Civil War History

I heard on the news this morning that Shelby Foote the famous Civil War Historian, has passed away. In 1990 when the Civil War series was shown on PBS, three women friends and I were avid viewers. After each airing of the series, we met for a picnic at the Louisiana Rest stop near the Texas border. It’s a delightful park like setting with shaded picnic tables, raised wooden walkways to view the swamp flowers and plants and a tourist information building. While spending the afternoon, we four widows discussed the film, and mutually confessed to falling in love with Shelby.

Long after the strife of the War Between the States was over, attitudes in the north as opposed to those in the south were part of my consciousness as I grew into girlhood. Customs of race, religion, agriculture and speech were topics of interest when comparing my life with my cousins in the south.

My southern family had fought for the confederacy; my northern family fought in the Union Army.
I grew up with corn fields; my cousins grew up with cotton and tobacco fields. I went to school with black children, my cousins did not. My cousins spoke with a ‘southern accent’, I did not. Both families went to Southern Baptist churches, but sometimes I tagged along with a school friend when she went to catholic catechism classes.

Abraham Lincoln, the song Dixie, and the Underground Railroad epitomized my understanding of the war when I was a kid. At Grandma W’s house there was a long, secret passage leading from a closet under the stairway to a large cellar room that had been made from digging into the side of the hill. The room had walls lined with bricks and a dirt floor. Potatoes, apples and jars of canned fruits and vegetables were stored on shelves around the room. From that room there was a door leading to the back yard as well as door leading to the kitchen. George and I were convinced that the house had been a way station in the Underground Railroad. George is my uncle and only a year older than I but we were like brother and sister in those early years.

When I was around 35 years old, I became intensely interested in reading about the Civil War. Over a period of about 5 years my reading was heavily concentrated on the subject. I frequently made mental notes to read more about a certain general, or battle and would be astonished when I would quite by accident, not design, find the very book I needed when I went to the library It might be a book on display or one left on a reading table.

This is something that happens to me in libraries. It’s as if ESP takes me directly to the book I want or need. I once was curious about how the Japanese tied bamboo together to make a fences but I had no intention of going out of my way to find out. On a visit to the library, I started down the whodunit aisle and the first book I pulled from the shelf was a book that was slightly out of line with the other books. It was a volume with colored photos of Japanese fences with instructions on tying the various knots. This happens often when I’m in a library, and, I’m equally astonished each time it occurs.

Esther and I once attended a two day re-enactment of a civil war battle in Mansfield, La. It rekindled my interest in the history of the war and the land where it was fought. When Adeline and I visited family in a part of Georgia that I had not traveled before, Sherman’s march to the sea crossed my mind dozens of times as I tried to envision his troops moving across the terrain. The consequences of that struggle are still creating situations to be coped with today, but the explicit history of those times continues to fascinate me.