Day 52. April 21, 1862.
52
We have suffered till we feel savage….
April Monday 21 1862
Quite a wet morning this morning rained all night and nearly all day and was very cold and disagreeable and very mudy. Things in camp was very quiet. We are in Virginia at Winchester. I hope we may soon have good weather soon and the mud dry up—
Note: Ephraim uses a punctuation mark for the first of just two times throughout all his entries today. He’s underlined mud dry, so for him, because he’s so understated, I think it means he really, really, REALLY wants to walk on dry ground asap. He would maybe term it “likely ground.” The only other instance he uses a punctuation mark to end an entry is on May 28– another dash– where he seems to want to emphasize the 110th has marched so much–.
Note: See April 19 entry for more about the funeral train. Lincoln’s funeral train will leave D.C. April 21st, 1865 with 300 aboard, retracing the route he traveled in 1861 after he won the presidency. Called The Lincoln Special, it will travel 1,654 miles in 13 days with his likeness on the cowcatcher. Lincoln’s son Willie, who died in 1862 (2/20), was also aboard. The schedule lists train stops & time, & reads at the bottom, “This Train and Pilot will have the right to the track over all other trains, and no train will run within 30 minutes of their time.”
Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33d United States Colored Troops Late 1st S.C. Volunteers Susie King Taylor docsouth.unc.edu P. 25
Writing of April, 1863, at Seabrook, S.C.:
“Some mornings I would go along the picket line, and I could see the rebels on the opposite side of the river. Sometimes as they were changing pickets they would call over to our men and ask for something to eat, or for tobacco, and our men would tell them to come over. Sometimes one or two would desert to us, saying they “had no more negroes to fight for.’”
“WHAT WERE WE FIGHTING FOR”:
NORTH CAROLINA, APRIL-MAY 1865
The Civil War The Final Year: Told by Those Who Lived It Edited by Aaron Sheehan-Dean P. 712 Diary of Samuel T. Foster, of the 34th Texas Cavalry had joined the Army of Tennessee, and wrote this entry near Greensboro, North Carolina.
“April 21st 1865
Rumor today says we are to go back into the Union, but as that is not the kind of news we want to hear, we don’t believe a word of it. What have we been fighting all these years for? Oh no– no more Union for us.”
An excerpt from Elliot Daingerfield’s Autobiography (unpublished, written in 1892)
http://nccivilwarcenter.org/an-excerpt-from-elliot-daingerfields-autobiography/
“Although I was but a child at this time, not yet six years old, I realized the terrible strain and grief of the period. The Southern cause was already known to be the Lost Cause, and we only waited for the end. Its burning banners were already in the sky for at night we could see the fiery reflection of burning towns in the path of Sherman’s march—and it was known that his march was directed toward our little town. The hurry to hide valuables was almost a frenzy and in nearly every case was abortive for they were never recovered. Things sent away into the country to be hidden or cared for were not returned. The men were all away except the very old. My father and my oldest brother—Archie—were away. I had seen the boy drilling to take his place in the Southern forces, he was but fourteen or fifteen years old.
In the Arsenal itself only a small company of old men were in charge and they speedily gave up when the demand was made. And so we waited. There came a brilliant morning in Spring. Two young Confederate officers rode up our gate—they were in tattered clothes and starved. My mother speedily had them at the table and all that the house had was quickly put before them. They were gay, fearless, and brilliant of eye and speech. One I remember clearly. Scarcely more than a boy, twenty-two or twenty-three, great blue eyes and fine white teeth. They ate as ravenous men must eat and poured thanks upon my mother and grandmother. Then came a great noise and clamor, the servants rushed in screaming, “The Yankees are coming!” Down the center road came the troop of Gen. Hardee’s men. Our two visitors leapt to their horses and joined them. Hard on the heels of the Confederates came the advance guard of Sherman’s Army. Led by an officer on a gray horse they pursued, and the hot fire from the Southern troops was answered by the Northern advance guard. It was a wonderful sight to have at one’s front door. My sister and I were at the side light of the front door, which had been locked, and this whole exciting scene was not fifty yards from us. We knew afterwards that this running fight kept up to the bridge, which was burned by the Confederates—the bridge over the Cape Fear River.
Following the advance guard [of the Union army] came thousands of soldiers of all ranks—Infantry, Artillery, Cavalry—and presently a squad of soldiers stopped at our gate, two men were posted as sentinels, and a sergeant came to the door and said to my mother a certain Col. Todd would occupy the lower storey [sic] of our house as his headquarters. Presently, a wagon train drove into the back yard, and the whole place swarmed with men.
The family retired to the second floor and the poor servants were more frightened than any one [sic] else. All that day, through the night and next day marching troops passed until more than eighty thousand troops had passed into and through the town. Just after dark, that first night, one of the servants rushed in to [sic] my mother and told her a soldier was misusing one of the maids. She at once went to Col. Todd’s room and told him of the trouble. He had on his wrist a riding whip. He went out and finding the man, who came to attention at once and took the whipping without moving, but he did say, “I’ve been wounded three times but this is the worst”. [sic] After this the maids were let alone.
Next day we were told our house was to be burned! There was not a man, no wagon, or horse to be had, or help in moving. So my mother who was a tall, stately and very dignified woman, took her two little boys by the hand and walked to Gen. Sherman’s headquarters, the third or fourth house from us. She did not see Gen. Sherman, but a Gen. Spencer, I think it was, talked with her. He was gravely courteous and told her that he could give her no help that day, but if she could plan to move that night, after twelve, he would send three wagons and men to move her. She thanked him then, as she did in her thoughts always, and years after told me if I should ever see him to give him her warm thanks. So I am sure she was politely treated.
That night wagons and men came and everything was hustled into the wagons. Although I was so young the excitement kept me awake. I was very indignant at the careless treatment of my mother’s things. There was one bottle of wine in the house, kept carefully for sickness and my particular joy for the bottle was promised to me when it should be empty. To my horror it was found by a soldier already tipsy, and without inquiry or permission he struck the neck off my beautiful bottle and drank the contents. Another thing I saw which troubled me greatly. The only gun or firearm in the house was a long barrelled [sic] fowling piece, flint lock and mounted with silver. This was well known to us as having belonged to Gen. Washington and was brought from Virginia—greatly treasured by my father. Gen. Washington had given it to a friend, one Thomas Herrord whose name was engraved on a silver panel let into the barrel. It was never use, only reverenced. This soldier put the long barrel across his knee and tried to bend it. Failing in this he put the muzzle on the floor, and then his knee on the barrel, and alas! The thing was done. Years after my father had the bent and broken end sawed off, and I have the gun now. These were just little incidents I remember of that night.
I do not know how I got to the house whose residents took us in for the time.
Everything was in such confusion, but I rebelled when they wanted to put me in a trundle bed, which had been pulled out from under a big four poster. I supposed my brother and I would be pushed back under the big bed. When they assured me that this would not be done, I was soon asleep.
About five o’clock next morning I was awakened and held up in some one’s [sic] arms to show me through the window our own lovely home burning down, as indeed very many others were. Very many terrible things were happening all over the town for the army was delayed while a bridge was built across the Cape Fear. The Arsenal was destroyed, all factories, all newspapers offices and many private residences.
The negroes now abandoned their old homes to follow the Army. Many went to their death and were never more heard of, and some returned, ragged and broken. Our man Henry said good-bye hoping to get back to Virginia. We never heard of him again.”
Belligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped our Understanding of the Civil War Stephen Cushman P. 78
(Quoting Sherman’s Memoirs, P. 655-656; Sherman’s departure from Atlanta with his army of 60,000, as it began the March to the Sea, about 7:00 a.m., November 16, 1864)
“Behind us lay Atlanta, smouldering and in ruins, the black smoke rising high in air, and hanging like a pall over the ruined city. Away off in the distance, on the McDonough road, was the rear of Howard’s column, the gun-barrels glistening in the sun, the white-topped wagons stretching away to the south; and right before us the Fourteenth Corps, marching steadily and rapidly, with a cheery look and swinging pace, that made light of the thousand miles that lay between us and Richmond. Some band, by accident, struck up the anthem of “John Brown’s soul goes marching on”; the men caught up the strain, and never before or since have I heard the chorus of “Glory, glory, hallelujah!” done with more spirit, or in better harmony of time and place.’”
Note: (P. 103) “….unlike Grant, Sherman wrote his first edition before the Government Printing Office began publication of The War of the Rebellion: A Compendium of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (1880-1901). In the absence of published records, to which he might have referred to his readers, Sherman had to act as his own compiler.”
“WHAT WERE WE FIGHTING FOR”:
NORTH CAROLINA, APRIL-MAY 1865
The Civil War The Final Year: Told by Those Who Lived It Edited by Aaron Sheehan-Dean P. 714 Diary of Samuel T. Foster, of the 34th Texas Cavalry had joined the Army of Tennessee, and wrote this entry near Greensboro, North Carolina.
“Ordered to be ready to move at 11 O’Clock today, but whether we move or not depends upon the answer to the new propositions sent by the flag-of-truce yesterday.
Andy Johnson the now President of the U S (no kin to the General) sent back the peace papers sent by Sherman as agreed upon between him and Genl Johnson. Not signed by him nor accepted, as a settlement of the war questions at all. Saying “that the rebellion must be crushed by the force of Arms, and all the prominent men concerned put to death, and the rest banished or made slaves.”
At 12 Noon we move out and travel 10 or 12 miles in a westerly direction and camp. Some say we are to remain here tomorrow.”
America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation David Goldfield P. 398
“Refugeeing women and children making their way back home chronicled the sorrowful journey. Elizabeth Allston and her mother recalled, “We were never out of the sight of dead things, and the stench was was almost unbearable. Dead horses along the way and, here and there, a leg or an arm sticking out of a hastily made too-shallow grave….No living thing was left.” It made a difference that the bloody war had been fought on southern ground.”
The Civil War Diary Quilt Rosemary Youngs P. 181
Emma Florence LeConte Furman (Dec. 10, 1847-March 2, 1932)
April 21, 1865
“Hurrah! Old Abe Lincoln has been assassinated! It may be abstractly wrong to be so jubilant, but I just can’t help it. After all the heaviness and gloom of yesterday this blow to our enemies comes like a gleam of light. We have suffered till we feel savage. There seems no reason to exult, for this will make no change in our position– will only infuriate them against us. Never mind, our hated enemy has not the just reward of his life. The whole story may be a Yankee lie. The dispatch purports to be from Stanton to Sherman– It says Lincoln was murdered in his private box at the theatre on the night of the 14th (Good Friday – at the theatre) The assassin brandished a dagger and shouting, “Sic semper tyrannis- Virginia is avenged”, shot the president through the head. He fell senseless and expired next day a little after ten. The assassin made his escape in the crowd. No doubt it was regularly planned he and was surrounded by Southern sympathizers. “Sic semper tyrannis.” Could there have been a fitter death for such a man? At the same hour nearly Seward’s house was entered– he was badly wounded as also his son. Why could not the assassin have done his work more thoroughly? That vile Seward– he it is to whom we owe this war– it is a shame he should escape.”
Raising the White Flag: How Surrender Defined the American Civil War David Silkenat P. 266
“In the decades after the war, many a former Confederate vied to call himself the last rebel to surrender. Edmund Kirby Smith, Richard Taylor, and William Holland Thomas, among others, all claimed or were granted that mantle. Being “last” mattered because it implied a deeper commitment to the Confederate cause; even when everyone else had given up, the sole survivor had continued the struggle. The value former Confederates attached to the last surrender helps to explain the periodic appearance in Southern newspapers of stories describing Confederate soldiers who had gone into hiding before Appomattox and only emerged months, if not years, later, unaware that the war had ended. These fanciful accounts, unsupported by any collaborating evidence, appealed to defeated Confederates’ romantic inclinations. The most widely reported of these anecdotes concerns four rebel soldiers who emerged from Virginia’s Dismal Swamp in August 1866 and “did not know the war was over.” Southern newspapers labeled their commander, Col. Tweksbury, as “the last man to surrender of all the Confederate forces,” although some incredulous editors added their suspicions that the story was most likely fabricated.
P. 291-293
In 2012, the Museum of the Confederacy opened a branch in Appomattox adjacent to the National Historic site. The new museum drew on the Richmond-based Museum of the Confederacy’s ample collections related to the surrender, including Robert E. Lee’s sword, jacket, gauntlets, and pen. As with earlier efforts to commemorate the site, the opening ceremonies were marred by controversy and protests. Groups including the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the Virginia Flaggers (a group dedicated to the public display of the Confederate flag) protested the absence of the Confederate battle flag on the site. They noted that the “reunification promenade” in front of the museum included fourteen state flags but did not include a Confederate battle flag. Their protest included a small plane that circled over the new museum, trailing an enormous Confederate flag behind it. In response, the museum’s executive director said that he had no plans to add a Confederate flag to the site. “Appomattox is a metaphor for the reunification of the country,” he said. “To put the Confederate flag into that display would be a historical untruth.” While some protesters objected to the absence of a Confederate flag outside the museum, others objected to how the flag was displayed within the museum. Some visitors who attended a pre-grand opening tour of the museum were offended by a cardboard cutout of drag queen RuPaul wearing a sequined dress patterned after the Confederate battle flag. The accompanying display described the myriad cultural uses to which the Confederate flag had been put over the past 150 years, including a “Dukes of Hazzard” serving tray. Although the display was promptly taken down after only six hours, some neo-Confederate visitors felt that its inclusion had compromised the site forever.
For their 2015 events, both Appomattox Courthouse and Bennett Place hosted surrender reenactments, in stark contrast to the centennial, when organizers bristled at the idea of publicly performing a manifestation of Confederate defeat. More than 6,000 people descended on Appomattox Courthouse to witness the reenactment.
While most of the speakers repeated familiar platitudes about how the site should be remembered, historian and University of Richmond president Edward Ayers used the occasion to challenge the myth of Appomattox. The problem with the dominant narrative, Ayers argued, was that “it allowed everyone to be a hero.” The willingness of Grant, both at Appomattox and in his memoirs, to extend a generous hand to Lee and his army, while decrying the cause for which they fought, helped in the “severing of the cause and of the fight that established the bargain that the white North and the white South would hold to for the next 150 years.” Ayers concluded his address by urging the audience to recognize Appomattox as both an ending and a beginning. Although it marked the symbolic end to the Civil War, it was also the beginning of a long process of Reconstruction and the continued struggle for racial justice. “People see in the events at Appomattox what they want to see: testimony to American’s shared greatness or testimony to promises unfulfilled,” Ayers observed. “Both those things are real.’”
The Historian’s Craft Marc Bloch (1953) P. 71
“Despite what the beginners sometimes seem to imagine, documents do not suddenly materialize, in one place or another, as if by some mysterious decree of the gods. Their presence or absence in the depths of this archive or that library are due to human causes which by no means elude analysis. The problems posed by their transmission, far from having importance only for the technical experts, are most intimately connected with the life of the past, for what is here at stake is nothing less than the passing down of memory from one generation to another. In historical works of a serious nature, the author generally lists the files of archives he has examined and the printed collections he has used. That is all very well, but it is not enough. Every historical book worthy of the name ought to include a chapter, or if one prefers, a series of paragraphs inserted at turning points in the development, which might also be entitled: “How can I know what I am about to say?” I am persuaded that even the lay reader would experience an actual intellectual pleasure in examining these “confessions.” The sight of an investigation, with its successes and reverses, is seldom boring. It is the ready-made article which is cold and dull.’”
Note: It was not until 1880 or 1881 (depending on source) that the Government Printing Office began printing the very first volumes of the Official Records’ four part series consisting of 70 volumes. The final volume in the series was printed in 1901. There are 127 vols., plus a general index & accompanying atlas.
So from 1865 to 1880-81 it was anyone’s guess what had happened during the war, and a gap of 35 years before Americans got the full picture of the war, provided they were interested. After that, decades would pass before the records were somewhat known to historians. Most Americans do not know of their existence. You can see how battle accounts were a point of contention. From 1865 to 1880 veterans had no official battle account. No wonder there was so much strife about assessments, or what actually happened in battles.
Note: At your library you can’t get the physical copy of the O.R. anymore. That’s been sold off for 50 cents at the library bake sale. City after town it falls. Someone’s basement then the landfill. You can try to print it off Hathitrust but their servers don’t transmit, so the O.R. is not accessible on Hathitrust. I tried printing from the Family History Library (LDS-Mormon; founded the year Ephraim was born, one of numerous 1800s situations where an American White male claimed ‘God spoke to me & only me so I started a tax-free church nonprofit’ corporation,’ with 100 billion in a tax-exempt investment fund, tithe up now, folks, 10% every Sunday, “In order to enter the temple, you must be a full-tithe payer”), one of the top servers in the U.S. Staff there said Hathitrust is a constant annoyance, with about 3 pages able to print every 15 minutes. And yet – and yet, it is not the end of everything. It is the beginning of everything. I don’t know where things go when they don’t come out of the printer, the words stop being here but instead go back into the dark of a box in the basement of a government archive you can never pay enough to see because it’s not for citizen’s eyes…
As Ohio State University puts it: “No serious study of the American Civil War is complete without consulting the Official Records. Affectionately known as the “OR”, the 128 volumes of the Official Records provide the most comprehensive, authoritative, and voluminous reference on Civil War operations. The reports contained in the Official Records are those of the principal leaders who fought the battles and then wrote their assessments days, weeks, and sometimes months later. The Official Records are thus the eyewitness accounts of the veterans themselves. As such they are “often flawed sources– poorly written in some cases, lacking perspective in others, frequently contradictory and occasionally self-serving.” Nevertheless, they were compiled before the publication of other literature on the subject that, in several cases, caused some veterans to alter their memory and perception of events later in life.
A word of caution must be made here about the value and limitations of the Official Records. As primary material, the Official Records are, without question, the most complete and impartial documentation on the American Civil War. They provide a foundation for serious research into virtually any aspect of the war. On the other hand, no study of the American Civil War should rely exclusively on the Official Records. The accounts contained in the OR were not edited for accuracy, and due to space considerations, only excerpts of reports were often included. Researchers should thus verify the information found in these reports with other source material to gain as complete a picture of events as possible.” ehistory.osu.edu/books/official-records
Note: Ursula LeGuin: “History is one way of telling stories, just like myth, fiction, or oral storytelling. But over the last hundred years, history has preempted the other forms of storytelling because of its claim to absolute, objective truth. Trying to be scientists, historians stood outside of history and told the story of how it was. All that has changed radically over the last twenty years. Historians now laugh at the pretense of objective truth. They agree that every age has its own history, and if there is any objective truth, we can’t reach it with words. History is not a science, it’s an art.”
Note: Michel-Rolph Trouillot:
“But the past does not exist independently from the present. Indeed, the past is only past because there is a present, just as I can point to something over there only because I am here. But nothing is inherently over there or here. In that sense, the past has no content. The past– or more accurately, pastness– is a position. Thus, in no way can we identify the past as past.”
Edgar Lee Masters (1868-1950)
Silence (last stanza)
“And there is the silence of the dead.
If we who are in life cannot speak
Of profound experiences,
Why do you marvel that the dead
Do not tell you of death?
Their silence shall be interpreted
As we approach them.”
.
.
things in camp was very quiet….
They say the Real War will never get in the books. That the one there is is too pat, hermetic. That the Official Record means more than what it says, is a lineage of words with something in the blood missing over the centuries, veiled by the alphabet, words torn out of the bloodlet like scattered skeletal remains, artificial words, play words, holiday words. Tales & verses, beliefs & afterthoughts, customs & superstitions, visions & debris so let’s call the whole thing off. The war like a mystery object on its way out of our solar system & not coming back. Inscrutable, as if the war must show up in words when it’s something seen only by torchlight, just out of reach, like a hand burnt to where you can’t get the fingerprints off.
The war can’t be retraced step by step as if we’re just one witness away from it all, whatever is missing between here & there. As if it’s discoverable material at a trial, a list of items placed into evidence collected on a CSI episode. The Real War lost as if they didn’t secure the crime scene properly, they didn’t collect the evidence, they didn’t get the DNA, they didn’t test the DNA existant on articles they could have, they let the DNA degrade, they completely lost the DNA, they didn’t reinterview suspects, they misplaced the files, they couldn’t find the evidence, the building burned down, a tornado came, then a flood, decades pass, centuries go by, it goes cold, it gets gone.
It dead-ended. You didn’t see what you thought you saw. You didn’t see it at all.
And no images of actual combat exist. No images.*
The Real War as if it’s trapped in an air-tight chain of custody so finds itself in certain hands only, over-classified. Working backward from what’s still visible back to its point of origin gets harder and harder; words start as one thing & end up as another, masquerading down the centuries in vanished letters, long fictions that take the language out, how the world shrinks to the space between margins of a page. It’s a war that has been worked on so long it’s become something else. The farther you end up from a crime scene the less likely you are to get a good arrest. And who could describe something at a house of murder if they weren’t there?
Yet it’s still as if only we could track down long-gone witnesses we could get a grip on the thing. But if somebody walks in blood the footprints get lighter. The footprints lose their intensity don’t they. They get gone. After exhausting the limits of all there is to know it becomes a palm print in blood the size of a loose sheet of paper in a history book. Words that go up & across your skin, up the back of your neck, then vanish like they died intestate. As if sometime between 1865 and 1866 they dead-ended at a route near the Mason-Dixon. A horse got tied wrong, and it run off in the hills so all we got was the skeleton, white, all bleached out with bits of flesh, mane, what carrion couldn’t slake off so left a century and a half back. So dry the minute you pick up the bones they go formless, back into Earth. Just bones, dusted glacous. Because we can’t use words for that which no words can rescue, & because the abstract can’t save what’s not abstract. The bodies are in the ground & we want the body in the end, not the words. Bones just don’t look like a body.
And there will always be small pieces of bone left no matter how much you burn them or which definition of the war you go with.
But we do have what’s available: a paper trail of 160 years; books: 100K & counting. It’s not as if soldiers & civilians were on a wordless journey the whole time & to the throat, someone’s throat, a gun held against a sentence. A gun held against a sentence. Word against a word. Wouldn’t it be there somehow, somewhere? If the Real War never got in the books, it was a trick of light and shadow.
It’s not enough to say the Real War will never get in the books because the Real War will never show up in words, period. Pages like these are blank the world over. The real drops through the very ink, pixels, and dead tree paper then slips off into a dark wood at The Wilderness. The Real War is the changing meanings put on words that shapeshift into new versions of themselves. A page’s reflection from another angle becomes a page on fire. Because when fire is burned away, a line or a phrase is where you pick it up beneath the surface. You catch it in split second reading Whitman, say, or Catton. Because of something that went beyond the words right then. Like you breathed in their air a second. You got it that time momentarily in time then it vapors off then you’re stuck back in 2022 holding a piece of paper staring off in the distance while the words on the page run back into the void. But you had it for that second & nothing can change that, not the centuries that passed, that will pass both forward in time & in reverse. You can touch a moment of greatness in time if you can just stand by close enough.
As Whitman wrote, “The words of my book nothing, the drift of it every thing.”
But what do the words hide? Muted and diluted, the ones already present, if the war is not in them? What we have left are letters, lone numbers, things in the ground before we got here, the terrain Google Earth satellite picks up a century & a half later with the trenches still not filled in. Newport News. Bloody Angle. Cold Harbor. The whole dream burned dead black there on the dirt, stranded in the humus, sinking down into what remains of the documents. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies in 127 volumes (plus index & atlas. the Navy has their own- 40 vol.) is found at ehistory.osu.edu. If there ever was a Real War, it’s there in the letters of the words soldiers strung in an order, arranged, dragged & lined up beside each other to make themselves make sense.
The historical record piles up after the war & new pieces still wash in, this diary being one. South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum has the Rebel flag that was raised over the dome of the State House until 2015. The National Museum of American History has Sheridan’s stuffed horse, 16 hands high, named Winchester. And the white towel Confederate Colonel R.M. Sims waved at the 118th PA. so he wouldn’t get shot asking directions to Sheridan’s headquarters, the Smithsonian has that. In 1936, the Smithsonian also got the chairs– “trophies of victory” –that Grant and Lee sat in. And in 1888, the 2 foot minie ball-riddled oak tree stump from Spotsylvania arrived. Commodifying it immediately, townspeople sold splinters off, claiming it was wood from the tree. These artifacts are still here. Countless, tangible reminders. You may have one passed down.
In the Shenandoah Valley thousands of men walked on the flat Earth two feet down, they walked with heart beating and then got wiped out. Their names lay flat on a government page now, row after row. They’re laid out as facts of literal presence clear & numbered on a ledger, black-nailed fingers sticking out of the ground grabbing at the sky still, grabbing at a handful of nothing, & nothing after that but a too far away sky, hands that became short black vertical dashes on a static register with calm numerals in their casings, the month, day, year stating what bone got where. You can’t be certain even at this late date though, waiting on another white spreadsheet with numbers in categories down it, or next century with the newly revised numbers of deaths by fates. And if there exists so much revision, did we entirely miss the war?
The Official Record opens a portal to the past but there’s less gravity at the bottom: the numbers keep migrating higher like a line dance out of a spaghetti acid country & western: 600k, 620k, 650, 700, 750, 800, 850, 900, 950, a million & counting. A million, a million and a half. Illiminitable numbers, casualty counts that still go up until it takes shape as an empty shell sized like a human ribcage, a white chalk outline of the dead as the dark slides out from under the sun in all that smoke drifting over the two armies. There is no use in counting. It will never be exact. Only the sky saw it, the ground the only witnesses, that some things lie behind words, all words, and all things after words by the side of the road. Know your lines, hit your marks but there is only so much language can do, all our small hands. Evidentally both sides padded their count in ways that just did not add up, they cooked the numbers so they were not sufficiently verifiable. The North has its set, the South theirs. Twin flames. All the flat statements & hand to God. And we’re still falling out of the first frame, or the second. “Thanks for playing,” like a slot machine loss disguised as a win, so the universal score is still the same, a blood price the only settlement because no other kind brings a thing like war to an end.
It’s hard to be certain what can be said even at this late date, waiting on another white spreadsheet with numbers in categories down it, another decade, next century, newly revised numbers a millenium from now weaving decimels between numbers on lines going down these logs of mortality as if you can decimalize a human life, forget the tinny blood stench permeating the air from the corpse you just buried with leaves stuffed up your nose. They were just thrown in upside down, back to front, upside down, pages missing, pages in family Bibles ripped out, a vertical ink stick figure sitting upright holding the injured hand in the uninjured one, baby corpses, their tiny lips curled in a final why? what did I do?
Edward Ayers raised the 20th century’s hand, called it at 800k recently, a number that keeps to the edge of the road, paces the border of that which appears & that which can’t now because the principal actors are so long in the ground. It’s a gradual retracing up, drifting & carrying us up with it, our blank page filling in this cheap graveyard.
Post-war, the question broke down to a procedural one: battle forensics, movements of battalions, the tactical or strategic elements. But what counts is also outside the normally counted, that which went past words that the war reports didn’t cut clean through, so missed everything for what was around them. Those moments are beyond the world’s eye but then, they always were. Where else would they be? Unless you were there? If there is an answer, it goes in darkness because sometimes there is nothing to say & nowhere to say it, getting out of town in an unmarked gray car, Jeff Daniels playing Chamberlain riding across the screen in Gettysburg. Carl Sagan & Ken Burns riding across the screen in The Sundowners circa 1950, that some things lie behind words, all words, and all things after words into the dark by the side of the road. Yet that flag a live totemic animal, still limply held by a catechism of insurgents, rebels without a cause in years of a burning vestigial reaction with no place else to go, & the world has lost nothing.
But fires progress differently depending on how they’re set. Historical revisionism when the plot comes later from the New York correspondent on a field sketching the remains after placing a rifle near the dead man’s hand where the words ran out, as if he’d wake up any moment & commence firing. Please Stand By: our original live shot is gone, we lost the feed. Many don’t know Jackson got himself 12,415 prisoners at one point; out of the battle for Maryland Heights so many captured that the War Department cut in half the numbers for the newspaper. For what could not be found there.
What do the words hide? The ones already present, if the war is not in them? As if the reasons have been pushed out beyond calculation. Is it the limitations of language itself? That somehow the world necessarily has to show up in words when it doesn’t. It never has. The world in Husserl, Sartre, in Hericlitus, is being temporary, moment to moment, then no more. The words we do have hide both the enormity of scale & the microscopic. By its nature, the record hides what it was like to be them living with what they were, when they were, with what they knew. We can’t carry the blood of that. We carry retrospection, a full stomach, fireworks on the 4th not aiming to kill us. And this lack of being able to amber a bug, pin an insect on the white paper isn’t like a melting glacier that’s coming for our shores. The high seas. Get used to this. While the stretch limousines burst into flames as rioters take the walls. Tumbledown walls. That snap apart like legos. The walls, at the point the water washes in. The seas will uproot. We can only share a Constitution now. But that was the point. That is enough. They could have told us that– did tell us that– & nothing more, except to keep up their graves. Shine up the GAR stars. Always, always. But controversy about the exact time, location, nature of, number of, aim of, result of, and questions about the principal actors therein will continue until the waters rise, the sun burns it all off, & there is no one left to debate.
Yet here it is like a spotlight that comes up from the ground to show who the prizefighters were: the Library of Congress Civil War Desk Reference with page after page of month after month of year after year a pithy quote at each page bottom to show where the war was at that time, someone speaking from the dead, saying look, look how it was, this was us, see?
If we listen to what they had to say we have the war.
Their words have been there from the start. It’s us who still wait to see them, not the other way around.
The dead will be there when we get there.
And their stories won’t be any different.
*Just one exists of a dead general: Ashby laid out on his back in a parlor, the rose resting on his chest-wound, that picture being the sole one of a Confederate General killed in action. Imagine it: being one of those Yankee prisoners on the road standing, silent, while taking off caps as Ashby’s company passed by, Ashby in the hearse dead, the procession silent, ambling by, the midday sun, no sound from anyone….
“People like us who believe in physics know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” Albert Einstein
.
FAIR USE NOTICE. Terms of Use. This non-profit, non-commercial, for educational purposes only website contains copyrighted material for the purpose of teaching, learning, research, study, scholarship, criticism, comment, review, and news reporting, which constitutes the Fair Use of any such copyrighted material as provided for under Section §107 of the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976.