Day 127. July 5, 1862. EPHRAIM’S LAST ENTRY.
127
reference to overwhelming numbers was a kind of code….
Saturday 5
Very warm last night and this morning and to day we came down in the accommodation train to Birmingham.* Stoped at Crist. There to evenning. Spent a pleasant afternoon but a very warm one. Rev Crist brot us over in the spring waggon
Anyway, to view an animated version of Ephraim looking about & smiling, try: https://myhr.tg/1WB0K3h8 WILD:
*Ephraim’s Huntingdon Station is 95 miles northwest of Harrisburg. The Lincoln Special stopped on the Northern Central Railway at Harrisburg at 8:00pm April 21, 1865. It’s probable that Ephraim & his family stood in black with thousands of others in silence, in the rain, an hour after the sun set there. Governor Curtain was aboard the train. Lincoln’s body was taken to the Capitol, where he lay overnight in the house chamber.
Note: There will be a July 6 Postscript.
Today, at last, Ephraim is home free, lifted & passed along over a road in a spring wagon piloted by his Lutheran reverend. Nearly 4 decades is the time he gave back to himself to live on his farm. Thank you for reading my grandfather’s diary as we’ve gone day-to-day, month-to-month. I think 1 person did, which helped me keep going, so thank you, stranger out there. I hope you found something here worthwhile about America, this campaign, this war. What was fought about, what was gained, what was lost somewhere along the centuries. I still have to do the introduction (incl. the process of writing & org. this), & will return to this site & manuscript & revise, plus I’m still daily adding pictures throughout. It’s a bittersweet feeling to finally arrive at July five. This project was conceived, then completed, & kept online throughout against all odds. I hope to God I got more history right than wrong, something that runs my blood cold in the middle of the night. This is the time to also thank everyone who put words on paper (& photographs, art, sketches) I quoted or otherwise reproduced or repurposed here, many dead, many soldiers, many very alive for now contemporary writers. This was possible due to your time & energy & 💓 in writing what you did. This been the project of a lifetime & I hope to never subject myself to anything remotely resembling this again, for the next several lifetimes. If you like, follow me on twitter at @GrateUp, not that I post much, or even have followers. Take care. Yours in the Union, Cheyenne 7/5/22
Btw, got the diary bug now? Try here: https://www.civilwardigital.com/html/civil_war_diaries.html
Lincoln Day by Day: A Chronology 1809-1865 Volume III: 1861-1865 C. Percy Powell P. 126
“July 5, 1862: Lincoln retires early, too exhausted to keep any appointments. Mrs. Lincoln in carriage on way to Soldiers’ Home tells Comdr. Dahlgren that President frequently passes sleepless nights.”
The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan, Editors (2000) P. 28 “The Anatomy of the Myth.” Alan T. Nolan
“Confederate sympathizers today contend that the secessionists acted in good faith; this presumably means that they thought that they were doing thr right thing. It would seem that this is neither here nor there in a historical sense. Leaders of all kinds of destructive causes—causes with wholly negative values—have thought they were right. It would be inflammatory to identify examples of this in modern times, but surely they occur to us. The historical question is whether, in good faith or bad, the movement that was led was positive or negative, humane or inhumane?”
Ringo, in The Unvanquished William Faulkner (1938) P. 229 “This war aint over. Hit just started good.”
The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism Edward E. Baptist P. 409-410
“Southern whites built monuments to the defeated generals of their war for slavery, memorialized the old days of the plantation and wrote histories that insisted that the purpose of the war had been to defend their political rights against an oppressive state. They were so successful at the last goal that they eventually convinced a majority of white Americans, including most historians, that slavery had been benign and that “states rights” had been the cause of the Civil War. Yet the kingdom that the South’s white lords had regained was a starved one. They themselves were much poorer than they had once been. Their violence was more self-destructive, and less profitable.
Even the new story about the old past was a kind of fool’s gold. The valoriztion of causes lost, the delusional praising of fathers’ treason— these things did not make one better adapted to the modern world. The white entrepreneurs vigorously promoted a “New South.” But the region’s economic decisionmakers struggled to adapt to two postslavery realities. First, neither African Americans nor anyone else would do hand labor at the breakneck, soul-scarring pace of the whipping-machine. Many white yeoman farmers, impoverished by war and unable to pay debts or taxes, lost their land and became tenants and sharecroppers themselves. The total number of bales produced in the United States didn’t didn’t surpass 1859’s peak until 1875, despite a significant increase in the number of people making cotton in the South after Emancipation. Cotton productivity dropped significantly. Many enslaved cotton pickers in the late 1850s had peaked at well over 200 pounds per day. In the 1930s, after a half-century of massive scientific experimentation, all to make the cotton boll more pickable, the great-grandchildren of the enslaved often picked only 100 to 120 pounds per day.
Second, both because productivity was now declining instead of rising, and because of the political-economic isolation that the South’s white rulers inflicted upon their region in order to protect white power, the South sank into subordinate, colonial status within the national economy. Although many southerners wanted to develop a more diverse modern economy that went beyond cotton, for nearly a century after emancipation they failed to do so. Despite constant attempts to industrialize, the South could only offer natural resources and poverty-stricken laborers. It did not have enough local capital, whether of the financial or the well-educated human kind, and it could not develop it. Although a textile industry sprang up in the piedmont of the Carolinas and Virginia, and an iron and coal industry in Alabama, they offered mostly low-wage jobs. Non-textile industries suffered in the competition with more heavily capitalized northern industries, which literally rigged the rules—such as the price structures that corporations used to ensure that Pittsburgh’s steel would cost less than Birmingham’s. Extractive industries, including coal mining and timber, devastated the landscape and depended on workforces oppressed with shocking violence. The continued small size and poverty of the nonagricultural working class also limited urban and middle-class development. Thus, in the 1930s, a lifetime after the Civil War, the majority of both black and white southerners were poor and worked on farms—often farms that they did not own.”
Message to Congress on the Concentration of Economic Power
Franklin D. Roosevelt
April 29, 1938
Unhappy events abroad have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people.
The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.
The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe, if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living.
And note too: As of late 2021, Elon Musk hoards 230 billion (Bill Gates & Warren Buffet combined), or 50x the SEC’s budget.
The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory Adam H. Domby P. 73
“It makes sense that aspects of the Lost Cause continue to influence our understanding of the past. The stories Carr and others told in memoirs, speeches, and regimental histories were used by previous generations of historians to write their master narratives of the war. The works of Shelby Foote, Douglass [sic] Southall Freeman, and others who took in the Lost Cause as children were often the first books about the Civil War that future scholars read. Because the Lost Cause framework influenced the narrative with which many historians begin, it is hardly surprising that courageous Confederates still appear. Even those historians of the war who do not directly use or cite questionable sources and accounts and only use wartime documents to re-create the past cannot help but be influenced by the Lost Cause; suspect sources helped create much of the foundational narrative off of which modern historians are working.”
Hearts Touched by Fire: The Best of Battles and Leaders of the Civil War Edited by Harold Holzer P. 59-60
THE CONFEDERATE GOVERNMENT AT MONTGOMERY
R. Barnwell Rhett Editor of the Charleston Mercury, 1860-62.
“Secret sessions were commenced at Montgomery, and at Richmond almost all important business was transacted away from the knowledge and thus beyond the criticism of the people. Latterly, accounts of the battles fought have been written from every standpoint; but of the course and policy of the Confederate Government, which held in its hands all the resources of the Southern people, and directed their affairs, diplomatic, financial, naval, and military, little has been said. During the war scarcely anything was known except results, and when the war terminated, the people of the South, though greatly dissatisfied, were generally as ignorant of the management of Confederate affairs as the people of the North. The arrest and long imprisonment of the President of the Confederacy made of him a representative martyr, and silenced the voice of criticism at the South. And up to this time little has been done to point out the causes of the events which occurred, or to develop the truth of history in this direction. It very well suits men at the South who opposed secession to compliment their own sagacity by assuming that the end was inevitable. Nor do men identified with the Confederacy by office, or feeling obligation for its appreciation of their personal merits, find it hard to persuade themselves that all was done that could be done in “the lost cause.” And, in general, it may be an agreeable sop to Southern pride to take for granted that superior numbers alone effected the result. Yet, in the great wars of the world, nothing is so little proved as that the more numerous always and necessarily prevail. On the contrary, the facts of history show that brains have ever been more potent than brawn. The career of the Confederate States exhibit no exception to this rule. Eliminate the good sense and unselfish earnestness of Mr. Lincoln and the great ability and practical energy of Seward and Adams, and of Stanton and Chase from the control of the affairs of the United States; conceive a management of third-rate and incompetent men in their places—will any one doubt that matters would have ended differently? To many it may be unpalatable to hear that at the South all was not done that might have been done and that cardinal blunders were made. But what is pleasing is not always true, and there can be no good excuse now for suppressing important facts or perverting history. The time has come when public attention may with propriety be directed to the realities of that momentous period at the South.”
Black Reconstruction in America W.E.B. DuBois P. 591-592
“No one reading the history of the United States during 1850-1860 can have the slightest doubt left in his mind that Negro slavery was the cause of the Civil War. And yet during and since we learn that a great nation murdered thousands and destroyed millions on account of abstract doctrines concerning the nature of the Federal Union. Since the attitude of the nation concerning state rights has been revolutionized by the development of the central government since the war, the whole argument becomes an astonishing reductio ad absurdum, leaving us apparently with no cause for the Civil War except the recent reiteration of statements which make the great public men on one side narrow, hypocritical fanatics and liars, while the leaders on the other side were extraordinary and unexampled for their beauty, unselfishness and fairness.”
Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War Elizabeth R. Varon P. 412
“In the context of Confederate ideology, the reference to overwhelming numbers was a kind of code, conjuring up images of the heartless efficiency of Northern society. In the wake of the surrender, Lee’s officers developed this theme, churning out speeches, articles, and memoirs designed to disseminate the idea that Lee had faced insurmountable odds of five to one or worse in the final campaign. Lee’s “eight thousand starving men” at Appomattox, Colonel Walter H. Taylor put it, had surrendered to an unworthy foe that “had long despaired to conquer it by skill or daring, and who had worn it away by weight of numbers and brutal exchange of many lives for one.” This doctrine referred not only to the size but also to the social composition of the Union army. Lee’s lieutenants lamented that they had been compelled to surrender to a mercenary army of their social and racial inferiors—“
German, Irish, negro, and Yankee wretches,” as Brigadier General William N. Pendleton put it bitterly in a June 1865 letter to his daughter. Scholars have since established that Lee faced odds of two to one at Appomattox, no worse than odds he had beaten before. But in its day, the numbers game had a distinct political purpose. By denying the legitimacy of the North’s military victory, former Confederates hoped to deny the North the right to impose its political will on the South.’”
Note: A fine example of this sore loser also-ran fizzer non-starter down-and-outer offscouring flunkee dead duck balls-up bellyflop might-have-been jalopy junk blue ruin old banger crack-up sour grapes embarrassing ideology at work is found in the surrender dispatch to General Grant General Buckner wrote at Dover, Tennessee on February 16, 1862:
“The distribution of the forces under my command, incident to an unexpected change of commanders, and the overwhelming force under your command, compel me, notwithstanding the brilliant success of the Confederate arms yesterday, to accept the ungenerous and unchivalrous terms which you propose.”
Note: I’m not laughing I’m not laughing I’m not lau
The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan, Editors (2000) P. 26
Note: The section title is The Saints Go Marching In:
“The legend’s image of Lee is at odds with the facts. He was not antislavery as the image claims; he was a strong believer in the institution. His secession, following Virginia, was not inevitable, but a calculated act of will in highly ambigulous circumstances. His aggressive, offensive generalship cost his army disproportionate, irreplaceable, and excessive casualties, which led to his being caught in a fatal siege. Contrary to the legend of his magnanimity, he was hateful and bitter toward the North during and after the war. His persistence in continuing the war after he realized the South was defeated was costly in the lives of his men as well as the Yankees and not necessarily a creditable act. In the postwar period, he was less of a healer than he was a conventional advocate of Southern positions.
Historically, Jackson was clearly an effective soldier. He was also fanatical, like Oliver Cromwell among the Irish, killing people zestfully for the glory of God. He was zealously pietistic, but advocated a no prisoners, black flag war, seriously proposing this to Virginia’s governor and proposing that he embark on such a campaign himself.
In many ways Forrest, although an able soldier, seems a strange hero for twentieth-century Americans. His personal fortune resulted from slave trading. He looked on as his troops helped massacre black Union soldiers at Fort Pillow after they had surrendered. After the war be became a prominent Ku Klux Klan leader. To a thoughtful or humane person, he seems an anamalous hero.”
P. 8
“Myths arise when people draw on images and symbols to construct a usable truth, which in term permits them to deal with traumatic events such as the Confederacy’s defeat.”
The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War Andrew Delbanco P. 350 Footnote
“Historians continue to revise upward estimates of Civil War casualties. In a recent study, “A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead” (Civil War History 57, No. 4 [Dec. 2011]), J. David Hacker suggests that casualties were previously undercounted by as much as 20 percent, in part because earlier estimates failed to include deaths from wounds or disease that proved fatal months or years after combat ceased. Hacker suggests that the true death toll was at least 750,000, possibly as high as 850,000. Even these numbers may be too low. Jim Downs, in Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering During the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), points out that emancipated slaves who died from illness or starvation tended not to be counted among the war dead. See also Margaret Humphreys, Marrow of Tragedy: The Health Crisis of the American Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), who asserts that “the Civil War… killed more than a million Americans.’” (311).
to be considered before inviting everyone to The Cookout™
the gone did not go so that we’d endure
plucking grapes from the potato salad
we did not stretch Frankie Beverly’s voice
like a tent across this humble meadow
of amber folk sipping gold sun through skin
rejoicing over their continued breath
just for you to invite anyone in
able to pause the bloody legacy
and distract your eyes with a flimsy act
you break all the unwritten covenants
forged in the saved language of unmarked graves
those called to eat are those who starved with us
and not those whose mouths still water
when watching the grill’s flame lick Uncle’s arm
Rasheed Copeland
Americans Remember Their Civil War Barbara A. Gannon P. 114-115
“As a result of inadequate recordkeeping, no one knows how many Americans died in the war. Recently, two scholars presented different views on this casualty count. J. David Hacker in “A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead” (2011) in Civil War History analyzed census data from before and after the war and argued that about 750,000 fewer Americans were alive in 1870 than there should have been given an analysis of expected peacetime death rates. In contrast, Nicholas Marshall expressed his opinion on this recount in the title of his article in The Journal of the Civil War Era: “The Great Exaggeration: Death and the Civil War” (2014). Marshall placed these casualties in the context of demographics before and after the war. People died at an early age in the middle of the nineteenth century even during peacetime. It said something profound about Civil War memory and Civil War reality that it required the passage of one hundred and fifty years for scholars to place death as central to the meaning of the Civil War– exaggerated or not.”
The Civil War Archive: The History of the Civil War in Documents Henry Steele Commager P. 36-37
“Even the most elementary facts are in dispute, and the statistical picture is a chaos. We do not know the numbers of those who fought on either side, or of those who took part in particular battles, or of casualties, and Confederate figures in these fields are mostly guesswork. Take so simple a matter as executions. Our literature tells us of innumerable executions. But Phisterer, author of a statistical hand book of the war, gives us three widely varying official figures, and historians who have gone into the matter accept none of them. Or take the matter of desertion…. For what was desertion, after all? Were those who failed to register for conscription deserters, or those who having registered failed to show up? Were bounty jumpers deserters, and how often should one of them be counted? Were those who went home to visit their wives or to help get in the crops, and later returned to the army, deserters? Or what shall we say of the blockade? Was it ever really effective? How many blockade-runners were there, and how many of them got through the blockade? With the most elementary facts of the war in this state of confusion it is perhaps excessive to strain overmuch at discrepancies in accounts of the conduct of a company or a regiment in a particular battle.”
Bill Roorbach: Memory is what people are made out of. After skin and bone, I mean. And if memory is what people are made out of, then people are made out of loss. No wonder people value their possessions so much. And no wonder we crave firm answers, formulas, facts, and figures. All are attempts (feeble in the end) to preserve what’s gone.
Belligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped our Understanding of the Civil War Stephen Cushman P. 176
Quoting Robert Penn Warren’s final paragraph in The Legacy of the Civil War (P. 108-109):
“Looking back on the years 1861–1865, we see how the individual men, despite failings, blindness, and vice, may affirm for us the possibility of the dignity of life. It is a tragic dignity that their story affirms, but it may evoke strength. And in contemplation of the story, some of that grandeur, even in the midst of the confused issues, shadowy chances, and brutal ambivalences of our life and historical moment, may rub off on us. And that may be what we yearn for after all.”
Note: To get a sense of the ongoing patriotism of men who joined the Grand Army of the Republic—GAR—of which Ephraim was a member, the Closing Ceremonies of GAR meetings went as follows:
“COMMANDER.—Officer of the Day, what should be the doom of all traitors?
OFFICER OF THE DAY (stepping in front of the Commander, smartly drawing his sword, and assuming the position of “guard,” as do all the officers)—THE PENALTY OF TREASON IS DEATH!
ALL THE COMRADES RESPOND.—The penalty of Treason is Death.
COMMANDER.—Such be the doom of all traitors, and may God keep you true in Fraternity, Charity, and Loyalty.
[The O.D. collects the Rituals and cards.]
I declare—Post, No,—,Department of—,Grand Army of the Republic, closed.
Last, the “Official Statement” of the 1910 Minnesota GAR for the last word:
“Lee was a double-dyed traitor, and Lee and Davis were the greatest traitors this country has ever seen because they had been educated to defend this country and then they turned against it in its greatest need.’”
The South: A Tour of its Battlefields and Ruined Cities, A Journey Through the Desolated States, and Talks with the People, 1867 J.T. Trowbridge, J.H. Segards, Editor P. 55
“The conflict was waged between two great principles,—one looking towards liberty and human advancement, the other madly drawing the world back to barbarism and the dark ages. America was the chessboard on which the stupendous game was played, and those we name Patriots and Rebels were but as the pawns.”
.
Rev Crist brot us over in the spring waggon….
After noting it was warm last night and this morning, after writing of the train to Birmingham, after saying he stopped at the Crist place that night, after again talking of the warm weather, and at last, saying the Reverend was kind enough to escort them in a spring wagon back home, after noting all this as if it were more important than the absolute black swirling mass of treason shrouding the entire country right now putting democracy at stake, & what his place in that has been or will be, he will write nothing of the war again. Nothing. 1/4 to 1/3 of the diary is blank. If you get your nose right up on it, there’s smoke still embedded in the leather. It stays a living breathing thing.
There is no July 6; Ephraim won’t write tomorrow, or ever again. No annotations, retrospections, nothing. Ultimately, he leaves it behind. Nothing crossed out or added to, no clarifications, no return to. It’s a relic in amber frozen straight in the time and place of whichever tent or field or hospital wagon he wrote in as events unfolded in real time.
The furlough is for one month; he has 8 days before he’s due back. Probably at the latest– tomorrow– he makes the final decision to sit the rest of the war out.
For five consecutive months, Ephraim missed not one day writing and now he’s out. Maybe he can’t find a role for his diary because he knows he won’t be heading back south. Maybe it came down to him not seeing a reason to continue to write. Maybe the tiny book filled a psychological & spiritual void, was a spirit alongside him, a friend those months walking beside him in a bag he slung over his shoulder.
The men back in Virginia? An estimated 100k Rebels go absent without leave by the end of the war. One quarter of the Union Army will desert by the end of the year. The 110th? In a week, they’ll promote Ephraim to 2nd Lieutenant of Co. D. Two weeks later, they’ll make him Captain. But they’ll never get him back. The lures won’t work. Nothing will work.
Now whether he actually returned, I don’t know, when it comes down to it. These promotions seem strange in his absence… so were they lures? Did he not step back on that ground South? Did he return & simply not record the fact? I doubt it because I have zero proof & I believe he’d have brought this diary. Maybe he left this one back in PA & got another to take. Maybe someday I’ll find the answer. And it could be it took a while for the promotion paperwork that had been started to get to completion, & that paper(s) arrived after he’d left. That’s the likeliest explanation now that I think about it.
July 12 he gets promoted from Hospital Steward to Captain, then the record shows August 9, not mustered. Ephraim waits until December 20 to resign, along with his friend Huyett. I can maybe assume this was a coordinated resignation. Like, between them they decided, & went down there together. Or however soldiers gave notice. I google it & all I get is the typical Lee & other famous men mish-mash. Always the common soldier forgotten.
Ephraim has this he wrote in one of the beginning pages of his diary, that he referred to himself as “Captain”:
Meanwhile, July has Lincoln calling on the nation for 300k more troops. 300k. They were hurting. Yet the Union was held together by men just like him, farmers who did what they could for as long as they could, or died trying. Died trying.
Ephraim’s record as I can find it so far: Ephraim mustered in at the rank of 2nd Lieutenant on December 19, 1861. Promoted from Hospital Steward July 12, 1862 to 2nd Lieutenant of Company D; commissioned Captain (a Captain commanded two squads directly, and the other 8 squads through his Lieutenant) August 9, 1862; not mustered. Was Ephraim was so important to the men that they made him Captain to get him back to them? What else could it be? He was gone. What happened between July 5, his final entry, & July 12, when he got promoted from Hospital Steward to commissioned Captain August 9, not mustered, resigned 12/20/62? (A full quarter of the Union Army deserted by January 1863.) Going from a promotion to a commission would take time. This is the time gap between July 12 to August 9. It’s unclear whether he returned before or after the July 12th promotion, or not at all. It’s possible– but not probable– he returned in July but left before the July 12th promotion. Again, I think he would have taken this diary back South & kept it going. It was too important to him, because he never skipped a day writing in it from March 1-July 5. And I remember no talk of a second diary my grandfather had that was passed down or otherwise went missing. There’s likely a simple explanation for the period of July 12—August 9—December 20, 1862.
Interestingly, Cool. Lewis resignation became effective that same day, 12/20/62:
Ephraim will resign 12/20/62 along with his friend Sam Huyett, who are the only two out of Co. D to resign that particular day. Henry C. Weaver will resign June 16, 1862, the same man in Ephraim’s May 27th letter home: “Weaver talks of resigning but I think he is only jesting.” Ephraim and Mary will have three more children. He will die January 17, 1901 at his farm, after a year of “illness” & “general debility.” His obituary noted he was “a good citizen, with a large circle of relatives and friends.” As for Lee (my great-grandfather), he will die in 1920. Elmer will go in 1928 (Lee and Elmer will founded the oldest business in Wayne, PA– an oil company– on the Mainline just outside Philadelphia in 1887, along the railroad, & pass it down the line to Lee’s son (my father’s father, then to my grandfather, then my father). Ephraim is buried in Huntingdon, at St. John’s Lutheran Church, and has a silver Grand Army of the Republic star still stuck in his plot like a flag pole planted. Planted firmly, even after 160 years. His church has a scan of handwritten records, some in German, from 1803-1865. I haven’t looked at them though have them in an email file somewhere.
Although I was born & raised close enough by, we never did visit Ephraim’s grave, & all the other Burkets & Fleck graves at the Sinking Valley Lutheran Cemetery. I never knew there was even a farm until I was much older; either I wasn’t listening or it seemed inconsequential for Ephraim’s grandson to mention. I cringe at all the things I could have learned had I been interested to ask.
But before I moved out of Iowa, I became interested in genealogy enough to visit Ephraim’s brother Peter Burket’s (1820-1874) grave at Inland Cemetery in Tipton, Iowa. A large headstone, the top part had cracked off. The groundskeeper, who buried just a few people there per year, happened to be digging a hole when I drove in, & showed me Peter’s grave, promising to fix it. I left rocks brought from Iowa City on the broken part of the stone, & picked off the ground some small pieces of his headstone & slipped them in my shorts pocket. Some time after, waiting in a long returns line at Walmart, I forgot, stuck my hand in the pocket, & bits of Ephraim’s brother’s gravestone ushered forth. Those I know where are in the house. I hope someday I can go to Ephraim’s grave. He doesn’t need anything left there. Just some presence.
Ephraim held onto this little diary the next 39 years. It was like a silent companion by his side– never far off– preserving his memories of the most intense experience of his life. He likely kept it in a box somewhere in his house, or in a chest, or a drawer. Maybe it sat on a bookshelf, fairly forgotten. His sons must have read it, and maybe his wife. His grandkids, I assume. He didn’t burn it, or bury it, or throw it in the Juniata River. He left it alone. He passed it on. His son Lee passed it to his son, who passed it to his son, who passed it to his son, who passed it to his son, my brother, who had no interest in it (yet, oddly, majored in history). I have carried and kept this diary longer than Ephraim owned it.
The nearly last paper to decode in the diary is handwritten, in a separate post pinned at the top on this website, Mostly illegible, dated 1839, written to a Mayor or Major JM Mason. In thick dark brown ink these are the words I could make out: “militia” is one, “and publishing I have carried several copies of my book to the it has occurred to me some of the members would have no objection can you ascertain this for me & let me know if there is no impropriety in asking the question. to the several governors & adjutants-general of states with a circular letter from. Expense of I think the work may be considered a published one as it was professionally for of the militia. Yours truly, June 2: 1839.” The paper smells like ancient, ancient smoke & it has mud stains on it same as his other letters. (Ephraim obv. did not write this letter, as he was born in 1830. But it was important enough to him 5o save in the back of his diary.)
Sadly, last I’ll note the ghost paper: the loose paper in his diary that was stolen by 3 Menlo College students who only had questions about the monetary value of the diary during a class in 2002-2003 where I’d brought this diary to encourage students to keep writing after the course ended. It was handwritten, possibly a deed, dated sometime in the 1700s or 1800s. Should anyone out there run across an old paper of questionable provenance, with the name Burket/PA. on it, well, this might be it. I discovered its loss years after that course ended. I had, in 1998, photocopied the diary in case it got lost in a disaster, but sadly didn’t think to copy any of his letters or papers. They probably realized fast there was nowhere to unload it. I can’t imagine the story they made up taking it somewhere to sell.
What stood out, really, the most for me while compiling these endless excerpts & notes? History gets lost. It’s not recoverable. The people who had that history firsthand are gone. Most left nothing behind. Nothing tangible. No way to know & pass on their own histories. It’s all just gone & forever gone. What we have is the present moment. We have nothing else whatsoever but right now. That’s it. Take what you have & make the best of it while you have it. One time soon & at once I’ll too join these ghosts I sense float about in their untold stories trying to reach us & say please don’t forget us & how we were in the world as it was. And their warnings for the future.
Walt Whitman: “There is, in sanest hours, a consciousness, a thought that rises, independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining eternal. This is the thought of identity—yours for you, whoever you are, as mine for me. Miracle of miracles, beyond statement, most spiritual and vaguest of earth’s dreams, yet hardest basic fact, and only entrance to all facts. In such devout hours, in the midst of the significant wonders of heaven and earth, (significant only because of the Me in the centre,) creeds, conventions, fall away and become of no account before this simple idea. Under the luminousness of real vision, it alone takes possession, takes value. Like the shadowy dwarf in the fable, once liberated and look’d upon, it expands over the whole earth, and spreads to the roof of heaven.”
Past one o’clock
Vladamir Mayakovsky 1930
“Past one o’clock. You must have gone to bed.
The Milky Way streams silver through the night.
I’m in no hurry; with lightning telegrams
I have no cause to wake or trouble you.
And, as they say, the incident is closed.
Love’s boat has smashed against the daily grind.
Now you and I are quits. Why bother then
to balance mutual sorrows, pains, and hurts.
Behold what quiet settles on the world.
Night wraps the sky in tribute from the stars.
In hours like these, one rises to address
The ages, history, and all creation.”
Above: Released 7/11/22, the image is “Webb’s First Deep Field,” the sharpest picture of the distant universe yet taken. Stars & galaxies as they appeared 13 *billion* years ago, some of the very first galaxies that formed in the universe. The telescope is, this minute, 7500 light-years from Earth.
AMERICA, THE BEAUTIFUL
Katherine Lee Bates 1893
O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain.
America! America! God shed His grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea.
O beautiful for pilgrim feet
Whose stern impassion’d stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness.
America! America! God mend thine ev’ry flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self control,
Thy liberty in law.
O beautiful for heroes prov’d
In liberating strife,
Who more than self their country lov’d
And mercy more than life.
America! America! May God thy gold refine
Till all success be nobleness,
And ev’ry gain divine.
O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years,
Thine alabaster cities gleam,
Undimmed by human tears.
America! America! God shed His grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea.
A DREAM I HAD AS I FINISHED my 1st draft of this manu, 155th anniversary of Appomattox.
He was walking up in my yard just now, in this snow at 11:30 p.m. I didn’t see in the forecast when I went outside & first noticed but it seemed too pat, & the air, too awfully bright out somehow, & then the abiding silence out the corner of my eye like flecks, something dark moving right then, coming in from the north, then it’s him, a dark figure swath at the far end of the trees out where I keep one portion of the yard untamed that I call The Wilderness. It’s him in a bent slow stride pitching toward my front door footfall after footfall & he’s lost in thought, not knowing it’s decades & decades later than it should be, it’s 163 years later, & he’s got that slow, long-legged stride tall men do, his head down, completely oblivious, but I yell Hi & we look across the yard at each other, somehow both caught by surprise the centuries are gone, & there’s no past, present, or future, only now, startled faces, a recognition of kin, family, then on outward to nation, to liberty, to our humanity & when we both get to the genus of us, about 50 feet off, the pixelation starts in & moves fast, so we become too large & not large enough to each other, & then the snow starts taking hold, worse, moving between us like a fog thick like the old late-night-TV sign-offs, that staticky snow on the screen after which the anthem starts & the flag waves in that invisible wind, but by now the colors are sinking, & then gone while all along he’s moving backward, sinking away too, smaller & smaller retracing steps but still facing me as he continues almost floating backward, & I seem to be moving backward too, yet I’m not walking, neither of us are, but a force is separating us now, so we’re not meant to meet, that’s made clear somehow, that we were to only see each other a brief shocking second, yet a moment that felt predestined, & he’s getting backward, farther out until he’s only a dark shape lessening, a dark outline reversing into the white until he dissolves completely to black so I can’t see him, nor he me, but I somehow know, understand he knows too that this will be the first & the last time we will ever meet. Goodbye, Ephraim. Thank you for being one of the ones to destroy the Selling of Humane Flesh, and to keep the Union together. 6/12/20
Ephraim’s tombstone isn’t etched with anything about angels or eternity, no. In stock block letters it simply tells, “EPHRAIM BURKET CO. D 110TH REGT. P.V. 1830—1901” Church member Chad Pedersen wrote me in 2020, “There are a number of Civil War Vets buried there as well as Spanish-American War, WWI, WWII, Korea and Vietnam. We get flags on all the graves by Memorial Day and take them down on Veteran’s Day. This year, I participated with the national event Taps Across America on Memorial Day. I sounded Taps at the Cemetery at 3:00 local time and then we all traveled to the other cemetery in the valley for the Presbyterian Church and I sounded Taps again there. I will be trying to do this each Memorial Day for as long as I can.”
Note: To read General Order No. 11, General John Logan’s Memorial Day Order, from D.C. on May 5, 1868, see https://www.hampton.lib.nh.us/hampton/history/military/legionpost35/genlogan.htm
Inside the Army of the Potomac: The Civil War Experience of Captain Francis Adams Donaldson Edited by Gregory Acken 1998 P. 19
Note: Acken sums up his experience & reason for writing his book, & the passage is a fitting description of my journey with Ephraim:
“In conclusion, I would like to add a personal note, a justification, and a comment. It has been an unmitigated pleasure for me to have spent a portion of the last seven years in the company of Captain Donaldson, and it is with regret that I part with him. Given the multitude of firsthand accounts by participants in the American Civil War, one might ask why we need another one. Harold Adams Small, in the preface to his father’s engagingly written memoir of service in the Army of the Potomac, answered the question best when he wrote:
“Because if we read only the latest Civil War novel or the latest Civil War history, we may lose as much as we gain. It is true that as time creates a perspective through which we look upon the past, we are better able to discern the relations of things and to judge men and motives more justly; but the gain in coolness of judgment is likely to be accompanied by a fatal loss in warmth of fellow feeling. The historian unhappily may be the first to suffer, and on his pages heroes will stiffen into statues, tides of anger and pride and fierce animosity will congeal as ‘trends,’ and pretty soon it will all be reduced to a ‘complex of forces’ and the war—the shouts and yells, the blood, the pain, the exultation and despair—will have become a ‘study’…. As the years carry us farther and farther away from the Civil War, the more we lose in actual nearness to what was once as near as a trigger to the finger. The only way for us to reach back to it, now, is through a book; and the surest way is through a record set down by one who was there.”
Small had prefaced these comments with an observation on the relative skill of the Civil War memoirist: “If he writes well, so much the more enjoyment for us. Even if he writes badly, something will shine through, and we will see for a moment what he saw and in the sunlight of his day.’”
Front Royal, VA., Skyline restaurant. Rockingham 🐔. If you know, you know. 
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