College Life during the Civil War
Untouched by the Conflict: The Civil War Letters of Singleton Ashenfelter, Dickinson College. Edited by Jonathan W. White and Daniel Glenn. 35 photographs, notes, index, 180 pp., 2019. Kent State Univ. Press, www.KentStateUniversityPress.com. $29.95 cloth.
The Civil War letters of Union soldiers have been published by the score over the decades. However, those penned by Northern civilians, especially those written by college students, remain elusive. That may be a bit surprising, for while the popular image of young men rushing to enlist in the Union army after the attack on Fort Sumter dominates historical memory, those who opted to stay home were not a small minority. In fact, sixty percent of white, Northern males of military age chose not to enlist and fight in the Civil War.
It is within this latter category that readers learn of Singleton (“Sing”) Ashenfelter, a seventeen-year-old, middle-class white man, who, in 1862 was attending Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa. This revealing new work collects forty-nine letters that he wrote to his good friend, Samuel Pennypacker, beginning in April 1862 through July 1865, which was just after the war and his studies ended.
As the title of this book asserts, Ashenfelter truly was “untouched by the conflict,” not merely physically but emotionally as well. Indeed, his sense of detachment from the great rebellion is striking. He is, of course, aware of the war but it is always in the background. His letters contain little personal thought about the war or the broader Northern home front.
For example, during the Confederacy’s September 1862 Maryland invasion which culminated in the battle of Antietam, we learn that Ashenfelter responded to the invasion by penning a patriotic poem that, by so doing, he felt he had displayed “sufficient patriotism.” Reconsidering, he then joined the local “milishe” but gave the impression he did so as a lark, rather than out of any profound sense of duty.
Ashenfelter described himself as a pro-war abolitionist who disdained Northern Copperheads. He wrote how “the South should be made to understand that she cannot do just as she pleases,” yet he never mentions who should do the fighting or why.
Some of these letters are rather short while others are quite lengthy. Yet throughout, the young author’s education, wit, command of the English language, and introspective intellect are self-evident. Like many young people, however, he struggled to find his place in the world. Ashenfelter consistently ruminated about himself, his beliefs, and his internal philosophical debates to the point that it bordered on navel gazing.
In this reviewer’s opinion, young Ashenfelter is not a likable character. He described himself as a materialistic atheist who looked forward to the life of a hypocrite “and a fine prospect it is.” He held the concept of principle in “utter contempt” and viewed “whatever contributes to my own personal pleasure is right: – all else, – wrong.” This type of person might be described today as a narcissist. As with many youthful men, Ashenfelter also wrote how he thoroughly enjoyed tipping the bottle and of his consistent focus on young women.
As for his studies, he admitted he was not what his teachers would consider a good student, though his grades were never below average. Peer pressure was present in his life as well, for he wrote how he placed more pride upon his position amongst his fellow students than with any honors that might be granted him by the faculty.
Editors White and Glenn have done impressive work in annotating these letters and adding extras that enhance the author’s mid-19th-century college experience for the modern reader. Noted scholar J. Matthew Gallman offers an insightful preface. Photographs of the work’s key participants abound as well as a descriptive listing of those persons. Four appendices include a record of Ashenfelter’s four-year curriculum at Dickinson, a fouryear summary of the expenses required to attend Dickinson, an essay on Dickinson College during the Gettysburg campaign, and Ashenfelter’s 1864 speech titled “Capital Punishment.”
Despite Ashenfelter’s youthful challenges, he enjoyed a successful post-college career as both a newspaper editor and then as a U.S. attorney for the Territory of New Mexico. His Civil War-era letters offer a revealing and uncommon social history glimpse into the workings of a well-educated young man’s mind as he navigated the border between youth and manhood.
Paul Taylor is an award-winning author of seven books pertaining to the Civil War era. He has recently finished transcribing, editing, and annotating the Civil War letters of Union engineer officer Orlando M. Poe to his wife. The manuscript is currently under publisher review.
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A Same-Sex Relationship that Powerfully Shaped National Events in the Antebellum Era
Bosom Friends: The Intimate World of James Buchanan and William Rufus King. By Thomas J. Balcerski. Appendices, notes, bibliography, index, 352pp., 2019. Oxford University Press, global.oup.com. $34.95 cloth.
Reviewed by David Marshall
This wonderful new title concerns a dual biography of two important 19th-century political figures and friends, William Rufus King and James Buchanan. Some people called them the “Siamese twins.” These men had a very close friendship that many individuals questioned, including the issues of whether there was a sexual element. Or was it a very close companionable friendship? Thomas Balcerski asserts that these lifelong bachelors formed a partnership that endured many tests during their public lives.
William Rufus King was older by five years and was a Southerner, living in North Carolina and Alabama. He held several important elected positions, including the House of Representatives and the Senate. Like James Buchanan, he also held positions that took him to Europe. Buchanan was from Pennsylvania, a successful lawyer who was also elected to the House and the Senate like his close friend. Both were Democrats who tried to avoid sectional conflict and were voices for compromise.
These two important individuals lived together in Washington, D.C. Their friendship brought them messing together in boarding houses, where they often shared meals and drank together. Buchanan and King were not alone in sharing quarters in the nation’s quarters, as many elected officials did not live with their wives and families while in Washington. Additionally, their salaries and per diem were quite small compared to the twenty-first century.
While their relationship was not uncommon, both men voted consistently the same way. They supported the Democratic party’s agenda, including the independent subtreasury system, a compromise tariff, and expansion of federal land-holdings. King consistently balanced the interests of the slaveholding South with those of the Democratic Party. Buchanan joined King in doing everything possible to stop abolitionism, including a gag rule on anti-slavery petitions. Both men strongly believed that their political positions were the best way to preserve the Union.
However, their nearly ten-year boardinghouse relationship was unique in several ways. The two men were from different parts of the U.S.: King from the South and Buchanan from the North. King hailed from a wealthy slave owning family, and Buchanan from a poor shopkeeping family. King was originally a Democratic- Republican, and Buchanan was originally a Federalist. However, they shared a few essential personal factors. Both were descendants of Scotch-Irish émigrés and shared ethno-cultural backgrounds. They both attended college, which in the early nineteenth century was a luxury and rare. Neither man ever married, which is one reason for gossip by many.
Interestingly, both men were separated by thousands of miles during the period of 1844–1853. King served as a minister to France, while Buchanan moved from the U.S. Senate to Secretary of State under President James Polk. The author makes an interesting observation concerning the reasoning behind their waning friendship in this period, mainly due to a lack of communication and their separate romantic pursuits. Both no longer consistently agreed on numerous important issues, especially dealing with foreign policy. Buchanan encouraged President Polk to gain new territory from Mexico and Cuba, while King was steadfast against the procurement of these lands. Distance and time permanently changed their relationship.
During the last years of their friendship, this political partnership reached new heights when King was elected Vice President under Franklin Pierce,
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and Buchanan elected president in 1856. Both were Democrats, and prior to running independently of each other they worked as running mates in 1852. In the end, their party failed to accept a “bachelor ticket.” Balcerski insightfully examines the reasons that these Bosom Friends were only able to advance one person at a time.
While this volume does not offer a definitive answer as to the intimacy of the relationship of Buchanan and King during the antebellum period, some excellent arguments and well-researched evidence answer many questions that historians have entertained since the nineteenth century.
David Marshall has been a high school American history teacher in the Miami-Dade School district for the past thirty-three years. A life-long Civil War enthusiast, David is president of the Miami Civil War Round Table Book Club.
Reviewed by Bill Hendrick
Gettysburg’s ghost tours are hugely popular. Same for Sharpsburg, also known as Antietam, where 3,650 soldiers in blue and gray were killed in the bloodiest one-day battle in American history. Indeed, ghost tours are often thronged, from Atlanta’s Oakland Cemetery to the haunting battery at Charleston to the rugged fields of Shiloh.
Tours of the alleged haunts of spooks are ubiquitous across the country, because Americans seem to want to see them, and somehow feel the past in eerie graveyards like the one at Trinity Church in Manhattan, where Founding Father Alexander Hamilton was buried after Vice President Aaron Burr killed him in a duel in 1804.
I don’t believe in ghosts, but I once sat silent through the wee
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hours in a Boston cemetery, staring at crumbling, tilted tombstones adorned with skulls and crossbones….you know….just in case.
And that’s why Michelle L. Hamilton has written a book on Civil War ghost stories that’s fun to read, especially for people who don’t know a battalion from a brigade, because it is not a war book.
She’s studied microfilm of Civil War newspapers, both Northern and Southern, and discovered many published accounts of ghost stories, reflecting a keen interest in the unknown. Her little book is a delight because it not only prints out her findings in readable type, but also publishes headlines and fuzzy microfilm images she had to strain her eyes to read. One, on the front page of the Oct. 2, 1862, issue of the Savannah (Ga.) Morning News, is headlined “A GHOST” and relates at length how the citizens of Lynchburg, Va., had “been thrown into a fever of excitement by the appearance of a ghost in their midst.”
Civil War Ghosts is not a collection of ghost stories, but of actual articles about “sightings” published during the Civil War. The country was being torn apart at the time and these accounts documented chilling, terrifying tales of the paranormal that may have offered comfort to the millions in a time of massive death. People have always had difficulty dealing with the death of loved ones, which makes stories about ghosts—which would bolster a belief in an afterlife—very appealing, a balm for the soul. This explains why public interest in spiritualism surged during the
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period. Even Mary Todd Lincoln was a spiritualist who held séances in the White House.
The Richmond Enquirer reported that a New Jersey regiment, quartered in the Marshall House in Alexandria, Va.—whose proprietor James Jackson was killed by Union soldiers after he gunned down Elmer Ellsworth—claimed to have seen the hotelier’s ghost and “stampeded from the premises in great terror.”
The Holmes County Republican in Mellersburg, Ohio, reported that “Clevelanders are getting a good deal excited about a certain ghost which it is said has been seen by sundry individuals in various parts of the city.”
Still another paper, the Burlington (Iowa) Weekly Hawk- Eye, headlined a story “Ghost! Ghost!! Ghost!!!” “An apparition, robed in white, was seen by a number of persons last night about eleven o’clock,” it declared. And the Keokuk (Iowa) Constitution reported that twenty-five people saw the ghost and were left quite spooked.
It’s quite evident that people of that age took ghosts more seriously than most folks do today.
You don’t have to be a Civil War buff to get a kick out of Ms. Hamilton’s book. It’s not about fighting, but what people believed, or claimed they did.
Also, Civil War-era newspapers—in the days before large reporting staffs and wire services, when telegrams were very costly—had a hard time filling up enough space with “news” to justify the advertisements—the lifeblood of papers.
“My interest in the paranormal is a way to connect to the past through a unique angle,” the author says. “I have worked in museums since I was 15. My first job was at the Whaley House in San Diego, which is famous for its paranormal activity. I learned to connect with the visitors through highlighting and focusing on the history of the house by addressing their interest in the paranormal. They came for the ghosts but left learning about the history of the house. The reason I wrote the book was to answer my own questions about what people believed during the Civil War.”
Bill Hendrick of Atlanta has been a journalist for 45 years, including three decades at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and one with the Associated Press. He is currently writing a book with Steve Davis on how the Atlanta Daily Intelligencer, the city’s leading newspaper during the war, covered the conflict.
Under a Cloud
The following Northerners and Southerners had their careers derailed or ended by misfortune—a battlefield defeat, or personal misconduct.
1. This Union major general, brought from the west after having captured Island No. 10 and New Madrid, oversaw the defeat of his Army of Virginia at Second Manassas. Who?
2. This Confederate lieutenant general behaved so badly when his lines were overrun at Spotsylvania, May 12, 1864, that General Lee turned his Second Corps over to Jubal Early. Can you name him; and better yet, what was his middle name?
3. When this Union brigadier general, in charge of Kentucky during the fall of 1861, told U.S. Secretary of War Simon Cameron that he needed 200,000 men, Cameron exclaimed, “Great God! Where are they to come from?” Soon afterward, the Cincinnati Commercial headlined an article that the general was “insane.” Who?
4. This son of Kentucky Senator John J. Crittenden lost the battle of Mill Springs, Ky., in January 1862. Officers observed that he was “in a beastly state of intoxication” during the engagement. Later, after Maj. Gen. William J. Hardee also found him drunk and Gen. Braxton Bragg deemed him unfit to command, he resigned on Oct. 23, 1862. Which Kentuckian?
5. As a brigadier in 1861 he was relieved of command in northeast Missouri for drunkenness. At Memphis he “resumed his heavy drinking and came
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under official scrutiny for allegedly accepting bribes from cotton speculators,” according to Jeffrey Lash. Sherman relieved him from command on April 18, 1864, partly for having kept a garrison of troops at Fort Pillow, Tenn. (which Forrest captured on April 12). What Union general? a) Cadwallader C. Washburn b) Stephen A. Hurlbut c) William S. Smith d) Samuel D. Sturgis
6.-7. These two Confederate generals presided over arguably the worst routs of a Southern army during the war: one on Nov. 25, 1863; the other on Dec. 16, 1864. To whom are we referring?
8.-9. These two Union brigadiers, whose divisions charged into the crater after the explosion near Petersburg on the morning of July 30, 1864, were in a bombproof drinking rum while their troops were being mauled by Confederates recovering from the blast. Which drinking/skulking duo? a) Edward Ferrero and James H. Ledlie b) William F. Bartlett and Simon G. Griffin c) Orlando B. Wilcox and Elisha G. Marshall
10. This Confederate lieutenant general surrendered 29,500 men at Vicksburg, July 4, 1863. On April 19, 1864, he resigned his generalship and asked to be reassigned as a lieutenant colonel of artillery. Who?
Answers found on page 46.
Confederate Exceptionalism. slavery and racism. As one state Civil War Myth and Memory senator put it, his constituents in the Twenty-First Century. “did not want to be carried back By Nicole Maurantonio. anywhere.” With the song’s reIllustrations, endnotes, index, tirement, Confederate exception250 pp., 2019. University Press alists lost a round. Maurantonio of Kansas, www.kansaspress. relates attending an SCV meetku.edu. $32.50 cloth. ing in Virginia Beach, where a lady sang the old song with tears Reviewed by Stephen Davis streaming down her cheeks.
In this thought-provoking, sure-to-be-controversial new book, Nicole Maurantonio sets out to explore how some people today can view Confederate heroes and symbols with “reverence and affection” (as the SCV pledge recites) and at the same time distance those heroes and symbols from the American history of slavery, racial prejudice and repression (“heritage not hate,” as the saying goes).
The author’s term to describe this phenomenon is Confederate exceptionalism, the process by which individuals can “dissociate Confederate symbols from the racist histories to which they are intimately connected.”
The author, who teaches at the University of Richmond, approaches Confederate exceptionalism by focusing on a half-dozen stories. First is how “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny”—written in the 1870s by a black New Yorker who had never been to Virginia—became the state song in 1940. Fifty years later, black Virginia legislators complained that references to “the old darkey’s heart” and “I labored so hard for old Massa” were offensive references to slavery. So the state legislature retired the song in 1997. The author demonstrates that this was a case in which a cultural artifact—a song written in the 1870s by a prominent black composer of minstrel music (James Bland’s other hit was “Oh Dem Golden Slippers”)— very much became associated with the South’s history of
Titles By Stephen Davis
The Atlanta Campaign from Dalton through Kennesaw Mountain to the Chattahoochee River May 5–July 18, 1864
All the Fighting They Want
With the Yankee army five miles outside of Atlanta, Hood promised not to give up with city without a fight— which is all President Jefferson Davis asked. Davis’ companion volume, All the Fighting They Want, describes Hood’s efforts to defend Atlanta. Its fall in early September 1864 was a mortal blow to Confederate hopes for independence and a big boost to Lincoln’s hopes for presidential reelection.
Quite different was the author’s experience when she visited the VMI museum in Lexington for the express purpose of viewing Little Sorrel, Stonewall Jackson’s taxidermied horse on display there. Quickly Maurantonio perceived that the stuffed horse was a “sacred relic” to the VMI
populace, and to the museum’s
Davis’ narrative history of the Atlanta Campaign is divided into two paperbacks from Savas Beatie’s Emerging Civil War Series. Volume One, A Long and Bloody Task, carries Sherman’s forces from Dalton in northwest Georgia to the Chattahoochee River. There the Confederate government was forced to relieve its army commander, Joseph E.
Johnston, and replace him with Gen.