A riddle wrapped up in an enigma

This monument in Canterbury honors many soldiers from Concord as well as Canterbury. One like it used to stand in a
square in Penacook,a village in the Concord city limits. When was it redone and moved and why? (Dick Stevens photo).

In an earlier entry on one of the local heroes in Our War, I lamented that I didn’t know of any monument that included the name of George W. Ladd on its honor roll. This was true when I wrote it, but it is false now. The story behind the flip-flop may interest you. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, it involves a riddle wrapped up in an enigma.

Ladd's cousin was Luther C. Ladd, a native of Alexandria, N.H., and, as a member of the 6th Massachusetts Volunteers, one of the first four men killed in the Civil War. Some accounts say he was the first. He was shot down in the streets of Baltimore on April 19, 1861, at the age of 17.

George Ladd, who lived with his mother and stepfather in West Concord, N.H., joined the 2nd New Hampshire Volunteers a short time later. In Our War and in an earlier blog post, I tell the story of George’s romance by mail with Carrie Deppen, a Pennsylvania girl. George wrote of his cousin’s death in his first letter to Carrie: “When I heard news of his death, I told my folks I would go and try and revenge his death.” His brother joined a New York artillery company.
  

Concord's Civil War arch was dedicated in 1892. 

George was wounded at the second battle of Bull Run and died on Sept. 25, 1862, after an amputation in a Georgetown hospital. He is not named on his hometown Civil War memorial because the Concord monument – the arch on Main Street in front of the New Hampshire State House – lists no names.

Not long ago, at a talk before the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War, I met Dick Eastman Stevens, the local chapter’s secretary and chaplain. He told me about a Civil War memorial in the cemetery in Canterbury Center, a town adjacent to Concord. On one bronze panel, he said, were listed soldiers from three wards of Concord – East and West Concord and Fisherville. He speculated that Canterbury might have honored these “neighbors” – the word is on the monument – because of the proximity of Canterbury to the capital’s three northern wards.

George Ladd of Our War is honored here.

Within a day or two, Dick sent me a photograph of the monument. In a way the picture deepened the mystery, but in another it made me smile: Right on the bronze panel labeled “1861 Wards 1, 2 & 3 1865: Comrades in War – Comrades in Peace” was the name “Geo. Ladd.” Like all the men who went to war, Ladd wanted to be remembered for it. And there it was.

Across the top of the granite stone to which the bronze tablets were affixed was this legend: “Erected 1926 by a grateful private of Co. I First Ohio Reg.’t. Art’y, 14th Corps, Army of the Cumberland.”

An Ohio artilleryman buying an elaborate monument for the soldiers of Canterbury and three Concord neighborhoods? What was going on here?

I turned to Augustus Ayling’s Register, which lists basic  facts about the service of thousands of New Hampshire soldiers. Under the section on men who joined out-of-state units, I found one George P. Morrill of Canterbury, the benefactor referred to on the monument's legend. He had entered Co. I. of the Ohio Light Artillery as a 20-year-old private on Aug. 19, 1864, and come home at war’s end.

Morrill was from an old Canterbury family. Born April 21, 1844, on his father’s farm, he was the seventh son of Capt. Davis Morrill and Sally Peverly Morrill. After the war he served as both town moderator and state representative.

Dick Stevens proved to be even more curious about the monument than I was. He identified Morrill through records in the Canterbury town library. In the 1927-28 town report he found a set of photographs showing three war memorials surrounding the soldier statue in Boudreau Square in Penacook (formerly Fisherville). The memorials honored soldiers from the Civil War, the Spanish-American War and the World War. They are no longer in the square, although the soldier statue is.

The missing monument for the Civil War faced east toward the W.I. Brown post of the Grand Army of the Republic, the chief organization of Civil War veterans. The lettering at its top reads “Gift of Geo. P. Morrill ‘Dilgers Battery,’ one of the twelve, 1st Ohio Reg L.A. 1926-27.” The inscription is not the same as it now reads in Canterbury, according to a note on the photo..

On the basis of this note, it seems likely the Penacook monument was altered and moved to Canterbury. Neither Dick nor I have a clue about what happened to the Spanish-American and First World War monuments that used to adorn Boudreau Square.

Despite a lack of clarity on wheres and wherefores of these monuments, I'm glad George Ladd's name made it onto one of them.  

How Napoleon B. Perkins lost his leg

In Our War I tell the story of Napoleon Perkins, a soldier from Stark, N.H. Perkins was under 18, the age at which a young man could enlist without parental permission, and his mother refused to let him join. He heard that across the state line the 5th Maine Light Artillery accepted volunteers without involving parents, and off to war he went.

My focus in the Our War chapter about Perkins is what happened to him after he was wounded at Chancellorsville 150 years ago today – his medical care. He remained semi-conscious through most of his amputation and gave a remarkable account of it.

Rebel soldiers attack near the Chancellor House, Maj. Gen. Joseph
Hooker's headquarters during the battle 150 years ago.

In the book I also cover the events that led to the amputation but not in such detail as Perkins himself did in his own account.

On May 2, 1863, rebel artillery opened on Perkins’s battery at Chancellorsville. Posted near the Chancellor House, the 5th Maine Light Artillery was in the 3rd Division of Maj. Gen. John F. Reynolds’s 1st Corps. Here is how Perkins, in a postwar narrative now available at the New Hampshire Historical Society library, described what happened to him:

“Edward Warren was about my age. We thought as much of each other as two brothers could. Whatever one got to eat, he shared with the other, and we made many plans for the future if we both got out of the service alive. . . . He was a fearless soldier, and a true friend. He and B. Frank Grover and myself had tented together for more than a year.

“[The enemy fire] was something frightful, the way their shells and canister swept our lines. . . . Whole gun teams at a single discharge of canister were piled up, ammunition chests exploding all around us. The limbs, leaves and blossoms from the apple trees were falling in all directions. I saw boys falling at the guns, and the shrieks and groans of the wounded men and horses were heartrending. . . .

Union cannons on the battlefield today.

“I saw Corporal Grover fall. He was struck in the breast with a shell, just as he had sighted the gun. He was badly torn, and mangled.

"Soon after this, my off horse was hit in the right forward leg. He commenced to struggle and was bleeding bad. Seeing Sergeant Loomis [Anson Loomis of Colebrook, N.H.] passing near me, I called to him and said, ‘My horse is hit bad.’ He said. 'Unhitch him and get a spare horse.'

“Just at this time I was struck in my right leg just above the knee. I again called to Loomis and told him I was hit. He said go to the rear. I did not then realize that I was wounded bad, for the shot did not knock me down. I was holding my near horse with my right hand, Sergeant Loomis’ horse with my left hand.

“When I attempted to walk I found I could not use my leg, but desiring to reach a piece of woods which was some distance in our rear, where I could get out of range of the Rebel fire, I thought I could make the distance on one foot. I had gone 2 or 3 rods when I came to the road which was somewhat lower than the ground alongside it. I stumbled and, attempting to catch myself with my right foot, the leg gave out at the wound and I fell forward on my face.

“By this time the leg was bleeding, and paining me severely. I began to reel. . . . After a short time, feeling some better, I turned on my side and straightened the wounded leg out as well as I could, then attempted to crawl across the road, but soon gave it up, as I was very weak and faint. I had laid there but a short time before several mounted officers and orderlies came galloping up the road and I expected the horses would crush me under their feet, but they leaped over me.

“Sergeant Loomis, seeing me fall (as soon as he could leave his gun), came to me leading his horse. He said, ‘Perkins, I will help you into the saddle and you can ride down the road to the rear.’ On making the attempt to mount, my leg hurt me so bad I began to grow faint again, and said, ‘Sergeant, I cannot do it. You will have to leave me here.’ He took me by the shoulders and drew me across the road. By this time I was burning up with thirst, and had no water in my canteen. I said, ‘Sergeant, can you give me a drink of water?’ He handed me his canteen which was nearly full, and said, ‘Keep it.’ I thanked him and took a long drink. Then he said, 'I will get a blanket and someone to help take you to the rear.' Soon he returned and said, ‘Perkins, I can’t do a thing. Sergeant Locke is dead, and he looked very sad, for Wm Locke and he were very close friends. He then returned to his gun detachment.

The ruins of the Chancellor House after the battle.

“While I was lying there, Wm Nason & Ed Witham, who drove the lead and middle team, were wounded. That left our gun team without any driver and they swung around and started for the road.

"There was a tree about three rods from where I was lying, which one of the wheels caught and stopped the horses. Soon a Rebel shot struck the ammunition chest and caused an explosion, killing all six of the horses, and for a moment I thought it killed me. But as soon as I could pull myself together, I found myself all right with the exception of being covered with sand & dust.

“One can hardly realize my feelings while lying there under that fearful Rebel fire of shot & shell. At first I was badly frightened and expected to be killed at any moment as the balls and shells were striking all around me. But after a time I became more calm, and began to realize my situation.

“Sometime before this, the rebel shells had started a fire in the woods, and a strong wind springing up, drove it over the ground where many of our wounded were lying, and it was something terrible to hear them crying for help. . . . A great number were burned to death. Perhaps on the whole it was fortunate for me that I fell where I did, for if I had succeeded in reaching the woods, I would probably have shared the same fate, for the fire swept through the place I was trying to reach.”

The Civil War: 'It was not my fault,' Buchanan insisted

Except for the U.S. presidents who came from the same families, it is hard to think of two presidents more closely linked than New Hampshire’s own Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan of Pennsylvania. They were Nos. 14 and 15, the so-called Doughfaces – northern politicians with southern views. Their feckless performance and political ineptness are sometimes blamed for bringing on, or at least hastening, the Civil War.

In a few days, I’ll post a professional appraisal of Pierce’s inability to hold his tongue during the war. For today’s post, I turned to my friend Michael Birkner, a Gettysburg College historian, for a peek at Buchanan, his fellow Pennsylvanian.

Quist and Birkner's new book

With John W. Quist, a historian at Shippensburg University, Birkner has just co-edited a book of essays on various aspects of the Buchanan presidency. The title is James Buchanan and the Coming of the Civil War. For anyone interested in the political crisis that led to the war, this is an excellent primer – and good reading, too.

One of my favorite chapters is an edited transcript of a 2008 panel discussion moderated by Quist and including two sages of 1850s American politics, William W. Freehling and Michael F. Holt. The discussion is not only crisp and enlightening; it's also funny.

Just one example: To a question about the prospects of slavery expansion into the western territories, Holt ends his answer with this observation: “If you draw the 36-degree, 30-minute line and extend it to the Pacific Ocean, as Buchanan wanted to do in the 1840s, it would hit the Pacific Ocean at the 18th fairway of the Pebble Beach Golf Course.”  

Michael Birkner wrote the book’s epilogue, “Buchanan’s Civil War.” I asked him this question about it:

In your essay on Buchanan’s life during the Civil War, you identify his main preoccupation as shoring up and burnishing his reputation as president. What might he have done differently to stave off the war, and how effective a case did he make in his own defense on this issue?

Here is Michael’s answer:

In sitting for interviews recently in connection with the opening of his presidential library, George W. Bush was repeatedly asked how he thought history would judge him, especially on his Iraq policy. Bush’s response was characteristic of the man: he wasn’t going to second-guess himself. He would let the historians sort things out. He was not worried about it.

What a difference from the approach of the 15th president, James Buchanan, during his retirement years!

Michael J. Birkner

Elected on the promise of defusing sectional tensions and quelling “agitation” on the slavery question, Buchanan departed the White House in March 1861 with tensions at fever pitch and the Union broken. Barely a month later, secessionists in South Carolina opened fire on a few “brave and hungry men” led by Major Robert Anderson at Fort Sumter. And the great war came.

“It was not my fault,” Buchanan repeatedly told family, friends and all who asked about his role as president in the events leading to war. If there is any thread that runs through Buchanan’s retirement years (1861-68), it is his determination to vindicate his conduct as president in all particulars, especially the secession crisis.

Mike Pride asks what Buchanan could have done differently, if anything, to stave off the war. This question goes to the heart of a central, ongoing debate among scholars about the degree to which the Civil War was inevitable, and the degree to which it was brought on by blundering politicians like Buchanan.

My own sense of the matter is that both answers have merit. There’s no doubt, for example, that Buchanan’s patently unethical intervention with the justices deciding the Dred Scott case was a blunder that cost him political capital. His vindictiveness toward Illinois Sen. Stephen A. Douglas (who had campaigned faithfully for him in 1856) was another blunder.

Buchanan’s stubborn and misguided policy on Kansas, in which he sided with a small minority of slave-owners there on technical grounds as they sought to make Kansas a slave state, was probably his greatest mistake of all. It split the Democratic Party on sectional lines and thereby paved the way for the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. Lincoln’s election triggered southern states’ secession and made the war inevitable, given that Lincoln was not going to compromise on his fundamental principle of no slavery extension, period.

What if Buchanan had not blundered as he did? Would the war have happened anyway?

We cannot know that for sure, as there are no do-overs in history. However, it seems evident that if Buchanan had taken a more even-handed line on the slavery question, and had he accepted popular sovereignty in Kansas, he would have been assailed and rejected by southerners, just as Douglas was when he fought Buchanan’s pro-southern Kansas policy. Consequently, whatever Buchanan did, the Democratic Party would have divided, the Republicans would have gained the White House, and the war would have happened.

Did Buchanan make a good case for himself in his memoirs, published early in 1866?

Not by my reckoning. His refusal to see fault in anything he did, his legalisms, and his stinging attacks on abolitionists as the cause of sectional tensions (while letting slave-owners off the hook) do not pass a credibility test.

It seems fair to say that controversial presidents are wiser to follow George W. Bush’s approach than James Buchanan’s.  Self-justifying memoir or no, Buchanan has occupied the basement among presidents ever since he left office.  With Bush, time will tell.

Front-page story

In the fall of 1863, Private William S. Marston of the 3rd New Hampshire Volunteers sat down to write a letter home to Exeter. “Mother,” he began, “I think you will be as well pleased to have me send you a New South and write on the margin that I am well, as you would be to have me write a long letter.”

Scribbled in pencil, Marston’s letter in the margins of the newspaper's front page hangs today in a frame on the wall of a gallery at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. It is part of an exhibit called “Blood and Ink: Front Pages from the Civil War.”

The New South, the optimistically named newspaper on which Marston wrote, was a pro-Union weekly published from 1862 until the war’s end out of the post office at Port Royal, S.C. Union troops had captured and occupied the port in late 1861. It became the headquarters of the Army of the South. The army’s postmaster, the Bostonian Joseph H. Sears, edited and published the paper.

After the white residents of Beaufort and the surrounding area fled, former slaves and northern cotton speculators took their land. Abolitionists, including Milton and Esther Hawks, both doctors from Manchester, N.H., came down to help the liberated slaves. The New South reported on these developments as well as battles, skirmishes and military movements in the area.

Marston wrote his letter on the paper’s Oct. 24, 1863, edition, which you can read here. Union troops, including Marston’s regiment and the 4th and 7th New Hampshire Volunteers, had taken Forts Wagner and Gregg on Morris Island after a summer of bloody fighting and siege. Marston’s mother no doubt enjoyed The New South’s report on how quiet things were now.

Like most newspapers of that time and well into the 20th century, The New South used jokes and anecdotes, known as fillers, to even out its columns. Here’s one from the Oct. 24 paper: “Two sailors were sitting on the gunwale of their shop drinking grog. ‘This is meat and drink,’ said Jack and fell overboard as he was speaking. ‘And now you have got washing and lodging,’ cooly remarked Tom.”

In a postwar memoir called Anecdotes of the Civil War in the United States, Edward D. Townsend, an assistant adjutant general working under Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, wrote about the triumphant moment to which Sears and his printing operation contributed.

Henry Ward Beecher

On April 14, 1865, exactly four years after Union soldiers had abandoned Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, Townsend directed the ceremony reclaiming of the fort. The speaker was the country’s most prominent clergyman, Henry Ward Beecher.

Sears, who was still the publisher of The New South, used his printing operation to produce programs for the grandees invited to the event and copies of Beecher’s speech for the press covering it. Sears apologized to Townsend for the quality of the printing. “I regret that our type and presses can do no better work,” he said. “My excuse is that the sand, which frequently rises in clouds here and penetrates even to the sacred precincts of our sanctus sanctorum, pays no regard to types and presses, and they soon wear out.”

When Townsend asked Sears for the printing bill, Sears replied: “Allow me to present this job to the United States.”

The flag-raising at Fort Sumter, where the war had begun, played second fiddle to a much bigger story in the papers that weekend. Just hours after Beecher spoke, John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre. The president died the next morning.

As for Private Marston, who wrote to his mother in the margins of the newspaper, he had been wounded at Secessionville, S.C., on June 16, 1862. At about the time he wrote his mother, he transferred to the Signal Corps. He was discharged at Hilton Head, S.C., on Aug. 17, 1864. He lived till 1910 and is buried in Exeter.

The generational history gap revisited

The other day during a short trip to Washington, D.C., Monique and I revisited Camelot, provoking further concern about the generational history gap.

The Newseum's Kennedy exhibit will be open through Jan. 4, 2014.

The occasion was the John F. Kennedy display at the Newseum, the cavernous media museum on Pennsylvania Avenue. We began with the images that helped create Camelot: family, campaign and White House photographs shot by Jacques Lowe, a freelancer given access to Kennedy and his family from 1956 to 1962.

The pictures are lovely, the exhibit superb, even offering visitors a chance to finger through digitized contact sheets and blow up their choices. And yet I wished the museum had pointed out prominently the mythical nature of the pictures. Kennedy, after all, was not the wonderful husband and family man depicted here.

Nov. 22 will be the 50th anniversary of the assassination. This national tragedy is observed on one of the Newseum’s upper floors. I was 17 when Kennedy was shot and have written about that day before (you can read it here). Having visited Dealey Plaza and the museum in the Book Depository, seen the Zapruder film a hundred times and edited a newspaper through years of conspiracy theories and anniversaries, I thought I was Kennedy-ed out. But I found myself returned to that day during the Newseum’s blow-by-blow account of how Americans first learned the news from Dallas.

Then, as we toured the rest of the assassination display (Oswald’s shirt, objects from his pockets, the UPI bulletin that JFK was dead), we heard loud young voices wisecracking, laughing and cutting up. A dozen or so boys 13 and 14 years old seemed oblivious to the solemnity of the story told by the pictures and artifacts of the assassination.

Their behavior shook Monique and me out of our reverie, and they would not shut up. Monique’s career as a middle-school teacher included many museum trips with students. Near the end of the exhibit, she turned to one of the boys as he joked and jostled with his pals. “It’s not funny,” she said.

A moment like this makes you feel your age. Why should young people today respect the memories of those who have lived with the Kennedy assassination for half a century? It is as ancient to them as the Garfield assassination. And the tools and products of media of the early 1960s – teletype machines, clunky cameras, black-and-white television, live broadcasts in which people off-camera whisper the latest bulletins to the anchor? Gutenberg, anyone?

Still, our pique hadn’t subsided the next morning when we set off for a walk down the National Mall to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

We were standing in front of Panel 9W and had just found Robert L. King on line 122 when a group of girls of middle-school age came up to speak with us. For a project on their trip to Washington, the girls were asking people at tourist attractions what being there meant to them.

I told the girls I had known many men named on the wall and visited them as often as I could. I did not know Robert Louis King, but I was on the Army funeral detail that buried him in Anderson, S.C., in July 1970. Twenty-five years after firing three shots at his grave, I called his family and wrote a newspaper column about him.

I told the girls at the wall what I remembered about him, including how much he loved his ’57 Chev. They listened respectfully, asked good questions, took notes and made a wall-rubbing of King’s name.

So this was the other side of the equation. No doubt prompted by parents or teachers, these young girls went looking for the meaning of the past and found a piece of it in me. And we left Washington feeling a little less curmudgeonly about rising generations than we had just the day before.

On the same subject . . .

In response to my recent post about trying to convey the importance of history to our grandchildren, my friend Al Hutchison  emailed me the following:

Your latest blog entry reminds me that for some time now I’ve been quietly alarmed over the lack of history knowledge that shows up so often in my conversations and readings. I was struck after Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation was published by tales I heard of young people being amazed to learn that the geezer down the street was actually a tail gunner or fought in the Battle of the Bulge.

The teaching of history has too often been left to football coaches and others who read their textbooks the day before the next lesson.

I curse myself that I never quizzed an uncle who was in one of the great naval battles of World War I. I was able to quiz my father, who had even more wartime adventures than my uncle, but I didn’t take notes.

A true story: Just before I retired from a newspaper career in 1999, I was invited to speak to a grade school class in Berlin, Vt. I told the class that we’d put on a mock press conference and that they’d be the reporters and they could ask me any question they wanted (they knew I was a journalist and that’s about it). It all went very well, but one moment stands out.

“What was the biggest story you were ever involved in?” a boy asked me.

“Oh, I suppose it was the assassination of President Kennedy,” I replied.

“You were ALIVE then?” the kid asked.

I should have reminded him it was JFK’s assassination, not Lincoln’s, I was talking about, but I wasn’t that swift.

You might wonder what my “involvement” was: The afternoon of the assassination I put out what I’m sure was the very last EXTRA the Evening Independent of St. Petersburg ever published. [Read all about it here.]

History's touch

Yesterday we took two of our grandchildren, Grace and Jackson, to Wild New Hampshire Day at the Fish and Game Department in Concord. The kids cast fishing lines, fired an air rifle, met a falconer, a furrier and many nature experts, and seemed to have a great time.

The wait to fire the air rifle was long. While Grace and my wife Monique went to watch retrievers show their stuff, Jackson and I held our place in line. As we waited, I recognized an old friend passing by and called him over. We had chatted earlier, but I wanted Jackson to meet him.

.

The friend was Russell Elwell, a Pembroke man whom I interviewed six years ago for a book called We Went to War. The book, which I wrote with my newspaper colleague Meg Heckman, compiled oral histories of many New Hampshire World War II veterans.

Russ had been a waist gunner on a B-29, flying bombing missions over Japan from India, China and the Mariana Islands. On a run to Omura, Japan, antiaircraft fire damaged his plane and wounded the pilot and flight engineer. The plane ran out of fuel over a mountainous area of China, and Russ bailed out with the rest of the crew. He landed in the garden of a goateed Chinese farmer who smoked a clay pipe. The oral history in the book tells the story of Russ’s long journey to safety.

As Russ shook hands with my 9-year-old grandson, I had déjà vu. The moment that came flashing back happened nearly 60 years ago, when I was a Cub Scout. One night at the log hut where we Cubs gathered for meetings, the guest speaker was one of the last men who had fought in the Indian wars of the late 19th century. The only thing I remember about his visit is that he shook each of our hands. His hand was large and gnarly, but his face was kind.

Often when I give talks on my books, people ask where my interest in history came from. The whole answer is complex, but part of it is the memory of meeting the Indian fighter. It was significantd because it involved actually touching the past. Also, perhaps I’m reading too much into it, but most of my work in military history deals with common soldiers, not generals. Certainly that is the case with Our War, and it was also true of We Went to War.

It troubles me that so few young people come to the talks I give about these books. Whether I speak to two dozen people at a town library in New Hampshire or hundreds in an auditorium, the vast majority of my listeners are 70 or older. If I were a local history teacher, I would give my students extra credit for attending such a talk, but I have given up on that idea.

Quiet Moment at Bull Run (by Monique Pride) 

I hope my own grandkids will be exceptions to this rule. As I related in an earlier post, Monique and I take them to historical sites whenever we can. 

Eleanor and Henry, our oldest son’s children, now live in Cairo, and their mom and dad have already steeped them in antiquity.

Last summer, on our visit before they left for Egypt, we took Eleanor and Henry to the battlefield at Bull Run. Accompanying this post is a painting Monique made of them inspecting a stone marker not far from the Henry House, which is in the background.

There is no way of knowing whether Jackson’s handshake with Russ Elwell will be meaningful to him – whether he’ll someday think of it as the touch of history. But I’ll nurture the idea as best I can. It was certainly a special moment for his grandpa.        

Did Abraham Lincoln really free the slaves?

Thomas Ball's familiar statue of Abraham Lincoln freeing a slave.

You probably learned in junior high school that he did. And even if you haven’t seen Thomas Ball’s 1877 statue, “Emancipation,” in Lincoln Park in Washington, D.C., or near the Boston Common, you are probably familiar with the image.

During the last half century, however, American historians have made the case for a different emancipation narrative. They argue that by fleeing to Union armies and to contraband camps and later by volunteering for military service, the slaves freed themselves. This argument diminishes Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which was, after all, a legalistic document that freed only slaves in Union-occupied southern territory – and not even all of them.

I decided to ask an expert about the controversy this revisionist narrative has caused. The expert is Allen C. Guelzo. Known as a superb lecturer and a fine writer and historian, Guelzo is the Henry C. Luce professor of the Civil War era at Gettysburg College, Years ago, over lunch, he pulled a small box from his pocket to share with me. Inside was the pocket Bible carried during the Civil War by a soldier from the 5th New Hampshire Volunteers. I had recently co-authored My Brave Boys, a history of the 5th under Col. Edward E. Cross, and I was thrilled to hold this relic in my hand.

Lively narrative prose and innovative research are the hallmarks of Guelzo’s Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America and Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America. Although I am a devotee of Stephen Sears’s Gettysburg, I can’t wait to read Guelzo’s Gettysburg: The Last Invasion. It is due out next month, shortly before the 150th anniversary of the battle.

Although I sensed from the subtitle as well as the text of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation what Guelzo’s answer would be, I asked him this question:

What is your view of the argument some historians make that President Lincoln’s role in emancipating slaves was less important than the self-emancipation of slaves who fled to the Union lines and, in some cases, joined the Union army?

Allen C. Guelzo

Here is Guelzo’s response:

“For a century after the Emancipation Proclamation, Abraham Lincoln’s claim to be the Great Emancipator stood virtually unchallenged, and especially among African-Americans, who revered Lincoln as their Liberator. But as the Proclamation approached its centennial, emancipation had been followed by segregation, Jim Crow laws and racial terrorism, and a vast disenchantment with Lincoln and his Proclamation settled in. Beginning with Vincent Harding and Barbara Field, a ‘self-emancipation’ thesis emerged which questioned the importance of Lincoln’s role in black freedom, and emphasized instead the many ways black slaves freed themselves.

“Part of this thesis recognizes an element of truth: black slaves did not merely wait to be freed, or to receive freedom purely as a gift from white men. From the outbreak of the war, they fled northward, or to wherever Union military authority prevailed. They gathered in ‘contraband’ camps, served as teamsters, cooks and laborers for the Union armies and eventually volunteered for combat service in those armies after 1863.

“But another part of the ‘self-emancipation thesis’ was political: it embraced the notion that self-emancipation is the only authentic emancipation, and it sought to underscore the validity of black agency in a conflict which had for decades been interpreted largely as a white man’s war.

“But the ‘self-emancipation thesis’ suffered at many points from fully as much naïveté as the traditional storyline of Lincoln as the new Moses, single-handedly leading the slaves to freedom. Slaves who ran north for freedom, either to the army or the cities, were indeed making themselves free, but only free de facto. In law, they were still simply fugitives, and liable to rendition under the terms of the Fugitive Slave Laws of 1793 and 1850.

“And if the Civil War had ended at any point short of an unconditional Confederate surrender – if, for instance, George McClellan had won the presidential election of 1864 and opened negotiations with the Confederacy to end the war – it is very likely rendition of those fugitives would have been a condition the Confederates demanded. To get peace, I am not sure a McClellan administration would have been able to resist that demand, or that war-weary Northern whites might not have complied. It might not have amounted to a very successful rendition program, but rendition of fugitive slaves had been a condition of our peace treaties with the British after the Revolution and the War of 1812.

“Lincoln’s Proclamation, however conditional and limited it is in specific terms, did this one incontestable thing: it declared the slaves it itemized free de jure. They now became legally free, and it was a free status which could be (and was) defended in court. It may be wondered just what legal significance a de jure proclamation might have when its subjects were securely behind Confederate lines. On the other hand, law has never lacked for effect merely because enforcement has yet to catch up with it.

“Lincoln was not the sole proprietor of freedom – even Lincoln’s de jure freedom had to be carried on the point of the Union armies’ bayonets, and the fugitives and ‘contrabands’ helped to destabilize an institution which could not stand much instability. But far from diminishing Lincoln’s role, these events only underscore how vital a part the Emancipation Proclamation played in the overall equation of liberty.”