Trivializing death for fun and profit

That a Frederick, Md., brewery recently bottled its first batch of beer from a Civil War-era recipe and is now distributing is testament to the creativity of American business. What better time to recreate an alcoholic beverage from the 1860s than the sesquicentennial of the War Between the States, right?

What’s troubling is the apparent lack of respect the Moncacy Brewing Co. is showing for the event to which it’s tying its product.

The first of nine ales to be released by Monocacy in commemoration of the 1861-65 conflict is called “Antietam Ale” and marks the Sept. 17, 1862, battle near Sharpsburg, Md., that resulted in 23,000 casualties.

According to the label of Antietam Ale:

“The Battle of Antietam changed the course of the Civil War, helped free over 4 million Americans and still ranks as the bloodiest single day in American history.”

In reality, only that last of those three statements is true. While Antietam is still the bloodiest single day in US history, it didn’t change the course of the war nor did it help free more than 4 million enslaved blacks.

Deaths of blacks during Civil War pondered

Last week, this blog wrote about a recent study that estimates some 750,000 Americans died during the War Between the States, rather than the 620,000 figure that’s generally been accepted as gospel for more than a century. 

However, James Downs of Oxford University Press highlights an important distinction: J. David Hacker, the Binghamton University SUNY historian who compiled the study, included only soldiers in his calculations, failing to reflect the mortality of former slaves during the war. 

“If former slaves were included in this figure, the Civil War death toll would likely be over a million casualties,” he writes at OUPBlog. 

Hacker published a paper late last year in Civil War History revealing the new 750,000 figure based on demographic methods and sophisticated statistical software he used to study newly digitized US census records from 1850 to 1880. 

The calculations yielded the number of “excess” deaths of military-age men between 1860-1870 – the number who died in the war or in the five subsequent years from causes related to the war. 

Given the margin of error, deaths from the 1861-65 conflict could have ranged from 617,877 to 851,066. Hacker split the difference and settled on an estimate of 750,000 dead, 21 percent higher than the long-accepted figure. 

In Hacker’s study there is only a passing reference to former slaves’ mortality, Downs writes. 

Vietnam vets strive to honor past warriors

As someone who believes that a society is judged at least in part by the respect it shows its dead, there’s little I find more depressing than a forgotten, dilapidated cemetery.

Perhaps even harder to stomach coming across the graves of veterans that have fallen into disrepair.

To see the final resting places of men who once put their lives on the line – and sometimes gave those lives, in defense of their country – and who are now effectively consigned to oblivion does a great disservice to our nation.

Apparently, others feel the same, as well.

Witness Joseph Hoesch and Martin Neamon, a pair of Vietnam-era veterans from Pennsylvania.

When the pair visited the Chartiers Cemetery plot in Carnegie, Pa., where 133 Union veterans are interred, on a grey day in November 2010, they found it disheartening, according to KDKA.

Museum looks to preserve Gettysburg flag

The Tennessee Chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans is spearheading an effort to conserve a Confederate battle flag captured on the pivotal third day of the Battle of Gettysburg, at the apex of Pickett’s Charge.

The organization is seeking to raise $12,000 to conserve the banner, which belonged to the 14th Tennessee Infantry Regiment and today resides in the Tennessee State Museum in Nashville.

The flag was captured by the 14th Connecticut on July 3, 1863, after the Tennessee unit had joined with approximately 10,000 other Southern troops and advanced over open fields for three-quarters of a mile under heavy Federal artillery and rifle fire.

The men of the 14th Tennessee were actually able to breach the stone wall that protected many of the Union soldiers, but couldn’t hold its gains, eventually being forced to fall back with heavy losses.

The unit lost four of its regimental colors.

After its capture, the flag was forwarded to the US War Department, where it was held for decades.

Civil War graffiti found in Virginia structure

Brandy Station, Va., was the site of the largest predominantly cavalry engagement ever fought on American soil, when a total of 20,000 Confederate and Union men locked horns near Culpeper on June 9, 1863.

The so-called Graffiti House served as a field hospital for the South during the Battle of Brandy Station and other local battles during the war. It also served as a headquarters site for Federal forces during the winter encampment of 1863-64. 

Soldiers from both sides made drawings and signed their names and units on the walls. 

Then, at some point, probably years after the war ended, the owner of the house decided to cover up the graffiti – written mostly using charcoal – on the walls.

By then a layer of dirt and soot had built up on the white plaster walls, and that thin membrane was just enough to preserve hundreds of historical scribblings, according to the Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star.

Since the graffiti was rediscovered in 1993, conservationists such as Chris Mills have worked to preserve the Civil War-era signatures and drawings found throughout the circa-1858 structure.

NJ town seeks vandals who beheaded statue

After standing watch over Bridgeton (NJ) City Park for nearly a century, the statue of a Union solider finally fell victim to the enemy last month.

Except it wasn’t a Southern counterpart which lopped off the head of Bridgeton’s silent stone sentinel and damaged other parts of the monument, but vandals.

Now, residents of the southern New Jersey community are trying to both track down the culprit and raise funds to restore the statue, erected in 1915 in honor of Co. K of the 12^th New Jersey Volunteer Infantry Regiment.

They’ve created a YouTube video as part of their efforts to generate money. Estimates are it could cost between $10,000 and $75,000 to repair the monument, said Rich Mendoza of nearby Vorhees, NJ.

“It’s not very often that I’ve particularly seen anything like this, but it happens,” Mendoza told The News of Cumberland County. “It’s probably just kids who don’t realize the consequences. But to see this is terrible.”

Bridgeton mayor Albert B. Kelly said there is $1,000 in the crimestoppers fund to be used to track down the perpetrators of the desecration.

Hide the moonshine, we’re from the South

Gina Williams, a native Texan writing at the always-captivating Like the Dew website, details common misconceptions some Northerners have about people from the South.

These include that we’re all racist, uneducated hicks with lazy Southern drawls who always vote Republican. (What about us also being NASCAR-loving, moonshine-swilling, ATV-driving, snake-handling Creationists? That’s some of the best stuff about living in the South, after all.)

Williams does a good job debunking these myths, including providing a USA Today map of the 2004 presidential election which showed interestingly that plenty of Southern counties voted for Democratic candidate John Kerry over Republican George Bush, while there were several Northern states with a majority of counties favoring Bush over Kerry.

Better yet is Williams’ assessment of the simplistic portrayal of Southern cultural and social norms:

• Surprise, we’re not all bigots, she writes:

The history books we grew up studying in school failed in one big respect: The American Civil War was not simply over the preservation of slavery; it was a war over states’ rights and excessive taxation. The simple fact is that, at the time, there was controversy on just how much involvement the federal government should have in state governments (sound familiar to current times?); the federal government’s involvement with the anti-slavery movement set many Southern states off because they felt that state governments, through citizen voting, should determine laws on such things. And with increasing pressure by Northern states in the late 1850s to increase taxes to benefit their industries, Southerners became upset. Before and after those taxes were implemented with Abraham Lincoln’s entry into office, Southern states began seceding.

Yow! Williams is right on the money here, but I wouldn’t dare trying pursuing this argument with anyone but my closest friends, whether they’re from the North or the South. Public school education dropped the ball on complex issues like the War Between the States a long, long time ago and I’m not stupid enough to try to pick it up.

Historian: Civil War dead vastly understated

A Binghamton University historian believes the number of Americans who died in the War Between the States, long said to have been around 620,000, may undercount by as much as one-third the actual number of deaths during the 1861-65 conflict.

David Hacker has used 19th century census data to calculate a new estimate of the Civil War dead, and he says it is much higher than previously thought.

Hacker said his research suggests 752,000 men died as a result of the war, but the number could be as high as 851,000, according to a report in the Charleston Post and Courier.

Hacker said he originally started out researching 19th century mortality rates.

“The traditional estimate has become iconic,” he said. “I was originally researching census under-counts. If you know mortality rates, it’s possible to get a better estimate. I was going with the 620,000 and what I was coming up with didn’t make much sense.”

NH paper details life of Northern slaves

Slaves in at least one Northern community fared little better than those in the Deep South, according to a New Hampshire newspaper.

The Portsmouth Herald has detailed the findings of a report put together by archaeologists and scientists after a “Negro Burying Ground” was uncovered in the city in 2003.

At that time, a contractor excavating an area for a sewer manhole came across the base of a coffin. Eventually, eight bodies were found, ranging in age from 7 to 40 and all were Africans or of African descent.

“Some showed evidence of the hard work they performed throughout their short lives, some had poor teeth, some had childhood diseases,” according to the publication.

“This and much more was learned painstaking moment by painstaking moment by a group of archaeologists, dendochronologists, forensic anthropologists, historians and biochemists in the wake of the discovery of remains at what was once the city’s ‘Negro Burying Ground.’”

The eight bodies were among an estimated 200 Africans buried in what was then the outskirts of Portsmouth, once New Hampshire’s most populous city, from 1705 to the 1790s.

Little-known Civil War camp turns up relics

Camp Lawton held Union prisoners for just six weeks toward the end of the War Between the States, but during that period more than 1,300 men may have perished, victims of disease, hunger and lack of medical care.

Today, the little-known Confederate POW camp near Millen, Ga., is being excavated by archaeologists, just a year after it was rediscovered.

Among items found: a man’s size-11 ring, pocketknife, buckle, keys and a token made in Michigan and used for trade, according to officials with Georgia Southern University.

“The camp is as rich in information as we thought it was,” said Kevin Chapman, a Georgia Southern University graduate student who last spring found the first artifacts.

Last week, Georgia Southern unveiled more than a dozen of the 60 to 70 items uncovered last month. The school’s museum also has acquired what’s believed to be the only surviving letter from a prisoner at the short-lived camp, according to CNN.