Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

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“Contemners and Serpents: The James Wilson Family Civil War Correspondence”

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James and Eliza Wilson were Presbyterian missionaries to India, including what is now Pakistan, from 1834 to 1852. Their five children, four sons and a daughter, were born there. Both James and Eliza were from Pennsylvania, and most of their families were in Ohio and Indiana. Eliza’s sister married a man who became a successful planter in Georgia and occupied a place at the top of the social hierarchy there.

When they left for mission service, partisan feeling in the United States could run high – for example, the 1824 presidential election between John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson was bitterly contested and controversial. But what had not yet emerged was what would become the defining, and intractably dividing, issue of the 1850s and 1860s – slavery. When they returned in 1852, the United States seemed a very different place, one that was increasingly not united. 

Their older sons had been educated in the United States, a common practice for missionary families. When the family came back in 1852, they settled in eastern Tennessee, not far from Knoxville. This area was not a bastion of pro-slavery sentiment, unlike the cotton-growing areas of western Tennessee. 

When the time came to choose sides, all four of the Wilson sons would enlist in the Confederate Army. The father, James, was pro-Union, at least in the early period of the war. He eventually became a chaplain with the Confederate army. The Wilson’s daughter Bessie was an ardent Confederate sympathizer. The influence of their mother’s family seems to have been a factor but not a complete explanation. The oldest son, Luther, for example, was educated at Princeton Seminary in New Jersey, although some of his observations suggest a pro-Southern perspective.

That we know what we do about the James Wilson family is because of their letters, and each of the family members wrote a considerable number of them. The letters have been collected and published under the title of Contemners and Serpents: The James Wilson Family Civil War Correspondence. The “contemners and serpents” comes from the lyrics of “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

How the letters were preserved and found is a story in itself. Theodore Albert Fuller (1909-1990) operated a retreat in North Carolina. A daughter of the Wilson’s oldest son Luther would come each summer, and she would always bring her most prized possessions with her. She happened to die at the retreat one summer, and her executor decided her prized old documents were worthless, so he threw them out. Fuller, who had published books on local history, saw their value and bought them from the estate. He researched the family and developed a manuscript based on the letters, but never published it. 

In the late 1990s, Thomas Daniel Knight was a graduate student at Oxford studying American history. He met Fuller’s daughter, who mentioned the manuscript. Years later, after receiving his doctorate, Knight was offered the opportunity to edit and annotate the manuscript. The result was this book.

The volume is extraordinarily well done. The letters appear in their entirety, with all names footnoted and identified. The letters are also placed in their historical context of battles fought and other developments (Eliza and Bessie, for example, were expelled from Knoxville after it fell to the Union Army). The father and all four sons would survive the war, although two of the sons were captured at the end of the war and spent time in prison camps.

What Contemners and Serpents provides is an inside look at the Civil War from the perspective of four sons fighting the war, a daughter and mother supporting the South, and a father who was something of a reluctant participant. They were writing to and for each other, of course, and not for publication. We are the beneficiaries of Col. Fuller’s saving of the letters and Dr. Knight’s careful and informative treatment and further development of what he was given. (Knight himself found additional letters of the family.)

Knight is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Texas – Rio Grande Valley. He received his B.A. in history and classics from Washington & Lee University; his M. St. in 18th Century English History and his M. Litt. In American History from the University of Oxford; and his doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Oxford. In addition to numerous awards for his work, he is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and the Oxford debating Society.  

Top photograph: Both Eliza Wilson and daughter Bessie were in Knoxville during the occupation by Gen. Burnside’s Union army, Confederate Gen. Longstreet’s siege to retake the city, and the eventual rival of Gen. Sherman’s Union forces which forced a retreat by the Confederates. Both women were expelled from the city and eventually ended up with relatives.

When Research for Your Historical Novel Changes Your Understanding

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For more than a year, I’ve been researching / writing/ researching / writing a historical novel set during the American Civil War. It’s loosely based on the experiences of my great-grandfather, but the more I write and research, the looser it becomes.

I thought I knew the basic story of the war. What I soon learned is that, for a very long time, historians focused on the war in the East, which specifically meant Virginia, Maryland, Georgia, and Gettysburg in Pennsylvania. But in the last two of three decades, the war in the West – in particular, Tennessee and Mississippi – has come to be recognized as almost as significant as that in the East.

It was certainly significant for both sides of my family. My father’s family experienced the Battle of Shiloh and Grierson’s Raid (the basis for the 1959 movie The Horse Soldiers, starring John Wayne). My mother’s family experienced the Union occupation of New Orleans (starting in 1862), both the Creole French and German immigrant sides of the family. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at the American Christian Fiction Writers blog.

Photograph: John Clem, who “enlisted” in the Union army at age 9 in 1861 and became a soldier at age 12.

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.