Person of the Year: 1862

If you like your history televised, and prefer talking heads (who doesn't) to documentaries, well American History TV on C-SPAN 3 every Saturday and Sunday is the place for you. This past weekend they broadcast a day-long seminar from the Library of Virginia in Richmond, co-hosted by the Museum of the Confederacy, where the assembled audience got to choose the "Person of the Year" for 1862.

  

Time Magazine started choosing its “Man” and then “Person of the Year” in 1927 and has continued doing so since then.  Last year’s conference in 1861 chose Abraham Lincoln. This year five historians presented five different historic figures and the audience voted at the end of the presentations. I think many would figure Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and George McClellan might make it in the top tier. But the other two who were presented were perhaps not so obvious. David Blight, Director of Yale University’s Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition spoke in favor of Frederick Douglass and James McPherson, Civil War Scholar & Princeton University History Professor Emeritus advocated for David Glasgow Farragut.

Frederick Douglass
Unidentified Photographer 1856

Blight stated that in 1862 Douglass was in the fifteenth year of editing the longest running black anti-slavery newspaper ever, originally known as the North Star, was the single most sought after anti-slavery orator in the country, was the author of more than 1000 editorials in anti-slavery newspapers, had given hundreds of speeches and had written two autobiographies. The first The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, which was by then a classic and best-seller for its time, the second was My Bondage and My Freedom.  Both books had attained true literary fame in the U.S. and Britain as two of the best examples of the American genre in the memoir tradition. He was the most famous and important black person in the world.  Blight pointed out that in 1862 as the scale and purpose of the war was changing that Frederick Douglass, as the most famous fugitive slave in the world was truly a significant figure of his time.

David Farragut

James McPherson, spoke for David Glasgow Farragut, the Union naval officer and captor of New Orleans and lower Mississippi Valley in 1862. In his judgment the capture of New Orleans was one of the most important northern strategic victories of the war, making him as significant a figure as Grant or Sherman in winning the war. He pointed out that his allegiance to the U.S. in 1861 was an open question. He had been born in raised in Tennessee, lived in Norfolk, was married to a Virginian and had brothers in New Orleans, and Mississippi. When Abraham Lincoln called out the militia after Fort Sumter he expressed approval, and moved to New York. Although Farragut was sixty years old in 1861, he had the vigor and ambition of a younger man. He was respected by fellow officers, but was unknown when he was made Commander of the West Gulf Blockading Squadron. In planning the attack on New Orleans, the South’s leading port and largest city, he concluded the meeting with his commanders by saying “I believe in celerity (speed, swiftness)” McPherson pointed out that this was not a word that many Union officers were thinking about at the time.  The victory did help temporarily dampen European interest in supporting the South at the time and so had significance beyond the fields of fire. Farragut would soon be named the first Rear-Admiral in the U.S. Navy and was on his way to becoming its first full Admiral.

Oh, and this years winner was, who else, Robert E. Lee.

First Blood

In late May of 1861, some five weeks after the shelling and surrender of Fort Sumter, the voters of Virginia made their decision to join the Confederacy. On May 24, the day after the referendum, Union troops moved across the Potomac River to occupy Alexandria and create a buffer to protect the Capital. Col. Elmer Ellsworth’s 44^th New York Zouaves were among the units marching into Alexandria.

Elmer E. Ellsworth
Author: Unknown, 1861 (published 1911)

A large Confederate flag was flying over the Marshall House, an Alexandria hotel, and Ellsworth decided he was going to remove it. Followed by a few of his men, the colonel made his way to the roof and took down the flag. As he was coming down the stairs the hotel manager and vocal secessionist James W. Jackson leveled his shotgun on Ellsworth and killed him. Jackson in turn was shot and killed by one of Ellsworth’s men, Corporal Francis Brownell.

Ellsworth was not just any Union officer. He had made a name for himself training a Zouave unit in Illinois, famous for their colorful uniforms and precision drill. He had also worked for a short time in the in the Springfield law office of Abraham Lincoln and had supported his presidential campaign, becoming a family friend.

After the incident, Ellsworth’s body laid in state at the White House and his death quickly became national news as he was recognized as the North’s first martyr of the war. Ellsworth’s life and death was commemorated with images on stationary, sheet music, lithographs and other items. Jackson was recognized in similar ways in the South.

The National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian is organizing four year-long exhibits in one of its alcoves to coincide with the Civil War’s sesquicentennial. The first of these is the 150^th Commemoration of the Civil War: The Death of Ellsworth. It’s a small exhibit with some twenty five objects, that helps bring to life this early incident in the war and explain some of its impact on the nation.

The centerpiece of the exhibit is Alonzo Chappel’s 1862 painting, The Death of E. E. Ellsworth depicting the Union officer slumped against the wall on the staircase just after being shot by Jackson. In cases on each side of the painting, are the actual weapons used in the incident, Jackson’s shotgun and Francis Brownell’s 1855 U.S. percussion rifle and saber bayonet, which were bequeathed by Brownell to the Smithsonian.

Next to Jackson’s shotgun is a copy of a book entitled Life of James W. Jackson, the Alexandria Hero, the Slayer of Ellsworth, the First Martyr in the Cause of Southern Independence from 1862. There is also a small piece of the Marshall House Confederate Flag and the Marshall House flagpole. Once the incident had been publicized, the house became a huge tourist attraction. A plaque on the Hotel Monaco in Alexandria today marks where the Marshall House once stood. It names James W. Jackson the “first martyr to Southern Independence” and makes no mention of Ellsworth.

Two of the first deaths of the war were widely remembered over the course of the conflict, but in the four years to follow, the suffering would be more personal, as nearly everyone in country would have a family member or acquaintance killed or wounded in the firestorm that was to come. The exhibit runs through March 18, 2012.

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.