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Origins of My Civil War Interests
To some degree, my interest
in Civil War history comes from learning of my great grandfather, who lived in Caroline County Virginia. Captain Tom
Jones was in the 21st Virginia (initially under Stonewall Jackson and later under Richard Ewell). He was captured along with his brother in
law, Samuel Dickinson, apparently in the Battle of the Wilderness, and spent the last year of the war
at Elmira prison in New York. Samuel
Dickinson did not make it through the year and is buried in the prison
cemetery. This story is typical of the
times, and as with all such stories it raises questions. To me, the questions do not relate to “who
were the good guys and who were the bad guys.” The primary question is, “How did this
happen?” How could the citizens of a
modern country who are ostensibly rational beings allow an event to occur that
killed over 600,000 people? It’s an
important question because it also relates to every war ever fought in the
history of mankind.
Living in Atlanta provided the opportunity to learn about the Atlanta campaign and to cultivate an interest in W. T.
Sherman, who has the odd dual role of being the “scourge of the south” and the
first superintendant of Louisiana State University, which is just one of the ironies that pervade that
era. I heartily recommend that anyone
interested in the Atlanta campaign, or the Civil War itself, for that matter,
read the memoirs of Sherman, Johnston and Hood, preferably simultaneously. Sherman’s memoirs are by far the most intriguing of the
three, and they have the added bonus of describing his pre Civil War days in
the San Francisco area, where I grew up.
On another level of the war,
the Diary of John Ransom is another remarkable work, not so much because of
what it says about Andersonville Prison, but because
of what it says about John Ransom. He
was a man who went through an indescribable nightmare. Not only did he survive, but he came through
the experience without the sort of bitterness that one would naturally expect.