Reflections of a Civil War Historian

By Jeffry D. Wert · Originally published November 2017 · p. 27

My fascination with the Civil War began with a monument. Unveiled during the heart of the Great Depression in a small central Pennsylvania village, the granite stone is not imposing, for it barely rises to a height of six feet. It is rectangular in shape, with a bronze plaque on its face. Few folks today pay it heed as it stands like a silent sentry along the town’s main street. The monument marks the spot and remembers a day, Aug. 25, 1862, where and when 85 mostly farm boys were sworn into the service of “the Army of the United States” for three years. The bronze plaque contains their names and those who joined them later in Company A, 148th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry. The names of their descendants can still be heard daily on the farms and in the communities from which they stepped forth to defend. Names cast in bronze on a granite monument need to be honored down through all those many years. But they have always been more than metal and stone, for they still reside with us in the stories that are told and written about them. I heard the stories as a boy of ten years from a remarkable teacher, who had gotten them directly from the veterans on many winter Saturday nights beside a warm stove in a dry goods store. Later, across a road from the school, I walked through the town cemetery, searching for their graves. The sites could be seen readily, graced by a G.A.R. marker and, on Decoration Day, an American flag. Most of them had returned from war, while a few had been brought home, having fallen at Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, or that most terrible of days for the regiment, May 12, 1864, at Spotsylvania’s “Bloody Angle.” My introduction to America’s greatest saga is surely not rare. My fellow historians and Civil War buffs, who read the pages of Civil War News, have similar memories of when the fascination enveloped them. For some, it must have come as early in life as mine, but for others it struck later. When and how does not necessarily matter for we all seem to share an unending affliction.

For me, it remains the stories and the retelling of them, for it is our shared humanity that intrigues more than a century and a half later. As a high school teacher, I took groups of students each year, for many years, to Gettysburg. We stood together on the backside of Little Round Top, where the 20th Maine and the 15th Alabama dueled; we talked about our regiment, 148th Pennsylvania, beside its monument in the Wheatfield; and, we walked out from the Virginia Monument to the ridge and heard the words of a soldier in the 14th Virginia, who recounted what happened as Union artillery opened fire on them that July 3 afternoon, “Arms and legs flew in the air like feathers before the wind.” As this special issue of Civil War News reminds us, the stories come to us today primarily on pages in magazines and books. As Joshua Chamberlain so eloquently reminded us, history abides in certain places where we can walk with those who hallowed the ground. History abides also, however, in the words of those who lived through the Civil War and of the historians who have since chronicled those four terrible years. To be sure, history will always be somewhat opaque, as the past remains behind a curtain of time. The past cannot be repeated, but the best historians can retrieve parts of it in words that can rekindle our abiding interest. The craft of history has had many fine practitioners. In the field of Civil War military history, three historians have had, in my view, a profound influence. Douglas Southall Freeman’s magisterial multivolume works on Robert E. Lee and his lieutenants have framed interpretations of the conflict in the East for generations. Bell Irvin Wiley reminded historians that the voices of Johnny Reb and Billy Yank must be heard if we are to understand America’s greatest saga. Finally, Bruce Catton made his prose sing, giving the Civil War a popularity that has been enduring. There has been during the past three decades or so, at least since the 125th anniversary, an outpouring of books on all aspects of the four-year struggle. The finest of the works have been characterized by research in manuscript collections and in a vast array of published accounts and by gifted writing. New facts have been uncovered, reputations of participants have undergone reexaminations, and new interpretations have ignited debate. Both historians and buffs have been enriched by these studies. Recent scholarship has continued the deluge of campaign studies, battle accounts, regimental histories, and biographies. Although the number of books published annually on the Civil War has decreased, it remains a popular subject to many readers. In the past few years historians have examined how the conflict has been and is remembered. Memory of the past and history of the past are inextricably linked but not the same. Today, how the Civil War is to be remembered has become a national controversy. It was perhaps inevitable that the country’s watershed event has engendered once again heated debate on how our current generation interprets it. The America of 1861 disappeared on April 9, 1865, but its legacy has endured. Too many fellow Americans died, too many mothers, fathers, and wives wept in the long loneliness of night for the issues to be settled forever. History chronicles the human condition and, by its nature, is complex, controversial, and never concluded. It should always be unblinking, even disturbing, in its portrayal of the past, but it can also be inspiring. Our fascination with it comes from its richness, from a past that might illuminate our present. Each generation interprets history from its perspective, redefining issues, offering new explanations. Our generation continues to do so. We must view the past – even one as divisive as the Civil War – not by imposing our values on it, but by understanding the values of those who lived through it. We have honored and remembered our forbearers in granite and marble, in brass and bronze. Civil War monuments stand in city circles and along broad avenues, in front of county court houses, beside streets in small towns, and among graves. Behind every one of these monuments lies the past in all of its intricacies, contradictions, and ironies. When we remove or destroy them, we deny, in part, our history to ourselves and to those who will follow us. Places for them need to remain while others may need to be erected. When we seek history, we should seek all of it. Among Jeffry Wert’s many books is Gettysburg: Day Three (Simon & Schuster, 2001).