in the Civil War. They were citizens of Louisiana and so of the Confederacy. But German immigrants largely opposed slavery and supported the Union; in St. Louis, for example, which another large population of German immigrants like New Orleans, it was the “German vote” that supported Lincoln in both St. Louis County in the election of 1860, one of only two counties in the entire state that voted Republican. 

The Bosch family remained in New Orleans under Union occupation. After Wilhelmina’s birth in 1861, the other two surviving children were August (1865-1945) and Julia (1875-1907). Their daughter Wilhelmina married Henry Wetzel in 1884; he was also of German immigrant extraction. They had three daughters – Edrienna, Lillian, and Beatrice – before Wilhelmina’s death in 1893, the same year her father Peter Bosch died. I think about those three girls, ages 8, 6, and 3, respectively, losing their mother and grandfather a few months apart. And I think about Wilhelmina Bosch, losing her husband and her oldest daughter in the same year. 

Henry Wetzel remarried six years later, when his daughters were 14, 12, and 9. In the interim, I suspect that Wilhelmina helped raise her granddaughters. The middle girl, Lillian, married in 1904; her husband died in 1908. Two years later, she married again, this time to Edwin Jacob, 12 years her senior and himself with two sons (his first wife had died). Edwin and Lillian had six children, the fourth of which was my mother.

My mother didn’t know her great-grandmother Wilhelmina Bosch (she died in 1923, four months after my mother was born), but she said her mother always spoke of her with great affection. 

My mother somehow ended up with the photograph of Wilhelmina Bosch at the top. This was a woman who emigrated to the United States as a teenager, had a child during a civil war, endured that war and occupation, helped raise three young girls when her daughter and their mother died, and lived to almost 90. The photograph would have been taken about the time of the Civil War or shortly before.

“Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era” by Frances Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant

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It doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, you know. You’re reading a book, and you sense that what you have in your hands is a game-changer.

This happened as I read the authors’ introduction to Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era. Co-authors Frances Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant studied what many had long believed to be an exaggeration at best and mythical propaganda at worst – the number of underaged boys who fought in the Civil War – and discovered something startingly different. The result is a work that changes our understanding of the Civil War, arguably the most powerful event in the history of the United States.

During the war itself, the myth of the “drummer boy” almost propagated itself, especially in the Union states. On both sides, the official minimum enlistment or conscription age was 18. With a parent’s consent, it could be less than that. In practice, and again especially on the Union side, the minimum age was widely disregarded.

For evidence, Clarke and Plant turn to memoirs, histories, periodicals, and especially both pension records and legal proceedings, whereby parents sought to have their underaged sons discharged. The military tended to be in the driver’s seat, however, and particularly so with the suspension of habeus corpus by President Lincoln (in 1863, Congress codified what Lincoln had done by executive order in 1861). 

Clarke and Plant carefully sift through the data and conclude that about 10 percent of the soldiers in both the Union and Confederate armies were under the age of 18 – teenaged boys, and sometimes younger. Numerically, that’s about 180,000 on the Union side and 20,000 on the Confederate side. Parents discovered their rights over their children seriously eroded by the demands of war and found themselves more often than not on the losing side in courtroom battles. Confederate parents appear to have had an easier time of reclaiming their underaged sons.

Frances Clarke

The authors tell the stories of some of the more famous children and teens fighting in the war, many as musicians in drum and bugle corps. The stories, of course, are what capture our attention and what captured the attention of readers during the war (see “Young Fred Grant Takes the Mississippi Capital, Almost” at Emerging Civil War). But they spend most of their tome looking at records, data, reports, and court records. It’s no surprise that the book was 10 years in the making.

The authors examine the history of underaged enlistment, going back to the War of 1812 and some of the legal disputes prior to the Civil War. They describe the social and cultural background that supported underaged enlistment, including the belief that war inspired courage in young minds and the propaganda benefits of depicting young boys fighting for their country. They show the various paths to enlistment included work, politics, and schools.

Rebecca Jo Plant

The subject of underaged soldiers was widely debated. While it tended to be more of a one-way outcome on the Union side, Confederate authorities (and parents) were concerned about what was called “preserving the seed corn” – making sure that the war didn’t devastate the region demographically. This was much less of a concern in the Union, with its much higher population. And one of the most moving chapters in the book is the account of enslaved and free youth who were forced into military and supporting service on both sides. 

Clarke is an associate professor of history at the University of Sydney in Australia and the author of War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North. Plant is a professor of history at the University of California at San Diego and the author of Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America.

Of Age is more than a significant contribution to our understanding of the Civil War. It changes our perception and understanding of the war itself, through the lens of how both the Union and the Confederacy used some of the most vulnerable members of society to fight. These children, and that’s what they were, children – were more than musicians and helpers. They picked up rifles and fought alongside men of legal age. Clarke and Plant make sure their rightful story is told and their contribution recognized.

Top photograph: Johnny Clem, one of the most famous child soldiers of the Civil War. He joined a Michigan regiment at age 9 and was officially enrolled at age 12. Photo: Library of Congress.

The Missouri Civil War Museum

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Recently, my wife and I visited the Missouri Civil War Museum. I’d heard about it from an online friend, but we’d never visited. It sits in the grounds of the Jefferson Barracks Park, with near Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery nearby, located in eastern St. Louis County adjacent to the Mississippi River. The museum has an admission fee, but it’s reasonable and well worth the cost.

The museum was opened in 2002. It receives no funding from state or federal taxes; it’s a 501(c)3 educational organization. It was created with the specific purpose of saving the Jefferson Parks Recreation Building (built in 1905) and opening a museum dedicated solely to Missouri in the Civil War. 

We started with the five-minute introductory video, which explained the history of Jefferson Barracks and how the museum came to be. And then it was on to the exhibits, which are on the main floor and in the basement level. 

I was surprised. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but the museum’s exhibits are extremely well-done and chock full of artifacts. The first room provided the background for the war – the events leading up to it as well as the 1860 election. But it’s all set in a Missouri context.

I found myself fascinated with a map showing how the counties voted in the 1860 election. Missouri, a slave or border state which remained in the Union, split its vote like many slave states did. But the map shows two counties that voted for Abraham Lincoln – St. Louis County and Gasconade County.

In 1860, the city of St. Louis was part of St. Louis County; the “divorce” happened in 1876, when the city decided it did not want to be part of all the criminal riffraff in the county – a decision that eventually became a huge mistake. The city’s business community and a large German immigrant population supported Lincoln, explaining why the county voted like it did. (There were slaveowners in the city and in St. Louis County, like Ulysses S. Grant’s father-in-law at Whitehaven, now a national park.)

Robert E. Lee drew this map in 1837 while stationed here.

Gasconade County on the Missouri River voted Republican because of its large German immigrant population. The town of Hermann, Missouri, was founded by immigrants in 1837 and became the county seat in 1842. They selected the area because the high river bluffs reminded them of the Rhine River. It became a center of wine production until Prohibition in 1920; the wine industry began its recovery in the 1960s and it’s part of the nation’s first officially designated wine district (which irritates Californians). 

For both counties, the German population helps explain the reason for the vote for Lincoln.

On the main floor, the exhibits are displayed around the perimeter of what had been the recreation hall’s gymnasium. In one tour of the room, you can experience the history of the war and how soldiers and civilians lived through it – or died during it. The museum has really done an effective, engaging job here. More exhibits were downstairs, including how the Civil War has been portrayed by Hollywood.

Looking from the museum to what was once the parade ground.

What you gain from the overall visit is an appreciation for how the state was ravaged during the war years and how guerilla bands on both sides participated in that destruction and death. The exhibits also explain the engagement that began at the federal fort in Pilot Knob, in southeastern Missouri, and ended near Kansas City in the far west. (The state of Missouri also has a Civil War Museum in Pilot Knob, which is well worth a visit.) After the war, many of the Missouri guerrillas drifted into criminal gangs, including Jesse James and the Younger Brothers.

Our museum visit ended at the gift shop on the main floor, which, again, was surprisingly good especially for the new and used books for sale. The museum organization is also renovating the 1918 post exchange building next door, which will be used as a Civil War Studies Center, and it’s received several preservation and recognition awards since it opened. And each year its sponsors a Civil War Symposium, this year scheduled for March 24-26. 

And, yes, I will be going back. It’s a wonderful gem of a museum.

“Irish American Civil War Songs” by Catherine Bateson

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My thoughts, lately, have been turning toward the green. Not environmental green, but Irish green.

A couple of years ago, my brother did one of those “Spit in a tube and mail it in” DNA tests. We’d always understood our heritage to be (in this order) English, Irish, French, and German. The results mostly corroborated that, except in the order: Irish (County Cork, Irish, in fact) led the blood pack, with 38 percent of our DNA. English (Midlands) was in second place at about 18 percent, followed by English (London) at about 10 percent. French (Alsace Lorraine) was there, to be sure, and so was German (Saxon). We even had a surprising 7 percent Scandinavian, which I suspect went back to the Vikings conquering England and Ireland. 

The Irish, as it turns out came from our father’s side of the family, through both of his parents. On his father’s side, it likely came sometime in the 18th and early 19th centuries, on his mother’s, mostly the 19th century.

The Irish had been emigrating to North America for a considerable period of time, likely as long as European emigration has existed. But it was in the 1840s that Irish emigration became a flood to America, following the Potato Famine. By the time of the Civil War, Irish immigrants accounted for 1.5 million of the total U.S. population (slave and free) of 31.5 million. The U.S. population had increased 35 percent from 1850 to 1860, and a considerable portion of that increase was due to immigration.

Some 200,000 Irishmen / Irish Americans fought in the Civil War. Most fought on the Union side, but about 20,000 signed on as Confederate soldiers. They brought with them their history, their political leanings, and their experiences with the famine and immigration. And they brought their songs.

Catherine Bateson, a lecturer in American history at the University of Kent in England, has documented the importance of Irish music, ballads, and songs in Irish American Civil War Songs: Identity, Loyalty, and Nationhood. I knew that music was important for both sides during the Civil War; it was used for marching, ceremonial activities, rest periods, and even for propaganda purposes with both soldiers and civilians. Thousands of songs and hymns were written and sung during the war years.

As Bateson makes clear, the Irish brought with them their longstanding love of ballads and music. They told stories with their songs and ballads, tales of victories and defeats. They expressed their political leanings (and desire for independence from Britain). And their music made its way into general overall American music, including to provide the music (and some of the lyrics) for “The Bonnie Blue Flag,” the Confederate anthem, and “The Fighting 69th,” the song of the famed Irish brigade from New York that provided the basis for so many other songs then and afterward.

Catherine Bateson

Bateson describes the background of Irish music and songs in mid-19thcentury America; how Irish American Civil War songs were produced; the ballads of the battlefield; how lyrics reinforced Irish cultural identity and Irish nationalism; how the songs and ballads expressed wartime politics; and how their music provided Irish Americans with identity and expressions of loyalty. Irish American music celebrated their military leaders, like Thomas Francis Meagher and Michael Corcoran, and their music provided solace after devastating defeats like the Battle of Chancellorsville in 1863. 

Bateson received her undergraduate degree in history from University College London and spent a year abroad studying at the University of Pennsylvania. She received an M.A. degree in American Studies from King’s College, London and her Ph.D. in history from the University of Edinburgh. She’s also an associate editor in the Irish in the American Civil War project and a former vice-chair of the Scottish Association for the Study of America. 

Irish American Civil War Songs provides a detailed study of some of the important music associated with the Civil War. It also opens a window into what some 200,000 soldiers sang during the war, and how their music provided very specific meanings. 

Top photograph: Soldiers of the Fighting 69th (Irish) Brigade. Michael Corcoran is standing at left, his hand on the gun carriage wheel. Thomas Francis Meagher is standing behind the gun. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Tracing the Life of an Ancestor Isn’t Easy—or Always Accurate

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Oral history may not be particularly trustworthy.

My father was four years old when his paternal grandfather died, so any direct memories he would have had were likely dim. He told me the story, passed down by his father, that his grandfather Samuel Young had fought in the Civil War for the Confederacy, had found himself stranded somewhere in the east when the war ended in 1865, and made his way home primarily by walking. My father said “the Youngs were a family of shopkeepers,” and had lived and worked around Brookhaven in northern Pike Country, and they had owned no slaves. (Pike was a large county; during Reconstruction it was split into two counties, Pike and Lincoln.)

When his grandfather reached home near Brookhaven, Mississippi, my father said, he discovered the family was gone. Neighbors said the entire family had fled to East Texas to escape the devastation of war and Union control. He continued his trek across Louisiana and eventually found his family. At some point, the family returned to Mississippi. My father also told me, again passing down the family story from his father, that Samuel had been too young to enlist, and so became a messenger boy. 

The only possible reference I’ve been able to find in Confederate war records to a Samuel Franklin Young is a listing for S.F. Young – but it’s a man from a far northern country in Mississippi, whereas my ancestor would have been listed for Pike County, which was in southern Mississippi on the Louisiana line. 

That’s as much as I knew about my great-grandfather. It turns out that much of it is likely wrong.

The family listing in the 1850 census

The first question involves Samuel’s age. His tombstone in a cemetery near Alexandria, Louisiana, says he was born Jan. 22, 1845. The 1850 U.S. census lists his age as 7 years, 7 months, which would make his birth year 1843. The records in the family Bible, which I have, and which were written by Samuel himself, say his birth year was 1846. Another record says 1847.

All of those possible dates, except possibly the last one, are problematic for the “too young to enlist” in the war statement from my father. By 1863, the conscription age for the Confederate Army was 16.

Then I discovered this on one of the popular genealogy sites – another bit of family oral history from a grandson of Samuel through another descendant’s line. 

The grandson remembered his grandfather telling stories about his life. Samuel had been born on the Lake Plantation east of Johnston Station in Pike County. His father Franklin owned the plantation and 17 slaves (Franklin is listed as “farmer” on the 1850 census). His father was also involved in building the fill or rail bed for the Illinois Central Railroad from Johnston Station to Summit, Mississippi (the station and line were constructed in 1857).

Samuel, “as was the custom in the family,” was called James Samuel, Clarence Samuel, Samuel Franklin, and simply Samuel. 

Then there’s this: Samuel was drafted during the Civil War, but his father paid a substitute $500 and a horse and saddle to take his son’s place. Later, Samuel was drafted anyway, enlisted in the cavalry, and “fought the Indians west of the Mississippi River.” After the war, Franklin supposedly lost his plantation “to the carpetbaggers,” and the family settled elsewhere in Pike County and worked as sharecropper farmers. Samuel later went to work in a sawmill. 

Samuel’s tombstone

There are a lot of problems with those statements. It’s unlikely Samuel would have been called “James Samuel;” he had an older brother named James who died in 1860. His name is listed as “Samuel Franklin Young” in the Bible, and his signature (also in the Bible) is Samuel F. Young. I’m not sure where Clarence came from. And for the Civil War service “fighting the Indians,” Samuel’s other older brother Wylie served in the Confederate military and died in Texas in 1863.

I suspect either Samuel or his grandson combined some stories, or the grandson’s memory combined the stories. But most of this runs counter to my own father’s memory, or at least his recall of what he understood about his grandfather. And a reader recently pointed out that his great-grandfather had also been too young to enlist and served as a messenger boy for the Confederate post office.

And who knows what name Samuel served in the army under? His own? Clarence? James? And perhaps my father, and I by extension, misunderstood the meaning of “messenger boy” and assumed it was military. And here I thought I had all the facts.

What I know for certain about my great-grandfather: he was born in 1845 or 1846 in Johnston Station, Mississippi. He served somewhere in the Confederate Army. At his death in 1920, he was living with an unmarried daughter named Myrtle Young outside Alexandria, La., and he is buried in a cemetery there. He and his wife Octavia had nine children, seven of whom survived to adulthood. Octavia died in 1887, and Samuel never remarried.

It’s back to the records to see what other facts I can find or corroborate. 

Top photograph: Samuel and Octavia Young about 1880.