Birmingham, Bombingham, "The Magic City"

Monday, April 28

Saturday morning we drove down to Birmingham, Alabama, to join the Edina Community Lutheran Church Civil Rights Tour, led by Mark and Leslie Swiggum.  They flew to Atlanta that morning, stopping for lunch at Anniston, AL, the site of one of the first freedom bus bombings.  First stop was Rickman Field in Birmingham, older than Wrigley Field, where black and white baseball was played on alternate days.  Photos of Willie Mays, Jackie Robinson, Babe Ruth and many others lined the walls, and we heard the story of Harman Killebrew's playing, as well as his return shortly before he died.  Imagine our surprise when we heard that Bull Connor started his career as the announcer for those games, making his name most recognizable on the ballot for Police Commissioner back in the 1960s.  That, of course, is only an introduction to the story.

Myrna Jackson was a "foot soldier" in the movement in the 1960s and shared story after story with us when we arrived downtown from the baseball field.  Jailed for two weeks at the height of the marches, she told of all mattresses removed from the cells when they came, as if there were beds for everyone anyway.  One day the guards brought in huge fans and blasted the cell with cold air which those in the next cell were blasted with hot air from several heaters that were turned on them.  She told of the "mass meetings" held in six different churches to plan for the "C," the nonviolent confrontations to march from 16th Street Baptist.  When it came time for the altar call during those meetings, they were used as opportunities to "commit" to the movement.  Individuals were then led into small groups where their commitment to nonviolence was tested.  If one was deemed to qualify, he/she was sent on to another group for more intense training.  If not able to commit to nonviolence, that individual was not allowed to continue.

Sunday morning we met Myrna in Kelly Ingram Park, kitty-corner from 16th Street Baptist.  As we walked through the park, she gave us more stories of her experiences and her interpretations of how the park had come to be, what was included, and what is yet to come.

Each of these photos speaks for itself, noting the shoes of the second sculpture.  We were told that their shoes became the means of identification of the girls killed in the bombing.  You can see 16th St Baptist in this photo of the three preachers praying prior to one of the marches.

Across the street the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, opened just two years ago, tells the powerful story of the 1960s.  One could clearly spend a half day examining each display, listening to each tape, watching each piece of footage.

Begun by immigrants, Birmingham quickly capitalized on the available labor force to become "The Magic City" of the south, an industrial giant of steel and coal, but as the  industry slowed, the once-thriving city lost population, but the now middle class immigrants and blacks demanded full standing in the city.  The ruling class of whites did not agree and the "Bombingham" title was easily applied.  Not only was 16th Street Baptist bombed, several other churches and parsonages were hit, as was the motel room in which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was staying, just a block from the church.  Amazingly, the bomb was planted in his room specifically, but he had already left the city.

How to think about all this?   As Myrna Jackson observed, "The more things change, the more they stay the same."

The Free State of Winston County Alabama

Friday, April 25

Hillary writes:  Last Sunday one of the new volunteers moved into the house with us.  Linda is from Alabama, assigned to help park staff develop curriculum for schools visiting the park, incorporating the Tennessee Core Curriculum.  With a PhD in education she is well suited for this task!

Needless to say we have had wonderful conversations, especially around the South and the Civil War.  I must admit to having a bias about the South, viewing it as one, monolithic, slave-holding area, and in which all states were like minded in leaving the Union after the election of Abraham Lincoln.  I have again discovered that using a very broad stroke often leads to messy and, usually, wrong thinking.

Linda told the story of Winston County, Alabama, which was settled by followers of Andrew Jackson during his campaign of 1813-14.  The people in this county, as well as of other hill counties in northern Alabama and Tennessee, were strong supporters of Andrew Jackson.  In about 1832, when South Carolina passed the Nullification Act, John C. Calhoun resigned and returned to his home state.  Then his friends printed buttons calling him the "first president of the confederacy," President Andrew Jackson declared, "We will have none of that." 

In 1860 14 slave owners resided in Winston County, owning 122 slaves, one of whom was a former Pennsylvanian who owned 20 slaves himself.  However, 637 families in the county owned no slaves and they were die-hard Union people; they had been born in Union homes, attended Union schools, and believed in the principles of Washington and Jackson, as their teachers had instructed them.  In 1860 Winston County supported the Democratic ticked and opposed the movement toward secession.  They were "Jeffersonian - Jacksonian Democrats."  Residents of Winston County called the southern Democrats attending the Baltimore Convention of June 1860, "bolters" because a small minority of slave owners had nominated John C. Breckenridge as a candidate as a presidential candidate.

In his history of Alabama, Moore states that on January 14, 1861, Alabama "went out of the Union" (p.514) by a vote of 61-39.  The people of Winston County regretted that resolution; they believed it meant "war, death, and destruction."  In the first volume of his history of Alabama, Moore writes, "Many people in North Alabama were not pleased with the work of the convention or with the South Confederacy ... Secession was distinctly a south Alabama achievement."  As a result meetings and and conventions were held in various counties in which a desire for neutrality was strongly expressed.  On July 4, 1861, Looney's Tavern was the site of a convention of over 2500 residents of nine different counties including Winston.  They passed resolutions with three major points:

• support of those who voted against secession "first, last and all the time"
• agreement with Jackson that no state could legally get out of the Union, but if that thinking was mistaken, then a county could legally leave a state by the same reasoning
• belief that the South had made a mistake when they left the Union.  These counties decided "not to take arms against their brothers nor shoot at the flag of their fathers" - Washington, Jefferson, and Jackson.

It was on the reading of the second resolution listed above that Uncle Dick Payne commented, "Oh, oh; Winston secedes," giving rise to the new name for this area - "the free state of Winston."  An interesting effect of their decision was that their withdrawal from the Confederacy meant that neither the Emancipation Proclamation nor the Reconstruction Act applied to those states that were not in open rebellion against the Union, which aptly included the "free state of Winston." 

I have learned another interesting facet of how complex the South, as well as this "civil war," really is.

New adventures

Tuesday, April 22

Hillary and I have a new task here at the park and we are delighted to be "on it."  As you might expect Stones River National Park has a storeroom full of archives, from old photos to muster papers, from cemetery ledgers to received letters, and many of these are fragile original documents!  We have been blessed with the task of digitalizing these documents.  What that means is that we are taking digital photographs of each and every piece.  Hillary dons her white gloves; I crawl up on the ladder to ensure the camera is focusing, completely grasping the entire piece, and snapping the photos.  We should only have a picture of this.

The first project we took on was a 1902 booklet of Confederate soldiers, one photo of most with a two or three sentence description on each of the 88 pages.  We were very surprised to read that the 40-year-old in the photo had joined up as a 13-year-old.  I knew there were youngsters sneaking into the ranks, but 13???  The book was not complete, but we gently turned the pages and shot every single one.  The photos are now on Jim's computer for filing and cataloging in the documents file.

The next project was the cemetery ledger from the Columbia, TN, Cemetery which was in existence for only a couple years because of local resistance to a national union cemetery.  Entries from 1867 and on.  Gentle is the order of this task, and Jim gave us a thumbs-up to take time now and again and read the entries.  It is a humbling experience to be working with these documents.  Once the cemetery books are finished, we have boxes full of "letters received" and "letters sent" from and to inquiries about persons believed to have been buried in the Columbia National Cemetery.

On another note, Saturday we are joining a Civil Rights trip group from Edina Community Lutheran Church in Birmingham, AL.  We will meet with individuals active in the civil rights movement in the l960s, worship at the 16th Street Baptist Church, and visit a park in Birmingham that memorializes the movement in downtown Birmingham.    A future post will no doubt appear about this upcoming adventure.

Good Friday at Stones River

Friday, April 18

The intersection between Good Friday and some of our experiences down here has been rolling around in my head of late.  A few coincidences:

• On April 14, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated at Ford's Theater.  Within hours of his death, commentators were observing the connection between that date and Good Friday.  Ohio Assemblyman James Garfield, who would later become another assassinated President, commented shortly after Lincoln's death, "It may be almost impious to say, but it does seem that his death parallels that of the Son of God."  In a 2006 editorial on April 14, 2006, also a Good Friday, Richard Wrightman Fox reports that many evangelical preachers lost little time in making the direct analogy.  "Jesus Christ died for the world," said the Rev. C. B. Crane in Hartford. "Abraham Lincoln died for his country."  Fox continues his commentary, "Most American Christians turned to the Jesus analogy because they realized how much they loved Lincoln. They took his loss as personal, often comparing it to a death in the family. Many felt attached to Lincoln almost as they felt attached to Jesus. The striving rail-splitter from Illinois and the simple carpenter from Nazareth resembled them, the people.  In contrast, while still heroic, Washington seemed more distant, even aloof."  As I am finishing David Goldfield's America Aflame I am reminded over and over and over again of the influence of evangelical Christianity - both in the South and North - on how the Civil War was interpreted, reinterpreted, and continues to be re-interpreted.  Just this morning I heard again about how the cause of the war was NOT slavery; it was states' rights.  The fact that the Articles of Secession began with the need to retain the institution of slavery seems to  be irrelevant.
• On April 10, 2009, a significant tornado blew through Murfreesboro, killing two, destroying block after block of structures, and taking out many trees here on the Battlefield.  The April 10 issue of the local paper just wrote of the five-year anniversary of that tornado, headlined "Good Friday Tornado Remembered."  
• One can't help but live daily down here without being reminded of the impact on the Civil War on daily lives.  The descriptions of what was left in parts of Georgia and South Carolina in the wake of Sherman's march are horrific.  I can't even imagine what homeowners, wives, children felt as they saw the destruction.  "The Federals entered homes and absconded with everything they could carry, leaving the residents, mainly women and children, unmolested.  ... In Columbia the Federals emptied a  barrel of molasses, and then tracked it all over a house.  They attired their horses in women's dresses and impaled chickens on their bayonets dripping blood on imported carpets" (America Aflame, pp348-9).  Reading and thinking about all this, I read this Good Friday morning from the Lament of Jeremiah,  "My soul is bereft of peace, I have forgotten what happiness is; so I say, 'Gone is my glory and all that I had hoped for from the Lord.'"  Can you imagine how those words might have sounded to those southern women confronted with the remnants of their homes?  

It is a hard place to be; these are hard stories to tell.  But tell them we must.  They are the stories of real people and they are true.

Pilgrimages

Tuesday, April 15

Hillary writes:  As we continue our work I am aware that many people come to Stones River on a pilgrimage, a journey to find the place where an ancestor may have been wounded, killed, captured, or even survived.  Last week two brothers from California arrived with a photograph of their great-great-grandfather as well as copies of his muster papers from the National Archives.  We were able to show the brothers where he had fought as well as provide information about the Pioneer Brigade into which he had been transferred.  That brigade-created earthenworks, Stop #4 on our audio tour, is but a few yards from the Visitor Center, remain from the days of the battle.  Their great-great-grandfather had helped create and defend the earthworks.  After they left I stood near the earthenworks and told visitors, stopping to see them, of the brothers whose great-great-grandfather had fought here and who had brought his photograph and documents to us.  Suddenly the visitors became very quiet as they realized this history is very personal, not an abstract war story.

History came alive again this week but in a very different way.  Our good friend Bruce Stahly from Grand Marais came to visit, on his own family pilgrimage to solve the mystery of where his great-great-uncle's body might be buried.  Bruce's great-great grandfather and his brother both fought in the Civil War as part of the Ohio 9th Cavalry.  His great-great-grandfather survived the war, but his great-great-uncle died in a hospital in Pulaski, TN, in the fall of 1864 from "chronic diarrhea" according to his documents.  The question of where this man had been buried has haunted Bruce for a long time.

I spent some time with SR Ranger Jim Lewis, who wrote the story of the Stones River Battle for Blue Gray Magazine, to wonder where Bruce's ancestor might be buried.  What Jim explained, first to me and then to Bruce when he arrived, was that a National Cemetery had been planned for Columbia, TN, but the opposition to such a project from the Columbia community was so strong that soldiers who would have been buried in that cemetery were dis-interred and re-interred at Stones River National Cemetery.  Jim also noted that Pulaski, where Bruce's uncle had died and been buried in the hospital cemetery, was the birthplace of the KKK.  Jim indicated that those who died in the Pulaski hospital did not receive any attention, other than removal; the hospital was primarily concerned about those who were still alive.  Bodies were buried in trench graves with wooden markers noting the site.

Sometime in 1867 Union soldiers originally buried in Pulaski and later moved to Columbia were finally moved again - a third move - to the Stones River Cemetery.  In this process the identities of many of those who had died in Pulaski were lost and then placed in graves of the "unknown." 

Jim stated that if you died on the battlefield, those of the battle buried their dead when possible, using facial recognition to identify their comrades, no other means of identification available.  Any documents or other papers were likely covered with dried blood, illegible.  Bodies were then buried in trench graves, shoulder to shoulder, identified by number and name (if possible) for the length of the trench, noting the location of the trench.  When the war ended, "ghoul maps" became tools to relocate those graves.  I discovered that many of the soldiers who had died at Pulaski, with the 9th Ohio Cavalry, were now buried in Section L of the Stones River Cemetery, some named and others "unknown."  Jim Lewis said that it was quite likely that Bruce's great-great-uncle is buried in one of those known graves in that section.

As some of you may remember the Stones River Cemetery starts about 200 feet from our Park house.  Bruce visited the Cemetery when he first got here and after our visit with Jim, we went back over to Section L, the Ohio 9th area, to bring some kind of resolution to Bruce's mystery.  These days at Stones River have been a time of remembrance and honoring the life that his great-great-uncle gave for the Union.  The 150 year mystery of not knowing where Willis L. Wright was buried has been given a location, even if not a specific grave.  This pilgrim leaves for Minnesota tomorrow with a new piece and image of family history.

Surprises

Friday, April 11

Hillary writes:  This has been a week of surprises.  The first one was Ms Carol.  You may recall her comments about "presiding" over the cash register in the Eastern National Books Store.  Someone called a "secret shopper" comes into each bookstore at random times to evaluate the performance of the personnel. Ms Carol was running the bookstore when the surprise secret shopper arrived.  On April 9, the bookstore manager received an e-mail evaluation from the secret shopper.  It seems that the 100% summary satisfaction was the first such rating for this year.  Her evaluation included the following, "I do not believe that my shopping experience could have been better.  Carol gave me her full attention and suggested several items within the store."  For this fine evaluation Carol was allowed to select a gift from the bookstore.  She picked out the bobblehead Smoky the Bear!

Surprise 2:  Only those who have served in the U.S military are buried in National Cemeteries which means that confederate soldiers are primarily buried in private sites, operated and maintained by non-profit organizations.  Imagine the surprise of Stones River visitors who walk through the National Cemetery to read stanzas from Theodore O'Hara's elegaic poem "Bivouac of the Dead" inscribed on iron tablets throughout the cemetery when they discover this soldier-poet was a Confederate soldier!  O'Hara was a colonel is command of the 12th Alabama regiment and saw action at Shiloh and Stones river battlefields.

Often these iron plaques provided to the national cemeteries do not credit the author in part because of his Confederate war experience, assuming, perhaps, that it would be unseemly to credit him in a cemetery dedicated to U.S. troops.  However, O'Hara was a captain, promoted to Brevet-Major in the Mexican War of 1846-48 including the battle of Sierra Vista.  He wrote "Bivouac" as a remembrance of the many casualties suffered by the second Kentucky Regiment of Foot Volunteers in that war.  This poem was written about the heroes of the Mexican American War and appropriated for the Civil War dead two decades later.  These same lines grace the entrance to Arlington National Cemetery.
                                 On fame's eternal camping-ground,
                                 Their silent tents are spread.
                                 And glory guards with solemm round
                                 The bivouac of the dead.
A photo of one of the iron plaques is included in an earlier post from our previous time at Stones River.

Surprise 3:  Stones River Cannons and Donuts, Oh, My
A couple from Illinois entered the Visitor Center this past week and in the chatting with them, we discovered they had traveled up the North Shore of Minnesota, as far as Grand Marais.  When we told them we live in GM, the both said, "That's the home of the 'World's Best Donut' and that they are."  Hillary also surprised them by telling them that not only does she know about cannons and Stones River Battle, she works at the donut shop!

Nursing in the Civil War is "not for the squeamish"

Tuesday, April 8

Today is my mom's 94th birthday, so I've been thinking about her a lot.  For over forty years her career was nursing - private duty, maternity, CCU/ICU, and finally supervisor of the chemical dependency treatment unit of a state hospital.  She is not "squeamish."  She was a professional through and through.

Interestingly enough, her father did not encourage her intent to become a nurse.  He believed teaching was the proper career for a woman (imagine that in the mid 1930's) - a career for women, that is!  But he encouraged her to work for one year and if, after that time, she still wanted to become a nurse, he would support that decision and drive her down to Swedish Hospital School of Nursing himself in 1939.  He did, she did, and that's how it all came to be.

All this is related to the Civil War, believe it or not.  When reading the history of the Swedish Nursing School, I discovered that since the time of the Civil War, nursing was not considered a proper field for women to enter.  Almost all medical staff during the War were men, although Clara Barton's incredible work stands out as a profound model of women as nurses. 

Last week I discovered a new children's book in our bookstore down here, "You Wouldn't Want to Be a Nurse in the American Civil War," by Kathryn Senior.  She added the subtitle, in quite small print, "if you are squeamish."  The entire book is a surprisingly vivid description of medical conditions during the Civil War describing, for example, that only 16% of those performing surgeries had any kind of medical background.  She also pointed out the familiar details such as no sterilization, no antibiotics, no anesthesia, no sophisticated medical equipment complete with stunning, almost cartoonish, drawings.  She writes truth.

This afternoon I checked some numbers in Glenna Schroeder-Lein's Encyclopedia of Civil War Medicine to confirm hunches I have about survival rates.  She claims that of the estimated 620,000 deaths during the CW, approximately 2/3 are estimated to be victims of disease, either post-wound or totally unrelated to any wound.  When one thinks about the long-term physical and mental effect of the kind of warfare that took place during those horrific years between 1861 and 1865, one can only wonder how many real victims in the broadest sense of the word.

The power of the Stones River Museum, telling the story of that very short battle (December 31 - January 2) never ceases to amaze me.  Talking with a man yesterday whose great-great-grandfather had been wounded during the first encounters early in the morning of December 29, we were able to identify the approximate area where he had been wounded.  As we moved from the battle map to a real-time map of Murfreesboro and he saw the general location, he fell silent and just looked at the map.  After a few seconds he swallowed hard and simply declared, "Thank you.  That is really something."

Winter weary visitors and stories of prisoners

Sunday, April 6

Hillary writes.  A wide range of people from Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Illinois visited Stones River Battlefield this week.  We heard one common theme:  winter weariness.  Responses we didn't solicit in the least.  Just today a family from Michigan arrived, their daughters wearing shorts.  The friends, whom they were visiting here in Murfreesboro, told me to ask them why they were wearing shorts.  "64 degrees feels like a heatwave after our winter," was the prompt response. 

A six-year-old girl from Rhinelander, Wisconsin, simply announced, "We had to leave.  I am so tired of winter."  Another visitor from Indiana asked, "Do you know we had 70 inches of snow in our town?  We never have more than 25-30 inches at the most."  These few samples are common in our daily encounters with visitors.  Economic impact is a common subtext of climate change, but what about the emotional cost?  It seems that this long, arduous winter is having an impact on many people's psyche.

This week also brought a young man whose great-great-great-grandfather was taken as a prisoner of war during this Stones River Battle.  He did survive, married a woman from the south and moved back to Illinois.  Reading more about Civil War prisons and prisoners has been stunning.  Portals to Hell is the source for the following data.  At the beginning of the Civil War most prisoners were exchanged between the federal and confederate armies, but the Union quickly realized that the policy was simply providing more men for the south, and prisoner exchanges stopped.  But neither side had made any preparation for holding prisoners so conditions soon degenerated in a "living hell."  To give a perspective:  674,000 soldiers were taken captive during the course of the Civil War.  This amounted to roughly 16% of the total enlistment for both sides.  Of those 674,000 taken prisoner, 410,000 were held in 150 compounds.  The death toll overall in both confederate and union prisons ranged from 12-15%. 

Imagine turning any old building, from barracks to warehouses, into a prison.  Some of the barracks were designed to hold 4000 maximum, yet \8,000 - 10,000 were consistently crammed into the space.  Blankets, food, bedding and clothing were in short supply, if at all.  Lice were a common companion.  As  the war dragged on, provisions for food diminished even farther and at times prisoners were reduced to catching rats as a food supplement.  The effects of this confinement on prisoners were long-lasting in terms of both mental and physical health issues.  The death rate was probably higher than the 12-15% noted above because many survivors died post-liberation.  This is a largely unknown dimension of the Civil War.  If interested, here are three books to search out:

Lonnie Speer, Portals to Hell: Military Prisons of the Civil War, provides a good overview.
Arthur Bergeron, Elmira: Death Camp of the North
Robert Scott Davis, Andersonville Civil War Prison.

Meanderings during the past few days

Friday morning, April 4

Over the past week we have averaged over 170 visitors per day; part of that may be due to the Spring Break for Rutherford County schools but staff think it is also related to the lovely spring weather of late.  I don't know how many times we've heard, "I've lived here for over twenty years and never come to the battlefield before" over the week.  Park staff have done a fine job of publicizing the park over the past year and it clearly is making a difference.

One of the tasks that least interests me down here is working the Eastern National Book Store, not because I don't love the books.  It's the computerized cash register system that freaks me out.  But over the past week I "girded up my loins" and took my place over there for much of one day.  Jim, our Ranger supervisor, came up to the visitor center, saw me, over there and pulled out his camera!

Then I got to reflecting about why this task has been such a challenge for me.  To my total amazement the verb that popped into my brain was "preside."  That was all I needed to start a real riff on "presiding."  I am most comfortable presiding in another context - worship,  so why did that that particular word come to mind?  Is there a connection somewhere?  Altars, temples, shopping ... and a brief web search confirmed my meandering thoughts.  I found this article by an unnamed person from the Temple University School of Social Psychology: "Temples of Consumption - Shopping Malls as Secular Cathedrals."  So perhaps my associations weren't totally off-line even if a bit tacky (or wacky).  Granted, the Eastern National Books Store is hardly a mall, but...  Just a series of thoughts while "on the job."

Tomorrow is "Park Day" at Stones River - some 100+ volunteers are expected, and we will be working out at McFadden's Farm, the final stop on the six-stop audio tour.  That farm is where the final January 2, 1863 confrontation took place, ending the Stones River Battle with the Confederate retreat down to Tullahoma, Tennessee.