Day 117. June 25, 1862.
117
useless to try to put on paper any idea of it….
Wensday 25
Quite pleasant this morning we got ready and left at 9oclock for Christ Harnishes we were all night at Neffs. We eat Dinner at C. Harnishes and left in the afternoon for Robert Tusseys eat supper there all night cool this evenning
Note: Again, same as last night, Ephraim writes nothing of tonight’s supper table talk. This is a choice, & the silence of his choice to not record real talk between these people can be heard in the thin air over these entries. As I noted 3/24 re Kernstown & writing in code, Henry Hitchcock, Elizabeth Van Lew, etc., Retrospectively dissecting a silence in a diary without context is tricky, but here his silence is embedded in context, making it a marked silence, so it reads as an intentional code. But today, the 25th of June, the context is entirely different; he’s finally home safe, & considering whether he’ll go back. Did he have the concern anyone could come along & read what he wrote? Where’d he keep this diary in his house, if he did keep it there? How did he feel about what he wrote, or didn’t? Did he read back? He must have, because a couple times he went back over something in pencil or otherwise filled it in. Googling permutations of how do civil war diaries end? gets me just how did the end of the civil war end? and what is a civil war diary worth? and my favorite, what ends a civil war?
Reminder that he left June 13 but didn’t arrive at his farm until June 17. That was an arduous 5 day journey. He’s still in the tailwind of that, I bet. I can’t even comprehend what an extreme adjustment he’s in right now.
And from here on out, Ephraim will write only about how he feels physically. He decides to not broach anything else about his state. Nine times, on nine different days out of the 21 total from the time he left VA. to where he’s gone off the page for good, Ephraim tells us some version of he feels bad: very much fatigued/ I appear to be entirely woren out and weak I have a pain in my back, I think I will suffer /I was somewhat tired out/ I don’t feel very well today again/I don’t feel very well but I trust that I will/ I feel unwell my bones all/ I was some-what tired of our long march in Virginia before I started home/I helped ¾ of a day hauling in hay I was very much woren out I scarcely do much towards evening— this last comment was on July 1. In a couple days, Ephraim’s handwriting will go completely different all the way to the end, but is especially noticeable July 2. Larger loopy words, almost twice as large as all that came before in his diary; it almost seems like he’s taking less care, his hand has less control now. These letters & words seem in a different gauge/type ink now, or pen: very thick now, tall words taking up more space than ever before. He might be taking medication, alcohol, or (preferably) both. Could be too he was shaky from working the hay, etc. Physical work affects hand dexterity if it’s soon after, especially. Or was something else? He had relaxed? Made his decision, finally, never to go back there. He was done.
It seems like the final time he connects with his diary— that’s the only way I can think to describe it, though someone who studies the field of diaries would be precise— beyond events of the day, is July 1. He tells the paper I scarcely do much towards evening. He’s entirely done for before the sun even thinks of lowering down. And this will be the final observation he makes on his own behalf. He likes that word. 5/27: And the land will scarcely produce anything 3/21: very tired of their 22 mile march yesterday some of the men with scarcely any part of the soles of their shoes on and their feet very wett.
/’skerslē/
Various dictionaries has it: Only just; almost not. BY a narrow margin: only just. Almost not. Certainly not. Probably not. The first known use of scarcely was in the 14th century. Look-up popularity is top 6% of words. What made you look up this word? Please tell us where you read or heard it.
Bible.knowing-jesus.com says scarcely appears 15 times in the Bible. KJV 1 Peter 4:18 If the righteous scarcely be saved, where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear?
Apparently the Bible has been revised 30,000 times. I don’t think scarcely happens until somewhere far into those 30k tries, if at all. Not that I’d know the first thing about it. Ephraim was a name there; Wikipedia says he’s the second son of Joseph & Asenath. Some of Ephraim’s sons were killed trying to steal cattle. His destiny: There was a Tribe of Ephraim, one of the ten lost ones. As part of the Kingdom of Israel, the territory of Ephraim was conquered by the Assyrians, and the tribe exiled; the manner of their exile led to their further history being lost.
He filled in all the words he had. These men, they’re writing from the past, they’re writing from the dead to us. We use the same words. Their words stand between being & nothingness. We are the sentence & the sentence is itself becoming us. But then, there is always this: The living never will outnumber the dead. They’re moving with near invisibility which has not left us yet, & I don’t know how long that will take, do you? There’s always another word.
Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War Elizabeth R. Varon P. 257-259
“Dora Miller, a Southern woman who concealed her Unionist sympathies, explained, “Cave-digging has become a regular business; prices range from twenty to fifty dollars, according to [the] size of cave…. The hills are so honeycombed with caves that the streets look like avenues in a cemetery.” “We are utterly cut off from the world,” she wrote of the siege, “surrounded by a circle of fire….People do nothing but eat what they can get, sleep when they can, and dodge the shells.” The grim rhythms of the Union shellfire structured each day and filled it with terror. “There are three intervals when the shelling stops,” Miller noted, “either for the guns to cool or for the gunner’s meals, I suppose,—about eight in the morning, and the same in the evening, and at noon. In that time we have both to prepare and eat ours. Clothing cannot be washed or anything else done.” Commenting on how the Yankee trenches encroached on the rebel ones, Sergeant William H. Tunnard of the 3rd Louisiana Infantry wrote on June 17, “The enemy’s lines were so near now that scraps of paper could be thrown by the combatants into each other’s ranks. Thus a Yankee threw a ‘hardtack’ biscuit among the men of the regiment, having written on it ‘starvation.’”
P. 265
“When we beheld the emaciated condition of the women and children at the entrance of their cave dwellings, along the roadside,” wrote one Union soldier, “we didn’t feel a bit like cheering. The boys emptied their haversacks for the little ones, and watched them devour the rations like starved animals.’”
Note: Thus far, the oldest animal art, or art of animals, are paintings in a cave on the island of Sulawesi. Hands, boars, etc. 45,500 years back. “Early modern humans.” Neanderthals Homo neanderthalensis… Who with their hands painted long lines across the walls near these boars to show movement, boars on the run from hunters holding spears. Something speeds faster than the two of them. To makes a mark of palms permanent against the walls they sprayed red paint out their mouths over their hands, red finger paint lacquered forever, or close enough to it. The “Buffalo Cave” is what locals call it, some of whom surely descend from the ghosts called up, whoever came before, & whoever came after, & the drift of whoever is still to come. When you stand just inside the entrance, it’s like with the eyes of a creature staring out from a broken eggshell. https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-58988252
The Civil War The Final Year: Told by Those Who Lived It Edited by Aaron Sheehan-Dean P. 601
THE BURNING OF COLUMBIA: SOUTH CAROLINA, FEBRUARY 1865
Emma LeConte: Diary, February 18, 1865
“Saturday Afternoon, 18th. What a night of horror misery and agony! It is so useless to try to put on paper any idea of it. The recollection of it is so fearful- yet any attempt to describe it seems so useless- it even makes one sick to think of writing down such scenes. And yet I have written thus far, I ought, while it is still fresh, try even imperfectly to give some account of last night. Every incident is now so vividly before me and yet it does not seem real– rather like a fearful dream, or nightmare that still oppresses.”
The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan, Editors (2000) P. 179 From “Let the People See the Old Life as It Was.” Lesley J. Gordon
Living Hell: The Dark Side of the Civil War Michael C.C. Adams P. 210
“As veterans aged, they, too, distanced the horrors of the Civil War in nostalgia for their passing youth. Could dentures and rheumatics pills ever make a fair substitute for the glow of the campfire on the mountainside, where young men had camped, and for the adventure of marching ranks? Memory became highly selective under the influence of sentiment. As time passed, a survivor of Stuart’s cavalry wrote that “the memory of those days seems like a beautiful dream—seen through the mists of the rolling years.” Pining for youth also pervaded a poem written in 1895 for the U.S. 1st Cavalry’s reunion: “Backward, turn backward, oh, time in your flight,/Make me a soldier boy just for tonight.’”
Ernest Hemingway: “There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.”
The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat Earl J. Hess P. 167
“Ohioan Levi Wagner admitted that he was proud to have served in the Union army. “Why should I not be? Is it not a pleasure to us old landmarks of today, who are now old, feeble and gray, that in looking back over lifes way, we can, with some degree of pride, feel that somewhere in the past we have not been altogether useless; that our lives have not been spent in vain, as we through our valor and patriotism can today show the whole civilized world one of the greatest, best and undivided governments that exists on the face of this earth.’”
The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat Earl J. Hess P. 185-186
“BACK TO THE BATTLEFIELDS”
“As the postwar years rolled on, veterans began to feel the urge to supplement their memoirs with visits to the battlefields of their youth. They traveled as individuals, sometimes taking their wives with them; in small groups of friends; or as part of regimental reunions. Standing on the ground; breathing Southern air; locating old landmarks, earthworks, and campsites; talking with local inhabitants; collecting souvenirs; and placing monuments all made the war physically real to them again. Many wrote about their return to the South, and their books and articles became part memoir and part travelogue.
It took some time, however, for the South to welcome this flood of Northern veterans. For many years following the war, Southerners were too numb and impoverished to care. The journalist John Townsend Trowbridge toured the war zone in the late summer of 1865 and found a region prostrated by the conflict. On battlefields such as the Wilderness and Chancellorsville, he discovered layers of discarded and rotting equipment on the ground, barely eroded earthworks lining the wood and pastures, and local inhabitants trying their best to salvage something from the catastrophe of defeat. Women, men, and children dug into the earthworks to find minie balls or retrieved old clothing from the field to wash and sell as rags. They dug up buried horses to sell bones as fertilizer, sometimes including human bones in the pile as well. Some farmers were forced to plow fields pockmarked by the graves of hundreds of soldiers. They tried to plow around them when possible, but they often dug up bones and rotting clothing without meaning to. At Chickamauga, black soldiers were methodically locating and exhuming the bodies of men who had been hastily buried* where they lay and removing them to the local national cemetery. In Trowbridge’s vivid description of his travels, the South seemed to have become a vast, stinking charnal house. Certainly, Southerners were in no mood to dwell on the war. On his way to Spotsylvania, Trowbridge met a man who guessed that he was a Northerner. Trowbridge asked him how he knew. The man replied, “Because no South’n man ever goes to the battlefields: we’ve seen enough of ’em.’”
The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat Earl J. Hess P. 159
“I can hardly yet adapt myself to Boston and to the duties of today. I have lived over the days of forty-six and forty-seven years ago.” Henry M. Rogers Massachusetts Volunteers
What Caused the Civil War: Reflections on the South and Southern History Edward L. Ayers P. 161
“Andrew Johnson wasted the immediate post-war era in which the South was most pliable. By the time the Radicals took over the resistance had become entrenched, rearmed, confident, and determined.”
Memory and American History David Thelen P. 30 “Frederick Douglass and the Memory of the Civil War” by David W. Blight
“….in his final autobiography, Douglass contended that “the future historian will turn to the year 1883 to find the most flagrant example of this national deterioration.” White racism, among individuals and in national policy, he remarked, seemed to increase in proportion to the “increasing distance from the time of the war.” Douglass blamed not only the “fading and defacing effects of time,” but more important, the spirit of reconciliation between North and South. Justice and liberty for blacks, he maintained, had lost ground from “the hour that the loyal North…began to shake hands over the bloody chasm.’”
Note: Touches earpiece, nods: “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.” Donald Trump, 2/1/17, his Slovene stripper wife trying to be a discount Kennedy, looking on. Pes te nima Rad.
Beleaguered Winchester: A Virginia Community at War, 1861– 1865 Richard R. Duncan P. 264-265
“Reconciliation reached its peak with the Spanish-American War. The enthusiasm of young Southerners for the war produced concern among the older generation of veterans. They feared that their past services would be forgotten along with historical memory of the Civil War. As Carmichael observes, those who had been young before the Civil War had “created a mythical world of perfect Confederate heroes fighting in defense of a noble land….” In the aftermath of defeat, they retreated “into a Confederate make-believe-land.” Unlike those seeking refuge in the concept of “moonlight and magnolias” of the Old South, he aptly writes, the “ascension of the last generation….figured prominently in the development of a Lost Cause mythology that would help justify the new order in postwar Virginia.”
In a memorial address in the early twentieth century Randolph Barton frankly told his audience, “Common honesty then and there required that we should give our whole souled allegiance to the United States, or quit the country.” He recognized no qualification to the assertion, and even though the “unfolding of the Stars and Stripes” did not excite him, he spoke of inculcating a “love of country” in his children. He hasten [sic] to add that “if patriotism means that I must forget my Confederate people living and dead, then I am not a patriot.” However, he believed that “a generous North” did not require that. He avowed, “There is no difficulty in keeping the Appomattox contract; all that is necessary is to be a true Confederate….’”
Deadline Artists: America’s Greatest Newspaper Columns Overlook Press, 2011 The History of Our Late War Fanny Fern New York Ledger 1/26/1867 P. 287-288
“Many able works have already appeared on this subject. And many more will doubtless follow. But my History of the War is yet to be written; not indeed by me, but for me.
A history which shall record, not the deeds of our Commanders and Generals, noble and great as they were, because these will greatly fail of historical record and prominence; but my history shall preserve for the descendants of those who fought for our flag, the noble deeds of our privates, who shared the danger but missed the glory. Scatted [sic] far and wide in remote villages– hidden away in our mountains– struggling for daily bread amid our swarming cities, are these unrecognized heroes. Traveling through our land, one meets them everywhere; but only as accident, or chance, leads to conversation with them, does the plain man by your side become transfigured in your eyes, till you feel like uncovering your head in his presence, as when one stands upon holy ground. Not only because they were brave upon the battle-field, but for their sublime self-abnegation under circumstances when the best of us might be forgiven our selfishness; in the tortures of the ambulance and hospital– quivering through the laggard hours, that might or might not bring peace and rest and health. Oh! what a book might be written upon the noble unselfishness there displayed; not only towards those who fought for our flag, but against it. The coveted drop of water, handed by one dying man to another, whose sufferings seemed the greater. The simple request to the physician to pass his wounds by, till those of another, whose existence was unknown to him until a moment before, should have been alleviated. Who shall embalm us these?
Last summer, when I was away in the country, I was accustomed to row every night at sunset on a lovely lake near by. The boatman who went with me was a sunburnt, pleasant-faced young man, whose stroke at the oar it was poetry to see. He made no conversation unless addressed, save occasionally to little Bright- Eyes, who sometimes accompanied me. One evening, as the sun set gloriously and the moon rose, and the aurora borealis was sending up flashes of rose and silver, I said, “Oh, this is too beautiful to leave. I must cross the lake again.” I made some remark about about the brilliance of the North Star, when he remarked simply, “That star was a good friend to me in the war.” “When you were in the war?” asked I; “and all these evenings you have rowed a loyal woman like me about this lake, and I knew nothing of it!”
Then, at my request, came the story of Andersonville, and its horrors, told simply, and without a revengeful word; then the thrilling attempt at escape, through a country absolutely unknown, and swarming with danger, during which the North Star, of which I had just spoken, was his only guide. Then came a dark night, when the friendly star, alas! disappeared. But a watch, which he had saved his money to obtain, had a compass on the back of it. Still of what use was that without a light? Our boatman was a Yankee. He caught a glowworm and pinched it. It flashed light sufficient for him to see that he was heading for one of our camps, where, after many hours of travel, he at last found safety, sinking down insensible from fatigue and hunger, as soon as he reached it. So ravenously did he eat, when food was brought, that a raging fever followed; and when he was carried, a mere skeleton, to his home on the borders of the lovely lake where we were rowing, whose peaceful flow had mocked him in dreams in that seething, noisome prison pen, he did not even recognize it. For months his mother watched his sick-bed, till reason and partial health returned– till by degrees he became what he then was.
When he had finished, I said, “Give me your hand– both of ’em– and God bless you!” –and– then I mentioned his jailers! Not a word of bitterness passed his lips– only this: “I used to gasp in the foul air at Andersonville, and think of this quiet, smooth lake, and our little house with the trees near it, and long so to see them again, and row my little boat here. But,” he added, quietly, “they thought they were as right as we, and they did fight well!”
I swallowed a big lump in my throat– as our boat neared the shore, and he handed me out– and said, penitently, “Well, if you can forgive them, I am sure I ought to; but it will be the hardest work I ever did.” — “Well, it is strange,” said he: “I have often noticed it, since my return, that you who stayed at home feel more bitter about it, than we who came so near dying there of foul air and starvation.’”
Americans Remember Their Civil War Barbara A. Gannon P. 131
“Although the future of Civil War memory is uncertain, based on how . . . Americans have remembered the Civil War, its memory will be about whatever present needs a past. The American Civil War is our great national myth, central to the American nation: what Americans think they are, or what they hope to be. Charles P. Roland called the Civil War, The American Iliad (1991), “the epic story of the American people.” I would like to suggest that Civil War memory is is the American Odyssey. Just as Ulysses spent decades trying to get home after the war, so have Americans spent decades trying to complete their own journey homeward from the Civil War, if only in memory.”
Note: Only the wealthy had cash for embalming ($100 a body, using arsenic).
Note: Today is the start of the Seven Days Battles: 6 battles, McClellan vs. Lee. The Seven Days will “mark the start of a new strategy for the South,” historians say. “The offensive defensive.” This is the start of Lee’s successes they say. McClellan’s right wing is in the air unprotected they say. Lee can get at it only if he moves fast, said they. Will he?
Note: A year from today, Yankees detonate two tons of gunpowder under Confederate lines at Vicksburg, which pushes their line back. Grant wrote in his memoirs: “All that were there were thrown into the air, some of them coming down on our side, still alive. I remember one colored man, who had been under ground at work when the explosion took place, who was thrown to our side. He was not much hurt, but terribly frightened. Some one asked him how high he had gone up. “Dun no, massa, but t’ink ’bout t’ree mile,” was his reply.”
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there all night….
He’s there all night, yet records nothing of the talks, his feelings, his family’s reactions; anything of substance is left off the page except where he travels. Point A to B, who he’s with is all. Imagine after all he went through, all the regimentation, the blood, the rancid facts of the Civil War, being inside it firsthand, a half a year’s worth since last December, all he witnessed as the 110th Hospital Steward, & working for Dr. Hays, all he soaked in with his own eyes, a simple farmer from the underbelly of PA. Imagine him trudging up the street then though his front door. And resuming life as if nothing happened.
He left out each word he didn’t write for reasons he took to the grave.
We can only guess about his final decision not to return & why he left it off the page. The pressure, the PTSD may be so all-encompassing right now that he has to keep it off the page. There’s no way to know if he considered recording any uncertainty about returning. The diary still functions for him as it has all along– as confidant, and he keeps it up until the last entry where he has decided, even if he doesn’t voice it, to stay put in PA. He’s still debating, still writing, even if it’s cursory. He’s leaving himself room either way by writing none of the pros or cons… sitting on a farm 50 miles north of the Mason-Dixon, a line that is showing up in his dreams at night along with smoky battles, viscera, screams, hunger, men cold & shivering or hot & dehydrated, panting. His friends back there come now to him in the night, & things float by in the shape of crackers, knives, saws, bandages, and he, he walks, runs, crouches on the ground with arms out trying to grab the states all back in, into his chest, doing his part to hold the states into one country while the woods stay all afire along the road in places, & the grate smoke still raises, & the men still need everything & everyone to save the Union, everything & everyone to ride to their side now. What I wouldn’t give to know his thoughts today.
The 110th’s next battle won’t be until Cedar Mountain, August 9th. That’s the picture you’ve seen, Sullivan’s stereoscopic with the 5 dead horses on the field.
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