The Civil War at 100

Here is how the literary critic Alfred Kazin opened his essay "And the War Came" in the May 11, 1961, issue of The Reporter as the Civil War Centennial was just beginning:

Kazin's 1961 story in The Reporter, an activist
 news magazine in New York City from 1949 to 1968.

"This year we began to play Civil War. On February 12, in Montgomery, Alabama, the bells 'opened a week of pageantry commemorating the beginning of the Confederate nation and the Civil War that followed.' In the State House of Representative Chamber, where the Confederate convention met, legislators re-enacted the secession debates that took Alabama out of the Union. 'To make the celebration as realistic as possible,' it was announced that 'men would walk the streets wearing Confederate beards, top hats, and string ties. Their womanfolk have forsaken formfitting dresses for the ankle-length hoop skirts of Civil War days.' In Atlanta Gone with the Wind has been 'screened again to kick off Georgia's centennial observation of the War Between the States.'

"A more somber note was struck in Charleston, South Carolina, where it was firmly announced that a Negro member of the New Jersey Civil War Centennial Commission, which had planned to attend the ceremonies marking the firing on Fort Sumter, would not be allowed to stay at the hotel with other members of her state group. Major General Ulysses S. Grant III, Chairman of the National Centennial Commission, seemed puzzled by the disturbance over one Negro lady.When Allan Nevins, in his official capacity as adviser to the national commission, also protested, the general said to a reporter, 'Who's Allan Nevins?'

The prolific Bruce Catton, popular Civil War historian. 

"In Virginia, opening his state's commemoration of the great event, Gov. J. Lindsey Almond, Jr., drew a parallel between the present conflict over what he called states' rights and the 'unhappy difficulties' of the nation on the eve of the Civil War. He lamented, 'It has unfortunately been the course of our history that men have raised false issues which could influence the minds and stir the emotions instead of exercising constructive leadership in the effort to mold common opinion in support of that which is best for the nation and the world.' And in a special series of articles for the New York Herald Tribune, Bruce Catton (the last survivor on either side) pointed out that the war need not have happened at all. and would not have happened if responsible leaders North and South had been less emotional. By 1861, says Mr. Catton, it could be seen 'that the very cause of the dispute was itself dying and would , if men approached it reasonably, presently reduce itself to manageable size. . . . The American Civil War . . . settled nothing that reasonable men of good will could not have settled if they had been willing to make the effort.' "

The Columbia University historian Allan Nevins is less widely known now than he was in 1961. At the time Kazin wrote, Nevins was still working on his eight-volume Ordeal of the Union. Catton, of course, was the leading popular historian of the war. Kazin's reference to him as "the last survivor on either side" is ironic. He means Catton was the last survivor on both sides.

In American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era, the Yale historian David Blight took an in-depth look at how the Centennial was celebrated. He found that slavery as a cause and emancipation as an outcome of the war were largely brushed aside in 1961-65. The role of African-Americans in fighting for their freedom was also minimized.

One section of Blight's book is a biography of Catton and an examination of his books. Blight cites Henry Patrick, who reviewed Catton for the Wall Street Journal, as having "captured something important in what appears to be a compliment." Seeking the secret of Catton's sympathetic and authoritative voice, Patrick found the manner "of a family elder discussing a quarrel between two favorite grandsons, each of whom seems to have much on his side."

Like a lot of people of my generation, I read Catton's books almost as breathlessly as he wrote them. They can teach you a lot about the strategy and  the fighting, including what happened both at headquarters and in the field. Catton's use of letters brings the soldiers of both sides alive. But Blight's work, and Kazin's before him, show that Catton was a product of his times: a historian reluctant to make waves by questioning the South's Lost Cause mythology.

Kazin was not at his most dazzling as a writer in the opening of "And the War Came." That was by choice. Sometimes the best approach is to get out of the way and present a straightforward tour of the facts, and that his what Kazin did.What I admire about his essay is that he saw in real time, without the advantage of historical perspective, that the Centennial celebration was being framed to appease the Jim Crow South.

Nevertheless, you can sense as Kazin moves from Montgomery to Atlanta to Charleston to Richmond the embers burning just beneath his own words and the ones he quotes: "the beginning of the Confederate nation," "a more somber note," 'unhappy difficulties," "false issues . . . which stir the emotions." Kazin makes you see the harrumph of General Ulysses S. Grant III, and you know without his saying so that he feels for the nameless African-American woman from New Jersey.  

Kazin understood when the Centennial was just beginning that it was a rigged game. It was a return, in a form so subtle it went unspoken, to the gag rule of the 1830s. That was the measure that banned discussion of slavery, the biggest issue in the country, in the halls of Congress.

Seen from half a century down the road, the events Kazin cataloged in his opening seem as anachronistic as the minstrel shows I remember from my southern boyhood. We've made progress, no doubt, but I wonder if enough attention is being paid during the Civil War sesquicentennial to why the war was fought and what it means today.

The decline of the book review

Like most things in our culture having to do with the printed word, the book review is in decline. In the survival struggles of several metropolitan newspapers the book section vanished early. Many small papers first cut and then eliminated the freelance budgets that allowed for the review of books of local interest.

This decline in reviews represents a big loss for readers. Sure, you can read what other readers think of books on Amazon and elsewhere on the web, but there is no filter for these. There is no telling whether the writers have personal connections with the authors or whether they have credentials as reviewers. There is no one to lay down a set of ethical and reader-friendly rules for the reviewers, no knowledgeable editor to select books worthy of review.

In the book world, pure democracy has its advantages, but it has drawbacks, too.

Michael Pakenham

For several years during the early 2000s, I was a horse in the stable of Michael Pakenham, the book editor of the Baltimore Sun. He knew my capabilities and sent me half a dozen books a year for review. He also sent boxes of Civil War books from which I was to choose five every six months or so for an omnibus review.

Michael had rules and enforced them. The length limit for a review was 600 words. Each review was to include a line written by the reviewer that would stick in the reader’s head. Each was to identify the intended audience for the book under review. And each had a tight deadline: Michael was a newsman, and books and authors were news.

This all seemed over-prescriptive when I started, but I came to appreciate Michael’s ways. The length limit allowed him to make the most of the space he had, serving the variety of interests that would be drawn to this space. The requirement for a line that would stick forced the reviewer to think about each sentence and write better throughout. Identifying the audience served readers as consumers.

Then one day Michael was gone, and with him much of the space he had filled so intelligently.

I love book reviews. Often I read them even though I know I will not read the book. I also read the book critics of bygone times, Edmund Wilson and Alfred Kazin, to name two.

Alfred Kazin

I have a shelf of Kazin, but recently at the Book Farm, a favorite used book store in Henniker, N.H., I found Contemporaries, a book I didn’t know. I bought it and put aside my other reading to read Kazin’s essays on Dylan Thomas’s death wish, Stephen Crane’s wife, the centenary of the Civil War, the posthumous battle over Emily Dickinson’s poems, Philip Roth’s first book, Kazin’s love affair with Moby-Dick and half a dozen more.

I subscribe to the New York Review of Books and the Book Review of the New York Times. In these hard times for the printed word, I worry about them both for different reasons. With the Review of Books my question is: How long can its editors keep this up? I always find fresh and surprising reviews and essays in its pages. Among periodicals, only the New Yorker consumes more of my time. I like many of the Review’s regular contributors, including my poet friend Charles Simic, a fine prose writer with eclectic interests.

What worries me about the Book Review in the Times may be as much about me as it is about the publication. I spend much less time with it than I used to. Either the reviews and essays are less compelling or I am less interested in contemporary literature.

Whichever is correct, I began writing this glimpse into my book world for positive reasons associated with the New York Times Book Review. This Sunday’s edition reminded me of the old days. In part this was because the subjects it took up were of interest to me. It included reviews of two books on how World War I started and two columns on the current fiction vs. nonfiction debate.

Jill Abramson

But the best of the Review was the meaty cover essay. Written by Jill Abramson, the executive editor of the Times, it addressed an issue that has bugged me for a long time.

The essay was titled “The Elusive President.” The president in question was John F. Kennedy, the occasion the coming 50th anniversary of his assassination. Abramson’s premise was that, for all his popularity, few good books have been written about Kennedy.

I’ve read, or tried to read, many of the books Abramson mentioned. As you can see from an earlier post, I’m a fan of Robert Caro’s monumental biography of Lyndon B. Johnson. But as Caro told Abramson, even though Kennedy is one of the great American stories, “there is no great biography of Kennedy.”

Abramson correctly argued that Robert Dallek’s An Unfinished Life is the best Kennedy biography, but frankly I couldn’t get through it. I just didn’t find Dallek a compelling storyteller. Abramson was also right in suggesting that one of the best Kennedy books is The Death of a President by William Manchester. The long excerpt she quotes told you why: Manchester was not only a good popular historian, but he was also a lyrical writer who knew how to rise to his subject.

You can read Abramson’s essay here. And here you can read Norman Mailer’s account of Kennedy and the 1960 Democratic convention, which Abramson also praised.

I hope the Book Review will do more such penetrating and important cover essays. Michael Pakenham was right: Books are news, and conflict and controversy swirl around them.

'It would be a pleasure to linger here and write of the heroic deeds of those who fought.' – "Carleton"

I spent many days this past summer reading for possible book projects. One idea was to write the wartime life of Charles Carleton Coffin, the Boston Journal correspondent. “Carleton,” as he signed himself, was from Boscawen, N.H. He covered the war from beginning to end and appears in several chapters of Our War.

Charles Carleton Coffin

One chapter recounts his visit to Antietam a few days after the battle of Gettysburg. He had covered the battle there nearly a year earlier. I wrote of his return because I liked his reverence for the place and his attempt to describe its historical importance so soon after the battle.

This summer I read three of Carleton’s war memoirs. My book idea is to follow him through the war, showing where he was and what he did and assessing his reporting against later scholarship. The project has stalled for one reason: I have found a couple of his personal wartime letters but no large cache of papers in any archive.

I haven’t given up. Carleton lived to write, and his letters must be out there somewhere. If I find them, I plan to move forward. Without them I won’t. The details, thoughts and candor a subject pours into letters or a diary are essential to biography.

But today I thought I’d share another little piece of Carleton with you. It turns out he visited another battlefield not long after having covered the battle there. The differences were that it was two years later, not ten months, as at Antietam, and that by then the war was over.

On July 7, 1865, Carleton returned to the portion of the Gettysburg battlefield where the fighting raged on the second day, July 2, 1863. His letter to the Journal gives an almost panoramic view of what happened, mixing what he sees now with what he saw then with what he reported with what he was still learning through interviews with participants.

In addition to finding this piece interesting and informative, I am glad for the prominent mention of the 2nd and 5th New Hampshire and Brig. Gen. Joseph B. Carr’s brigade, which included the 12th New Hampshire. In Our War I used soldiers from these three regiments to tell the story of the second-day fighting.

Note that Carleton also chronicles the battle on Little Round Top. More than a century later, this story became the basis for Michael Shaara’s Killer Angels. Note also that Carleton sometimes refers to Little Round Top as Weed’s Hill. This is in tribute to Stephen H. Weed, a brigadier general from New York who was killed defending it. I have left Carleton’s imperfect spelling intact, correcting a few names in brackets.

[From the Boston Journal, July 17, 1865]

Second Day’s Fight at Gettysburg

                                                                             Gettysburg, July 8, 1865

The Codori house on the Emmitsburg Road,

Riding down the Emmittsburg road from the house of Nicholas Codoris [Codori], just east of which is the high water mark of the rebellion, we pass the houses of Mr. Velingel [Klingel] and Peter Rogers, and come to Joseph Sherfy’s peach orchard. At this point there is a by-road leading east toward Weed’s Hill, or Little Round Top. The orchard is on a high knoll – high enough to command the surrounding country.

This was the most advanced position of the Union troops on the second day of the battle, and here commenced the great struggle. Standing here by the peach orchard, I see the scene as I beheld it at two o’clock on that afternoon. Gen. Sickles had advanced from the main line to this point. The 2d New Hampshire was lying in the orchard behind the little cabin belonging to John Wentz. A portion of the regiment was forming west and a portion south, conforming to the angle made by the roads. The 3d Maine and 3d Michigan were in the orchard south of the by-road, all of them east of the Emmittsburg road. The only regiment across or west of the Emmittsburg road, I believe, was the 1st Massachusetts. The 11th Massachusetts and the other regiments of Carr’s brigade were along the road by Velingel’s [Klingel’s] house. Ames’ New York Battery was in the peach orchard. East of Ames’ was Clark’s New Jersey. Then continuing along the by-road were Phillips’ and Bigelow’s, both of them Massachusetts batteries, which did a great work for their country on that day.

Klingel house and barn. The trees behind them are along Emmitsburg Road. 

It is about three-fourths of a mile east to Little Round Top. Southeast of the peach orchard, sixty rods, is the house of John Rose, who has a large stone barn. The buildings stand in a hollow, where a cool spring gushes from the ground, which becomes a rivulet and trickles south through a rocky grove. Looking southwest from the orchard along a narrow road we see the house of James Worfield [Warfield], where the rebel pickets were showing themselves at noon on the second day. Gen. Sickles [commander of the 3rd Corps, whose units in and around the Peach Orchard are mentioned above] had thrown forward nearly all of his corps to this line, which I have indicated, who were lying almost at right angles with the true line of defense. The fifth corps had not moved into position, but were resting after the hard march of sixteen miles from Hanover that morning.

The rebels first in sight came from the woods behind Worfield’s house – a long line in the form of a crescent, reaching to the base of Round Top. They were Hood’s and McLane’s divisions of Longstreet’s corps, moving with the intention of gaining Weed’s hill. They advanced under cover of a rapid fire of artillery – not only here but all along the rebel line. It was not quite so fierce as that of the third day, when Pickett made his last desperate attempt. Ames’ battery, I believe, was the first to open. Thompson, who was to the right of Ames, followed. Clark and Phillips came next. Bigelow, from his position, could not get a sight of the rebels from his position till a minute or two later. The third Michigan, the third Maine and the second New Hampshire were the first [infantry] regiments to fire. It was the beginning of an obstinate struggle. Sickles, on his part, determined to maintain his position, but the advance of Hood threatened his left and he was forced to move his second line by the left flank to prevent Hood from gaining Weed’s hill. Ward’s brigade went down upon the double-quick, and came into position, on the rocky ridge directly in front of Weed’s hill, and east of Rose’s house.

Dead horses of Capt. John Bigelow's battery near Trostle's barn. 

Col. Edward E. Cross of the 5th New
 Hampshire was leading a brigade of
Caldwell's division when he was
mortally wounded in Rose's Woods.   

How fearful the fight in those woods, covering that ridge! Sickles’ front line, after a most desperate struggle, was forced back; but troops of the fifth corps and the second came in to help them. Caldwell’s brigade of the second came down past Jacob Trostle’s house, south of it, while Bigelow was thundering from the knoll west of the brick barn. Ayres’ division of regulars came down from Weed’s hill on Caldwell’s right. Barnes’ brigade of the fifth came through Trostle’s door yard and orchard. Zook’s brigade of the second was to the right of Barnes, and beyond him was Col. Tilton of the fifth. Regiments from three corps and from eight or ten brigades were fighting promiscuously. Sometimes they moved west, sometimes south, sometimes southeast, as the tide of battle surged in and out of the rocks and round and over the ridge. The 17th Maine was in the front line, about twenty rods east of Mr. Rose’s house. The 22d and 28th Mass. fought on the same ground during the afternoon. The 5th New Hampshire was on the left of Caldwell’s line when he came in, and then Col. Cross, who had fought the Indians and faced grizzly bears among the Rocky Mountains, faced the advancing foe until he fell mortally wounded. Gen. Sickles was wounded in the edge of the woods, but a few rods from Bigelow’s battery, east of it. His headquarters were at Trostle’s house. The Pennsylvania Reserves, under Crawford, made a gallant charge just at night to recover our lost ground – their right reaching up almost to Trostle’s, just after Bigelow went back firing his two guns – his others left on the field, with sixty of his horses torn to pieces by shells or disabled by sharpshooters.

The woods bear evidence of the conflict. Every tree has its bullet mark, and there in the path way, after every rain, you may pick up a score of bullets. The ground is yet strewn with knapsacks, hats, caps, bayonet scabbards, boots and shoes, and canteens and cartridge boxes. The sabots, which were fastened to the spherical case shot hurled by Bigelow and Phillips and Clark, are still to be seen. What lanes they mowed in the rebel ranks! Plum run, which trickles south from Trostles, was red with blood.

While standing on Weed’s hill this morning and looking down upon the spot, an officer of the 17th regulars came up. “We went down this hill upon the run,” said he, “and crossed the brook down there by that tree. It was like going down into hell, sir. The rebels were yelling like devils. Our men were falling back. It was terrible confusion – smoke, dust, the rattle of musketry, and the roar of cannon. We went up the ridge upon the run, reached the edge of the ridge, and there I lost my leg. Six of my men were shot while crossing the brook.” How thrilling it was to hear him, and to recall what I saw and heard of that contest! It was terrible to see our troops forced back side by side, but then when the rebels came within reach of the 2d corps batteries, east of Trostles, there would be another side to the story, and there was.

Brig. Gen. Weed was shot in the
chest after his brigade relieved
Strong Vincent's on Little Round
Top. Lt. Charles Hazlitt, an artillery
officer nearby, was killed trying
to hear Weed's last words.

There were about seventy thousand men on both sides, who took part in that struggle in front of Weed’s hill on the second day. It is generally known as the fight of Little Round Top, but most of the fighting was west of the hill, on the ridge between the hill and Mr. Rose’s house, on ground about a half mile square. The trees, fences, and rocks are all marked with bullets. Thousands of visitors have carried away relics and mementoes, and it is easy to find bullets, pieces of shell, especially after a shower. The grass is rank in the field across which the rebels marched in their attack upon Bigelow, enriched by the mouldering forms of the rebels who fell in the fight.

It would be a pleasure to linger here and write of the heroic deeds of those who fought, but there are other localities equally interesting.

On Weed’s hill, so named for Col. Weed, who was killed by a sharp-shooter on its summit, a desperate struggle took place, far less extensive, but not less important. The advance of Hood enveloped the force on the ridge below. Hood’s right skirted the base of [Big] Round Top, clambered over the rocks by the Devil’s Den, and began to pour into the gap – a depression between [Big] Round Top and Weed’s hill. This was not far from six o’clock in the afternoon. A portion of the 5th corps was down on the ridge – all of the regulars an the Pennsylvania Reserves. The 3d brigade of the 3d division – Vincent’s I believe – was holding the hill, with Weed, who commanded the 3d brigade of the same division. [Strong Vincent and Stephen H. Wood were both 5th Corps brigadiers, and both were mortally wounded on Little Round Top. Vincent commanded the 3rd Brigade of the 1st Division, Weed the 3rd Brigade of the 2nd Division.] The 20th Maine, Col. Chamberlain, was on the extreme left, the soldiers resting upon the rocks and looking down upon the conflict. The 83d Pennsylvania, 44th New York and 16th Michigan stood next in line, connecting toward the right. There began to be a dropping of bullets along the line from the skirmishers climbing the hill. Then Col. Chamberlain saw the rebels moving through the hollow to gain his rear. He immediately extended his flank by forming his men in single rank. The fight began fiercely – from rock to rock, and tree to tree. Chamberlain was outnumbered five to one, but he had the advantage of position. He was on the rest of the hill and at every lull in the strife his men piled up the loose stones into walls. He sent hastily for assistance, but before the arrival of reinforcements Hood’s troops had gained the eastern slope of the ridge and Chamberlain’s regiment was in shape like the letter U.

By war's end Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain was a major
general. For his actions at Gettysburg he won the
Congressional Medal of Honor.

Well do I remember the din of the conflict, while the summer sun went down and while the summer twilight lingered on the hills. Then it was that a division of the 6th corps, after a march of thirty-two miles on that lowering day, threw aside their knapsacks and came over the walls, along the Taneytown road, upon the run. Then it was that a portion of the 12th corps came down from Calf’s hill [Carleton must mean Culp’s Hill]. Gillis’ [Gibbs’] Ohio battery was dragged up the steep over the rocks and through the woods, while Martin’s 3d Massachusetts, I think it was, flamed upon the western slope. I only know that troops went up to help Chamberlain. I only know that there were dark lines of men moving up the hill, which became lost to sight under the deepening shade of the forest – that there were a few volleys – a lighting up of the sky by sudden flashes – a sulphurous cloud rising from the hill – a triumphant hurrah, and a sudden cessation of the struggle.

The tide had turned. The heroic endurance of the 20th Maine – holding on, although out-flanked – refusing to yield the ground – saved us that day, and also the battle of Gettysburg, for had he rebels gained possession of Weed’s hill, Meade I think would have been compelled to take another position. All honor to the men who held on with such bull dog tenacity to that rugged crest, though out-numbered and out-flanked and all but overwhelmed. Other regiments no doubt fought just as bravely, but they were in the breach, and had they given way all would have been lost. Hence the special service rendered by those men from Down East.

All hear this

David M. Blight

Terry Gross interviewed David M. Blight on Fresh Air yesterday. The subject is slavery in America. Inspired by the movie 12 Years a Slave, the interview is brief but enlightening. Please listen here.

Blight is director of the Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale University, I highly recommend his books on slavery and the way the Civil War and its causes are remembered. These include Race and Reunion, A Slave No More and American Oracle.

Finding Private Lamprey: the sequel

My wife Monique and I took a walk in Blossom Hill Cemetery in Concord on Monday to find the grave of Pvt. Horace A. Lamprey of the 2nd New Hampshire Volunteers. It was a perfect day for such a mission, with maple leaves crunching underfoot but some trees still in the orange-yellow splendor of the season.

The Lamprey family stone at Blosson Hill Cemetery.

When we set out, I had just posted the story of Lamprey’s wounding on June 25, 1862, in a little-known battle on the Virginia Peninsula. He died the next day on a hospital ship.

Jim Tamposi, who came to my Civil War talk at the Temple Historical Society last week, shared a photo of the temporary wooden marker originally planted over Lamprey’s grave in Virginia. He found it for sale in a glass case at a memorabilia shop in Gettysburg. My educated guess is that the pine board was placed on Lamprey’s grave in the cemetery in Yorktown just before Union troops evacuated the place. George B. McClellan’s grand retreat began in earnest the day Lamprey died.

A severe head wound felled Horace Lamprey
 on June 25. He died the next day on a hospital
ship and was originally buried in Virginia.

A note with the temporary grave marker in the Gettysburg shop said that Lamprey’s family had managed to have his body dug up and returned home to Concord. With the help of Jill McDaniel, Concord’s cemetery administrator, Monique and I easily found him at Blossom Hill.

He is in good company there. For one thing, he had many brothers and sisters. He is buried in the same 15-by-20-foot plot as nine other members of his immediate family. He was the third child buried by his parents, Ephraim and Bridget Lamprey, who died a week apart in 1884 at the ages of 84 and 82. Three of the brothers in the plot were also Civil War veterans – Maurice in the 10th New Hampshire and later the Signal Corps, Austin in the 13th and Clarence in the 18th. (The grave should have an American flag, as do those of many veterans around it.)

The fifth Lamprey brother to serve, Maitland, is buried elsewhere. He left Dartmouth College in 1862 to join the 16th New Hampshire, a nine-month regiment. He survived the regiment’s sickening experience in the swamps of Louisiana, the story of which is told in Our War, but came home so ill he could not work for two years. Dartmouth gave him his degree in 1863 despite his early departure. Once he was well again, he began a career as an educator, culminating in a 24-year tenure as  high school principal in North Easton, Mass.

The stone erected by the 2nd NH for Harriet P. Dame

The good company Horace Lamprey keeps on Blossom Hill extends beyond his family. The Lampreys are buried just a few yards from the mausoleum of two prominent Concord abolitionists and philanthropists, Nathaniel and Armenia White. The mausoleum sits on a hillock and is the size of a small house. The Whites’ New Year's party in 1863 celebrating the Emancipation Proclamation is featured in Our War. Nathaniel was a founder of the American Express Co, but the Whites are best known in Concord for the vast central city park named for them. Armenia conveyed the parkland to the city after Nathaniel’s death.

Maybe 75 yards up the road from Horace is the monument that veterans of the 2nd New Hampshire Volunteers installed to honor Harriet P. Dame. She was the 2nd’s nurse and helper throughout the war. The 3rd Corps’s diamond-shaped emblem tops the monument.

Part of my fondness for Blossom Hill, which slopes upward from the Lamprey grave to a northward facing ridge, derives from my past life as a newspaper editor in Concord. Many of my predecessors lie here. Three of them are Isaac Hill of the New Hampshire Patriot, a member of Andrew Jackson’s Kitchen Cabinet; Asa McFarland, whose gravestone bears the nameplate of his newspaper, the New Hampshire Statesman; and my favorite, George Gilman Fogg, editor of the Independent Democrat and, for a brief span, the Concord Monitor, which I edited for 30 years.

Hill was Mr. Democrat.

Hill and Fogg were strong-willed polemicists in an age of partisan newspapering. As both an editor and a U.S. senator, Hill was a staunch Democrat with southern sympathies. He ruled the New Hampshire party until Franklin Pierce took the reins in the 1840s.

Fogg became the voice of New Hampshire Democrats who broke with the party over the extension of slavery and eventually merged with Whigs and Know-Nothings to form the Republican Party. He took a staunchly antislavery line during a time when only a slight minority held this position. Fogg attended the 1860 Chicago convention that nominated Abraham Lincoln and traveled to Springfield with others to deliver the news to Lincoln. He later served as U.S. minister to Switzerland.

George Gilman Fogg's monument

Fogg has one of my favorite epitaphs of all time. In fancy letters across the top of his stone, almost unreadable now, is a mysterious quotation from Solomon 2:17: “Until the day break and the shadows flee away.” Farther down the stone are these words commemorating Fogg: “A faithful advocate of equal liberty and exact justice to all men without distinction of race or color.”

One more sidelight to the Lamprey saga: Maurice S. Lamprey, the 10th New Hampshire veteran, became a photographer, working first in Fisherville (now Penacook), a village of Concord, and later in Manchester. Maurice lived until 1912 and is buried two spots from brother Horace. Here are two of the scenic river stereoviews he made in Fisherville and the backmark from one of them.

A temporary grave, and then what?

I never visit a local historical society in New Hampshire without picking up something new about the state’s Civil War history. One night last week after my talk, Jim Tamposi, a member of the Temple Historical Society, showed me a photograph of a temporary grave marker he had seen in a Civil War memorabilia shop in Gettysburg. It was accompanied by the following note:

The rough pine marker

“Temporary grave marker of Horace A. Lampry, Co. B., 2nd New Hampshire Infantry. Killed at the Battle of Oak Grove, June 26th, 1862. Co. B had 22 men killed and wounded out of 42. Lampry’s family paid to have his body shipped home. This marker was nailed to the coffin. Lampry is buried in Concord, N.H. Temporary markers were almost always discarded, this being one of only a few that survived.”

History is mystery. If I were an American history teacher, I would give the photograph and this note to a student and say: “Your assignment is to see what you can find out about this. Who was Horace A. Lampry? What was the Battle of Oak Grove? What’s the story here?”

I devoted a couple of hours to this assignment myself, and I had a blast. I also emailed my friend Dave Morin, a web-diver extraordinaire, about Lamprey (as his last name was actually spelled). The information we found led to the following narrative:

A native of Groton, N.H., Lamprey was an 18-year-old apprentice harness-maker in Concord when the war began. He was the first of five sons of Ephraim and Bridget Lamprey to join New Hampshire infantry regiments during the war. His eldest sister, Delia, served as an army nurse, first at a temporary hospital in Concord and later at Fort Monroe, Va., and in Washington, D.C. (After the war she made $208 a year as a nurse in the Discharged Soldiers’ Home in Massachusetts.)

Horace A. Lamprey

Horace enlisted in the 2nd New Hampshire, the state’s first three-year infantry regiment, on May 27, 1861. He was a private in Co. B., known as the Goodwin Rifles. The 2nd fought in the first battle of Bull Run less than two months after he joined. On May 5, 1862, the regiment had an even worse fight at Williamsburg, Va., during George B. McClellan’s Peninsula campaign.

After the battle of Fair Oaks on June 1, the two armies camped opposite each other in a testy standoff that lasted 3½ weeks. The Confederate army had its back to its capital. Union soldiers climbed trees to see the spires of Richmond, seemingly within easy reach. Picket duty was dangerous and often deadly.

At around 9 a.m. on June 25, elements of McClellan’s army advanced in what the New York Times correspondent “Argus” described as “the battle for the hour of whose coming many thousand hearts had throbbed, and many thousand bosoms had beat high.”

The reporter was mistaken. McClellan was already thinking defensively, planning his army’s retreat across the Peninsula rather than commit it to the capture of Richmond. But he did want to push back the Confederate picket line in a tree-strewn morass at White Oak Swamp.

The 2nd New Hampshire was part of a small force ordered to accomplish this task in what became known as the Battle of Oak Grove. The regiment’s commander, Gilman Marston, sent his men to extend both ends of the line of the 1st Massachusetts, which was already fighting. Under fire, the men advanced “through the fallen timber and into a swamp covered with a dense growth of bushes,” Marston later reported. Armed with Sharp’s Rifles, Co. B., including Private Lamprey, pushed even farther forward. Marston reported that in addition to rebel balls, Union artillery shells began hitting his men.

Co. B bore the brunt of the fight. Lamprey was badly wounded in the head. The Times reported that he suffered “a severe fracture,” whether from a Confederate ball or a Union shell it did not say. 

Cpl. Thomas B. Leaver 

Cpl. Thomas B. Leaver, one of Lamprey’s comrades in Co. B and a man well-known to readers for his regular dispatches to Concord’s Independent Democrat, was killed outright. He and George H. Damon died at nearly the same moment.

Both of them, but especially Leaver, were well known to Harriet P. Dame, who had served as the 2nd New Hampshire’s nurse and resident mother from the beginning of the war. In his 1896 history of the regiment, Private Martin Haynes reported that Dame was caring for wounded soldiers at White House Landing in the rear when the blankets bearing the bodies arrived. When she lifted one blanket, she gasped, “My God! It is Tom Leaver!” She prepared both his body and Damon’s for burial and watched as them disappear into a grave under a nearby oak tree.

The wounded Lamprey was carried to the St. Mark, a clipper ship that the U.S. Sanitary Commission, a forerunner of the Red Cross, had just fitted out to care for hundreds of sick and wounded soldiers. The ship drew too much water to make it up the Pamunkey River and was thus anchored in Yorktown harbor. Lamprey died aboard the ship on June 26, one day shy of his 20th birthday.

Harriet P. Dame, guardian angel to the 2nd NH

I’m not sure where he was buried, but I think it was in the cemetery at Yorktown. I suspect the temporary grave marker was originally planted there. The deterioration of its base suggests it was planted in the ground for some time.

The Seven Days battles – McClellan’s retreat and Robert E. Lee’s pursuit – had begun in earnest with the fight at Oak Grove. Frederick Law Olmsted, the noted landscape designer and social critic, served as executive secretary of the Sanitary Commission in 1862. He was on the Peninsula, at White House Landing, directing care of the wounded in late June. On the evening Lamprey died, he planned to visit the St. Mark, but rumors that Stonewall Jackson was about to attack changed his mind. The hospital ships had to clear out and head to Fort Monroe.

The New York Times reported the July 7 arrival of the S.R. Spaulding, a steam transport, which had towed the St. Mark from the fort to New York harbor in 36 hours. Aboard were 426 sick and wounded soldiers from the Peninsula.

I was not able to learn online when Lamprey’s body was removed from its temporary grave and moved to Concord, or by whose request.  This afternoon I’m going to the cemetery office in Concord to see what I can find out about those questions. I’ll also look for his grave.

In a later post  I’ll let you know what I find and also share more information about Lamprey’s family, including the four brothers who went to war.

Little Round Top, summer morning, 2013

Little Round Top, summer morning, 2013. My wife Monique's painted this after our Gettysburg trip for the 150th.

Summer is gone in New Hampshire, but along with the changing of the leaves, October has delivered several warm bright days. This month, as I sat reading and writing, my wife Monique often set up her easel on the porch overlooking the pond and Mount Sunapee. Every year she makes beautiful paintings of the pond in fall, but this year she also painted a scene from Gettysburg.

She and I walked the battlefield every day we were in town late last June. It had rained often early in the month, and the grass was lush, the foliage thick. Twice we walked from the Peach Orchard on Emmitsburg Road to the Wheatfield.

In an earlier blog post, one of a series called "A Gettysburg Journal," I remarked on how this walk had deepened my perspective on the battle. In my book Our War, I wrote about the actions of the 2nd, 5th and 12th New Hampshire regiments on July 2, 1863, but not until this walk did I see how the key locales of the fighting on that day lined up west to east along the Wheatfield Road: Peach Orchard, Wheatfield, Rose's Woods, with Little Round Top farther east to complete the foursome.

We took many photos all around the battlefield that week, but the ones Monique found most art-worthy were the ones from the Wheatfield Road walk. In the foreground of her painting is the Wheatfield, where Col. Edward E. Cross's brigade fought. Just beyond it are trees from Rose's Woods, where Cross was shot while conferring with the lieutenant colonel of the 5th New Hampshire. Little Round Top looms in the background.

This was Monique's second foray into battlefield painting. You can see her picture of two of our grandchildren at Bull Run here. I hope there will be more to come.