Is this America’s Homer (the ancient Greek one)?

There are a number of Civil War Roundtables in the DC area that meet monthly, have lectures and go on tours. A speaker named Ed Bearss spoke in August and September at the Bull Run Civil War Round Table and the Loudoun County Civil War Roundtable on First Manassas and Wilson’s Creek respectively and I went to hear him.

Born in 1923 in Montana, Bearss (pronounced bars) served as a Marine in the Pacific in WWII and in 1955 he started working for the National Park Service. From 1981 to 1994 he served as its Chief Historian for the Park Service and on his retirement in 1995 he received the title of Chief Historian Emeritus. At almost ninety he still continues to do what he loves, lead Civil War battlefield tours.

I first saw Ed Bearss as one of the talking heads on Ken Burns Civil War series in 1990. Shelby Foote got a lot of face time on that series and he was pretty smooth as a speaker. When Ed would come on, he had this of loud, dramatic voice and I kind of tuned it out, not finding it to be very entertaining. In 2005 Smithsonian Magazine described it this way, “Ed Bearss has what might best be called a battlefield voice, a kind of booming growl, like an ancient wax-cylinder record amplified to full volume—about the way you'd imagine William Tecumseh Sherman sounding the day he burned Atlanta, with a touch of Teddy Roosevelt charging up San Juan Hill.” I’d say that’s pretty apt.

Now having heard him twice in person and I can say that for the larger packed, standing-room only room at the Centreville Regional Library, he was booming it out. In Leesburg at the Old Courthouse, with a smaller audience he was a bit more sedate, as suited the size of the audience. And I would say that in person, it is easy to get caught up in his narrative style. He seems to speak for long periods with what looks like closed eyes, and without using any notes at all, one almost begins to wonder if he actually witnessed the events he is talking about. His knowledge of the battles and their protagonists is truly encyclopedic.

And sometimes he has some pretty humorous outbursts, like in his talk on First Manassas when he asked several times throughout the talk if anyone in the audience was a medium or spiritualist. One of the interesting unanswered questions of that battle was whether General Barnard Bee who called out “there stands Jackson like a stone wall” was complimenting or criticizing Jackson. Was he being praised for not being moved by the Federals or was he supposed to be moving? General Bee died shortly after making that pronouncement and Ed Bearss (along with lots of others) want to know how he meant it.

Literary types say that the Iliad, the epic story-poem of the Trojan war attributed to the poet Homer, came from a long-standing oral tradition. Like those ancient Greek taletellers, Ed Bearss, now closing in on his ninth decade, still has a story to tell.