The chocolate chips have become a tradition. As the bus rolled homeward, south Interstate 75 from the northwest Georgia battleground, we ate homemade cookies as Professor Brian Wills distributed some logo coffee mugs and picked the winning tickets for several other giveaways. Soon we pulled into the parking lot at Kennesaw State University, wrapping up the field trip Wills had labeled “Bragg Tries Again.”
This outing was sponsored by KSU’s Center for the Study of the Civil War Era, a facility formed in 2005 and headed by Wills since 2010. Under the tutelage of Jim Ogden, the chief historian at the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park, learned a great deal about the movements of two armies just south of the Tennessee line in September 1863. The maneuverings were efforts by Confederate General Bragg to bring superior force to bear on isolated elements of General Rosecrans’s Federal army. These efforts failed, of course, so history has recorded the sanguinary Battle of Chickamauga, a Confederate victory to be sure, but not the battle Bragg wanted to fight.
GEORGIA’S CONFEDERATE MONUMENTS In Honor of a Fallen Nation Gould B. Hagler, Jr.
This unique work contains a complete photographic record of Georgia’s memorials to the Confederacy, a full transcription of the words engraved upon them, and carefully-researched information about the monuments and the organizations which built them. These works of art and their eloquent nation’s profound grief, praise the soldiers’ bravery and patriotism, and pay homage to the cause for which they fought.
This November 2018 field trip was typical of the Civil War Center’s programs, providing indepth analysis of the marching and countermarching; of orders understood and misunderstood, followed and not followed; and of the terrain on which the armies fought and over which their supplies were laboriously hauled. The script also included sidebars of great human interest, such as the story of Deborah Thedford, a local woman who tended the wounded and found among the suffering soldiers her own two sons.
And on the trip home we enjoyed the cookies baked by Deborah Lindsay, a member of the Center’s Advisory Board.
The Center’s physical plant is two rooms in KSU’s Social Sciences Building; the staff consists of Prof. Wills and his assistant Sarah Rudick. With these modest resources the Center offers a wide variety of programs which, according to its mission statement, “enable scholars, students, and enthusiasts to study the causes, nature and outcomes of the conflict, as well as the role that Georgia and the South played in this nation’s greatest calamity.”
Battlefield tours and other field trips are a particular favorite for what we nowadays call “the Civil
War community.” Past events have included visits to Shiloh, Vicksburg, and a Virginia trip called “Siege to Surrender,” a trek from Petersburg to Appomattox. Many attractions are closer to home; they’re in Georgia: visits have been to Andersonville, Dalton (where the Atlanta Campaign began), Gainesville (Longstreet’s post-war home), and the Civil War Naval Museum in Columbus.
Upcoming events include a May trip back to northwest Georgia to study the first day of the Battle of Chickamauga and the Fourth Annual Vince Dooley Leadership Seminar, an all-day program scheduled for June.
Another offering is the symposium held yearly since 2005. The 16th Annual Symposium, on March 23, focused on railroads in the Civil War. Speakers included Gordon Jones, the Senior Military Historian at the Atlanta History Center, historian and author Thomas Parson, and Wills himself. In 2020 the symposium’s theme will be on the navies. Past symposia have centered on a wide variety of topics: the home front; General Longstreet; medicine; diplomacy; and the leadership of Lincoln and Davis. One symposium, “After the Scourge of War,” explored the ways various societies dealt with ruinous defeat. There is no shortage of ideas, and never will be.
From time to time the Center has conducted staff rides at Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park. Analysis of a Civil War battle can teach many important lessons that are relevant to leadership teams in all organizations. Wills says that the staff rides, combined with classroom instruction and discussions, “create a unique leadership experience to talk about strategies and things that you can learn from this time period and what these folks did, what you can learn about your own battleground, your own warfare, when you are promoting your business and products.” The staff rides program was the brainchild of Dean Robin Dorff. “Commanders’ intent was always one of his favorite things,” Wills says. “And the Civil War provides many examples of what can happen in positive ways— and otherwise.”
While Wills would like to see more student involvement, he is realistic about the priorities of youth. He asks “When you were 18, what did you do?” (Had I thought the question was aimed me specifically, I would have refused to answer, but he was posing the question in general to our adult world.) “We are planting seeds,” Wills says. One method of cultivation is the Center’s art and essay contest. When a student “draws a picture about something, or writes an essay on a particular topic,” the germination can begin. Wills also talked about the Center’s small but diverse artifact collection. “When they’ve come to see this saber, this bugle, it resonates. There is no way you can put a value on that and no way to know how it will play out.” Or when. “It may not be until you are in your 50s.” But the seed is planted. The Collector’s Showcase, scheduled for July, offers a similar opportunity for students and others to see the artifacts up close, hold them, and talk with the collectors.
Wills gives an example of an artifact in the collection—a receipt for a tax paid in kind, in this case 123 pounds of bacon—that catches students’ imagination and demonstrates how the past was another world, and a very interesting world. “It’s a great teaching tool,” he says. “How do you get the resources you need to wage war if you are the Confederate government? I guarantee they didn’t learn that in high school, or see it on the History Channel.”
The Center’s website (https://chss.kennesaw.edu/cwc/index. php) has several resources of interest to the community outside the University. There are lesson plans for teachers; a Civil War timeline; a bibliography; a list of Civil War terms; and a pronunciation guide.
The last item is useful and also fun. You think you know how to pronounce “Taliaferro,” “Huger,” “Sabine,” “Mackall” and “Meagher”? Don’t be so sure.
Most readers of CWN don’t need an explanation of what makes the Civil War so fascinating, but for the poor souls who do, Wills says this: interested in the Civil War, I say ‘What are you interested in?’ And they will name something. And I say ‘The Civil War has that. It has politics; it has society; it has the home front; it has church, music, literature. There is not anything that you could be interested in that is not there in the Civil War.”
Gould Hagler is a retired lobbyist living in Dunwoody, Ga. He is a past president of the Atlanta Civil War Round Table of Atlanta and the author of Georgia’s Confederate Monuments: In Honor of a Fallen Nation, University Press in 2014. Hagler speaks frequently on this topic and others related to different aspects of the Civil War and has been a regular contributor to CWN
“When people say they are not
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