Ciivl War

Finding an Army Medal in a Small-Town Antique Store

July 2, 2025 By Glynn Young 2 Comments

I’m always suspicious of Facebook messages coming from people I don’t know. If it seems that a message might possibly be legitimate, I’ll check the person’s profile page. More often than not, it’s people from Hong Kong or the Philippines or Africa, or people who names and profile photos clearly don’t match. Click delete.

A few weeks ago, one arrived that raised my suspicions, but the sender seemed legitimate. And he was. He asked me if I was the author of this article at Emerging Civil War: “Research for a Novel Upended a Family Legend.” Yep, that was me.

He said he had an interesting story to tell me, and we eventually connected by phone.

Some weeks before, he’d been in an antique store in Paris, Texas, north of the Dallas-Fort Worth area. He collects Civil War memorabilia, and he’d found a medal with a serial number on the back.

The medal was a Cross of Military Service. It had been awarded by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDAC) to veterans whose ancestors fought in the Civil War and who themselves were veterans of World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Persian Gulf War, and/or the Global War on Terror. He said finding a medal like this was highly unusual, because families tended to hold on to them, even after the awardee’s death.

He contacted the UDAC and learned that this one was even more unusual – it had been awarded to a woman for her service in both World War II and Korea. Her name was U.S. Army Major Ruby Edwina McCain. She was born in 1913 and died in 1991. The UDAC was able to tell him that her Civil War ancestor was Jarvis Seale, born in 1824 in Amite County, Mississippi, and died in 1862 at the Battle of Shiloh. Ruby was his great-granddaughter.

The man who found the medal went looking for Jarvis Seale, and what did he find but my article at Emerging Civil War.

For a long time, Jarvis Seale was the mystery man in the Young family Bible records. No one knew why he was there. Family Search eventually revealed the reason – he had married a Martha Young, the oldest sister of my great-grandfather Samuel, who originally bought the Bible and entered all of the family records. Samuel would have known his brother-in-law and remembered him in the Bible. Samuel also lost his two older brothers in the war.

What puzzled my new friend was what had puzzled several people – why was Jarvis listed in Find-a-Grave and Family Search as buried in a cemetery in Clarksville, Texas? The fact is, he wasn’t. He was buried in one of several mass graves for Confederate dead at Shiloh. At some point years later, one of his daughters moved with her husband to Clarksville, and she had placed a memorial stone there in the family plot. That was two mysteries solved – the Bible’s mystery name and the Texas gravestone.

Ruby McCain was from Clarksville. Her grandmother had been the one to arrange for the memorial stone. Clarksville is about 20 miles south of the Oklahoma border, and 30 miles east of Paris, Texas, where Ruby’s medal ended up. Our best guess is that a relative (Ruby had no children) had included the medal in an estate sale or given it away, and it ended up in the antique store.

Jarvis and Martha furnished their names for characters in my novel Brookhaven. A medal, a memorial stone, and a book brought them back from the past, facilitated by Facebook messenger and a phone call.

“The Canteen” by Trevor Tipton

December 11, 2024 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

Family memories passed down through the generations can create fascinating stories.

Eighteen-year-old Travis Tipton and his Indiana unit find themselves lost in the mountains of eastern Tennessee. It’s late 1863; the men are cold and they’re increasingly tired of the war. They’ve become separated from the main body of Union General Burnside’s army and need to find their way back. Travis has just gone off guard duty when the Confederates attack. The few Union soldiers are killed; Travis himself is shot directly in the heart and tumbles into the nearby stream.

When he wakes, he discovers he’s still alive, protected by the canteen he’d slung across the chest; the rest of his troop are dead; he’s floating on a log downstream; and the water is freezing. He loses consciousness and later finds himself rescued by a Union-friendly mountain family, who help him recover from frostbite and exposure.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is The-Canteen.jpg

He finds romance, but his adventures are far from over. He eventually leaves the mountain family to find Burnside’s army but soon faces another peril: Confederate bounty hunters.

Travis’s story is told in the short novel The Canteen by Trevor Tipton. The reason the story’s fictitious hero carries the same last name as the author is because the story is based on family history and a Civil War rifle passed down through the decades. There really was a Travis Tipton from Indiana who fought in the Civil War and married a young woman he met during the war. And one of his descendants would write a novel about the war, loosely based on Travis’s history.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is Trevor-Tipton-1-768x1024.jpg — *Trevor Tipton*

It’s a rich story, filled with anecdotes about real events during the war, including the POW camp at Camp Cahaba in Alabama, which plays a role in the story. (Designed to house 100 soldiers, the camp housed up to 3,000 Union prisoners. Not as bad as Andersonville or some of the POW camps for Confederate POWs in New York and Chicago, Cahaba had its own horror stories.)

Tipton the contemporary author taught for 43 years, using his storytelling skills to make the past become interesting and alive. He lives in northern Indiana.

I learned about The Canteen from an unusual web site / podcast / YouTube channel called American Civil War & UK History (link below). I, too, have a Civil War story passed down through the generations that eventually became a manuscript, and will soon become a published novel.

What Happens When You Finally Type “The End”?

February 21, 2024 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

It’s been more than two years since the writing began. It’s been more than four since the research started. A little over a month ago, on Jan. 16, I wrote this in my writing journal: “Reached 87,758 words. First draft completed.” Five days later, I wrote “First reread / editing completed.”

It was there I stopped, almost mentally and emotionally spent. I need to do the second edit, which for me is the most serious one. But I stopped, to catch my breath, reflect and take stock, and consider how the past two years of my life have been devoted to a story that is about 25 percent true and 75 percent fiction. Nd what I thought was mostly true mostly wasn’t.

I’ve published five novels and a non-fiction book. I’ve completed two novel manuscripts that have potential but need considerable reworking. I have at least five different novel ideas, and a dozen short stories, buzzing around my head.

This story I just finished, this manuscript I’ve labored over, isn’t exactly a labor of love. It’s more a labor of sweat, the story I had to get done.

To continue reading, please see me post today at the ACFW Blog.

Top photograph by Rui Silva sj via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“The Red Badge of Courage” by Stephen Crane

December 13, 2023 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

If I have one vivid memory of high school junior English class, it would be the classic coming-of-age assignment of The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane. In the spring, anyone could spot a sophomore, because inevitably each and every one of us was carrying our paperback edition of the classic novel about the Civil War. It was assigned at the same time we were studying the Civil War in American history.

Crane published the novel in 1895, two years after he’d published the book that put him on the American literary map – Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, the story of a prostitute. Crane belonged to the Naturalist, Realist, Symbolist, or Impressionist School, depending upon which critic you ask. The story of a prostitute had not been done before, at least not in a way that made Maggie something of a heroine.

But it was The Red Badge of Courage that turned Crane into an international literary star. The novel tells the story of Henry Fleming, who lives with his mother, who enlists as a private in the Union army. His mother is deadest against him enlisting, and he does one day on his own and then tells her what he’s done.

We follow Fleming in his new army life. Crane depicts the adulation of the townspeople for his patriotism, how much of army life was characterized by waiting, rumors, and boredom, and Fleming’s fear of facing his first battle and behaving as a coward. In his first military engagement, he performs well, and the enemy is sent running in retreat. But the next day, Fleming and his squad face a renewed attack, and this time it’s Fleming and his cohorts who are running in retreat. He finds himself in dense woods, and in of the most memorable scenes in the novel, he stumbles upon the body of a soldier who died in a battle in the same place.

Still in retreat, he learns that the Union side has prevailed and won the battle. He becomes separated from his regiment, and he’s soon hearing the stories from others. The reader sees how courage and cowardice can exist in the same person at the same time. We learn about the universal complaint of all soldiers in every war – the incompetence of commanding officers. And we see that battles and a war are often won less by brilliant military strategy and tactics and more by who can hold out the longest.

What Henry Fleming experienced was life in the army during wartime, and it was (and remains) a far cry from the colorful accounts and government propaganda common to all wars.

In addition to the first two novels, Crane (1871-1900) also published a poetry collection and another novel, based on his experience as a war correspondent during the Spanish-American War. He published several highly regarded short stories, including “The Open Boat” and “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky.” With no actual personal war experience, he said that he drew inspiration for The Red Badge of Courage from football games. His short but eventful life ended when he died in England from tuberculosis.

The Red Badge of Courage is a short, intense, and essentially plotless story. It explores the psychology of solders and war, long before the subject became a popular war. It likely influenced every novel about war written after it. And it explored through fiction, the experience of the Civil War, still the deadliest war ever engaged in by America.

Top photograph: An illustration of the First Battle of Bull Run, July 21, 1861, showing the Connecticut troops standing firm as the battle turns against them.

“The Civil War: The Final Year Told by Those Who Lived It”

September 13, 2023 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

It’s last of the four volumes of Civil War, told in the words of people who lived it. The Civil War: The Final Year covers the year from March of 1864 through June of 1865, and it’s every bit as somber and thought-provoking as its three predecessors.

The volume is edited by Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Fred C. Frey Professor and History Department Chair at Louisiana State University. The Final Year covers some of the final major battles of the war, including Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, Atlanta, and Petersburg, as well as Ulysses S. Grant taking control of the Union army and William Sherman’s march across Georgia to the sea.

Using letters, diaries, memoirs, speeches, official orders and directives, newspaper reports, and much more, the book provides a broad telling of how civilians and soldiers on both sides lived that final year. You get the good and heroic, and you read the bad and the cowardly. You also see how newspapers on both sides, but especially those in the Union, helped fan the flames of hatred and desire for retribution.

You read the experiences of women and children in the path of Sherman’s army in Georgia, and how troops routinely ignored Sherman’s directive not to touch private homes (barns, stables, smokehouses, sheds, and henhouses were fair game). You read how a Louisiana woman deals with both Union troops and slaves who’ve freed themselves. You read letters full of hope and heartbreak. You see communications between generals and their subordinates. And you experience the presence of Abraham Lincoln, and what happens when the president is assassinated at Ford’s Theatre.

You can also read what was already emerging as the postwar sentiment on both sides, from radical Republicans and unrepentant Southerners, including and sometimes especially the women. It’s the Civil War in all its glory and terror, and the Confederacy in its death throes.

At LSU, Sheehan-Dean teaches courses on the Civil War and Reconstruction, history of the New South, nd a graduate readings seminar on 19^th century America. He received his B.A. degree from Northwestern University, and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Virginia. In addition to the numerous articles he’s written on the Civil War and related topics, he’s also edited or co-authored several books on the war, including Why Confederates Fought: Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia and Concise Atlas of the U.S. Civil War.

The Civil War: The Final Year Told by Those Who Lived It is a fitting conclusion to the entire series. It’s the history of an event, a time, and the people who lived it whose effects we are still experiencing and living with today.

The Civil War: The Second Year Told by Those Who Lived It

The Civil War: The Third Year Told by Those Who Lived It

Top photograph: the McClean House in Appomattox Court House, Virginia, where Lee and Grant met to discuss surrender terms.

Why We Celebrate Thanksgiving

November 24, 2022 By Glynn Young 2 Comments

We celebrate Thanksgiving Day because of Henry VIII, the Gunpowder Plot, the 1619 landing of 38 English colonists in Virginia (without slaves), the Pilgrims, the end of the American Revolution, the beginning of the American Republic, the Civil War, and the need to stimulate the economy in the late 1930s. And it might have been called Evacuation Day.

Thanksgiving as we know it today in the United States evolved over a period of some 400 years. The idea of thanksgiving observances goes back to the Protestant Reformation in England under Henry VIII, consolidating a rather large number of thanksgiving holidays during the Roman Catholic period. Special days of Thanksgiving would be called for military victories and for deliverance from such events as the Gunpowder Plot of 1606.

The idea of Thanksgiving and feasting, but without a fixed date, had been around by the time of the American colonial period. The first known Thanksgiving celebration in America was not in 1621 with the Pilgrims but in 1619 in Virginia, when 38 English settlers arrived on the ship Margaret on Dec. 4 and immediately celebrated their landing with a day of thanksgiving, as required under the charter of the London Company which sponsored them. The landing day was to be observed in perpetuity.

The Pilgrims (and the Puritans) brought their tradition of thanksgiving days with them from Europe. The Pilgrims celebrated their first day of thanksgiving in 1621, and it is this observance that’s considered the forerunner of what we know today.

Not everyone in the American colonies celebrated a day of thanksgiving. The observance varied by colony (and later by state); in New York, for example, thanksgiving day was known as Evacuation Day, an observance of the departure of British troops in 1783 after the end of the American Revolution. George Washington led his army down Manhattan Island to what is now Battery Park in a grand triumphal march. And it was Washington who, as the nation’s first Preisdent, proclaimed the first National Day of Thanksgiving on Nov. 26, 1789. By the end of the 18th century, the last Thursday in November had become the day went most states observed a Day of Thanksgiving.

It was Abraham Lincoln who made it an official national day of observance. In November of 1863 (the same month as the Gettysburg Address), Lincoln proclaimed a national Thanksgiving to be observed by all states on the final Thursday of November. This was in recognition of both the bountiful harvests the Northern states had experienced and the military victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg.

Thanksgiving Day remained the last Thursday in November until 1939, when President Roosevelt proclaimed it to be the next-to-last Thursday of November. This was done to stimulate retail sales by extending the Christmas shopping season – an early recognition of the commercial importance of Black Friday as the day after Thanksgiving. Finally, in 1941, Congress and Roosevelt officially made the fourth Thursday of November as Thanksgiving Day. And there it’s remained ever since.

But for all the reasons it was created and observed, what has been at its heart from the beginning is thankfulness to God for his provision and faithfulness. And that is, perhaps, the most important aspect of this holiday we call Thanksgiving.

Top photograph: Union soldiers celebrate the first national Thanksgiving Day in 1863.

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